Draft #48 "The Elusive Rare Draft" - May 15, 2015

It's time for the Dragons of Tarkir rare draft! The only problem is that these rares are so rare, they're downright camera shy!

So you might notice that the video is a little short this week. We've been plagued by recording issues and hardware failures recently, and this draft is no different. After the client crashed twice, I decided that playing the games was more important than recording the video. All I managed to record was the draft.

I don't know whether this is common knowledge or not, but here's something you may not know about MTGO. When you don't submit your deck in time for the rounds to start, MTGO automatically puts all your cards, as well as enough land to play them, into the deck. This results in an 81 card deck, which you'll be given automatically for the first game of each round. Hilarity ensues. Go ahead and watch the draft, then come back if you want a break down of how the rounds went.

So this started out as a rare draft, and it could have been a really good one. The rares we had weren't the greatest, but they weren't absolutely unplayable, and for the most part they stayed right in two colours. The result was a fairly strong Dromoka deck with a black splash for removal. Picture of the final deck below:

After the crash, we ended up losing all three of our first games, though not as badly as we might have expected. Myth Realized is not a bad one drop. Several times we got it up to four or five counters, and it won us the second game of the round we actually won. Basically, it's a fine mana sink, and it shares some of the bonus of dash creatures in that it can't be targetted by creature removal on the opponent's turn.

Obscuring Aether was also useful in a way I didn't expect. We didn't actually have any Megamorphs in the deck, and I thought it was going to be one of those rares I never wanted to draw, but dropping it on turn three, getting a counter on Myth Realized, and then having a surprise blocker for our opponent's morph was well worth the card. 

Assault Formation, Ojutai's Command, and Shamanic Revelation were utter duds in our deck, though I'll be talking more about Assault Formation when I post my next Constructed article. The real strength of our deck was in our white creatures. There were two games we won just on white aggro. We dropped myth realized, then dragon hunter and obscuring aether, then Dromoka Captain, and we were off to the races. When Dragonscale General came down, it was bolster three and against an empty board, that's a win.

Our deck even had sideboard options. Double Pinion Feast against flyers, and a Dromoka Dunecaster against aggro are both strong, and one game we brought in the Sadist to get value off of a pacified creature, to good success.

All in all, it went about as well as a rare draft should, even with the auto submission. I'm just sorry the videos aren't there to watch. We'll try to get these computer issues figured out so that they stop getting in the way of our recordings, but in the mean time...


Thanks for Watching,


-Step.