PT:London Report (10th) Part 2

Before London I thought of it as a sort of final exam for Urza's Block limited, where you had to put together everything you'd learned one last time. And in the end, I returned to the first deck I ever drafted in Saga block, and lost the matches I lost in London for the same reason that deck lost. Here was the situation: A year ago at PT:Chicago, Alan Comer managed to track down enough packs from the prerelease for a draft to be held. The eight of us sat down, as Gary Wise on my left got his first look at the cards (I'd read the spoiler already). I started out with Acridian, which seemed horribly undercosted, then Hidden Ancients which also did, and moved into blue for Veiled Serpent. I got some Winding Wurms, and ended up with a lot of big creatures. I added two Cloak of Mists, which I compared to Invisibility and seemed like a good idea at the time. Who knows, in that deck they might even have been decent. In the first round I ran into Andy Wolf, who had W/B and introduced me to Dark Hatchling. He stalled the ground, used Pit Trap to get around Cloak of Mists, and flew over me for the kill after killing the blue flyers I managed to summon.

Soon I started to draft W/U on a regular basis. I knew black had powerful cards in it, but I felt it was too risky. The power cards were Corrupt and Pestilence and they could easily turn out to be useless if the black dried up. Eventually, of course, I realized that the black cards were just too good to pass up, and adopted The Rule, which in Saga is basically only is to draft black unless everyone else knows the rule (see my LA report for full details). It worked out well, and I drafted black in all four drafts. Legacy made black a little less overwhelming, and people didn't realize that. I started to move away from it, to distrust black again. After Destiny came in and I saw how bad black was in it, I assumed black was again rather risky. With Saga as the second pack you could always get the black coming back if you were cut off first pack, but now that was no longer true. Even so, in my second draft with destiny, which was the second draft of GP:DC, I ended up in W/B. In a feature match, I played against a U/G deck, and again the W/B deck stalled the game and won, this time decking him with a Congregate and a Field Surgeon.

First draft of US Nationals I ended up in B/U and the cards dried up so much I had to play Telepathic Spies. The second draft was even more important to my drafting. Casey McCarrel was in seat 1 of the Rochester, I was in seat 2, and I had to switch out of W/U when McCarrel decided to fight. Red seemed underdrafted, and I had 2 Veiled Sentries, so I decided to build a time advantage deck, and used the extra time you get in Rochester to map out what I wanted. The deck got an amazing mana curve, multiple Sluggishness and Sigil of Sleep, removal and counters and cheap creatures. I actually played a six minute match. Rob Dougherty beat me with Protection from Red, and I won my other two matches easily.

At worlds I got great representatives of two more deck types. I learned some of what made W/R tick in the first draft, facing Brian Hubble in the seventh round at 2-4 after drafting next to him, but the second draft was even more important. Only the winner of the table would enter day three with a chance at the top 8. Since it was Rochester, I chose my colors based on what everyone else was drafting and ended up in U/G. The deck I drafted ended up being an amazing example of U/G, with a solid mix of flyers, bounce, counters and a solid curve of creatures. The deck won without me having to do anything. I'd just play my creatures and try not to let damage through. After a while, I'd use Yavimaya Elder or Marker Beetles or Yavimaya Granger or Wizard Mentor or Raven Familiar or something to get extra cards, and after a while I'd have a ton of stuff and he'd have nothing. I won the table and survived long enough to lose in the first round of day three.

During the qualifiers for London I'd travel to Edison, NJ for their PTQs and I played in a lot of practice booster drafts, although I never played with top level players. Those kinds of drafts just didn't happen in my area. I suspect that the success of Boston players recently has a lot to do with the fact that they can assemble eight top-level players on a regular basis. Not only couldn't I do that, most weeks there wasn't even a sanctioned eight man draft at Neutral Ground, because they wouldn't cut off entries at 8 people, resulting in tables with very different dynamics. When you get the pack back for pick 7 that has a big effect on how you draft. On the plus side, the prize support for eight man booster drafts at PTQs was excellent. I had two goals. One was to learn how to 'sense the draft,' or determine what colors everyone was playing. The other was to learn how to build decks that tool bad players. It rapidly became clear that in Edison red was horribly underdrafted. I started drafting R/W decks, and picked up insane picks like 6th pick Jagged Lightning and 8th pick Shivan Phoenix (!). From then on, whenever I got a powerful Saga red card much too late, I would draft it and consider a color switch. I learned how to draft a certain kind of W/R, where you use red pumping and both red and white removal to make it impossible for your opponent to block your red dorks, even something like Retromancer, or impossible to attack on the ground while you burn his flyers and he takes hits from a Voice or Gargoyle or even Tormented Angel. When he gets low enough you burn him out.

But the big leap was when I started netdrafting. I'd done some practice Rochesters for Worlds and Nationals, but for London I started doing a ton of them. Because I felt I knew the cards and the play well enough, I only played it out when I'd drafted a deck I couldn't evaluate, which was once every few drafts. My main goal was to learn how to manipulate drafts, learn how they flow. Figure out what everyone must be drafting during Saga, pick in such a way as to force players to your left out of your colors while avoiding those on your right, and in the next two packs get paid off. Especially in Legacy. I started to solidify my feelings about black, and basically didn't draft it without opening a Pestilence or receiving a clear signal. Every time I started to draft R/G I ended up abandoning it, so I decided I just wouldn't draft it at all. And more and more, I found myself drafting U/G. When I played the decks out they did well, and I got a better and better feel for the deck. The basic goal is to use blue for the cards green doesn't have; you can read more about the system at the Sideboard after I finish writing an article about it for them. I liked it enough that I was looking for a chance to go U/G from the start of the draft. At the same time, I decided there were other combinations I really didn't like. Let me explain why.

Almost everyone knows why W/G is the worst color combination. I like Gary Wise's summary the best: There are a hundred broken rares out there and you can only deal with half of them. Ninth in my power rankings was R/G. For some reason, every time I drafted R/G I lost in practice. I tried to figure out why, and came up with a few complementary answers. One is that R/G isn't my style, both small and big versions. I don't play that type of deck and I'm not all that good at it. That's at least partially true. The other is that I don't know how to draft R/G. This is also at least partially true. Where the bigger problem was, I'll probably never know. The third problem was that at this point when I started into R/G my heart just wasn't in it, and I'd be looking for a way out. So those were the two combinations I wouldn't draft without being forced. That created some sticky potential situations. If I start with a green card, I have to look to complement it with blue, or in some cases black. This is the one case in which I found sometimes I would have to enter black without the early broken black, if my blue position was unacceptable. But green doesn't have very many good first picks in Saga, so I settled that one by thinking that you wouldn't start with green very often. If I did, I'd just know to be careful.

The next problem combinations were B/R, B/U and W/U, for different reasons. B/R is too vulnerable. Mask of Law and Grace is the biggest threat, but you also have no say in your opponent's enchantments in general. I could live with that, but the other problem is that both colors are very demanding. They have good Scents, Cinder and Nightshade, and both reward you for going into them heavily. The red in this deck has to be kept light to keep the mana ratio right. That makes the red much weaker, because many of the cards you would normally be in red for late, especially Scent of Cinder, become bad cards. There's virtually nothing red for you in Destiny. The deck works best with the red as a splash, which I will do, but in general going for non-broken red cards once you're into black is a mistake. B/U and W/U both have the same basic problem. You can get a deck full of good cards and still not have a good deck. Even more commonly, you can have all good cards and some broken ones and still not have a great deck. At the same time, you have to be very careful not to finish your draft with a piece of your deck missing. W/U in particular is good but full of traps. Miss any portion of the draft, like flyers, power, toughness, removal or counters, and your deck will suffer big time. I don't have a problem with W/U, I just prefer not to draft it. Often you will enter Destiny without a deck and need to get passed the right type of card or end up with a horrible deck.

The other five are the combinations I like better. W/B and G/B are where I look if I start black. If I start white I'll look to go into red or maybe blue or black. Blue I'd enter if I had a good blue position and wasn't in danger of falling into one of the traps. Black would be a great second color but again I need to be in a great position to be willing to take that risk, especially at the ProTour itself. W/R is the default here. If I start blue I'll look to red or green, leaning toward whichever deck I seem to have the components of but heavier toward green. Starting red I'd look for blue if I need only a few cards or white if I need a lot, position being equal. Starting green I look for blue, and I'll try to avoid the start if this looks like it won't work.

Now for what happened on the way to London. As usual, I totally forgot to get the hotel information, tournament site and other such information and therefore had to get lucky and find another player at the airport. I did just that, and me, Eli and Justin Gary proceeded to the hotel. When I got there, naturally everyone asked me if I wanted to draft, but that wasn't what I was after. If you draft you need to play it out and you don't get to see how anyone else thinks. What I did instead was watch other people draft. I compared their choices to mine, watched how color choices were made and top level drafts developed. It was enlightening, to say the least. Finally, I got into a draft because there were exactly eight of us talking draft strategy and a draft needed to start. I sat between Randy Buehler on my left and Gary Wise on my right. I knew Gary Wise knew I didn't like to take black and liked U/G a lot, and I knew Buehler also knew my strategy, because we'd exchanged strategies earlier that day. I knew he was a best-card drafter. So Wise went R/B. I passed the cards I needed to in order to get Buehler into R/G. But things went horribly, horribly wrong. The blue cards just didn't show up. In fact, not much was there in any color. I had no color commitments and was getting nothing. After the first pack the core of my deck was a bunch of Goblins, including Raider, Lackey and Matron. And everything else I had was white. I had only one way to save the draft, to go for W/R time advantage. In Legacy I got what I wanted, had the good 1 and 2 drops for the deck, but missed Lava Axe. Then in Destiny the cards didn't come, even though Wise took only one red card. I'd played the whole draft for Scent of Cinder, Flame Jet and Reckless Abandon at the end, because I had no choice. The cards weren't there. This could have been the worst deck I've ever drafted in this format, and quickly was dismissed in the first round by Bryan Hubble.

After the draft, we talked about what happened and what I did wrong. My strategy had been to "play the man, not the cards." I'd played the men right, but the cards just weren't in the packs to begin with. Gary Wise said I should have gone blue in Legacy. He said something to the effect of: Blue's most important pack is Legacy. You were passed no blue cards, so you passed less than no blue cards. So you'll get it coming back. The fact that you don't have a single blue card right now doesn't matter. A lot of things about that bothered me, like the problem of Randy deciding the same thing, but realistically I knew he wouldn't and couldn't have stayed in blue even starting with Morphling if his strategy was to draft the best card. There was just nothing. Point well taken. But the draft wasn't exactly a confidence builder.

As for registration, I was the first person to register because I stood outside the door right before registration opened and saved myself from a gigantic line. Good call. Inside, I had my traditional talk with Rosewater. This time, he had to defend MM from charges it was too weak, and challenge the charge that combination decks would dominate the new T2. He also had to apologize for not getting XXL shirts, which some of us need. At one point when I was talking about how T2 was going to be a 3-way contest between combination decks at states, he yelled out "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" I thought for a minute about how to respond to that. What I said was: "You're right. I do tend to say the game is in trouble. The only thing that can be said for me is that most of the time I happen to be right."

The last thing I get to do before the tour is check out WotC's new encyclopedia program, and chat with one of the developers later between rounds about improvements. It looks pretty good, but there are a ton of little things they need to work on and one huge one: Currently you can't connect for a game using IP addresses, you must use their site. That's not good. The biggest other one is that the box for your cards in hand isn't big enough. But if they make the right improvements, this could be a great product.

End of flashback and part 2. When we return, Draft Pod #2.

Zvi Mowshowitz