I have done 66 Theros drafts on Magic Online so far. In addition to all the live drafts I've done (maybe 15 or so) that's about 80 drafts. That's a lot more than I thought I would end up doing. I suppose the reason I'm drafting so much is because, as of this blog post, my only remaining qualification is for PT Born of the Gods in Valencia in February. The formats are Modern and BTT draft. I'm really confident in Modern, so I feel like my best shot at doing well is to understand the draft format as best as I possibly can. My draft records in pro tours have historically been pretty mediocre. The best I've ever done is 4-1-1 at PT Avacyn Restored. I've gone 3-3 quite a bit, 2-4 once, 1-2 once, and 1-5 once. I've noticed that the draft records of the people that end up top 8ing PTs are generally 5-1 or better, so confidence in limited for PT Born will be very valuable to me, since I already have plenty of confidence in Modern.
At any rate, one thing I have been doing differently is trying to pay attention to how I lose, and in the first handful of MTGO drafts I did I found myself losing to huge makeshift monsters a lot, usually via the Ordeals. I also lost to Aqueous Form quite a bit. Whenever I lose to slow decks, they are usually black and/or green, and they involve life swings to combat my aggression (usually via Nylea's Disciple or Gray Merchant), strong defensive men (usually Baleful Eidolon and Nessian Asp), and the ability to survive until they can cast Sip of Hemlock. Some of the better black aggressive cards are Blood Toll Harpy and Mogis's Marauder, since they're both fast and evasive.
My favorite decks are W/x heroic. X can be anything (I've seen all four colors be good) but my favorite is blue. The things you use to target are just so strong. Triton Tactics, Nimbus Naiad, Aqueous Form, even Fate Foretold. You also get a lot of good guys to target, like Vaporkin and Battlewise Hoplite. Red is really strong too, definitely my second favorite. With Green, you typically want to use the green heroic guys and Hopeful Eidolon to make a huge lifelinker and swing every race in your favor. The 3/3 1GW guy that draws a card is also really effective in this deck. Obviously Time to Feed and a green heroic guy is a fantastic combo in any green deck, but it's excellent in G/W since you get more good hungry guys like Wingsteed Rider and Favored Hoplite, as well as anyone enchanted with Hopeful Eidolon. As for white/black, even though heroic can be OK with tons of Scourgemarks and Baleful Eidolons, the real reason to go W/B is Scholar of Athreos. If you can live through the early turns (and the best way to live through the early turns is to just be aggressive and force your opponent to live through the early turns), you can use all your extra mana to drain your opponent with Scholar and close the game out. Scholar is harder than it looks to actually remove (you need to play narrow feel-bad cards like Last Breath), and it's usually pretty easy to pick them up late since W/B is not a popular color combo.
It should go without saying that I think the Ordeals are extremely powerful and I started to take them higher and higher until I just started first picking them. It has been pretty hard for me to make a deck in this format that I thought was good, that couldn't make good use of an ordeal.
As for non-white decks, I like blue a lot. U/G is very good with Aq. Form and Time to Feed with heroic guys, and I actually kinda like U/R. You can make very good use of Flamespeaker Adept, especially with Aqueous Form and, to a lesser extent, Omenspeaker. It's also a cheesy yet effective strat to put Aqueous Form or Nimbus Naiad on a Two Headed Cerberus, and then pump him however you see fit (Dragon Mantle, Titan's Strength, etc.) U/B is very strong too, but I was fooled into thinking that U/B was very controlling, when I think the truth is that the really good U/B decks are aggressive. With Returned Phalanx defending early and providing a good body for later attacks, Wavecrash Triton also defending early and giving a good way to both defend against bigger threats and force ground damage through, and cheap effective flyers like Blood Toll Harpy and Vaporkin, a good U/B deck should have a low curve and try to be aggressive while defending. There are some decks that are just plain unable to beat a Shipwreck Singer.
The only remaining decks are B/R, B/G, and R/G. Of those 3, I like R/B the best, since it's the most aggressive. The 2/3 1R minotaur guy is very good, and if you get one of the minotaur lord guys, you can get some sick curveouts. The tricks in R/B are also excellent. Boon of Erebos is still kind of underrated.
I don't like B/G and R/G very much, but you can still make those decks work. I've found good R/G decks to be big monster decks, and good B/G decks have to be able to survive the early game (and the mid game) to out-value the opponent. I'll have more to say about these decks when I get some experience with drafting them.
As for splashing, I've done it but I try to do it very infrequently. It's easiest to splash in green decks since Nylea's Presence is an awesome fixer and it's easy to pick them up (for now, anyway). The color I'm most likely to splash is red, for Lightning Strike, Magma Jet and Destructive Revelry.
When I first started drafting this format, I thought it was a slow, 18 land format that was defined by bombs. I'd open cards like Shipbreaker Kraken and Hythonia the Cruel, thinking I'd have to take them since they were just so strong, but the truth is that these cards are very beatable. With all of the enhancements available in this format, and the overall difficulty of removing guys with enhancements, it's really easy to play a series of cheap cards that matches up very well with a 6+ mana rare, no matter how flashy its effect is.
Overall I like my understanding of this draft format. I feel better about it than I have about any limited format ever before. Draft formats evolve though, so I don't know how long I'll be able to hang on to my decent grip of this format before I have to start catching up with the changes. I'd like to attend Grand Prix Toronto, so I'll definitely continue to draft and try to expand my understanding of this format.
No comments:
Post a Comment