Bronze to Mythic: Khans of Tarkir, draft #2
Destined for a 1-3. Nothing went right.
Pack 1 pick 1 Herald of Anafenza over kinda nothing, and I think maybe I can try the BW warrior aggro deck. Herald is nice because on the play you can outlast it and have a 2/3 to block their morph. Pick 2 Chief of the Scale over Jeskai Ascendancy (it hurts because looking back at the draft, I think I could have got there and it would have been really fun.) Pick 3 Scoured Barrens over Kin-Tree Invocation and Abzan Guide. Pick 4 Jungle Hollow over second Kin-Tree Invocation and Jeskai Student, Jeskai Windscout and Jeskai Charm. Pick 5 Sandsteppe Citadel over Goblinslide. Pick 6 Disowned Ancestor over Jungle Hollow. Pick 7 Armament Corps makes me feel a little better about my choices, but Force Away and Treasure Cruise would have been nice in an alternate reality. Pick 8 Rush of Battle. Pick 9 Mardu Hordechief feels like a hook-up. War Mammoth, Sultai Scavenger, and Jeskai Student round out the pack. I'm liking the plan here.
Pack 2, pick 1 is a brick, Arc Lightning. Not unplayable, but I need lands for it. Pick 2 Ainok Bond-Kin over Savage Punch, Bloodfell Caves and Jungle Hollow. Just trying to stay on target. Pick 3 Seeker of the Way, Pick 4 Ponyback Brigade over nothing, and now I'm really wanting some Mardu lands. Pick 5 Mardu Hordechief over Bloodfell Caves. Pick 6 Mardu Hateblade. Pick 7 Rush of Battle. A War Behemoth wheels, but nothing else. I'm feeling ok, not great.
Pack 3 pick 1, Utter End over Mardu Hordechief, and I think that was wrong for this deck. Pick 2 Sandsteppe Citadel over Savage Punch. Pick 3 Debilitating Injury. Pick 4 Mardu Hordechief. And the rest of this pack pretty much sucked.
I felt like this deck was pretty medium. I've got some redundancy in playing a 1 or 2 drop, getting a pretty safe attack for the raid trigger on Mardu Hordechief, then having two copies Rush of Battle to clean up the game. But nothing anywhere close to that happened in my games. The Jeskai deck I think would have been pretty good but I didn't really see a offramp into it outside of taking that Jeskai Ascendancy on a hope and a prayer.
My first loss, I mulligan a no Plains hand where I couldn't cast anything into a really mediocre six, and just draw all the bad cards in my deck while my opponent crushes me with Ponyback Brigade plus Rush of Battle.
I beat a Sultai deck that played zero relevant cards and I ran them over.
My second loss, I mulligan a no Swamp hand into an almost identical no swamp six. I put back the card I can't cast, and I end up drawing the other cards I had in my original 7. The shuffler is bugged, clearly.
My third loss is the kind of game where you're just like, yeah, this draft just was going to happen like that. I keep an okay 7, except it has both my red cards in it. They Despise me on turn 1, taking my Chief of the Scale, which blew up my entire hand. They're on Sultai. They cast Sultai Soothsayer, then the next turn they play Shambling Attendants for 1 mana, and a morph, so I try to Utter End the Shambling Attendants, and they Disdainful Stroke me! I get two War Behemoths and an Armament Core to pump them up for a nice attack, but then they have Duneblast. Of course. I mean. *Sigh* It do be like that sometimes.
