Draft Deck

Last Wednesday I held a successful Draft night. For those who are unfamiliar with the term Draft in the game of Magic the Gathering this is how it’s played:

Each player is given 3 booster packs. At the same time all players must open a pack. Then you take one card, and pass the rest of the pack on to the next player, they choose one card and pass the rest of the pack on and so on and so forth. The idea is that you will all end up with 45 cards to which you will need to make a 45 card deck to play with.

Obviously you will need to think about the cards you are taking, and whether you can make it into a playable deck. I also find that all players have to agree that they’re not just after rare cards.

So, things to consider when making a draft deck: 45 cards to make your draft deck... but you will need to take some cards out to add land (which are important). So you will in a sense be left with a sideboard. This does mean you have some space to take some cards with you that you don’t want to see used against you. But do you take that risk? Another player could be aiming to make a deck very similar to the deck you’re trying to make, to which you find the cards you want are being taken before you can get them

Moving on to the draft game I held in dining room. We had three players, my good friend Kev, my Uncle Mark and myself. We all have different playing styles. This worked well when it came to the decks that we all made. We had one Rise of the Eldrazi and two Scars of Mirrodin packs each.

Kev’s deck: When it came to it Kev wanted to make a black/another colour deck but I had jumped in taking the black cards. So he ended up with a multi coloured deck. He managed to bag “level up” creature cards with happened to finish me off.

Marks deck: Mark had gone for a White/Green deck. He only got Plains out so we never saw what Green cards he actually had. This is the reason he conceded in the end as he had a hand of only Green cards.

My Deck: I went for Black, as in my First pack was ‘Baneful Omen’, although there was also ‘Hand of Emrakul’. I was torn because in any deck you want a big creature, what made me pass it on though was the ability which required ‘Elarazi Spawn’ (A 0/1 creature token “Sacrifice this creature: Add 1 to you mana pool.”). What really set me on black was ‘Consume the Meek’.

I did end up picking ‘Hand of Emrakul’ because there was ‘Dread Drone’ and ‘Essence Feed’ being passed around so with them I went for it. I know the chances of getting all three would be pushing my luck but you have to think that after the draft you have got the cards forever, so I was thinking about any future decks I may use them in. Another card that went in hand with these was ‘Eldrazi Temple’, this was going around too so I took that up as the other must not have seen the combos.

Being that we had Scars of Mirrodin boosters, we had a lot of Artefacts to choose from; when I saw ‘Kuldotha Forgemaster’ I had to have it as I’m in the middle of making an Artefact deck. But how happy was I to get ‘Wurmcoil Engine’? I now had a reason to use both in my draft deck.

I also started to take red cards to be my second colour but in the end they all ended up in my sideboard.

My deck list:

                Black Creatures:

Dread Drone

Cadaver Imp

Plague Stinger

Contagious Nim x2

Blackcleave Goblin

Necrogen Scudder

Painsmith

                Artefact Creature:

                                                               

                                                Ichorclaw Myr

                                                Moriok Replica x2

                                                Palladium Myr

                                                Kuldotha Forgemaster

                                                Wurmcoil Engine

                Colourless Creatures:

                                                Hands of Emrakul

                Black Other:

                                                Grasp of Darkness

                                                Essence Feed

                                                Tainted Strike

                                                Instill Infection

                                                Inquisition of Kozilek

                                                Baneful Omen

                                                Consume the Meek

                Artefacts:

                                                Accorder’s Shield

                                                Strider Harness x2

                                                Necrogen Censer

                                                Pennon Blade

                                                Trigon of Corruption

                Lands:

                                                Eldrazi Temple

                                                Swamp x 16

When it came to game play this deck did dominate with Creatures having ‘Infect’ (This creature deals damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters and to players in the form of poison counters). But these started to fail as the other players creatures got stronger.

Having only played one game so far with our draft decks it is hard to say how good we have been in making decks, but with more games will come more updates.

Cards not used/Sideboard:

                Demonic Appetite

                Iron Myr

                Saberclaw Golem

                Spawning Breath

                Raid Bombardment

                Kiln Fiend

                Akoum Boulderfoot

                Flameborn Hellion

                Ferrovore

                Ogre Geargrabber

                Mountain x2

                Engulfing Slagwurm

    Forest

                Plains