Theros Beyond Death FNM Draft 2020-02-14

Yeah, I played Magic on Valentine's Day.  :)

It was actually the biggest draft crowd we've had, but that is partially because there weren't enough Modern players to hold a tournament, and a couple of them joined the draft.  Still, we had 16 people for two full tables of 8.

Here's what I drafted from bottom left to top right:

My first pack was complete garbage.  The other contender for my first pick was Mystic Repeal, but I didn't think a very good enchantment removal spell was good enough to start the draft with.  Since I've done well with white-red aura aggro decks, I took the Eidolon just on the chance that I ended up on that plan again.  It turned out to be the only white card I drafted.  Threnody Singer didn't have any super strong contenders in its pack either, but it's a card I am happy to play in any blue deck.  Then I rounded out most of my colors by taking red and black removal.  The second Threnody Singer, in foil no less, was a pretty good indicator that I could settle into blue.  The rest of the pack had a few playable cards but nothing I was excited about.

Second pack rare was Dalakos.  He's a weird one -- his abilities don't synergize with very much in THB Limited, as he was apparently designed mostly for Commander, but a 2/4 for 3 mana is an ok card on its own if you're playing the right colors.  I wasn't sure I was playing them, and I thought he was a good candidate to come back around.  So I took a blue-red (UR) payoff card that has much better set synergy in the Manticore.  Second pick Oracle again isn't an amazing bomb of a rare, but it's just good and efficient.  The next 3 cards are very good and further indicated I could draft UR.  When the first pack came back, it didn't have Dalakos, but instead I got Stern Dismissal, which is probably a better card for my deck anyway.

Third pack was a fist pump, as Phoenix of Ash is a very good card and also in my colors.  There's not a lot to say about this pack other than that it gave me exactly the kind of cards I wanted for the first half.  The two Fields of Ruin, which are good in constructed but bad in THB Limited, were placed perfectly in the packs for me to take them without hurting my draft, so that was nice.

Here's my main deck:

The main themes I wanted to support were devotion to blue (Callaphe, Thassa's Oracle, Threnody Singer), "cast a spell on opponent's turn" (Manticore, Arena Trickster), and ferocious (power 4 or greater).  The good news was that most of the cards for the first two themes are good enough without much help, so I didn't bend over backward to support them.  For ferocious, Furious Rise is really strong but does nothing if you don't have a ferocious creature, so I had to work a little to make it work, specifically by playing Impending Doom.  The pump abilities of Phoenix of Ash and Incendiary Oracle are also sneaky ways to turn it on, and Callaphe also often has 4 - 5 power in the mid-game.

Here's what didn't make it into the main:

My default sideboard play on the draw was to take out an Island and add Infuriate.  Soul-Guide Lantern is a great sideboard option when playing against strong cards with escape, so it also saw play.  I brought in Stampede Rider a couple times as an aggressive card, but I never wanted to cast it over other spells, so it was probably wrong.

First round was against white-black with auras.  I had two bad games.  In the first game I drew excessive lands, and in the second I kept a hand with 2 Islands, Callaphe, and 4 red cards, thinking I would either draw blue spells or Mountains.  As it turned out, I drew just enough stuff to avoid discarding to hand size, but I wasn't able to cast my red spells or keep up with my opponent's very strong curve out.  Loss, 0-2.

Second round was against one of the store guys playing white-blue Nadir Kraken control.  This deck was basically built around a few strong cards and a bunch of removal and tokens to slog up the ground.  He got good mileage out of Flicker of Fate, a card I haven't wanted to play in my aggressive white decks.  In the first two games he played Nadir Kraken on turn 3.  In both games I was able to neutralize it as a creature but not stop its ability (Entrancing Lyre and One with the Stars both have this effect), and whoever got a good flier to stick won the game.  In game 3, he didn't have the Kraken right away, but it became a slog and he did eventually get it again (and I locked it down again).  I think I was likely to lose that game in the long run, but we went to time and drew 1-1-1.  He gave me the win.

I made one pretty notable misplay in the second game (loss) as a result of not being used to the play pattern of certain cards.  He had just flickered his Nadir Kraken to get it out from under One with the Stars, and I had an active Furious Rise in play.  I played Thassa's Oracle and saw Fateful End, but I put it to the bottom, knowing Oracle puts the card on top of the library instead of drawing it, and thinking I wouldn't be able to cast Fateful End before Kraken grew to 4 toughness.  Then my Furious Rise triggered, and lo and behold, I would have had Fateful End available from exile with mana to cast it before the Kraken's upkeep trigger resolved!

Third round was against another good player on blue-black with a strong escape theme.
First game I was a little aggressive as I tried to feel him out, and he punished me with some combat tricks.  Second and third games I had a much better feel for his deck and played it a little more carefully.  The coup de grace in the final game was an Infuriate after blocks on my all out attack, which forced him to sacrifice all but one of his creatures to Lampad of Death's Vigil just to survive the turn.  Win, 2-1.

Fourth round I split the pot with another X-1 player, earning $7.50 in store credit and making time to play some Commander.

So this deck did pretty well, and I honestly think it could have done fine in my first round match if I had drawn the cards that play well against aggressive creatures, such as Threnody Singer and Riptide Turtle.  I probably should have mulliganed the second hand there.

One of the tricky things with Threnody Singer and Riptide Turtle is knowing whether you want to cast them on turn 2.  I generally played the Turtle because it doesn't have as much surprise value, but Threnody Singer I tried to leverage based on whether I needed to be the aggressor.  Singer isn't aggressive on its own, but when you hit it with Impending Doom on turn 3, it becomes a must-answer threat.

As far as value, I drafted a bunch of cards that are cool but not super valuable.  The Oracle is about $5 based on some combo decks that are using it, and the Phoenix is about $1.  After barely getting any Nyx lands last time, this time I ended up with 6 somehow.  My default (and I think most other people's as well) is to always draft them over commons that aren't likely to make my deck.

Another odd wrinkle is that I drafted 3 rares, which is exactly average, but 18 uncommons, which is twice as many as a normal draft.  Add that to the 6 basics and 2 foil commons, and I drafted probably a record low 16 "normal" commons.

I had a bunch of store credit, so I bought two collector boosters for science (one Eldraine and one THB).  I'll write that up separately.

Thanks for reading!

Theros Beyond Death FNM Draft 2020-02-07

Time for another Theros Beyond Death (THB) draft.  This time there were 13 drafters, so that was a little better.  I was at a table of 6.

If you've never experienced different size pods, the number of people in the pod can make a big difference in how the draft goes.  Last week there were 10 in my pod, and that means that out of 15 cards in the pack, only 5 cards would be left when I got them back, and the other 9 drafters were likely split across all the colors.  So I couldn't count on anything wheeling back to me.  This time, with only 6 in the pod, I would see the pack again with 9 cards left and a third time with 3 cards left.  This is a huge difference, especially in second and third packs if you can make your early picks with the expectation that certain cards that only you want will come back to you.

Anyway, here's what I drafted, from bottom left to top right (apparently brought to you by www.yugioh-card.com).  There should be a Nyxborn Courser somewhere toward the end of the first pack -- it was apparently hidden behind another card in the photo.

Pack 1 rare was Temple of Deceit, which I wouldn't mind owning but was not worthy of a first pick.  It was a good pack overall, but I value Banishing Light very highly for its ability to answer almost any problematic card in this format.  Second pick was a lot less clear.  I decided Commanding Presence is just very strong.  Warbriar Blessing is also a strong aura, and suddenly I had 3 enchantments including two auras to start a draft; this felt very weird.  Hero of the Pride was the kind of creature I was looking for, and then the end of the pack fizzled a little and I drafted some blue cards that seemed better than their pick order.

Pack 2 started with Storm's Wrath, a card I happily picked last week.  This time I wasn't sure of my second color, so I grabbed the Transcendent Envoy because (a) I knew I was short on creatures so far, (b) I wanted a flier that synergized with auras (and especially curves into Commanding Presence), and (c) I wanted to signal my opponents to stay out of white.  Second pick Haktos may not have been the most winning play (and it's likely it would have wheeled, although you never know with rares), but it is a card that can randomly win games on its own.  You can see that I still wasn't sure on my second color after that, but a very late Hero of the Nyxborn (which I had passed in favor of a blue counterspell) told me that I should follow Haktos into white-red.

Pack 3 was a frustration point.  I was pretty sure about white-red aggro now, and the pack gave me Kunoros at rare plus a foil Labyrinth of Skophos.  Both of these are cards I would probably first pick in pack 1, but here I was not set up to switch to white-black after passing a ton of really good black cards, and the Labyrinth didn't fit the likely aggressive style of my deck (using 5 mana to remove an attacker or blocker just wasn't likely to come up, and I needed colored mana from my lands).  So I ended up with a red common that was a maybe to make my deck.  After that, I was taking a bunch of commons, and as many Daybreak Chimeras as I could manage.  I took an Eidolon of Obstruction over one just because I didn't think anyone was drafting white as hard as I was, and it did come back to me.  This pack really made the deck viable by giving me the creatures I needed.

An odd note -- people really like these Nyx lands.  I managed to draft 1 total, and it was from a really bad pack that still had 5 other cards.  Note that I also received a rare as my last pick of the draft, suggesting that everyone else found a card they wanted, and one person valued the basic land over the rare.

Here's the deck I played:

There's not a whole lot to say because it's very close to the same deck I had the previous week.  This time I was much heavier in white, and I did start just 16 lands because my curve was slightly lower (Daybreak Chimera effectively costs 3 - 4 mana most of the time).  After laying everything out, I didn't even play my first-picked Hero of the Games because I felt like I had better creatures.

Here are the cards I didn't play in the main deck:

Omen of the Sun was the card I was least sure about.  I probably should have played it, but I'm not sure where.  Triumph of Anax seems like it might be good, but none of its chapter abilities trigger heroic.

How did it go?

Round 1 I was paired against a black-green player from the other table.  I won pretty easily in the first game, but in the second game he got Erebos out, making it really hard for me to use or enchant my small creatures unless his mana was tapped down.  This resulted in interesting gameplay on his part because he didn't want to turn Erebos into a creature or it would be more vulnerable to my removal (Dreadful Apathy, which he had seen with Agonizing Remorse).  He eventually outdrew me enough to break through and win.  Third game he mulliganed to 5, and I had a draw that I liked, with the potential to make a big Hero of the Pride.  Turn 1 and 2 he played deathtouch creatures, and I was held off from attacking for way too long because I couldn't find more creatures.  Eventually I got Commanding Presence, but I wasn't set up to win the race even with a 7/8 vigilant first striker and two copies of Karametra's Blessing in hand.  Loss, 1-2.  I found out later that his sideboard plan included bringing in Kiora Bests the Sea God for longer matches.  Good stuff!

Round 2 I drew the bye, which counts as a win but left me bored for a bit.

Round 3 was against a deck playing white-blue-black off a third pack Dream Trawler, one of the cards that Banishing Light does not answer.  He also had the Kunoros that I had passed.  I had two very strong draws and his deck was quite slow, so I won without much resistance.  Win, 2-0.

Technical 2-1 was worth $12 store credit.  I think this deck is pretty good, but it was missing some of the good things I had last week like Hero of the Winds and the lifelink effects.  This deck was much more driven by commons.  I never did get to try Haktos -- the only time I drew him was in a mulligan hand, and I put him to bottom since I wasn't sure I could get the right mana.  One card I wished I had was Wrap in Flames.  My first opponent was really vulnerable to it, and it would have won me game 3 easily.  I saw one in the draft, but it didn't come back around.

Here are the "value" cards I drafted:

Nothing too exciting, maybe $2 total.  I drafted 3 rares but only 6 uncommons and 1 Nyx land.

Anyway, another good draft for this set.  Thanks for reading!

Theros Beyond Death FNM Draft 2020-01-31

Let's take a shot at Theros Beyond Death (THB) booster draft!  It's only the second week of FNM draft for this set, and there are only 10 of us signed up, so that's not a great sign.  I think a lot of people have abandoned my LGS since it stopped supporting draft as its primary FNM format (now Modern is the primary tournament, and drafts are more like a side event).

Everyone was at one draft table, which makes signals a little weaker and ensures that you'll rarely get a second shot at any good card you pass.  Here's my draft, from bottom left to top right:

Shadowspear is an amazing equipment, and as a colorless card it was an easy first pick.  This pack had good uncommons as well, but I don't think I would ever pass Shadowspear in this format.  This set doesn't have many good artifacts, but Entrancing Lyre is a good one too.  It can usually remove their best creature, and if you have the mana for it, you can have two things tapped down for your attack (one on their turn and one on yours).  This left me wide open on third pick, and I was able to settle into the colors other people were passing.  Hero of the Winds and Commanding Presence led me toward a white heroic/aura plan, so my biggest task was to figure out my second color.  Return to Nature is a great removal spell in this format, and I was shocked to find it at 7th pick, but then the red cards seemed better toward the end of the pack.

Pack 2 was a tough call.  The rare was Eidolon of Obstruction, which is an unexciting rare (it plays pretty much like Youthful Knight, which was common in Eldraine).  There were some pretty good commons, but I felt like Reverent Hoplite had the biggest upside since token creatures play well with the heroic ability of Hero of the Winds.  The next couple picks were things I didn't want to spend such high picks on, but Banishing Light at 4th pick was great.  It's one of very few cards that can answer almost anything in the format.  The rest of the pack was cards that go well in the red-white aura/heroic deck I was working on.  Karametra's Blessing in particular was a card I was very happy to find.

Storm's Wrath doesn't exactly synergize with the cards I was taking, but I think sweepers like this really go into any deck until proven otherwise.  I took a few more just solid cards for the deck and then was rewarded with Anax, who is both a big beater and a nice buffer against removal.  The bottom of the pack was mostly filler.

An interesting side note for this set is that the full-art Nyx lands are more desirable/valuable than normal basic lands, so people draft them instead commons that they won't play.  This results in slightly better nonland cards being available toward the end of packs.  I really like when sets are built with cards in the land slot that are desirable for drafting.

So despite having 3 really good green cards, I was clearly going red-white:

The hardest parts of building this deck were balancing pump/aura spells vs. creatures, and cutting 5-drops.  I started with 16 or 17 creatures likely to make my deck, and I cut it down to 12, which is lower than normal for an aggressive draft deck, because I needed enough combat tricks and auras to take advantage of the creatures' abilities and to make Karametra's Blessing usually function as a 1-mana counterspell.  Most of my cuts were at the top end of the curve, but the bottom end got hit too.  Oread of Mountain's Blaze was a card I ended up being very impressed with, because adding power/toughness boosts to a 1/3 results in a much better brawler than adding the same boosts to a 3/1 like Leonin of the Lost Pride, which I cut.  Also, being an enchantment creature is an upside with Karametra's Blessing.

I had 2 very good 5-drops and 4 more that were good enough to consider.  I feel like there are decks where Skophos Warleader would be an all-star finisher, and it would have certainly had potential in this one.  On top of that, the 6-mana flier Archon of Falling Stars is the kind of card that you almost always want to play in draft.  In the end, I felt like I'd rather stick with my main plan and hope to pressure with instant speed spells rather than draw enough lands to stick 5- and 6-mana battlecruisers.  Interesting in hindsight, the Eidolon of Obstruction that I passed would have easily made this deck, but the Reverent Hoplite that I picked instead did not.

Arena Trickster and Nyxborn Courser were both filler creatures that I wanted just for my curve (rather than playing a better 5-drop).  Trickster is intended for the blue-red "cast spells on your opponent's turn" deck in Limited, but it had mild synergy with some of my spells.

I considered going down to 16 lands, but I played it safe at 17 and only cut to 16 on the draw.

To emphasize how much flexibility my pool had, here's my sideboard:

Entrancing Lyre is a main deck card almost every time, but I felt like I didn't have the flexibility with mana to rely on it as a relatively expensive removal spell in game 1.  On turns 3-5 I want to be casting creatures and auras, and holding up mana for Karametra's Blessing, Indomitable Will, or the activated abilities of some of my cheap creatures.  Triumphant Surge is another removal spell I felt was just too expensive and conditional.  Mirror Shield looks like a great way to protect a creature buffed with auras, but again it costs 4 mana that I'd rather be using to pump power.

So how did it go?

Round 1 was against a grindy black-green deck with at least 3 Moss Vipers.  First game I won pretty handily, and the second game I brought in the Entrancing Lyre and used it to great effect to keep pressure on during my attack step.  This game showed the weakness of Hero of the Winds and Transcendent Envoy -- several turns I could only attack for 1 or 2 damage because I couldn't find my pump spells.  Win, 2-0.

Round 2 was another white-red player.  He had a lot of the cards I had grudgingly passed during the draft, and our decks were quite different from each other.  He also had a Purphoros with the constellation alternate art.  First game I made a 5/8 vigilant Oread of Mountain's Blaze.  He eventually got a Captivating Unicorn, which is a very frustrating card to play against with so many flash enchantments and enchantment creatures in the format, as well as an ineffective Purphoros, but I had just enough power to cross the finish line.  I also made a mistake in this game, missing the "create a 1/1 human soldier" trigger on Commanding Presence at least twice.  Second game he had the better draw and won.  Third game was back according to plan, and I think I still had an unused Banishing Light in hand when I won, "just in case."  Alseid did some great work as a first turn play with its lifelink.  He played Purphoros twice in the match but was never able to get enough devotion to make it a creature (and lost both games).  Win, 2-1.

Round 3 was against someone brand new to Texas who was playing at this store for the first time.  Very nice guy and I hope he comes back.  He was playing blue-black Kiora Bests the Sea God.  This card has been nicknamed "Kiora Wins the Game," and I didn't realize just how true that is until I saw it in action.  On the turn after they play it, you have your last chance to attack (into an 8/8 hexproof) before all hell breaks loose.  The next turn, all your stuff is tapped for 2 turns and they get to attack you for free, and the last turn they steal your best thing and attack again.  This means that you can't really survive the card by playing creatures onto the board as chump blockers, and the only feasible way to beat it is to remove the saga itself.  So in game 1 I had built a good board presence, had no idea how he got to 2-0 with this deck full of filler, and then he played Kiora and won.  I sided out my less effective cards (Storm's Wrath, Dreadful Apathy, Mountain) and brought in pure gas (Infuriate, Leonin of the Lost Pride, Aspect of Manticore).  Second game on the play I was just fast enough to race his mana, and third game I had a dominating draw with Alseid and Shadowspear both gaining me tons of life.  I finished with 45 life and Banishing Light in hand waiting for Kiora to appear (with Shadowspear out, I would have had my choice between Kiora and the Kraken token, which would have been an interesting decision in itself).  Win, 2-1.

Two notable things happened in this match.  Early in game 2, I had a situation where I made a feel-bad mistake after incorrectly assessing timing.  I attacked with the 3/1 Leonin, with Karametra's Blessing in hand.  He cast Threnody Singer, which was going to debuff my Leonin to 2/1 and block it.  I looked for a moment and then said, "Karametra's Blessing with the trigger on the stack," not processing that the Singer wasn't blocking yet.  He started to say ,"ok, trigger on the stack..." and I suddenly realized I wanted to catch it blocking and didn't care about the triggered ability and said "Oh wait, I want to cast this after you block, is that ok?"  He looked for a second and then agreed to let me do it, but I immediately felt bad and told him he doesn't have to let me.  I shouldn't have asked to change the order.  In hindsight, I realized (a) neither of us caught that Blessing wouldn't give hexproof anyway because Leonin didn't meet the requirements, and (b) it is possible that I would have preferred to deal the 4 (or 5 if we both missed the interaction) damage to him rather than kill the Singer in combat (and it's possible but unlikely he would have chosen to block my 4/3).  So anyway, mistakes were made, and I don't intend to do that again.

Second thing was we found a really tricky rules interaction that no one at the store was sure how to process.  He played Ichthyomorphosis on my Transcendent Envoy that was enchanted with Commanding Presence.  The weird part of this is that Commanding Presence grants a normal ability (first strike), a triggered ability, and +2/+2 all in the same text block.  It was clear that it would lose the first two, but we and the store experts/judges weren't sure about the boost.  In looking at the rulings for Ichthyomorphosis, I think we did it right -- it kept the +2/+2 and lost the other abilities, making it a 2/3 with no other abilities.  In the third game, he used Ichthyomorphosis again, on Anax with Shadowspear attached.  It became a 1/2, but I could have re-equipped the spear to give it the trample and lifelink again.  Weird stuff.

So the end result was that I was the only 3-0 player, with a game record of 6-2.  Not bad!  The payout was $25.

This time I drafted 2 rares (below average) and 11 uncommons (above average).  The only card with any real value was Shadowspear at about $5.  The Nyx lands are pretty popular right now and mostly have market price of about 40 - 50 cents on TCGPlayer.

All in all, I felt like I did a good job assessing the cards in this draft, both for drafting and for deck building/sideboarding.  I never drew Storm's Wrath, and I only drew Shadowspear once, which makes the result even more impressive.  All of the 2-drops in the main deck were great, and the heroic mechanic in this set has to be scary to play against, as you can take surprise losses or trades in combat when the heroic player only has 1 or 2 mana available, and on defense you can just lose the game out of nowhere.  With 3 creatures attacking, for example, Infuriate on a heroic creature can add 6 extra damage for 1 mana.

I also think I did a good job of being judicious with removal.  A deck like this doesn't have to remove everything, because it either ends up making them play from behind and lose creatures in combat, or it wins races by surprise with a flurry of combat buffs.  Banishing Light is a truly precious commodity to be saved for the biggest bombs that are indestructible or otherwise hard to answer.

Thanks for reading!