"I'm never drafting again." - me after every draft: 2014

I attended GP Ottawa this past weekend and got 71st place, which was good for $250. It was the same format as GP Orlando (which I also wrote about), and it's the same format as GP Baltimore (which I will definitely be attending), so even though the sealed PTQ season is over I still feel there is some value in opening up my thought processes to everyone.

Ottawa meant a lot to me. Not only do I have an absolute blast every time I come to Canada to play Magic, but it was the first time I've succeeded in a while - prior to this, my last individual cash in a GP was in DC in June, which meant that I struck out six times in a row. Doing poorly in that many tournaments in a row definitely has an effect on your mental game, but I finally snapped out of it in Ottawa (even if it was just a mincash).

Last time I wrote about this sealed format, I didn't like it very much. Since then I've kind of come around - I still don't love it, but I think there is a bit of a learning curve. You can open a lot of pools where you are presented with decisions like "should I play an aggressive Jeskai deck or a controlling Abzan deck?" and you have the cards to support both decks, and not know which one is objectively better. After quite a few 2-3 finishes in Magic Online PPTQs and discussions about the format with Tommy Ashton, the conclusion that I came to was that you should just try to build the deck with the highest average power level. Synergy is nice if it's available, and you of course want to be able to cast your spells (so don't be TOO greedy with your mana), but if your 4 or 5 color deck is objectively stronger than your 3 color deck without being too much worse mana wise, you should go for it, even if it looks like nothing more than a pile of strong cards. As always, removal is key, and you should opt for as much good removal as your mana allows you to play.

Here's the pool I opened:

If you want to try and build it yourself, you can download the Magic Online .dek file here.

The first things I noticed about this pool were the excellent red rares Crater's Claws and Sarkhan the Dragonspeaker, and the lands pushing me into Esper apparently. My deepest color appeared to be green.

Having the high power level paradigm in mind, I knew I definitely wanted to play red, but after that I wasn't exactly sure. Although I had a couple strong black cards (Murderous Cut, Necropolis Fiend, and two Sultai Scavengers), black was looking like my weakest color overall. My deepest color was green, but not by a lot. While looking at the green cards, I noticed Trail of Mystery and started counting up my morphs.

I was able to get to 10 morphs pretty easily without having to include too many terrible ones, so I quickly settled on a G/R base Trail of Mystery deck. I didn't have many white or black cards I wanted to play, so I focused on making a Temur deck that just splashed Suppression Field and Murderous Cut off a Plains, a Swamp, and the two Scoured Barrens. The problem I had with this was that it only left me with 14 lands to cover all my blue, red, and green cards, and I needed to make sure I could reliably cast Trail of Mystery on turn 2 while still having enough red mana to cast both of my double red cards. It ended up being too challenging and, although I think Murderous Cut is way stronger than Suppression Field, I just cut the black. This let me play Tranquil Cove as another convenient blue source, and I even got to squeeze Efreet Weaponmaster in.

Here's what I ended up with:

Some notes about my card choices:

The red morphs were kind of bad. I can't get over my aggressive conditioning that Magic seems to have pushed on me in the past couple years with its brutal tempo formats, but I guess I just felt like getting 5 points in with Canyon Lurkers would be awesome every once in a while. Having a morph that flips for less than 5 is kinda nice, but it's not all that good. It is, however, a bit better than Ainok Tracker, which almost certainly should have just been Witness of the Ages. With only one pump spell and two damage dealing instants, there are not a whole lot of spots where a 3/3 with first strike is better than a straight up 4/4. The advantage of not needing red mana to flip it is also worthy of consideration.

The Alpine Grizzly was also pretty bad. Even though I wanted to be playing a morph on 3 almost every time, preferably after a 2 drop, this deck is still more of a midrange deck than an aggro deck. Without any Savage Punches to make the Grizzly's inclusion worthwhile, he's just worse than a morph most of the time. I think it should have been Tuskguard Captain, but I let my bias prevent me from playing it since I don't really like that card as much as other people seem to.

My evaluation of Dragon's Eye Savants keeps going up and up. I think all the morphs that flip for free are great, and Ruthless Ripper is obviously the best one, but this one might be the second best. The information of what's in your opponent's hand is always welcome, and 6 toughness for free means that you will be getting a lot of mana advantage from your opponent in the event that they try to rescue their morph from combat with yours (by flipping it or with a trick). After that, it sticks around as a huge blocker afterwards that just gives you more time to set up your own board, and I think all the best decks in this sealed format want to be going pretty long anyway.

I only played one Monastery Flock because I always start out assuming that my decks want to be aggressive, but I really should have just played both. I boarded into the second one almost every round. I also boarded into the Highland Game quite a bit.

I chose the white over the black mainly because of the extra morph (the Efreet Weaponmaster, which is one of my favorite morphs in the format), but it's possible that just playing the Murderous Cut would have been better.

After round 4 or 5, I showed my deck to Ari Lax, who mentioned that I should have been playing Bloodfire Mentor in my deck. Originally I had that card pegged as not really playable, so I never think too much about including it in any of my decks. Plus, it didn't really fit into the aggressive slant that I thought my deck had. After talking about it, I ended up boarding it in every round.

I had two byes in the tournament, but my name wasn't on the pairings for round 3, which has never happened to me before. After talking to a judge, I found out that my DCI got entered wrong and the system thought I had zero byes, so I was dropped from the tournament after being a "no show" in round 1. Their solution was to enter me back in and pair me down with a 1-1 player, who was already in a match that they had to interrupt and re-pair. They gave the player who was originally paired with my new R3 opponent a bye. That player originally had a match loss for being tardy, and I won R3, so the net result was that my tiebreakers were worse, my opponent was probably sad about being up a game and then getting re-paired and losing the match, and his original opponent got rescued from being a bonehead. I can't help but feel like this is a crappy solution, but I don't know any DCI procedures and the only other easy solution I can think of would be to just give me another bye, which is obviously super biased in my favor. At any rate, I was 3-0 now and my tiebreakers shouldn't matter that much if I just plan on going 13-2 anyway.

I lost rounds 4 and 5 and then won my last four in a row to make day 2, which felt awesome. I had plenty of interesting games and three of my last four rounds went to 3 games after I lost the first game. I never changed more than 3 cards out of my deck, but those changes often felt huge. Bringing the Bloodfire Mentor in made a huge difference in a lot of my games.

I originally wanted to write about my complete tournament, but I got caught up doing other things and only wrote up to here. I still want to publish it so I can share my sealed experience in time for GP Baltimore.

For the sake of completeness, here are my two draft decks. It's worth noting that, because my tiebreakers were so bad, bot of my pods were 7 player pods.

Draft 1:

I thought this deck was pretty good, but I only managed to go 1-2. I lost one match to Take Up Arms + Rush of Battle, and another to huge green creatures and Savage Punches. The one match I won, my opponent barely got to play, having only made 5 or 6 land drops total in the two games.

Draft 2:

I thought this deck was a pile of dog vomit. Despite that, I still managed to win two matches (vs. two mirror matches actually) and intentionally drew in the 3rd round to guarantee a mincash. This deck played out a lot better than it looked.