Zass

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

10th edition draft

I played my first draft of 10th edition magic, the gathering today. It was pretty fun! I'll talk about my impressions of the set, and then about the draft

Set impressions
First of all, the black borders make such a big difference, it's unbelievable. This is the first core set I will actually buy packs of. I've avoided every single core set since Revised (when I first started), because the cards were simply so unattractive. Case in point, I opened a brushland in the 9th edition release event, but I was kind of disappointed because it looked so ugly. I never put it in my deck. At the 10th release event, I got a brushland, and this time I'll be playing with it.

Draft
I opened a Chimeric Staff. Wow, this was one of my favorite artifacts from Urza's saga. I still have a mono-green deck that uses it, that's one of my favorite cards. That along with Jolrael (empress of beats) , which they reprinted in Time Spiral. Things continued well when I was passed a Treetop Village. I started going Green/White. In the second pack, I opened a foil wrath. It's such a pretty card black bordered!

In the end, I had a green/white deck splashing black. The notable cards (in my opinion) were

Wrath of God
Ballista Squad
Serra's Embrace (I was excited when I opened this too, I didn't know they reprinted it)
Treetop Village
Chimeric Staff

Results
I did very poorly with the deck, getting 1 match win and 4 match losses. That's the worst I've done in any event, ever. I've almost always had a tied or winning record, almost never a losing record, and never near this bad. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. My deck was full of bombs, but I felt like I kept losing stupidly.

I went over my deck with another player afterwards and identified one of the problems. I had drafted Yavimaya Enchantress and I overvalued her power. I was already playing with Serra's Embrace and Overgrowth , and I put in two Holy Strength because of the synergy. That was a questionable decision, and I think I would have done a lot better with other cards instead.

One fun part of the match was playing against a player that lost to my wrath in game one. He was obviously wary of it in games 2 and 3, and kept playing around it. It really showcases the power of the card. It seemed like he wasn't playing threats because of the fear of it, which helped me, because I had slow draws and it was giving me time to actually draw my creatures and wrath! As they say in chess, the threat is stronger than the execution.