Some general thoughts

So what happened to drafts #20 through #25?

Well, I didn't post them. I have a much better idea now of what cards I should and shouldn't be looking at, and I'm much better at gauging the power level of cards in Innistrad in general, so it's become less helpful for me to detail all of my picks. I'm still going to post some drafts, but I'm not going to write out my thought processes for each pick, since for the most part they are getting closer to where I want them to be.

As far as Innistrad limited goes,


It threw me off at first because it's not your everyday average "draft removal, then creatures" format. The creatures are much better than the spells, unless the spell is Silent Departure. At first I would draft these regular decks with traditional card values and I'd get steamrolled by the guy who got all the Darkthicket Wolves I passed. Then I'd try drafting these semi-aggressive R/b decks with tons of crappy red creatures because hey, they're everywhere, and I'd lose to like a single armored skaab. Now I have a better grip of the texture of the format, to know what kind of cards go in a winning deck.

One thing I've decided, and I'm not sure how many people will agree with me, is that I love drawing first. I'll almost always prefer to draw. The only disadvantage is that you could just plain lose if your opponent gets an aggressive start with a nut G/W deck or whatever, but I've found that aggressive draws are just as good on the draw, and I'd much rather have the extra card because I've been taking a lot of games to parity in this format, and I just can't afford to either stumble on mana early or hit a land clump late and lose, so having the extra card goes a long way in helping out both of those causes.

What made me realize this, and I might as well get my crazy "you should know better you're a statistician" theories out of the way, is that modo has been extra harsh to me lately with mulligan decisions. Lots of 1 land hands, or miscolored hands, or hands with 5 lands and 2 4+ drops, or whatever. I've also noticed that the decks in this format (that I draft at least) don't mulligan well, so going down a card or sometimes 2 cards makes it a lot harder to win than if you had a deck with just powerful cards and not as much synergy. I decided to start drawing so that I could mulligan more confidently and beat my modo luck, but I've been finding that I want to keep my 1 landers, or my 2-forests-when-I-need-just-one-plains hands way more since I have that extra draw step to try and peel out of it. I have no real way of measuring, but it feels like I've been way more successful when I just get to go 2nd and have that extra card to make everything better.

I've done 27 drafts total in this format. I've made the finals 6 times, with 4 splits, 1 win and 1 loss. If you take a dead average drafter (someone who has a 2/8 or 25% chance of making the finals), then after 27 drafts you'd expect that drafter to have 6.75 finals appearances, so I'm not too far off the average mark. To further hammer that in, my match record so far is 20-20-4 and that's about as average as you can get. Given that limited was never really my thing, and especially not Innistrad limited, I'd say that I've been improving at a pleasing rate and that this blog effort has been a success so far.

I'd like to extend a personal thank you to anyone who has commented on my blog, or messaged me on facebook, or gave me any kind of opinion or advice at all about these drafts. I really could not have improved without your help.