When Drafts Go Bad - MTGAER Draft Feb. 11, 2017

 

Step here,

If you follow any of our other projects, you'll have already heard me talk about my draft deck from last week, and how bad it was. The deck I played was bad, but the deck I should have played, could have been competitive.

Join me on this little adventure, through the mind of a player who is too uncertain, too scattered, and just plain too tired to draft effectively.

First, let me show you the deck I should have played.

This deck looks... Okay, not great, but it certainly looks playable. There's a curve, there's a top end, there are tricks that could get value. Most importantly, it looks like it would be able to cast its spells without too many mana issues.

Now let me show you the deck I actually played.

This is a messy pile of good cards and no fixing in at least one too many colours. It's the deck I ended up with after the drafting process went off the rails and I just rage piled all the good cards with the jank together into some semblance of a deck. I knew from the outset that I was going to lose every game, and that's exactly what happened, but that's not what should have happened.

Where did I go wrong?

To start with, I had had a long week, and I knew I shouldn't be going to play cards in public. I just wasn't mentally prepared for competitive entertainment. If you want a draft to go well, and you're concerned about winning, you need to be sharp, and I was not.

Next, I wasn't as cognizant as I could have been about what the real signals were, and I waffled between two archetypes longer than I should have. The why I'll get to when we walk through the draft... painfully.

Finally, let's talk about rule one of salvaging a draft. When I realized I was in trouble, I should have done two things. First, picked my colours and forced them, and second, always always always take the cheaper playable over the more expensive, if I had a choice. A good curve can make up a lot for lost power level in a draft that goes south.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the approximate pick order of my pack one.

 

Note: I wanted to figure out just where I went wrong, so I tried to reassemble my draft after the fact. From here on, I'm going to take pictures of the whole draft before I start deckbuilding, as I think this serves as a good learning tool.

As you can see, even pack one was a bit confusing. I started the draft with a choice between Greenbelt Rampager and foil Sram, Senior Artificer. If I hadn't been aware before opening that pack that I was too exhausted to draft effectively, it should have been a tip off. I tilted pretty hard at seeing my draft going green and/or white for the fifth time in as many drafts. I really wanted to draft something different, something interesting, something not what I'd already done a bunch of, and that's the wrong place to start.

I took the rampager, and was hopefully optimistic that I'd be able to go red/green, or something. Second pick I had a choice between an Outland Boar and a Treasure Keeper. I did want to go red/green, but I wasn't willing to commit to a second colour when I had an arguably better colourless card available. The next two picks were probably reversed, now that I'm looking at it. I think when I saw the Barricade Breaker, I'd decided to go all in artifact ramp, and picked up the Druid to facilitate it. Everything seemed to be going well for a while, and then on the wheel I saw an Aether Swooper. I decided to hedge on that, as I overvalue small fliers, and then a late Ravenous Intruder pushed me back toward red. Coming out of the first pack, I decided I was Green/Red. This was my biggest mistake.

Pack two started off fairly well, too. I took the Metallic Mimic mostly just to have it, though I figured it would be fine in Draft, whatever it did. Being passed a Winding Constrictor made me focus in on black. Had I seen late black in the first pack? Could I just move in? It would work well with the one Bandar I already had, and any energy I could pick up. I should just take it and see, I thought.

Getting Treasure Keeper number two, and then a Narnam Renegade made me feel great, but I was still looking for a second colour. Neither black nor red seemed open, and I kept seeing mediocre blue. What I should have been focusing on was the green. The closer I could stay to mono green at this point, the better it would have been. I'd forgotten about ramping, and passed some artifacts which I could have taken. By the end of the pack, I knew I was in trouble.

Pack three had a rare which, if I'd known about, would have made me take the Sram in pack one. At double white, however, Aetherstorm Roc wasn't going to make it into my pile, so I took the Aether hub, because I knew I'd need fixing. I should have remembered that decision when the person to my left passed me a Whirler Virtuoso, but at this point, I thought blue was open, and I also thought I had more good red than I did. Temur energy was my pack three plan, and I was going to pick up every Attune with Aether I saw. This, it turns out, was a bad plan, especially when I passed an Attune to pick up a Filigree Familiar.

By this point, I was just in a silly mood. I was taking "the fun cards" and deciding not to buckle down and win games. The module into module into gearseeker serpent felt good when I picked them, but in the back of my mind, I knew I wasn't going to have a good deck and I was trying to ignore it.

All said and done, I went 0-3, and didn't win a single game. I'm sure that if I'd built the deck I showed you all at the very beginning of this article, I could have won some games, and had some fun, but there's no way to win when you feel like you've lost, and that was where I was at.

I hope this tale of woe and dispair has helped to teach some valuable lessons. I certainly learned a lot, and now, one week later, I'm feeling good about the experience and what it taught me.

Join me next week when I talk about my next draft experience, which turned out quite a bit better. I promise.

Thanks for reading,

-Step.