And I suppose I should tell one of my favorite short MTG stories - during my second phase of playing the game, around the Time Spiral era, someone wanted me to play against his killer Type 1 tournament deck. It relied on using zero-cost artifacts to make a large storm count, and then cast Tendrils of Agony, as I would discover.
So I do my first turn, and he does his, and I do my second turn, and then on his second turn he starts the combo - builds his huge storm count, and brings out Tendrils - and I cast Trickbind on the Storm triggered ability.
It takes him a second or two to process what just happened, then he scoops his cards and stomps off in a huff.
So I guess there’s a new expansion releasing tomorrow and the local game shop is having a Booster Draft tournament for it. I stopped in and talked to the guy there for a little while (and bought some cards, naturally) and it sounded like a good way to play without anyone getting crushed by another guy’s uber deck. He said even in general game nights they try to discourage super competitive play unless it’s a tournament designed around it – no fun (and probably bad business) for newer players to come in for a night of casual playing and get slammed time after time by people with $1,500 invested in their decks.
Anyway, maybe someone here knows the answer: The Booster Draft has you buying in with three sealed boosters. Everyone opens one booster. You pick a card to keep then pass the opened booster to the left. Each person picks a card from their “new” booster to keep, passes it, etc. Continue this for the three sealed packs and each person winds up with 45 cards that they “drafted” and sort of built a deck on the fly. You play a 40 card deck with the extras as a sideboard to tweak between matches.
Sounds good but… don’t boosters only contain one basic land? So won’t each person have, on average, only three basic lands in their deck? Does the tournament provide some additional basic lands or how is that resolved?
Basic lands are free in a draft. You can have as many as you want, of whatever kinds you want. Sometimes, if you’re left drafting a few real stinkers at the end, you might want to just leave them out and pad out your deck with an extra land or two.
Oh, I forgot to post my story of an expensive deck being trounced. Unfortunately I wasn’t playing this one, just watching, but one guy had a super expensive deck-- As in, his mana base consisted entirely of original dual lands and Mox. But his play was atrocious. First turn, he put out a land and cast a Mana Vault. Second turn, he played another land, and used the two lands and the vault to cast a Juzam Djinn (and took a point of mana burn from the Vault in the process). He was obviously expecting that getting out a 5/5 immune to Terror on the second turn would let him cruise to victory… Except that the other guy just cast a Spirit Link on the djinn, and sat back and waited. So every turn, the expensive guy took one point from his vault (which he never untapped, even once he had the mana to do so) and one from the djinn, and the djinn was never able to accomplish anything because whenever it hit the other guy, he gained the life right back immediately, and meanwhile the other guy is also getting an extra 1 life per turn from the djinn hurting its controller. There were other things that happened in that game, too, but that’s the real core of it-- Nothing else really mattered; it just sped things up a bit.
Depends on the store. I don’t play magic, but I know the store I play other games at used to provide them for free, and now charges some (minor) fee for lands.
A word of caution: Drafting is the absolutely best magic format that there is. But it’s also EXTREMELY complicated and difficult. I’d suggest playing sealed deck instead until you get the hang of playing limited decks as opposed to constructed decks. If that’s not an option, prepare to lose embarrassingly your first few drafts.
Well, I’m okay with losing (I’m really going to help support the kid and have a night out with him) and, as noted in the OP, I’m familiar with the game itself. But if you have any tips or anything I have about 22 hours to absorb them
Plus, with the expansion release tomorrow, the kid is rather jazzed up about attending tomorrow so win or lose it wouldn’t be quite the same to miss the big event.
Draft decks are 40-card decks. That means usually 17 land and 23 spells, sometimes 18 or 16 land. You should almost always be playing 2 colors, or occasionally only one color.
You want a good “mana curve”, meaning lots of things to do that cost 2 and 3 mana early in the game, tailing off with the more expensive things.
A mistake beginning drafters tend to make is to draft lots and lots of giant growths and things of that sort, and they end up with too many ways to enhance their own creatures, not enough actual creatures. However, the current environment (Theros and Born of the Gods) have an unusual number of unusually good creature enchantments. In particular, all the creatures with Bestow (which can act as either creatures or creature enchantments) are VERY good.
In this format, bounce spells (in blue of course) are exceptionally good, and all the creature removal is pretty bad, so all of the clunky 3-to-6- cost removal spells are less good than they would be in many formats.
In this format even more than most, faster and cheaper is better (although that does NOT mean that random 1/1s for 1 that don’t do much are worth playing.)
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!
I went with a white/blue deck aside from a handful of black cards that I’d get stuck with at the end of each draft. Never green or red, only black at the end each time. first match I lost 1-2, the second we only had a chance to play two of the three and I went 1-1. Both times I won, it was a set up cards like:
Oreskos Sun Guide (2/2 - Gain 2 life when untapped)
Deepwater Hypnotist (2/1 - When untapped, target creature get -3/-0 until end of turn)
Ephara’s Radiance (Enchanted creature has 1W, Tap; Gain 3 life)
Evanescent Intellect (Enchanted creature gains 1U, Tap; Target player puts top 3 cards in library into graveyard)
Had other cards working primarily as defenders with cards like Hold at Bay (Prevent 7 damage) and Nullify (Counter creature or aura spell) to keep stuff up. Tapping each turn to pump up my life and grinding the other guy’s library down. Won both times when he ran out of cards – milling is pretty vicious in a 40 card deck. I lost once due to a real bad streak of mana, once just because the other guy overwhelmed me with creatures with various abilities (a unicorn everyone had to defend against, etc) and the other guy had some set-up running that I can’t even begin to properly describe: He was playing with the top library card face up and could chose to keep or put it at the bottom of the deck, or take it if it was a land and then got counters on some creature… I dunno. It was red/green so I wasn’t familiar with the cards to describe the names/effects. Anyway, it didn’t work for him the first game where I milled him and came out gangbusters in the second.
I made a few bad choices in picking cards/building my deck but whatever. I put some mythic rare enchantment/god in there which was dumb because she required 7 devotion to act as a creature and I rarely had that much out at a time. I was just temporarily blinded by “Oooh, White/Blue god card!”. All in all it was a good time and I was glad to hold my own to some extent despite my inexperience. Everyone was pretty cool; by coincidence or by design I was put in a “pod” of eight people which had four players closer to my age and a few kids. But one of the kids was eager to lend me a life counter and everyone was patient with rules questions, etc. My son was in another group and lost each match but I didn’t see him or do or take a good look at his deck.
They didn’t play everyone down to the bitter end of two remaining players (would have taken all night) but rather tallied wins/loses and distributed prizes based on that as the evening wound down. Everyone got at least one booster as a prize in addition to the three when you bought into the tournament so, for $15, you couldn’t go wrong.
The MTG Salvation limited forum is a pretty good place for questions about drafting - maybe a bit advanced for where you are now, but also friendly to newbie questions.
If it’s any consolation, Ephara, God of the Polis is actually an excellent card in draft. Even if she never becomes a creature, you’re still drawing an extra card every time you cast a creature, and that can really add up. All those extra resources are very helpful in winning games.
Don’t you also get to keep the cards you draft? In that case, it might be worth drafting a valuable card even if it doesn’t fit well in the deck you’re constructing.
Agreed. The power of drawing cards is a lesson new players learn over time. The more you draw, the more likely you have the answers you need. The important thing, though, is you had fun (and the WU god is probably going to be pretty valuable :))
I thought as much as well but she never really worked out for me. Usually based on when she entered the game, etc. I’m still happy to own her and will include her in WU decks but, in the few games I played under the circumstances, she didn’t work out for me.
Yeah, we kept the drafted cards. Ephara was the only mythic I had upon opening (and kept, naturally) and I don’t remember what was in the rare slots on the other two or what color they were. I wasn’t really thinking “card value” at the time so I might have passed off a decent rare black/red/green but too late to have regrets about that now. Just as likely that I traded off a rare that no one cares about.
Do cards count towards their own Devotion costs? Ephara requires Devotion: 7 but her casting cost includes WU. So do I only need to make up another five across my other permanents?
Neither the Wizards site nor the Wiki I looked at addressed this.
My fondest memories of MtG are playing something like 8 player free-for-alls in college in the early 2000s.
Note: If you play Balance in an 8 player game when you have no creatures and 1 card left, peple will remember and you will be the first to die the next four games you play. I won that game though
