Doctor Anime's picture
By: Doctor Anime, Tomer Abramovici
Dec 06 2012 2:42pm
0
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 My favorite thing about writing these articles is the feedback I get from them. Sometimes people will thank me for writing the article. Maybe they learned something, either what pick/plays to do or NOT to do. I can totally see people taking notes during my early M13 drafting days when I was terrible and decided not to draft green no matter how many Rancors were passed to me. Dark times indeed. But either way, I love knowing that people do appreciate these articles. It's nice to know I'm not just writing for myself.

More surprising, however, is the constructive feedback I get critiquing my play decisions. Often I get second opinions on card choices or better play decisions in my games. It could be a minor critique, like taking X card over Y, but other times I'm alerted to game-changing errors that I would've never noticed on my own. I can name at least two drafts where I huffed and puffed about losing to "bad luck" like a crummy noob, only to discover later from a comment that I could've actually won had I done things differently. It's that kind of feedback that makes me re-evaluate how I play and shows me how to be a better player. You guys are awesome!

With that in mind, here's a draft where I didn't do very well. I know this because I've already caught some enormous mistakes without you guys having a chance to comment on it yet! First I'll show you it, then we'll talk about it.

Here's the picture draft, with the video draft below. I actually wanted to put the picture draft as a hide/show spoiler but when I attempted to put in some fancy html code, puremtgo disagreed with my terrible attempt and my entire article was deleted. If someone can help me with that in the future I'd really appreciate it:

Drafting: 

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The end result was this:

 

The end result is decent, but not great. So, what went wrong?

Well, if we stick with the Azorius direction that I decided upon early in the draft, I missed some obvious opportunities picking up great Selesnya cards. First off were the Centaur Healers. These guys are amazing. They're one of the few creatures that give you a definite edge over the ever-powerful Rakdos decks.I picked up one, but then passed up two more for subpar choices, Stealer of Secrets and Runewing, which aren't even close in power. Then I made an even worse mistake taking Hover Barrier over Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage. I just.. I mean.. no words can describe the shame. Horrible, horrible shame. Imagine if my deck splashed green for 3 healers and the guildmage. What a spike in power! I even had two selesnya guildgates to help splash for them. Sigh.

The next option is much more interesting to me because I don't know if it would've been correct: what about jumping into Rakdos? That guild was clearly open from start to finish. In the videos I make it clear by the time I pick up a pack 1 pick 10 Grim Roustabout that rakdos is severely underdrafted. I was willing to jump into Rakdos with the second pack... only to open Archon of the Triumvirate and then be passed Palisade Giant immediately after.

So, is it worth jumping into Rakdos then? Pack 1 it was clearly open, but now packs are being passed in the other direction. Did someone else jump into the colors by then? Maybe the people feeding you this time are actually in Rakdos, what if you're cut?

Is it worth sticking with these cards, in a color combination that doesn't seem particularly open:

Archon of the TriumvirateLyev SkyknightDramatic Rescue
Centaur HealerVoidwielderPalisade Giant

Or switch to this, which has been critically underdrafted in pack 1?

Grim RoustaboutLaunch Party

I decided to stick with Azorius. Turns out Rakdos DID stay critically underdrafted in pack 2, and remained so all the way to the end of pack 3. But it could've happened the other way around too, and Rakdos could've dried up. So the question remains: what is the right choice here? Jump in or don't? Let me know what you think!

 

R1 G1:

 

 

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