If you've watched one of my triple Shadows over Innistrad drafts, you're probably aware that BR Vampires was my favorite thing to draft there. The insane curve the deck could muster, along with the very abusable madness mechanic, made it a pet archetype of mine, one that I would routinely force and get good results with.

Eldritch Moon, sadly, made the deck a lot less appealing. The power level of the madness cards seems to have dropped quite a bit when compared to SOI. Take the premier common madness removal spell for each set (Fiery Temper vs. Alchemist's Greeting), for example. Then compare the go-to 3-drop common madness creature, which was a 3/5 in SOI, and is now a measly 3/3. Round that up with a bunch of borderline or straight unplayable chaff (such as Distemper of the Blood), and it's easy to lose faith.

Of course, sometimes you just open a couple of the great rares that make the archetype work, and this is exactly what happened in today's event.

There we go. That was a pretty weird event overall, truth be told, but the first and last matches were pretty awesome. Here we even see the first time I managed to record an actual melded card on the battlefield (which, for some inscrutable reason, isn't twice as big as every other card in MTGO. What's the point of the mechanic then, MTGO team? What's the point!?)

Ahem. I hope you enjoyed this, and see you soon.