The best cards in the packare Nimbus Naiad, Vaporkin, Aqueous Form, Shipwreck Singer and Reaper of the Wilds. Spearpoint Oread is good, but it's not stronger than any of those other 5. Horizon Scholar is generally pretty mediocre. The two gold cards require shoving on a color combo, and neither of them are strong enough to make me want to do that, so it's down to the 3 blue commons. That makes it pretty easy, since Nimbus Naiad is the best one by a wide margin.
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Pack 1 pick 2:
Pukey pack. The best card is Time to Feed. The second best card is Blood Toll Harpy.
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Pack 1 pick 3:
Now THIS is a pack. It sucks seeing 3 great blue cards (and a Hopeful Eidolon), but I will happily take the Ordeal.
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Pack 1 pick 4:
Nessian Asp is the best card, and it looks like I'm set up to be U/G. If I can get that Agent to wheel I'll be in business.
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Pack 1 pick 5:
Bleh, sucky pack. It's either Pharika's Mender or Returned Phalanx. I went with Mender because I'm more likely to actually use it (since it could be a splash or I could end up B/G somehow). Using the Phalanx would require me to commit to blue/black since I think it's a pretty bad splash.
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Man it's awesome that these wheel.
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Pack 1 pick 10:
Two reasonable sideboard cards. I went with the one that's more likely to be useful (since every color has bestow guys and ordeals, but flyers are typically only seen from blue and sometimes white decks).
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Pack 2 pick 1:
Hard pick. Battlemaster is a lot better if you have Aqueous Form(s), but I went with the rare. Not sure what's right but I think Hydra is better on 5 mana than Battlemaster is, and obviously improves the more mana you have.
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Pack 2 pick 2:
I want both of those 2 drops, but I think the Ordeals are just too strong.
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Pack 2 pick 3:
Luckily I end up with a Satyr anyway.
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Pack 2 pick 4:
omg and a dryad
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This guy is awesome in the Aqueous Form deck. I think that is what U/G is mostly about. This guy and Battlemaster + Aqueous Form.
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I'd rather have a decent SB card than fox.
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Really excited about this deck.
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Pack 3 pick 1:
Good open.
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Pack 3 pick 2:
Even better pass.
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Pack 3 pick 3:
I'm not really sure what's right. When I started drafting this format I had pegged Sea God's Revenge as the best non-rare, but that's when I thought the format was a slow 18 land format where you had time to develop a board presence. I still took it here because I don't have any Griptides or Voyages Ends, but I'm not convinced it's as good as I thought it was, and I don't know that it's better for my deck than the Emissary would be.
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Pack 3 pick 4:
This is a cut since I don't want to use any of the blue or green cards in this pack.
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Pack 3 pick 5:
Also a cut
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Pack 3 pick 6:
Tough pick. A 3rd Aqueous Form would add a lot of consistency to my strategy, but I chose Scorpion for 2 reasons. The first is that it gives me a potential 1 drop + Ordeal nutdraw (since I have 2 ordeals), and the second is that it's one of the few cards that can stop an enemy Ordeal nutdraw.
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Pack 3 pick 7:
I generally dislike this card but between Nylea, Mistcutter Hydra and Asp monstrous I felt like I had really good ways to use all the mana this guy gives.
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Pack 3 pick 9:
Kinda wish I took Shredding Winds over the other copy of this in pack 1. Maybe since there's 2 effects like this (this one and Fade into Antiquity) and only one flyer killer, if you're faced with this choice in the future you should choose Winds.
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I think this deck is very good. It helps to have 3 awesome rares, but I'm actually more excited about the Aqueous Forms with the 2 ordeals and the 2 green heroic guys. I think that core package is what a good U/G deck in this format should be about, and it's mostly commons. Agent of Horizons is also a decent poor man's guy-with-Form.
Round 1 I played vs. the guy who got all the good U/B cards. I lost the game he drew his Agent of the Fates (and only because he also drew Voyage's End for my guy with Form), but I was able to win game 3 by forcing him to use his Voyage's End well before I decided to move in on a guy with Form.
Round 2 I played vs. a U/W heroic deck. His draw in game 1 was very good, with T2 Battlewise Hoplite and lots of stuff to load it up with, but mine was just a little bit better, with a T3 Boon Satyr contributing to a T4 Nylea that was active on T5 for piles of damage really quickly. His draw was less impressive in game 2, with a curve that had t3 Opaline Unicorn and t5 Akroan Horse. I moved in on a Staunch Hearted Warrior with Aqueous Form and the green Ordeal, but he instantly had Voyage's End to punish me (everyone has that damn card). It didn't matter though, because I got to replay it and put three more things on it (Naiad, Leafcrown, and Feral Invocation) and it was very lethal very quickly unless he had another bounce spell, which he fortunately did not.
I split the finals. I don't really like splitting these days, but whenever my opponent asks for it I ask if he'll give me the QP. If he's willing to give it to me, I'll split because I like taking the easy QP, and that's what happened here.
The card evaluations in this format are a little strange. When I first started drafting the format, I didn't realize just how strong of a strategy it was to make a huge, annoying guy (either via ordeal or Aqueous Form or whatever else), and that's because the single cards that can stop them easily (IE not huge 2+ for 1s) are few and far between. It also means that those cards go way up in value and should be taken accordingly. This is the reason that I like Voyage's End over Griptide, since you can stop shenanigans earlier and with more convenience.
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