Penix's INN Draft #1

( Behold those willing to drop 20 tix on a draft!  Thanks guys!!) 

I ended up going 2-1.

I wasn’t sure how many things like Moon Heron (which don’t play into
the themes of the deck, but are solid cards) versus things like Think
Twice (which are pretty good if they get milled, but don’t have a
whole heap of impact) I should play, and I think I might have erred
too much on the side of synergy. Maybe having solid creatures like
Moon Heron or Markov Patrician is just better? You will notice that
the manabase for this deck does not include any plains despite the
fact that the mana requirements aren’t that onerous (aside from
Reaper), and Unburial Rites is great when you can flash it back. That
is because I am a moron and forgot to add plains when I was adding
land. I switched two plains for two islands after the first game of
every match.

Match one was against a pretty aggressive red/green deck. In game one
he hit me down to 1 life, but then I played my demon and a bunch of
zombie dudes and stabilised. Game two I F6ed through my first turn
because I’m a moron, and then lost. Game three I played my demon which
he killed, and I then got it back with Unburial Rites, and then played
Cackling Counterpart on it, with a plains in play to Unburial Rites it
a third time if he killed it again. I won that game.

Match two was against blue/green werewolves and zombies. I got pretty
badly manascrewed both games (in game one I was on three land while he
was on 7-8), and in game two I finally managed to get out the Reaper
(with the help of two Deranged Assistants), but he played two Grasp of
Phantoms (sorcery that puts a creature on the top of its owner
library) on successive turns, then played that red Devil that gets
back sorceries at random, and replayed his Grasp of Phantoms, and then
the next turn got to eight mana which let him flashback Grasp of
Phantoms. It is very hard to win when you get time walked four times,
and so I didn’t.

Match three was against red/white humans. Game one my deck did exactly
what is was supposed to do. I had Deranged Assistant, Armored Skaab
and Forbidden Alchemy to get a bunch of stuff in my graveyard, zombies
to cast and to exile from my graveyard, and a bunch of flashback cards
to get value. I also had a Reaper of the Abyss and Cackling
Counterpart to copy it. He Fiend Huntered my Reaper, but it didn’t
really matter. I won before I was able to flash back Cackling
Counterpart in order to have three demons on the battlefield :( Game
two I mulliganned to six and then got stuck on three land. I played
Armored Skaab and milled four land, which made me very sad. I ended up
having to Forbidden Alchemy for a land. I eventually drew another
couple of land, but all his stuff got bigger when I killed something
(like Thanben Sentry and whathaveyou), which prevented me from
stabilising. Game three I had a turn one Delver into turn two Vampire
Interloper. The Delver flipped on turn four or so, so I was beating
down pretty hard. He eventually got Markov Vampire and Silver Inlaid
Dagger, so was able to gain a bunch of life. I killed his vampire…
somehow, and then he ended up with a 5/5 Juggernaut and a 5/2 equipped
human that dies and gives +1/+1 counters. I was on five, but luckily
had a Markov Patrician to chump with, leaving me at three. I swung in
for the win the next turn.

I feel like this was a really good deck, but I played a lot of pretty
aggressive decks, and found myself winning at pretty low life a lot of
the time. I’m not sure if I built this wrong, if the quality of
archetypes are really close in Innistrad, or just if everyone in the
draft opened very well. I think maybe the fact that I picked up a lot
of synergistic cards led me to play too many do-nothing cards like
Think Twice, whereas if there had have been less graveyard-centric
cards, I maybe would have been happy with playing more solid
creatures.

Cheers
Penix