Deranged_Hermit's ISD Draft #3

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=32iik

this was a really fun draft. i took a couple chances early with the curse and the drownyard, and they really paid off. i won in a multitude of ways in this swiss. only losing in the last match due to mana screw in both games.

my strategy was to go for the lab maniac win in G1, w/o curses (i've found the curses are too hard to control when trying to get the lab maniac out of the yard. especially in multiples. perhaps this in't the case, i just had enough playables to get by w.o them).  then in G2 i would side out the maniacs and the mem's journey and bring in the curses and additional 'mill-you' cards. and with the alchemist hitting the board in multiple games, it just gets you there.

neat combo btw... undead alchemist and occultist. mill them a few times with a dream twist/drownyard, get some duders from the alchemist, swing in and force them to either block or take 'damage' that creates more milling and more duders.

lost in the "finals" after a game 1 win, with two games of mana screw. M3G2 things were going fine. put a curse on him, then played armored skaab, milling my drownyard (frown). then he fills his board up, plays the skirsdag high-priest. i have victim in hand but i never find a second swamp and he beats me with demons about 5 turns later while he's at 11 cards in library (my math isn't great... but the drownyard over those turns would've gotten me there).

M3G3 i keep a one lander (forest) and a mulch in hand, on the draw. you know how it goes... no 2nd land until turn 5. he curves out and beats me before i get to draw/play the 2nd land. that's how it goes doesn't it

Deranged_Hermit's ISD #2

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=32asx

another disappointing draft that lacked a solid direction. i recognize this and know that i need to be more focused in my drafting strategy.  too many times i just take the best card in the pack, hoping that people surrounding me will pass me more good cards in the colors i decide to play.

if i was more adept at reading signals, i would've abandoned white a lot earlier, and gone BUG self mill with the spawning. dont recall however seeing a single gnaw to the bone. but had several shots for enablers in blue while it was being passed, along with overall solid removal and tempo adv.

BUG is my favorite archetype to draft, although i just didn't have the tools to take advantage of the spawning, or the juggernauts. if i had 3 or 4 total mulches, and sac outlet like a hauberk or disciple to untap and keep the juggs attacking, i would've been a lot more comfortable and would've had a great shot in the finals. but as it was, i steamrolled a couple of lesser opponents, and lost 0-2 to the very focused and solidly built UW aggro/tempo.dek


until next time

Fiffo416 ISD Draft #2

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=32bj3

A question I would like to ask people is

how often do you make "wrong" picks (something like midnight haunting
over curse of death's hold) in order to draft the deck you want to
draft? And which are the decks you NEVER want to draft? It's
green-black to me, and I don't even like blue-black control (but I
like a more creature heavy blue-blac deck like the one I drafted
here!) A deck that I like but most people don't is green red.

Deranged_hermit''s ISD Draft #1

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=32ifa

Deranged Hermit makes his draft debut!

Acidrakken ISD #2

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=31qpi

Went 2-1 in this draft, lost in R3.

During the draft process, I felt like I was being pulled in two different directions and only barely managed to pull out a deck with enough playables without dipping into a third color for more than a splash.

Commentary on the games:

R1G1:

Pretty easy keep, Shepherd in hand and the mana to bring him out Turn 2.

Villain seems to be running some kind of four-color monstrosity, though I don't see any green creatures from him.  He is stacked with Ashmouth Hound and Village Ironsmith, making it difficult to attack profitably into him.  Villain becomes impatient and attacks in with his forces.  I pull Evil Twin, copy an Ashmouth, and start blowing up Ironsmiths/Ironfangs and Hounds, get Shepherd flipped and win.  I make a pretty bad misplay at one point here, attack with juggernaut, get blocked by Makeshift Mauler, + 2 Ashmouth Hounds.  Should have assigned damage to the hounds, then Corpse Lunged the Mauler with the Corpse Lunge in my hand.  On the other hand,  if I would have done that, the later E.Twin play wouldn't have worked at all.

R1G2:  I keep a loose hand after mull to 6, only draw land, Villain gets a quick start, and game is over fast.

R1G3:  Hand is suboptimal, but a quick bat, followed by Abbatoir Ghoul keeps Villain off my case.  He puts wings on his lone ironfang.  I respond by flipping my bat into the 5/5 beater.   He Temblors, getting rid of my Abbatoir ghoul.  I Ghoulraiser, Village cannibals flipping his Ironfang, Recast Abbatoir and get there on the back of my 5/5 ground based beater.

----------------------

R2G1: I've scouted this opponent, and they have a pretty strong UR deck.  Kinda concerned, but could get through with tight play.  Snap-keep opening hand, with the shepherd + mana combination.  More Ashmouth Hound from this Villain, but I'm not worried.  Shepherd gets flipped, he's golden.  Tribute his early play and get in with the shepherd.  He ends up losing Ludevic's Test subject to Desperate Ravings, but gets a mindshrieker online.  Then the crabs start coming down, invalidating my big beaters: juggernaut and fensnake.  Unfortunately my deck is kind of weak to mindshrieker, lots of stuff piled up at the 4-drop, not much flashback.  Villain uses a lot of mana to just activate mindshrieker on me, I suspect is trying to mill me out.  I also take a severe beating in the air until I hit spider spawning and use it to hold down the air while my Gatstaf Howler gets in for the last few points of damage.

R2G2:  Mulligan to six, but come up with the shepherd again.  Some unimportant early stuff happens, but then he keeps pounding 5 drops on me, Sturmgeist, Murder of Crows, Sturmgeist(!?) after I deal with the first one.  Not much for it after that.  So tired of these drafts where I've got some reasonable deck built out of uncommons/commons (because I open stuff like Rooftop Storm) and get wrecked by someone who opened/got passed multiple *good* rares/mythics.

R2G3:  On to game three.  Planning on saving E.Twin for Sturmgeist, but Murder of Crows becomes a relevant threat fast enough that I go ahead and grab it with the twin.  There's some back and forth, but a 4/4 beater in the skies when the rest of his air force seems absent is good, and I go ahead and put it away.   Especially when I'm looting off the incidental other deaths.

--------------------------------

R1G1:  Not sure what I could have done differently here.  I'm already at a disadvantage because Villain is green and, other than the shepherd (who loses much value against G), has much better green cards than I do.  An early trep blade on every guy Villain plays ends up causing me to lose to being decked out.

R2G2:  Side in the Naturalize, but not sure it matters, because Villain is still hitting big stretches of my best cards every activation of trep blade, as well as having a flipped Ulvenwald Primordials that I just have no way of dealing with.  Even Tribute is unhelpful, because there's always something alongside it to get eaten instead. Spider Spawning holds off the inevitable for a bit, but then I just draw into a brick, and lose.

Acidrakken - ISD #1

(Acidrakken makes his blog debut.  WHAT UP DUDE!?!)


Acidrakken's RAREDRAFT

Went 2-1, lost in the "finals" of a Swiss queue.

JoostdB ISD #1

(Lets give a warm welcome to JOOSTDB!)

http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=31qmz

Once again, embedding is still disabled.  Sorry about that.

This deck went 2-1 in a Swiss queue losing in the "finals."

MrFishy's ISD Draft #1

Hello there everyone. I had a draft recently where my deck building process very nearly went to time due to what I felt to be a very difficult evaluation of cards and determining what to cut. I would be very interested to hear how anyone else might have put together a deck with what I had.

Notes:

So clearly BR aggro was open this draft as I was picking up playables on every single wheel. (The only non-land card not shown is a Make a Wish). For probably the only time I was in a position where I was overloaded with possibilities and struggling to figure out what to cut. I knew I wanted to be as aggressive as possible with this deck and wrestled with the following questions.

-Do you play 17 lands or go to 16? Is there any validity to going even lower?

-With an aggressive curve what would your top end look like? Which of the 5+ CC cards are strong enough to include?

-The removal package felt very weak, at least in terms of ability to reach out and deal with threats, is it worth it to splash for the Bonds of Faith? The flashback on Ancient Grudge?

-You have 7 'normal' zombies, is this a deck that wants the Unbreathing Horde?

-Do you run the sacrifice package of Altar's Reap/Disciple of Griselbrand/Traitorous Blood?

-Do you run the run the 'dome' burn package of the 2 Bump in the Nights?

-What ratio of creatures to spells do you run?

-Is the Curse of Stalked Prey actually a good card for this deck's play style? Or is it a greedy infatuation with a rare?

Two items to consider.

-Olivia Voldaren was a miracle P3p2 pick up, the pack average otherwise and the transform card was missing. I took this to mean that somone snagged a Garruk (turned out to be a Mayor of Avabruck).

-While black and red were ridiculously open, many mid-level cards that I would have played did not end up wheeling. (Diregraff Ghoul/Traitorous Blood/Pitchburn Devils/Harvest Pyre/Corpse Lunge/Village Cannibals). And other then one Harvest Pyre I never saw a single red burn spell, so at least one other player was in each of my colors.

This was the deck I finally ran:

Decisions:

-I wanted to be dropping as many creatures as fast as possible so I went down to 16 lands, with an even split given my desire to be to get one-drops and double color cost spells in each color down as reliably as possible.

-With lower land, difficult casting costs and a need to be on the play as much as possible I decided there was no way I could splash, even for a strong card like Bonds.

-Likewise I couldn't add a forest for Ancient Grudge, and cut it from the deck as a side board consideration. Night Terrors also felt like it should only be considered from the sideboard if I absolutely need a silver bullet for something.

-With 7 zombies it didn't feel likely that Unbreathing Horde would be very strong, and so was cut. How relevant have people found its damage prevention ability? 

-I removed the Typhoid Rats/Manor Skeleton/Riot Devils/Altar's Reap/Disciple of Griselbrand as not being aggressive enough for this deck. 

-I knew I wanted to keep the Ghoulcaller's Chant in for cheap recursion, sufficient zombies for value, and the possibility of my deck NEEDING Olivia to win games.

-At this point I really started to struggle, I saw strength in playing everything I had level on one level or another.

-With my mana base I really wanted to avoid anything with more then 4CC. Night Revelers and Scourge of Geier Reach, while strong cards, seemed like slow vanilla beaters. At this point I felt the deck was going to win by putting the opponent on the back foot as FAST as possible, and decided to give up the later game inevitability.

-I kept the Mokrut Banshee and the Into the Maw of Hell in despite their cost as I thought they were too strong as removal spells to cut. However this did cause me to have uncastable cards in my hand at points.

-I finally ended up losing the Bump in the Night's, even though they seemed a perfect fit for this deck. I was getting close to losing a critical mass of creatures and need to cut spells. I thought that the combination of 4 falter effects (Nightbird's Clutches and Crossway Vampire), many early drops to get in for incidental damage, and the Curse of Stalked Prey to transition them from early to late game would end up being more consistent then an early all-in creature damage + burn plan.

-The lack of sacrifice outlets made Traitorous Blood lose a lot of value to me, despite seeming a very strong finisher card in an aggressive deck like this. Also the possible weakness of Curse of Stalked Prey giving the opponent back a stronger creature led me to cut it.

-This left me with 2 cards that I still needed to cut. I figured I could take out one of the Ghoulraisers because I wanted more aggression then a 2/2 for 3 CC, and infinite recursion, while awesome in a deck that would suicide creatures, was less valuable then other card combinations. Lastly I cut the Tribute to Hunger, I felt I couldn't go lower then the 16 creatures I had, and thought of all the cards I had left TtH was the most likely to lose value if my deck's plan started to go wrong.

The deck ended up playing exactly like I had hoped (and feared). I went on the play any time I got the choice, and ended up winning the draft going 6-1-0 total.

M1G1: I first Mulliganed a hand of 4 mountain, Curse of Stalked Prey, Dead Weight, and Rotting Fensnake and ended up keeping my second 1-land hand of Swamp, 2x Dead Weight Markov Patrician, Rotting Fensnake, and Nightbird's Clutches hoping that I could clear opponent's early game with the Weights and use the Patrician to recover any lost life. Only got a second land 4 turns later, much too late.

Two of the other games were won either by Olivia Voldaren directly or by my opponent having to play around her while ignoring my other guys, the others were won by the combination of curving small guys out with repeated falter and recursion effects and growth from the Curse of Stalked Prey. I nearly always ended up siding out Into the Maw of Hell for Tribute to Hunger, the 2nd Ghoulraiser, or an extra Mountain.

Even with the strong wins I still wonder if this was the best deck I could have made. What would you have done?

Yablo's ISD Draft #1

(Yablo is here for an INN Draft!  I can't embed because rare draft embedding is currently turned off... sorry to be creating extra browser windows)


http://www.raredraft.com/watch?d=30inh

Ended up going 1-2 but I thought I had a pretty solid draft, must have been the play.  Any comments I could get off the site would be appreciated.


Thanks!
Yablo


(Also, sorry about the huge delay!  I was having some formatting issues from the new blogspot layout.)

Zvazda's ISD #5

R1G1 - I curved out.  Walking Corpse into Chapel Geist into Abattoir Ghoul into Midnight haunting.  He didn't stand a chance.  I got him to 2 and he psuedo stabilized but a top decked blazing torch took care of that pretty fast.
R1G2 - Won!  (replay got lost)

R2G1 - Lost (replay got lost)
R2G2 - He played a Elder of Laurels, but we were able to fly over his head with  a chapel geist, and the abbatoir ghoul + blazing torch made it so he couldn't actually block our abbatoir ghoul.  He tried to stabilize with creepy doll but Avacynian Preist took care of that pretty fast.
R2G3 - Lost (replay got lost)

R3G1 - Lost (replay got lost)
R3G2 - Facing Red/Black Aggro.  His Furor of the Bitten on a bloodcrazed neonate was easily handled by our rebuke.  And the juggy was easily handled by victim of night.  He geistflamed our patrician  and one of our midnight haunts.  He then played an olivia into a totally reset board... Yipes.  It was OK because of our Rebuke, though :).  After that Chapel Geist got brimstone volleyed... but we were able to flashback an unburial rites to get him back and throw down our Silverchase fox.  He topdecked a Kessig Wolf which we promptly tribute to hungered and cracked in for the win.
R3G3 - Lost (replay got lost)


I dunno why we MTGO has been so bad about replays lately.  Anyone have any insight to this?

Listen Along with Zach!


21 - Adele - Yes, I do listen to popular music on occasion... Some of it I even enjoy!  I think this album is quite good.
Lady In the Dark - This is a Kurt Weill show from 1941.  It is the rare musical from before Oklahoma! that is worth listening to but this score is truly sensational and I'm happy everytime it shows up on my Ipod.
Best That I could Do - This is a John Melloncamp best of collection.  I normally avoid best of collections but somehow this one ended up on my computer.

knrhenry ISD #1

(Knrhenry makes his blog debut!)

This deck 1-2'd in the swiss queue.

Oraymw's INN draft #3

Commentary:

To be honest, this draft was pretty ridiculous. I got passed all of the removal, and ended up with eight potential cards for the final slot.

As for the play, it really wasn't difficult to win the games. Basically, I just played a few zombies, and then killed everything that got in the way.

Round 1 was vs. a decent UW aggro deck. One of his biggest problems was relying on Cloistered Youth. Turns out that an Unholy Fiend with Claustrophobia is not an asset. I did this to his creatures in both games, and it just made it too easy for me to race him.

Round 2 was vs. RG aggro, and the games were pretty close. He had Devil's Play, which got me down to 1 life in both games, but I managed to pull squeak out the wins anyways. Of course, in the second game, he had to mull down to four. Against him, my main strategy was to keep chaining Ghoulraisers, which just gave me so much card advantage that he couldn't compete. He was banking on a lot of things like Harvest Pyre and Ambush Vipers which don't do very well against a continuous stream of Ghoulraisers.

Round 3 was vs. WG aggro. Basically, he played large creatures, and I killed them with the greatest of ease.

Zvazda's I Draft #4

This deck was pretty removal light, but I felt very good about all the fliers.  I didn't think it was quite 3-0 worthy... but it got there anyway.

I feel like the draft portion was very tight, as was my play.

Here's the deck:

Listen Along with Zach


Blood Money - Tom Waits - This album is very interesting.  It's a rock concept album based on the play Woyczeck.  Tom Waits... is... well eccentric.

The Lion King (Soundtrack) - I find the soundtrack from the original disney movie greatly preferable to the original broadway cast.

Asturiel's ISD Draft #4

Here's the deck I submitted

Here's the deck I found myself boarding into, taking out the armored skaab because I have that much synergy with them and my deck had plenty of mill.

This was a draft that didn't go quite as I planned, I went 1-1 with a bye which disappointed me but whatever. There was the obvious signalling thing that you'll see in the draft, white WAS open and I should have seen it. But alas the deck wasn't too bad, I had fun with it and I look forward to being able to draft INN online again because of it :)

Zvazda's ISD Draft #3

MTGO is being very bad about saving games lately so I don't have any game recaps.  Suffice to say we went 1-2 losing to much better decks (including the blue tempo deck we passed and didn't have a chance against).

Listen Along with Zach


Ten Summoner's Tales - Sting - This is my favorite Sting album and not just because it has Fields of Gold, which reminds me of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - the saddest cancellation since Firefly.

Artificial Heart - Jonathan Coulton - Thank goodness I ran so good on music on this disappointing 1-2 daft.  Seriously, if you haven't heard this album yet, go get it.  Then go get everything else JoCo has done and listen to that.

Asturiel's ISD Draft #3

The mana was a bit light, I'm not used to going 16 but I felt like in this deck it was justified. The curve topped at 5 aside from Flashback cards and I couldn't cut another spell for the life of me :) I decided to go with the 2nd rites in the board since I couldn't get myself to cut another creature since I was light on those, and I couldn't see a spell to cut. Maybe the cleaver was the call to cut, but I felt it was quite necessary in the deck. The scarecrow also got the axe since I didn't have any "bombs" to stall to so I needed guys who could turn sideways more than guys to stop them from turning sideways. Le sigh, I don't know. Anyway the deck durdled very well, and when it died while durdling it didn't, but if you let me durdle around, I ground ya out :P

Went 2-1 losing in the finals to a GW travel prep deck. He didn't let me durdle :(

Twantwan's ISD #1

This draft went 1-1

(Everyone welcome Twantwan)

Zvazda's INN Draft #2

I kinda wish I'd played a Diregraff ghoul over something, but I was skewing more towards green than black  What do you think?

All my games got lost :-/  I ended up going 2-1, though.

Listen Along with Zach


Deep Dead Blue - Elvis Costello
Dawn Metropolis - Anamangauchi
Complete Recordings of Bessie Smith - Bessie Smith
Disneyland Soundtracks - This had the disneyland soundtracks, mostly from frontier land.  The highlight of this was the 22 minute complete recording of Fantasmic.  Yes, my roommates looked at me funny.

Fiffo416 ISD Draft #1

(Fiffo sends us his first draft!  Be nice... but not too nice.) 

I ended up with a very aggressive BR deck and won the draft, winning the finals against a perfectly shaped mill deck (with the blue curse in multiples, the 1-mana artifact, the Nephalia UB land, dream twist...). He put me on a very very fast clock, but my deck was even better than his one talking about very fast race-based
scarcely-interactive games :P Innistrad is awesome, by the way.

I feel my drafting was fine except for the tree-of-redemption pick (don't really know what I was thinking)... but would you have drafted differently? Should I have switched to blue seeing that it was so open? Should I have picked the brimstone volley over the demon? Please let me know ^^

Asturiel's ISD Draft #2

This was similar to a deck I split the finals with in my FNM, except that deck was INSANE. One of the few things Ill say is this. 3x Travel Preps, 2x Midnight Haunting and a Instigator Gang. I had 34 playables... yeah....

I didnt think that the mana in this deck was that bad, but I would either fall flat on 1 color so often I found myself questioning the mana base. So this went a 1-2 in the swiss ques...  Yeah...