FNM M20 Draft 2019-07-12

M20 is out and...the store has changed its FNM format.  Now the Modern tournament is the official FNM event, and drafts will be done as pod side events on demand.  This has the upside that if you want to draft, you aren't stuck in 5 or more rounds of play to get to top 8, but it also means you get less play out of your draft money.  The draft is single elimination, so normally people will play 2 rounds and then the top 2 will split the prize (8 packs first place + 4 packs second place).

I sat out of Modern again and played an M20 draft.  Here's what I took, bottom left to top right:

First pick was an easy $15 card in Leyline of the Void.  It's basically unplayable in draft though, so my real draft started with Skittering Scorcher and a couple common black creatures.  Rabid Bite and Shared Summons suggested that green was open, and I shifted into it hard.  The Leafkin Druid that wheeled was a great indicator that I was right; that card is one of the best green commons, and it fits well in the blue-green or red-green Elementals deck.

The rare in pack 2 wasn't memorable, and I've done enough practice drafts that I'm not sure what it was.  I had a couple good enough black cards from pack 1, so I took Yarok's Fenlurker just as a solid value card.  Meteor Golem and Blood for Bones are also 2-for-1 cards, so I felt like I could make a nice grindy deck based on out-valuing the opponent.  Second pack I took the Golem over Barkhide Troll because I thought the Troll was more likely to come around, and it did!

Pack 3 rare was Mystic Forge, which is so bad that it came back around to me.  It might be good in a colorless constructed deck though, as it's close to a better Experimental Frenzy aside from the colorless requirement.  Anyway, 2 Murders and another Yarok's Fenlurker were nice picks, but I was really shocked to see a 4th pick Steel Overseer.  In the early game, it can just grow and grow until it's the biggest thing, and often the opponent can't attack into it without it blocking and growing itself bigger than their attacker.  Field of the Dead is very hard to play in draft, but it's a card I think will be popular in Commander and maybe also other constructed formats.  I was happy to get a second Mammoth Spider near the end of the draft as another way to stabilize my slow deck.

Here's my deck:

All things considered, this was a basic black-green deck with no special theme.  It had a fair amount of incidental lifegain, several 2-for-1's, great removal, and the possibility to incidentally combo into a turn 4 Meteor Golem or Feral Abomination with Gorging Vulture and Blood for Bones.

The sideboard had more than pictured, but this is the gist:

I had the ability to go aggressive with some of those top row cards, but I didn't use it.  On the draw, I always took out a land and usually added Gift of Paradise in addition to any other changes.  It's possible this deck would have been ok with 16 lands and 2 Gift of Paradise on the play, but I didn't want to risk it.

Round 1 vs. Red
I think this was just straight red.  It had the uncommon Chandra and her Regulator, but they never showed up together.  The value plan was great here.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 vs. White
He had a first round bye so I didn't know whether his deck was going to be good.  He had Cavalier of Dawn and Loxodon Lifechanter, a bunch of anonymous support creatures, and some Pacifism.  I won the first game over a slow grind.  The second game he was on the offensive, and I made him work for it but he won without taking any damage.  Third game I got to some dire spots but was slowly working my way out of it and probably would have won with unlimited time.  But the game went to time, and the sudden death rule is that the player with the most life at the end of the 5th turn wins, so he played defense and maintained his high life total long enough to take it.  Loss, 1-2.

And that's that!  I got 6 rares and 13 uncommons, which are both unusually high numbers.  Between Leyline of the Void and 3 other $1 - 2.50 rares, I got about $20 in value, and Leyline is almost guaranteed to maintain or increase its value long term, so that was good luck for a draft.

I also played a game of Commander that went for a fairly satisfying 2 hours.  One player (Yidris) had a lot of stormy cascade-y stuff and probably could have won sooner, but he held back and let everyone have a chance to play a bit.  The Niv-Mizzet, Parun player had a hard time finding his red lands and took a long time to get going.  The third player was playing my Cho-Manno Lifegain deck.  He got a couple of the good things out at various points -- the Cho-Manno + Pariah combo, Elesh Norn, and a 37/37 Serra Avatar, but we managed to break past those.  I was playing Intet Temur Dragons And I got a little stuck on mana as the game went on, but otherwise got to do my stuff.  I had Kefnet the Mindful out practically the entire game but was never able to activate his card draw and rarely had him turned on to attack or block.  So I'm replacing him with God-Eternal Kefnet, who can at least attack and block while being relatively hard to kill.

Thanks for reading!

M20 Prerelease 2019-07-06

The War of the Spark is officially over, and now it's Core Set time!  I don't know if it's because I'm still getting used to the cards, but M20 certainly felt a bit more complex than I remembered from M19.  The store started having Friday night prereleases for the first time, so I dodged a bunch of the FNM regulars at noon on Saturday, but it was still a pretty solid crowd.

My colors were pretty evenly split, and I probably could have made a playable deck in almost any combination, so I followed my rares and my dual lands:

Sorin is probably the most game-breaking rare I opened, and I had a few vampires and lifegain synergies to work with:

Sadly, I never got to experience using Sorin's first ability on Bloodthirsty Aerialist, which would have been truly disgusting (two +1/+1 counters per turn), but he still worked well with the other stuff.

Steel Overseer is an unassuming card, but it is about as good as it gets for a 2-drop.  It's good on its own, but I put in a few other artifact creatures for the occasional bonus:

Prismite and Anvilwrought Raptor are marginal on their own, but I did like the extra source of multicolored mana in this deck, and the first strike flier was also a nice target for Sorin's first ability.

There were a few other nice interactions in the deck as well, like Gorging Vulture plus Blood from Bone to get a big creature into play and another in hand on turn 4, or Gauntlets of Light plus Griffin Sentinel to get a 5-damage vigilant flier.

Here are the sideboard cards I actually used.  I had some others that might have come in for certain matchups, but never did:

They brought back protection from colors and color hosing cards in this set, and it made for a slightly stronger sideboard plan.  Noxious Grasp and Unchained Berserker were both great when I needed them.  In my deck, Kethis basically reads "3/4" with no other text, so I only wanted him when a 3/4 was good (like against 3/3s).

Brief summary of the gameplay:

Round 1 vs. Temur (blue-red-green) Elementals
This deck had two Voracious Hydras.  I played two very competitive games and lost both, but they were excellent games.  In the first game I missed a chance to trigger Griffin Protector before attacking for 1 extra damage, and that might have made the difference (he was at 1 life at the end), but he made a similar mistake in the second game by not playing a creature before combat that gave his other creature trample, which allowed me another turn or two.  Loss, 0-2.

Round 2 vs. Sultai (blue-black-green) Yarok
I never saw Yarok in play, but that was his promo so he built around its ability.  The parts of the deck I faced were not able to keep up with my deck.  In the second game, I ended up with one of the most ridiculous board states I've ever had in limited, with Sorin at about 12 loyalty, and Vampire of the Dire Moon, Steel Overseer, and Prismite all with 5 or more +1/+1 counters.  Steel Overseer was a 9/9 and I had 44 life when that game ended.  Win, 2-0.

Round 3 vs. Jeskai (white-blue-red) Tempo
I rarely expect to see a truly aggressive deck in sealed, but this was a good deck built around cheap fliers, Marauder's Axe, and tap or bounce effects.  He got the first game super fast.  I sided in a bunch of red cards and 2 mountains to speed up for game 2, and I had a very aggressive start that he couldn't keep up with.  In the third game I made a pretty basic planeswalker mistake.  He had a 1/1 and a 2/2 flier, and I played Sorin and dropped Epicure of Blood into play with his third ability, essentially trading Sorin for the ability to have a 4/4 on turn 3.  I was holding Shock in hand and should have taken 1 turn more to set up my board so that I could have gotten long term value out of Sorin.  The game was fairly close but he was pressuring me the whole way.  Loss, 1-2.

Round 4 vs. White-Blue Fliers
This was the daughter of a guy who comes to a lot of the prereleases, and she had a pretty strong set of fliers led by Sephara, Sky's Blade and Dungeon Geists.  First game I simply had the better draw.  Second game she got all the fliers set up and I couldn't handle Sephara when she showed up.  Third game I went off with Sorin and she couldn't stop it.  Win, 2-1.

So no prize for me at 5-5 in games and 2-2 in matches, but that's fine.  I did get some pretty good cards out of my packs, including promo Kaalia at ~$20, Sorin at $16, Lotus Field at $12, Kethis at $6, Scheming Symmetry at $5, and Steel Overseer at $3.  Some of those will undoubtedly drop as the set ages, but Steel Overseer is a Modern staple and a few of these are cards that Commander players will want.

One final note on this set: the tokens are great!  They've gone to a full art format, and they've even included basic rules information on the back of some of them.  Pretty nice!

Thanks for reading!