That said, I still have some photos and brief thoughts on a couple drafts. Here is my Modern Horizons draft from July 26, bottom left to top right:
I haven't had great luck drafting Defile with first picks. It's a great card but utterly useless as a splash removal, which is why I am now thinking Mob is a better card to pick early. As you can see, I tried to do blue-green snow with this deck. I was shocked to get a Fact or Fiction third from last pick. This was a strong signal that blue was open.
Next pack I got my favorite jellyfish. I don't remember the rares in these packs at this point. I tried to pivot to black again but was quickly pushed back to blue-green. Glacial Revelation is bonkers good in a snow deck.
Third pack Morophon was a pretty good top-end card that can go in any deck. Then I was super happy to get two Blizzard Strix, because those are great in any deck with enough snow support. I didn't have much creature support in the first two packs, so pack 3 was my spot to make up for that. The late Winter's Rests were also key to a good snow deck.
Here is what I built:
There are some powerful things going on in this deck, but it has a suspect mana base and not a lot of early game defense. I probably shouldn't be playing Archmage's Charm with just 7 blue lands and 2 Astrolabes. I considered trying to go mill with the two Streams of Thought, but I didn't feel like my defense was good enough to win that way.
Round 1 vs. Mono Black
This guy had a great black deck with multiple copies of Defile and all the good common black creatures. He beat me in two games, and neither was particularly close. He had enough removal for all my creatures and I was stuck with a bunch of leftover cards in hand that I couldn't deploy fast enough.
I drafted 6 rares, but the value of the draft is only about $10.
On August 16 I got two drafts in.
First draft:
I'm not sure if Unsettled Mariner is really first-pick material, but it's interesting so I took it. After that, I got into actually good red and green cards and stuck with that for most of the draft. Springbloom Druid is a legitimate first pick card, fitting in any color pair or multicolor deck. The red-green archetype involves lands in the graveyard (like Igneous Elemental), so it is great there.
Second pack I went back to my favorite common jellyfish even though it was off color, and then I got two blue-green Talismans to help cast it.
Nurturing Peatland is a $10 rare still, and as a bonus it also helps the lands-in-graveyard theme. Two Cleaving Slivers and a Volatile Claws gave me a way to end games explosively -- both together results in all my creatures getting +4/+0 at instant speed.
After this draft, some of the other drafters were so disappointed with their pools, or the rares that were opened, that they wanted to just start over. But I was excited to try this red-green lands-in-graveyard / slivers deck. I don't have a screenshot of the deck, but it was red-green splashing for the Man-o'-War and sometimes Winter's Rest.
Round 1 I played against a blue black ninjas deck. I dropped the middle game when he had the lifelink ninja and a couple others out, but I won the round 2-1.
Round 2 was against a hyper aggressive white-black changling deck with nasty slivers and Amorphous Axes. I lost the first game and sideboarded out my slower cards to counter his aggression. Second game was a tight win, and third game we both made some errors (most notably he didn't attack all out for lethal because he wasn't tracking our life totals), but I pulled it out. Win, 2-1.
I got a 6-pack split for my trouble, and it was on to draft 2:
I think Giver of Runes is an absolute bomb, as she makes it very hard for the opponent to interact with you once her summoning sickness wears off. I got into white-black pretty quickly, and I was looking for anything that worked well with the white blink spells or changelings.
Second pack I was getting almost nothing in white, so I experimented with other colors and got a couple black ninjas.
Third pack I finally first picked a Changeling Outcast. I never get this card because other people pick it so high, and it's good! It enables ninjas, and it wears equipment and auras well. After a couple more changelings, I was lucky enough to get Valiant Changeling, an amazing 2-drop in the right draw. The way its ability works, if you have another changeling in play, it gets the full discount because the other changeling counts for 5+ creature types on its own.
Building this deck was tough because I had a lot of candidates for useful last spells. I really wanted to play Fallen Shinobi because it just wins the game once it starts hitting, and I had multiple early evasive creatures to enable it, so I splashed it on three Islands. As it turned out, I always drew either the Shinobi or an Island, which was terrible.
Generous Gift was a card that impressed me. It always at least made a tempo play against the opponent, and sometimes it could win a combat against a double block. But it had some interesting fringe uses as well, such as turning my Putrid Goblin into a 1/1 and a 3/3 at instant speed.
Round 1 I played against maybe black-red? Now I can't remember. I lost the first game by failing to make a lethal attack, but then I bounced back and won twice. Win, 2-1.
Second round was against a red-green deck without any lands-in-graveyard cards. He had lots of early creatures and a lot of good mid-game synergies, like Mother Bear plus Bogardan Dragonheart. I really couldn't get a foothold and lost in two games. Loss, 0-2.
I think this deck was pretty good, but it was missing a couple more strong interactions.
Here's what I came away with on the two nights. I'm consistently drafting more rares and more snow lands than the rest of the table, aside from the last draft where I had zero snow lands.
Thanks for reading!
This post is going up extra late because I was having trouble with Blogger saving -- maybe because my Google account space was almost full.
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