War of the Spark Prerelease 2019-04-27

The awaited War of the Spark (WAR) is finally available!  This set is more story-heavy than most, and the story is about Nicol Bolas and his army of "eternals" (blue zombies) fighting against basically all of the other planeswalkers at once.  WotC made this happen in the cards by printing 36 different planeswalkers in the set and putting one in every pack, mostly at uncommon rarity; for reference, most sets have 3 - 5 planeswalkers total and they're all mythic rare, so most Limited decks don't include any planewalkers.  In WAR, most draft decks will have at least a couple and maybe 5 or more.  And for the prerelease, everyone gets 6 packs plus 1 normal promo and 1 planeswalker promo, so you have 7 planeswalkers in your card pool to build with!

The effect of all of these planeswalkers generally comes down to a few things:

1. The games are often more about fighting against good planeswalkers than trying to kill your opponent.
2. Therefore, good decks are often designed to protect their own planeswalkers with a bunch of big creatures.
3. With at least 2 abilities on every PW, the board becomes very complicated very quickly.

This results in slow, complex games that are rewarding for experienced players and probably daunting for newer players.

Anyway, lets see what exciting stuff I opened:

I had the amazing fortune of opening a single pack that had both Nissa, Who Shakes the World and a foil God-Eternal Kefnet.  My planeswalkers and Kefnet are all in blue, green and red, so I started out by building a multicolor deck with as many strong cards as possible.  But I just had too many cards I wanted to play, so I pulled out several color-fixing cards and all the red stuff, and I was able to build a more focused blue-green deck that combined powerful PWs and proliferate:

One big weakness of my pool was a lack of removal.  In black I had two Spark Harvest, but black was my shallowest color otherwise.  So my deck didn't really didn't have any removal aside from planeswalker abilities and No Escape, and my main plan was to win by having better stuff and card advantage.

I spent most of my time refining the blue-green deck, but I had a bunch of aggressive red and white cards and I threw together a second deck in the last 5 minutes of deckbuilding:

This deck borrowed a few colorless cards from the other deck.  It is not a good deck in general, but I wanted an option to play against slow or greedy decks, especially if I needed to finish a round before time was called.  It also has more direct ways of killing a bomb PW if needed.  Plus, Chandra is cool and I really was sad not to be able to use her.

So how did it go?

Round 1 vs. Grixis (UBR) Bontu

This was a greedy deck playing 3 colors with almost no mana fixing.  In game 1 I used Nissa's -8 (keeping her in play) and overwhelmed him with value.  In game 2 I switched to the second deck and won while he was looking for his third color so he could cast the cards in his hand.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 vs. Bant (WUG) Ajani Proliferate

He also had a Kefnet.  He had good early game blockers, so I stuck with my first deck.  In both games, I was able to ultimate Nissa while keeping her in play.  I snagged Kefnet with No Escape in game 2, which felt awesome.  Win, 2-0.

Round 3 vs. UBG Amass

This deck was nuts, and I was having trouble blocking because of Angrath.  However, in the first game I managed to stabilize at 1 life with Nissa at ultimate.  I had to kill Angrath (who had been brought back from the graveyard) or I was going to lose.  I played Ugin and deliberated whether to make a token or kill Angrath directly, probably losing Ugin as a result.  I didn't see his on board trick and attacked with one creature into his tapped army (I couldn't afford more attackers).  He sacrificed his Herald of the Dreadhorde to Spark Reaper and blocked, assuring my loss.  I should have just used Ugin to kill Angrath and been satisfied with that.  I made the mistake of switching decks for the next game.  He had lots of good blockers and incidental lifegain, and I failed to make any headway with a fairly weak draw after we both mulliganed to 6.  Loss, 0-2.

Round 4 vs. White-Red Stuff

We agreed to split before playing, with winner taking the uneven pack.  I had good proliferate draws and just overwhelmed him with big fliers, even beating a Sarkhan in the second game with Ugin to kill it and a 6/6 Aven Eternal to dwarf the dragon token it made.  Win, 2-0.

So that went well overall.  I think I had a chance to win the third round if I had played better.  I was happy to have no rounds go to time -- a lot of other people were timing out, even in game 2 sometimes.  I got 4 packs of WAR for the performance, plus the foil God-Eternal Kefnet is theoretically a $40 card right now (although that price will probably drop by half after the presale period).  Not bad!

A few individual card thoughts:

• Ugin feels very much like a card that is amazing when you're ahead and is just a 6-mana removal spell with a little lifegain when you're behind.  That's still good though.
• Nissa, on the other hand, is really tough.  Her mana doubling ability means that you have access to at least 2 extra green mana on the turn you cast her if you +1 her on a Forest.  I did make a sequencing error several times though -- when holding a proliferate spell, you get the most value by tapping the land for mana, then using her +1 to make it a creature with counters, then casting the proliferate spell to make the creature bigger.
• Speaking of Proliferate, I was very happy with Bloom Hulk, Contentious Plan, and even Kiora's Dambreaker.  Teferi's Time Twist on one of those creatures is great value.
• Jiang Yanggu played well too, and I had one game where I just kept growing things and proliferating to keep the value coming.
• I didn't get any bonus value from Kefnet, but just a 4/5 flier for 2UU is disgusting enough.
• I misread Ugin's Conjurant at first -- I thought it lost 1 counter instead of taking damage, but it actually loses counters equal to the damage.  It's still fine, but not nearly as strong as I thought.
• Never got to see Chandra in action.  She would have really turbo boosted the aggressive deck, and I love the design.

Thanks for reading!  I can't wait to try drafting this set!

FNM Chaos Draft 2019-04-12

With the Ravnica Allegiance season coming to a close, the store has gone back to Choose Your Own Chaos Draft!  This format is great -- I love chaos draft (random boosters), but it's even better when you get to pick which boosters you start with.

Bonus: The buy-in was $4 plus the cost of the boosters, and the boosters can be bought using store credit (normally tournament fees are excluded from store credit, to keep people who win often enough from "going infinite" by just buying into each tournament for free).  So I was able to use my $38 store credit to buy packs.  Last time I didn't have this luxury, and I bought triple Eldritch Moon.  This time I went high-roller and bought 2 Masters 25 and 1 Ultimate Masters, for a total of $40.  So my out-of-pocket cost was $6, or half of what a normal FNM draft costs.

Bonus 2: Normally this would have been a single-elimination pod draft.  But due to an anomaly in the number of people who signed up (which ended up 16, but looked like it was going to be 15), they did it as a normal Swiss draft with 4 rounds and cut to top 4.

Anyhow, I started with the M25 packs, and here's how my draft went, from bottom left to top right:

There were two relatively inexperienced drafters at my table, but there were also plenty of good drafters.  Chaos draft is weird though, especially with Masters packs in the mix, and even good drafters do odd things.

Pack 1 rare was Rugged Prairie.  I wasn't sure what it was worth (about $4.50), but I didn't really want to start my draft on this kind of land.  The uncommons were ok but not better than the commons, and I settled on Man-o'-War as a solid creature that is always good.  Coastal Discovery is a great card, usually played at 7 mana as a "draw 2 and turn a land into a hasty 4/4."  Then I started seeing good red removal, and I jumped on that wagon.  Mistblade Shinobi is an interesting one, as it is almost another Man-o'-War, and it combos with Man-o'-War to generate 3 bounce triggers if you can get the opponent not to block.  After Electrify, most of the rest of the pack was misses, although Blue Elemental Blast is an insane sideboard card in Limited.

Pack 2 rare was another land, Pendelhaven.  Again I wasn't sure about the price (about $2), but I was comfortably in blue-red short of opening an absolute bomb rare in a different color.  So the pick was Man-o'-War again, and I could seriously work toward a really annoying tempo/burn deck or a more controlling deck depending what came my way.  This pack wasn't super exciting, but it was full of cards I wanted.  Benthic Giant is great in chaos draft where you have no idea what removal your opponents will have.  Chillbringer has been very good in Ravnica Allegiance draft, and it solidly fit in my tempo plan.  Seeing a card like that at 5th pick looked good for my prospects in blue.  Toward the end of the pack it looked like green was underdrafted.

Pack 3 was a third rare land, this time a $20 Ancient Tomb.  I would have taken it for the price tag regardless, but it also seemed pretty strong in Limited.  They don't print ramp this powerful anymore outside of Masters sets, so it's hard to evaluate it through a normal Limited lens.  Second pick I bit on a Prescient Chimera, a card that I had wanted but passed over in a previous pack.  Blue 5-mana 3/4 fliers are almost always great commons.  Illusory Angel was a bit of an odd pick.  It's another card I have a hard time evaluating.  It looks good, but there are some hands where it would never be castable.  I didn't think it would come back around to me so I reached a little to make sure I had plenty of good fliers.  It turned out I didn't need to worry because Phantom Monster and Nimbus Naiad were coming to me shortly after.  The Naiad makes a good pairing with Benthic Giant or Dragon's Eye Savants.  I was stoked to see Treasure Cruise, Rosheen Meanderer, and Swiftwater Cliffs all wheel to me.  Rosheen Meanderer feels like a card people evaluate incorrectly.  It has this weird mana-making ability that you can almost never use, but you really need to look at it as a 4-mana 4/4 that can be played easily in red or green.  That's a better rate than most creatures, and it should not have been available this late in a pack in chaos draft.

Here's the deck:

Building the deck was pretty straightforward since my number of playable red-blue cards was only a little over 23.  The last cut was Illusory Angel.  Realistically I couldn't play it easily without my 1-drops, and my 1-drops were very bad against an unknown opponent.

The Cougar's mountaincycling ability let me play more Islands to facilitate the heavy blue aspect, and it was nice in 2-land hands to be able to search for a third land and get things rolling.

This deck played an annoying tempo game with a control/burn finish, and it was fantastic.  The bounce effects kept me from falling behind too quickly, and the more expensive removal helped with the most problematic creatures.  Treasure Cruise and Coastal Discovery are great when you're able to cast them without being under too much pressure.  Since I didn't have any other graveyard effects, I could just exile my whole graveyard toward casting Treasure Cruise.

Arrow Storm and Bolt of Keranos could both burn the opponent, and Barging Sergeant was also a great finisher on a board with a 3-power flier or a bunch of random jellyfish.  I never played the Sergeant in GRN draft, but I was very impressed with it here.  And Arrow Storm is great in the same situations -- I ended several games by making a strange looking attack with a few small creatures and then casting Arrow Storm.

I had a special sideboard swap for games on the draw against red aggressive decks:

Three one-drops and Illusory Angel in, and some slower stuff out.  The two 1-drop creatures would potentially hold off or trade with opposing small attackers, so I felt they were worthwhile in these games.

So how did it work out?  Well, I wouldn't be talking this deck up so much if it was bad...

Round 1 vs. White-Black Stuff
He must have been having trouble building his deck, because he still hadn't gotten his lands yet when we were supposed to start.  His best card that I saw was Necropolis Fiend, which suffers a lot against bounce abilities and dies to Arrow Storm.  Sideboarding also took him a long time, and my primary concern was making sure I won both games so we didn't end up in a draw.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 vs. Blue-Black Thassa
This deck had some powerful stuff, but it was very durdly and did damage to itself regularly.  In the first game, he made a mistake by burning my creature with a +1/+1 counter without accounting for the counter, but I was well in control of the game anyway.  In our second game he did 6 damage to himself with Blade Juggler, Dusk Legion Zealot, Night's Whisper, and Read the Bones, and I was holding Arrow Storm, so I only had to do 9 "real" damage to win.  Win, 2-0.

Round 3 vs. Black-Red Aggro
Game 1 Dragon's Eye Savants enchanted with the Naiad made it impossible for him to attack well.  This was my first opportunity to use the sideboard package, and it resulted in a ridiculous start to Game 2.  I had 2 Islands and Ancient Tomb on turn 3, and I killed his red 3-drop with Blue Elemental Blast and played Illusory Angel.  The game didn't last very long after that.  Win, 2-0.

Round 4.
I was one of two 3-0 players, so we drew into the first two seeds of top 4.

Top 4 vs. White-Red Aggro
He had a good deck with some good removal, but I had the right answers and was able to navigate to more wins.  When I tapped out to cast Dragon's Eye Savants on turn 3, he tried to kill it with a 2-mana burn spell and was surprised that I could flip it for free.  No one expects the free morph.  Win, 2-0.

Then I split top 2 with the other winner.

So that was as good as it could have gone, 4-0 in matches and 8-0 in games.  I don't think my Masters packs were heavily influential to my success, since they raise the power level of all decks and my 3 first picks weren't bombs at all.  This draft also showcased the value of understanding how older abilities work.  I had opponents who were completely blindsided by the Dragon's Eye Savants flip or did not understand how bestow (Nimbus Naiad) works.

Here's what I came away with:

I drafted eight uncommons (half of which I didn't play) and only one rare, but the rarities are a bit misleading with the varied power level of the packs (many of the commons from Masters sets are at uncommon power level in a normal set).  Everyone in top 4 got the beautiful Growth Spiral promo (about $3.50 currently), and I got $24 store credit for splitting top 2.  So if you consider store credit to be real money, I roughly broke even.  But if you consider it to be fun money, as I do, I did great, getting a lot of fun and value for $6 real money.  If I don't find something else to spend it on, the $24 will roll over into the next CYOCD.

Thanks for reading!