Saturday, 2 May 2015

Draft #47 - "No Impact" - May 1, 2015

This weeks draft found us again in black/red, which is a favourite colour pairing, for both of us in this format. It tends to be highly aggressive and difficult to beat, what with all of the strong dash and supporting cards. As we found out though, that is not always the case. 



We first picked a Pristine Skywise.  Though I generally stay away from pack one pick one two colour cards, as it's generally not the best choice to commit to two colours so early, I still stand by that pick. It's a strong rare that we decided to simply speculate on. If we found white/blue open and viable we would run it, otherwise we would bench it. The only other choices I would have considered were Dragon Fodder, Salt Road Quartermasters or maybe Reckless Imp. That said, we didn't feel we were missing out on much by not choosing one of them.

In pick two Step and I had a differing of opinions as to which card to take- the Ukud Cobra or the Sarkan's Rage. I wanted the creature, Step, the removal. I still think the right choice at this point in the draft was the creature- it's uncommon and really good. A 2/5 with deathtouch for four can be removal, create board stalls, and can get in for damage. I agree that straight up removal is something to prioritize but I felt that a good multi purpose, uncommon creature was the better choice. Re-watching the draft, I still stand by that.

As we moved through the first pack there was the option of picking some decent white cards over the black, which would have set us up for the Daghatar we passed later on, but given that we had no way of knowing that, and the black we chose was fairly solid, I still think we went in the right direction.

Pack three pick one saw Daghatar as our rare. I briefly contemplated suggesting taking it, and hope to pick up a piece of fixing as we had a few drafts earlier. After seeing the Wild Slash though, I figured that a strong piece of removal trumped a admittedly strong card that we'd need to hope to splash in a two colour format. As we moved into the next pick, there was a Wind-scarred Crag that we could have nabbed to splash with, but given that we couldn't be sure we would find one, I still believe that Wild Slash was the better choice for us.

By the end of the draft we created a mediocre red/black deck, that was missing most of the stand out dash cards, and that proved to be a weakness. The R/B decks biggest asset is it's speed, and ours was slower than we would have liked. I will admit that variance was a big issue in some games and we probably would have fared better if our deck had behaved, but still, it just wasn't as strong as we were hoping.

The last thing I want to talk about is Impact Tremors. We only wound up with four dash creatures, though Dragon Fodder would have given us two points of damage to our opponent for the cost of one card, but still, this probably wasn't the optimum deck for this card. Step and I talked about it afterwards and he said a creature would have been better. He's probably right but given that we didn't see Impact Tremors at all, we wouldn't have seen that creature either, so it's really hard to tell if it would have helped in any of our games.

While this wasn't the strongest of decks or the best of drafts, we still had a blast and learned some things, so that, to us, makes it worth while.

Hope you enjoyed the video and thanks for stopping by!

~Tams

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