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By: runeliger, Sebastian Park
Feb 15 2009 10:09am
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Given the craziness surrounding all of the Alara and (Conflux eventually) drafts that are occuring, I decided to take it easy and find a Tempest draft to fire. In this blast from a past, I bring in the New Year with Tempest.

Given the upsurge in articles about how the classic community is in need of more cards from sets like this, get out there and draft MED2, Tempest, Weatherlight, etc!

If you're drafting tempest, hopefully the following will help.

Part 1:

Part 2:

With the draft done, here's the finalized decklist as seen in the video.

 

Rune Drafting #4 TTT Deck
Triple Tempest Draft Deck by Sebastian Park
Creatures
1 Verdant Force
1 Gravedigger
1 Dauthi Slayer
1 Knight of Dusk
1 Trained Armodon
2 Rootwalla
1 Pincher Beetles
1 Skyshroud Ranger
1 Rootbreaker Wurm
10 cards

Other Spells
1 Disturbed Burial
1 Pit Imp
1 Darkling Stalker
1 Screeching Harpy
1 Souldrinker
1 Rampant Growth
1 Manakin
1 Overrun
1 Muscle Sliver
1 Dark Banishing
3 cards
Lands
9 Forest
8 Swamp
17 cards
 
Verdant Force

Anyway, given the situation in which I recorded the draft, I only managed to get a single game of action recorded for viewing. And it's as follows (credits for the music go to the Korean group Epik High)

 

Since the game was lost, I thought I'd go over some key essentials to drafting Tempest for any of you out there lucky enough to draft it in the coming months.

#1. Although there are controllish builds to be found (and when you have the right cards, it wins), a strong aggressive curve seems to get the job done in this format.

This is important to note when you're drafting a shadow creature only deck. Although controllish decks do win if it comes together, aggro decks seems to win without coming together in the draft. I recommend if you're rare drafting (which there really isn't any reason not to rare draft in this format), that you pursue an aggro build in order to compensate for the loss of good cards that you'll be passing to make bank.

#2. Rolling Thunder is just ridiculous in this format.

It fits into almost any deck that runs red, but shines in decks that are able to deal with the strong aggressive curve and then just win off of this card alone. I've seen this card literally steal games, destroy opponent board positions, and dominate a person's play decisions.


#3. The creature quality is much lower than what we have today.

This last point is for all of you who want to jump into Tempest drafts coming out of Alara and Lorwyn (and pretty much any set released after 2005). The creature quality of Tempest is extremely low in comparison. This basically translates to taking creatures higher in the pick order compared to the abundant removal spells. This was my mistake in this draft and one that I've worked on correcting in my pick order overall for older sets.

Hopefully with these tips your draft can improve as mine has. So Sayonara to Tempest. I'm moving back to the present with Alara and Conflux!

-Sebastian Park
AKA runeliger
airizel AT gmail DOT com
blogging at Airizel.Net

2 Comments

why didnt u run living death by Anonymous (not verified) at Mon, 02/16/2009 - 18:33
Anonymous's picture

why didnt u run living death in your deck?

Interesting article, i by LOurs at Thu, 02/19/2009 - 07:56
LOurs's picture
3

Interesting article, i enjoyed to see video of the draft, really nice.
About the deck, it should have been great to know what was your feeling before & after the draft about the limited tempest meta. I mean, did you analyze it as a more control or aggro meta ?? What is specific to the limited tempest meta, to each color ? (for example, tempest is Shadow, big hate cards, good black removal, weak red burn spells, strong mana acceleration available (petal, dar ritual, rampant growth), really good control blue card (differents counters, capsize).
It has a big impact on the choosen cards i think, and this is a success key to well draft in the environment so this is as well a good learning. This part should have been more analyzed in the article i think.

Otherwise, once again, video is a really good way to follow your progress in the draft, making this article original & interesting.
GL for your next draft :)