Last week brought the release of the newest Magic set, Dragon's Maze. As has become tradition, our group of casual players had a 12-hour Magic release marathon this weekend. It featured a bunch of events (several drafts, a couple sealed, and a number of pack wars), but I'll focus on the drafting as (a) that's different from the sealed event that I did last week and (b) the drafts were the highlights of the night anyway.
I was initially a little worried about the official drafting order of Dragon's Maze/Gatecrash/Return to Ravnica, thinking that the more general set (Dragon's Maze) would be more useful once you've already settled in a few colors. My opinion shifted rapidly during the first draft, as I realized opening with the more general set allowed you to take the best card in each pack without committing to a color strategy, which ultimately gives even more flexibility in the other packs.
In the end, I really like drafting in that order.
At some point I'd still like to draft three packs of Dragon's Maze (I think that would be nuts), but that'll require a number of other players to be on board. Maybe I'll get a chance sometime before the next block starts up...
Anyway, here's what happened:
First Draft
My drafting strategy tends to revolve around just accepting my rares and building around them as much as possible. It's effectively rare drafting, but in our casual formats, that's not much of a problem. In the first draft, this strategy was tested pretty severely; my first pack contained two rares: Sire of Insanity, a potentially brutal game-ender for a super aggressive Rakdos deck, and Stomping Ground, the incredibly useful (and valuable) Gruul shock land. Because I like the idea of Gruul in a draft (not because of Gruul itself, although the Bloodrush mechanic has been growing on me, but because it can easily combo with Boros, Simic, Rakdos, and Golgari, all of which I love), I went with Stomping Ground to try to force some Red-Green action.
The guy to my right handed me a pack containing Blood Scrivener, which immediately made me regret my opening pack decision. The Scrivener's effect combined with the Sire's would grant awesome card advantage, which could easily have dominated limited matches. I took the Scrivener anyway, as I was excited about the possibilities of a Gruul/Rakdos/Golgari deck (and black removal would be very useful).
The remainder of the drafting portion went in my favor, allowing me to grab a nice number of Rakdos and Golgari cards, plus some other aggressive creatures (like Legion Loyalist). The Return to Ravnica pack really sealed the deal, with both Desecration Demon and Jarad's Orders coming my way. The only real disappointment was that I didn't have any really good Scavenge targets for Jarad's Orders, but using it as a tutor for the Demon was pretty solid.
Here was my first draft deck in all its glory:
Creatures:
1 Basilica Screecher
1 Blood Scrivener
1 Bomber Corps
1 Desecration Demon
1 Grim Roustabout
1 Legion Loyalist
1 Rakdos Shred-Freak
1 Riot Piker
1 Rix Maadi Guildmage
1 Ruination Wurm
1 Slaughterhorn
1 Slitherhead
2 Spire Tracer
1 Zhur-Taa Druid
1 Zhur-Taa Swine
Instants:
1 Fatal Fumes
1 Punish the Enemy
1 Weapon Surge
Sorceries:
1 Act of Treason
1 Jarad's Orders
1 Traitorous Instinct
Enchantments:
1 Stab Wound
Lands:
5 Forest
4 Mountain
1 Stomping Ground
7 Swamp
The main focus was obviously aggression - get a bunch of creatures out quickly and attack as often as possible. Act of Treason and Traitorous Instinct support that cause, removing a blocker and giving me another attacker, and things like Weapon Surge and Rix Maadi Guildmage (whose first ability is bonkers) make my constant attacks that much more effective. This incredibly aggressive draft was really effective, dropping only one game in four total matches played.
Second Draft
The second draft was even worse for my rare drafting approach. My first rare was the very awkward-in-limited Possibility Storm. Although I think the card has the potential to be really sexy (combined with something like Curse of Exhaustion you can shut your opponent down completely), and it definitely makes for some crazy games, I just couldn't justify taking it off the bat. Instead, I tried to draft into another aggressive deck, grabbing Gruul War Chant and Rot Farm Skeleton.
When Possibility Storm made its way around the table, though, I took it anyway, openly vowing to play it if I ever got the opportunity (a totally crazy game now and then is good).
The next couple packs also fit with my plan pretty well. I had established a Golgari direction, as I'd grabbed a couple copies of Drown in Filth, and I managed to get several nice Scavengers when Return to Ravnica rolled around. I had a couple Battalion and Bloodrush dudes, too, so I was set to play another aggressive deck.
My second draft deck:
Creatures:
1 Bomber Corps
1 Drainpipe Vermin
1 Golgari Decoy
1 Maze Behemoth
1 Maze Rusher
1 Nivmagus Elemental
1 Rot Farm Skeleton
1 Rubblebelt Maaka
1 Scab-Clan Giant
1 Scorchwalker
2 Sluiceway Scorpion
1 Terrus Wurm
2 Zhur-Taa Druid
Instants:
1 Annihilating Fire
1 Furious Resistance
1 Pit Fight
1 Showstopper
Sorceries:
2 Drown in Filth
1 Mugging
Enchantments:
1 Gruul War Chant
1 Possibility Storm
Lands:
5 Forest
6 Mountain
5 Swamp
Gruul War Chant can't be underestimated - even with only a couple small creatures on the board, that enchantment can start dealing decent damage in the early game, and it can make it impossible for your opponent to respond in the late game. Combine that with a little bit of removal and you have a pretty strong deck.
This deck won all the games where Possibility Storm didn't get played (winning two matches in the process). I had promised myself that I'd play Possibility Storm whenever possible (heh), and each time I did I got slaughtered. Those were some crazy fun games, though, and I'm absolutely planning to build a deck around Possibility Storm at some point.
Third Draft
Our third and final (serious) draft was a bit different; instead of playing with at least six people, we only had four for this draft, so it was a little goofy. The Dragon's Maze pack gave me some serious Dimir options, though, which made it exciting despite the small size.
My opening rare was Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker, which set me on the milling path immediately. I was then able to take all the Dimir cards that were floating around (Haunter of Nightveil and Pilfered Plans being the big ones). I continued that strategy into the other two packs, coming away with a solidly mill-oriented control deck.
My mill deck:
Creatures:
1 Balustrade Spy
1 Crosstown Courier
1 Dinrova Horror
1 Haunter of Nightveil
1 Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker
1 Nivix Guildmage
1 Rakdos Drake
Instants:
1 Essence Backlash
1 Mindstatic
1 Psychic Strike
1 Totally Lost
1 Ultimate Price
Sorceries:
1 Blast of Genius
2 Mind Rot
2 Paranoid Delusions
2 Pilfered Plans
1 Toil // Trouble
1 Voidwalk
Enchantments:
1 Way of the Thief
Artifacts:
2 Prophetic Prism
Lands:
1 Dimir Guildgate
6 Island
1 Izzet Guildgate
2 Mountain
6 Swamp
This deck also performed very well. The combination of efficient milling and supreme card advantage (Mind Rot can be brutal when paired with card draw) allowed me to eke out a win in my first match. I was then able to dominate my second opponent (although to be fair, we were all really tired at this point, so it's hard to say how much of that was due to mutual exhaustion), making me think that limited mill decks in Dragon's Maze are viable.
All-in-all, I'm really excited to see where the Maze takes me. There are a bunch of awesome cards in the set, both to bolster existing decks (I'm definitely going to try to find a place for Mirko Vosk and Pilfered Plans in my mill deck), and there are some fun new cards that could be the basis for some silly decks (Possibility Storm).
I'll be doing lots of deck revisions in the next few weeks, always trying to find a good way to incorporate some nasty Dragon's Maze cards. I can't wait to find out where I end up!
Showing posts with label Dragon's Maze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dragon's Maze. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Monday Magic - This Weekend's Dragon's Maze Pre-Release Recap!
One of these days I'll be able to post my Magic blogs on Monday...
This weekend's Dragon's Maze Pre-Release brought a number of firsts for me: my first MTG pre-release event, my first formal sealed event, and my first official tournament. It was quite an experience, so let me break it down.
This weekend's Dragon's Maze Pre-Release brought a number of firsts for me: my first MTG pre-release event, my first formal sealed event, and my first official tournament. It was quite an experience, so let me break it down.
A "sealed" event is a limited format where you build a deck after cracking open six booster packs. You don't get the strategy of picking cards and reading signals that you would in a draft, and you don't get the benefit of your entire collection (and anything you're willing/able to drop the cash to acquire) like in constructed formats. Sealed tournaments require a totally different skill set, so it was a completely new (and somewhat frustrating) experience.
Sealed competitions seem to be much more heavily influenced by luck. If you open a terrible pack in a draft, you know that everyone is going to have to pick a card from that pack; in sealed, you're stuck with all the junk you might open. Sure, the fact that you get six packs in sealed as opposed to three in a draft helps balance the odds, but particularly unlucky packs can knock you out of a sealed event before you even start to play.
The emphasis on multicolored cards from ten different guilds in Dragon's Maze exacerbates this problem. The odds of having a random smattering of decent cards in each guild is pretty high, which makes running four colors much more likely. Although there's a good amount of mana fixing in the set, a four-colored deck will need to be really tight and cohesive to make good use of the limited number of non-mana-fixing cards. It seems hard to pull off.
Sealed competitions seem to be much more heavily influenced by luck. If you open a terrible pack in a draft, you know that everyone is going to have to pick a card from that pack; in sealed, you're stuck with all the junk you might open. Sure, the fact that you get six packs in sealed as opposed to three in a draft helps balance the odds, but particularly unlucky packs can knock you out of a sealed event before you even start to play.
The emphasis on multicolored cards from ten different guilds in Dragon's Maze exacerbates this problem. The odds of having a random smattering of decent cards in each guild is pretty high, which makes running four colors much more likely. Although there's a good amount of mana fixing in the set, a four-colored deck will need to be really tight and cohesive to make good use of the limited number of non-mana-fixing cards. It seems hard to pull off.
Being a special pre-release event, this sealed tournament had some added wrinkles. Instead of grabbing six booster packs and bursting into deckbuilding, each player chose one of Ravnica's ten guilds and received a guild pack (containing 15 cards exclusively of that guild's colors), an allied guild pack (containing 15 cards for a single guild that shares one color with the chosen guild), and four Dragon's Maze packs. Then we were tasked with building the best deck we could.
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| Pre-release goodies: Shiny Plains, Shiny Maze's End, guild button, and cards with two guild seals. |
On top of a normal 32-player tournament (actually two, as a group of 64 players was split into separate brackets), the Ravnica guilds competed in an Implicit Maze. Players represented their chosen guild in this additional competition (mine was Simic, as evidenced by my guild button), where a win in the tournament meant that their guild advanced one step closer to the Dragon's Maze. It was cool to see how each of the guilds were doing between rounds (unsurprisingly, the more aggressive guilds, like Boros and Rakdos, tended to do better than the more passive guilds, like Dimir and Selesnya), even if there weren't tangible prizes for the most successful guilds.
The fact that we received a couple of guild packs helped mitigate the multicolored craziness of Dragon's Maze, as you're guaranteed 30 cards across three colors, but I still found it to be a little troublesome. In particular, my Simic pack was virtually useless, aside from a Gyre Sage. My Dragon's Maze packs were pretty heavy with Izzet and Rakdos, including Dragonshift, Breaking // Entering, and the brutal Master of Cruelties. Conveniently, my fourth Dragon's Maze rare was Varolz, the Scar-Striped, which fit nicely into the Golgari side of my deck.
But I was faced with a tough choice: I had some decent Rakdos commons and uncommons (black-red), some decent Izzet cards (blue-red), some great Golgari cards (green-black), and a really lackluster selection of Simic cards (green-blue). My pool had good support for an Izzet-Simic deck or a Golgari-Rakdos deck, but it didn't feel terribly cohesive in general.
My first match was a slaughter. I tried to go for all four colors (everything but white), but I was spread too thinly to do much of anything. At that point, I decided to be more focused, so I dropped blue completely, thereby abandoning my primary guild. Match two went a bit better for me, but I was still schooled pretty handily.
The first two dramatic losses put me solidly at the bottom of my bracket, so round three gave me a bye. On the plus side, getting a break allowed me to seriously rethink my strategies and develop a more coherent approach. The result was good - both the fourth and fifth matches ended in 2-1 victories for me, giving me a final record of 3-2, enough to place in the upper half of the bracket and win two Dragon's Maze packs!
The fact that we received a couple of guild packs helped mitigate the multicolored craziness of Dragon's Maze, as you're guaranteed 30 cards across three colors, but I still found it to be a little troublesome. In particular, my Simic pack was virtually useless, aside from a Gyre Sage. My Dragon's Maze packs were pretty heavy with Izzet and Rakdos, including Dragonshift, Breaking // Entering, and the brutal Master of Cruelties. Conveniently, my fourth Dragon's Maze rare was Varolz, the Scar-Striped, which fit nicely into the Golgari side of my deck.
But I was faced with a tough choice: I had some decent Rakdos commons and uncommons (black-red), some decent Izzet cards (blue-red), some great Golgari cards (green-black), and a really lackluster selection of Simic cards (green-blue). My pool had good support for an Izzet-Simic deck or a Golgari-Rakdos deck, but it didn't feel terribly cohesive in general.
My first match was a slaughter. I tried to go for all four colors (everything but white), but I was spread too thinly to do much of anything. At that point, I decided to be more focused, so I dropped blue completely, thereby abandoning my primary guild. Match two went a bit better for me, but I was still schooled pretty handily.
The first two dramatic losses put me solidly at the bottom of my bracket, so round three gave me a bye. On the plus side, getting a break allowed me to seriously rethink my strategies and develop a more coherent approach. The result was good - both the fourth and fifth matches ended in 2-1 victories for me, giving me a final record of 3-2, enough to place in the upper half of the bracket and win two Dragon's Maze packs!
After a lot of tweaking, here's the deck I settled on for the last couple of matches:
Creatures:
Instants:
Sorceries:
Enchantments:
Lands:
4 Forest
1 Island
5 Mountain
4 Swamp
 |
| The MVPs in my Simic (???) deck. |
And that's how I ultimately how I got my wins. With Varolz in play I could trade my cheap creatures with my opponent's, then use my dead dudes to buff whoever's left. Whenever Master of Cruelties hit the board, he forced my opponent to respond, allowing me to build up for a Golgari assualt (or, in one case, the Master was able to end the game in conjunction with Zhur-Taa Druid, who pinged after combat for the win). It was an awesomely fun deck to play, and I'm excited about building a pure Golgari deck at some point in the next few weeks.
That'll have to wait, though, because this weekend is the official release of Dragon's Maze, so there will be tons of new Magic to experience. It seems like it'll be an awesome set, so I have high hopes for this weekend.
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