The draft turnout has been a little sparse in the last month. For Thanksgiving week, we did a Chaos draft with 8 people. Here are my picks, from bottom left to top right:
First pick rare was the pretty bad Overwhelming Denial. Green looked good for a couple packs, but I started seeing red and white cards I liked. Toward the end of the pack I was seeing really good blue and black cards, and I probably should have switched. But my red and white were fine.
Pack 2 gave me an absolute bomb for a slow deck. The foil rare Oracle's Vault was accompanied by an Irrigated Farmland. Then I got some more good artifacts and stayed in white/red.
Third pack rare was Bonescythe Sliver, which managed to wheel back to me. I tried just a little to make blue fit because again I saw really strong blue cards, but in the end it didn't make sense because I didn't have enough color fixing for blue.
The end result was a lot of removal, some mostly small and aggressive creatures, and a couple card advantage engines. Here's the deck I made:
And here are the leftovers/sideboard:
I'm not sure if this was the best way to build the deck, but it wasn't bad. I think I could have pivoted into blue-black when I saw it was open and had a very good control deck. There was another person drafting white-red at the table, and he ended up with a powerful pure aggro deck full of cards I had hoped would come back to me.
Anyway, I lost the first round 0-2 against my neighbor on the right who had ended up in white-blue-black. Second round I won 2-0 against a kind of mediocre blue-green deck. Then I ended up splitting with my third round opponent for a $5 prize. We did play one round 3 game for fun, and I won on tempo although he was slowly accruing powerful card advantage.
My final game record was 3-2 and my played match record was 1-1. So the deck was fine, but it wasn't exactly what I want in either an aggro or control deck in draft, and I don't think it's correct to call a deck midrange when it's half aggro and half control.
Oracle's Vault and Sunset Pyramid made for a pretty sweet combo in the late game - I could peek at my top card before activating Vault each turn.
The value was not amazing in this draft. Bonescythe Sliver is worth a few dollars because people like slivers for casual play.
The next week, we drafted Throne of Eldraine even though we only had 8 players again. Here's what I did:
Hushbringer was my pack 1 rare. I feel like Lucky Clover is a strong position at the start of a draft because there are so many adventure cards and you only have to double one before you've gotten your card back from casting Lucky Clover. I took the Secretkeeper straight away and decided to try to make mill (dump cards from library to graveyard) work. After an on-theme So Tiny, I bounced around between blue, red, and white, with white appearing most open.
Pack 2 rare was a bomb, but unfortunately in blue-black. I had been letting black go and wasn't sure I could get into it. Fae of Wishes was a pretty easy second pick, and then most of the rest of the pack was in white-blue, so I stuck with it and didn't push for black very hard. Ninth pick Ardenvale Tactician is ridiculously late, as it is generally considered the best white common.
Pack 3 had Blacklance Paragon at rare. I took the pretty alternate art foil Tactician without a lot of consideration. I had hoped for more Secretkeepers, and I finally got a second one here. I got a bunch more of the cards I wanted in this pack.
So the final result was a mix of white knight cards, white-blue artifact-matters cards, and blue mill cards. I decided I wanted to go hard on the mill, and I built this:
I originally had Acclaimed Contender in this deck, but I realized it was unlikely I would have a knight on the battlefield to trigger it unless I added some of the worse knights from the sideboard.
Fae of Wishes meant I had some interesting considerations in sideboard. Since it can get basic lands, I prepared to bring in off-color cards with a basic land of the correct type if I ever had the opportunity to cast it with Lucky Clover. Searing Barrage and Return to Nature were my most likely targets for this.
Looking back, I think I had really good knight, flier, and tempo cards, and I should have ignored the mill plan and gone with cards like Flutterfox and the better knights (Acclaimed Contender, Vantress Paladin) instead of Secretkeepers. In my games, I was back and forth between having good mill or good aggressive starts.
Round 1 I lost 0-2 against a nasty white-black deck with Doom Foretold. I almost got the mill win in the second game. Round 2 I lost 1-2 against blue-green stompy with several Garenbrig Paladins after winning game 1 with a terrific aggressive/tempo hand. Round 3 I wasn't going to play unless I had a pairing since I was 0-2. I got paired up against a 1-1 black-red deck, and I gave him the win before we started but played the full match for fun. In this one I won 2-1, milling him in the first game and winning the normal way in a hard-fought third game.
My final game record was 3-5 and my played match record was 1-2.
Anyway, the lesson I took here was that you shouldn't try to play a mill deck unless you really get the right cards. In this case, I needed maybe 1-2 more Secretkeepers and probably worse attackers or better removal in order to make mill Plan A.
Oddly, I drafted 4 rares and 2 foils but only 5 uncommons. There isn't much money value here.
I went again this week, but we didn't have enough people to draft, so I just played Commander. Things should pick up again after the holidays.
Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something like I did!
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