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By: Doctor Anime, Tomer Abramovici
Sep 03 2012 2:08pm
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I ended up with a really sweet mono-white deck last draft. I opted against splashing black for more deck consistency and it worked out perfectly. But it's uncommon to draft a mono-colored deck. A color has to be really open for mono-color to work, or else you're left scrounging for playable cards to fill out your deck. That's why most draft decks in M13 end up being dual color. You give up some consistency in your manabase (though the degree varies depending on how the deck is built), but you're far more likely to end up with overall better cards. But what about taking it further and going three colors to take the very best cards passed in those colors? Is the boost in raw power worth the loss in consistency? Well, this time I do end up tricolor. Let's see how it went:

 

Drafting (Part 1)

Drafting (Part 2)

R1 G1

R1 G2

 

Closing Thoughts:

The best way to get better at Magic is to learn from mistakes. And the most obvious mistakes to learn from are the ones that cause you to lose horribly. These are the kind of mistakes I made in this draft.

I think I drafted a kickbutt tricolor deck. It could've easily 3-0'd the tournament. Turns out I got my butt handed to me by the green player that I fed. Now, I could fall into a toxic mentality that many players succumb to and blame my loss on external factors. "Omg bad draws shuffler hates me!" "Augur of Bolas tucks 3 mountains and loses me the game wtfhax!" But that's not productive, and most importantly, it's flat out wrong.

I got steamrolled because I made some huge mistakes.

The first and most obvious error was not taking the Primordial Hydra and sticking to green when it was clearly open. My picks turned out fine, but there's no excuse for not taking the best card(s) at the very beginning of a draft. Hydra is clearly a much better first pick than Sleep. I let my misguided dislike of green (which is actually strong in M13) get in the way of picking correctly.

Possibly the biggest mistake was during deckbuilding. I built tricolor all wrong. The best way to do tricolor is to have the third color as a splash, ideally something you don't want to cast until lategame. For my deck in particular, Public Execution could've been a very acceptable black splash. Crimson Muckwader is another decent "splash," as a 2/1 for 2cc is still okay even without a swamp. But Sign In Blood? Way too greedy. Ravenous Rats is absolutely not powerful enough to warrant a splash either. Harbor Bandit is superb, and I'd splash black to run him if my deck was really desperate for playables, but in this situation I had waaaaay too many playables in red/blue anyway. I mean, I was sideboarding out Vedalken Entrancer in a hardcore control deck! Because I opted to run black as more than just a splash, my manabase was all over the place. This is bound to cause consistency issues during gameplay. And it did -- both games had incompatible lands to cast the cards in hand. Now imagine if my only black cards were Crimson Muckwader and Public Execution, with 2 swamps in the deck total. I probably could've kept those hands without any problems.

Another huge problem was my choice of mulligans, or rather my lack thereof. The first game's hand should've been tossed back. I got greedy and paid for it. The second game should've been a mulligan as well. It probably would've been an easy keep if black was a light splash in my deck, but it wasn't and the odds of me drawing a mountain on time was lowered because of it. The fact that my Augur of Bolas tucked away the top 3 mountains on my deck, while unfortunate, doesn't change the fact that I made mistakes.

So that's a textbook example of how not to draft tricolor. I'll hopefully get it right next time. And you can bet that a jarring loss like this has fixed my negative outlook on green! I sure as heck will take the best card, green or not, in the future!

2 Comments

The common cause for this all by Moryn at Sun, 02/02/2014 - 08:28
Moryn's picture

The common cause for this all is the same. They are really going to become a little bit better with it. - Roger Stanton

what a brilliant idea!!!very by jamesyap at Fri, 06/27/2014 - 12:34
jamesyap's picture

what a brilliant idea!!!very good!
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