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!
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