Ready for a change.

Fugie has gotten us some Lorwyn boxes for rock-bottom prices, and I couldn't be happier. The same skill testing that caused some other bloggers unmitigated success with Xth draft pretty much relegated my performance to mediocrity. I don't know why. I had drafted Xth about 10 times when Quentin Martin finally ran his Xth walk-through draft, and I still had no idea why he thought any of the cards he picked were any good. Card evaluation with expert level sets is somehow different; everybody starts on the same naive ground and works their way forward. With base sets I get all fouled up by having played with the cards (in different environs) since 95. Last weekend I went to a final Xth edition sealed event and went an awful 1-2-1. I'm just finished. I used up all my Xth packs drafting and I won't draft it no more. I have not been very excited by Lorwyn thus far, but have not actually played with any of the cards yet. I imagine having a couple boxes of product tomorrow night will help me get into the mood.
T
In a totally unrelated aside, those for a taste of double geekitude in other environs might want to track down Jacob London's track "Interest Rates Just Fell Again (the Sound Republic Lost In Translation Mix)." I just got done watching Episodes 1-3 of Star Wars again and I swear somewhere on Tatooine there are two beat-up service droids that make this abrasive, techy funk music while their master sleeps. All the other droids are dancing...

XXX on MODO

I finally jumped in the XXX pool online tonight. Tried to get a MED-X-X but it wasn't firing and I didn't have the packs for MMM, nor do I think I should be reading more than one pack of cards (since I don't know most of em, duh). Anyhoo.

Draft: Pick 1 (I forgot to turn DraftCap on until the next pick so the numbering is off) was Troll Ascetic over a bunch of cards that didn't pay for half the draft.

Pack 1:Civic Wayfinder, Severed Legion, Bandage, Rootwater Commando, Bloodrock Cyclops, Rushwood Dryad, Goblin Sky Raider, Suntail Hawk, Lava Axe, *, I*, Regeneration, Ballista Squad, Forest

Here's an interesting pick right away. Ballista Squad is amazing, but I am not really enamored of white, and Civic Wayfinder definitely keeps my options open.

Pick: Civic Wayfinder

Pack 2: Dusk Imp, Boomerang, Spined Wurm, Cancel, Robe of Mirrors, Angelic Wall, Spineless Thug, Grizzly Bears, Goblin Lore, Creeping Mold, Spawning Pool, *, Bottle Gnomes

Pick: Spined Wurm

Pack 3:Unsummon, Stalking Tiger, Samite Healer, Viashino Sandscout, Reviving Dose, Horseshoe Crab, Scathe Zombies, Deathmark, Wall of Fire, Seismic Assault, *, Island

I really like Unsummon as a way to get my green fat through, but Stalking Tiger is pretty solid as well, and I don't see Unsummon as a huge "Blue is Open!" sign.

Pick: Stalking Tiger

Pack 4:Highway Robber, Venerable Monk, Viashino Runner, Cancel, Firebreathing, Suntail Hawk, Treetop Bracers, Spirit Link, Telling Time, True Believer, Forest

This is probably a grotesque mispick. Treetop Bracers is asking for a 2-for-1. I love Highway Robber. I love Telling Time. U is probably open.

Pick: Treetop Bracers

Pack 5: Recover, Kavu Climber, Rock Badger, Demolish, Warrior's Honor, Commune with Nature, Crafty Pathmage, Angel's Feather

I also love Recover.

Pick: Recover

Pack 6:Uncontrollable Anger, Looming Shade, Giant Spider, Remove Soul, Terramorphic Expanse, Plague Beetle, Pincher Beetles, Lumengrid Warden, Swamp

Now black is probably open here, but we haven't seen anything truly amazing. Looming Shade sucks as much as it rocks and Giant Spider is so good.

Pick: Giant Spider

Pack 7:Rock Badger, Scathe Zombies, Goblin Elite Infantry, Overgrowth, Tundra Wolves, Demolish, Stronghold Discipline, Mountain

Pick: Scathe Zombies

Pack 8:Boomerang, Smash, Wall of Wood, Shimmering Wings, Angelic Blessing, Fog Elemental, Forest

Pick: Boomerang

Pack 9:Rootwater Commando, Goblin Sky Raider, Suntail Hawk, Elvish Berserker, Regeneration, Forest

Pick: Elvish Berserker

I would have gone with Rootwater Commando here, but my decks always lean on the 3-drop and I was trying to make a curve pick.

Pack 10: Robe of Mirrors, Angelic Wall, Grizzly Bears, Goblin Lore, Mountain

Pick: Grizzly Bears

Pack 11: Viashino Sandscout, Reviving Dose, Horseshoe Crab, Plains

Pick: Horseshoe Crab

Pack 12:Cancel, Suntail Hawk, Forest

Yeah, blue is open.

Pick: Cancel

Pack 13: Crafty Pathmage

Pack 14: Swamp

Pack 15:Anaba Bodyguard, Essence Drain, Steadfast Guard, Assassinate, Cloud Elemental, Crafty Pathmage, Llanowar Sentinel, Goblin Elite Infantry, Unholy Strength, Fists of the Anvil, Spiketail Hatchling, Leonin Scimitar, Demon's Horn, *, Mountain

You are probably going to say I should have picked Essence Drain or Assassinate. I think Blue is open and I am taking it.

Pick: Cloud Elemental

Pack 16: Uncontrollable Anger, Snapping Drake, Skyhunter Prowler, Recover, Steadfast Guard, Holy Day, Pincher Beetles, Horseshoe Crab, Naturalize, Thieving Magpie, *, Phyrexian Vault, Paladin en-Vec, Swamp

3 power over 1. Yes, I do know Thieving Magpie is insane card advantage. Watch.

Pick: Snapping Drake

Pack 17: Highway Robber, Skyhunter Patrol, Dehydration, Viashino Runner, Goblin Piker, Demystify, Sage Owl, Treetop Bracers, Fear, Luminesce, Reminisce

Ooh. Blue removal.

Pick: Dehydration

Pack 18:Heart of Light, Afflict, Aven Windreader, Benalish Knight, Rootwater Commando, Holy Strength, Fugitive Wizard, Canopy Spider, Contaminated Bond, Telepathy, Treasure Hunter

3/3 evasion is nice.

Pick: Aven Windreader

Pack 19:Wild Griffin, Anaba Bodyguard, Sift, Ravenous Rats, Commune with Nature, Honor Guard, Lumengrid Warden, Distress, Spirit Weaver, Agonizing Memories

See, card advantage

Pick: Sift

Pack 20:Heart of Light, Merfolk Looter, Hill Giant, Natural Spring, Vampire Bats, Shimmering Wings, Goblin Piker, Spellbook, Spark Elemental

And you wanted me to take the Magpie. 6th pick Looter!

Pick: Merfolk Looter

Pack 21: Counsel of the Soratami, Looming Shade, Skyshroud Ranger, Warrior's Honor, Peek, Plague Beetle, Duct Crawler, Rootwater Matriarch, Plains

Okay, I was hoping to mise a Shimmering Wings in pack 3.

Pick: Rootwater Matriarch

Pack 22: Aven Windreader, Mass of Ghouls, Grizzly Bears, Stun, Elvish Berserker, Fear, Viridian Shaman, Plains

This probably should have been the Windreader, but my curve wasn't great and there are some nasty artifacts in XXX.

Pick: Viridian Shaman

Pack 23: Anaba Bodyguard, Crafty Pathmage, Unholy Strength, Fists of the Anvil, Spiketail Hatchling, Demon's Horn, Mountain

Pick: Spiketail Hatchling

Pack 24: Steadfast Guard, Holy Day, Horseshoe Crab, Naturalize, Phyrexian Vault, Swamp

Pick: Phyrexian Vault

Pack 25:Reminisce

Pack 26:Fugitive Wizard

Pack 27:Lumengrid Warden

Pack 28:Spellbook

Pack 29:Plains

Pack 30: Benalish Knight, Sea Monster, Bloodrock Cyclops, Dusk Imp, Spined Wurm, Wall of Wood, Terramorphic Expanse, Mind Rot, Smash, Earth Elemental, Recollect, Phantom Warrior, Hypnotic Specter, Island, Leonin Scimitar

Ooh, 4 tix or a win condition? I like Hyppie and if I had a deck which played him, I would have raredrafted. Phantom Warrior is teh nuts in XXX though.

Pick: Phantom Warrior

Pack 31: Lightning Elemental, Youthful Knight, Dehydration, Hill Giant, Civic Wayfinder, Spineless Thug, Lava Axe, Natural Spring, Fugitive Wizard, High Ground, Wurm's Tooth, Persuasion, Island, Mountain

Pick: Persuasion

Pack 32: Terror, Ghost Warden, Twitch, Kavu Climber, Festering Goblin, Viashino Sandscout, Cloud Sprite, Distress, Raging Goblin, *, Kraken's Eye, Angelic Chorus, Forest

Okay, so maybe you were right about the Essence Drain.

Pick: Terror

Pack 33: Unsummon, Ravenous Rats, Giant Spider, Dross Crocodile, Fists of the Anvil, Tundra Wolves, Llanowar Sentinel, Peek, Sylvan Basilisk, No Rest for the Wicked, Sculpting Steel

At the rate I was wheeling fliers, I really didn't wanna see this on the other side of the board.

Pick: Giant Spider

Pack 34: Bandage, Sea Monster, Llanowar Elves, Mass of Ghouls, Firebreathing, Mind Rot, Demystify, Robe of Mirrors, Academy Researchers, Hate Weaver, Forest

For some reason, I thought my curve was too high and I needed the Elves. This wasn't really so.

Pick: Llanowar Elves

Pack 35: Festering Goblin, Aven Cloudchaser, Counsel of the Soratami, Holy Day, Duct Crawler, Naturalize, Reviving Dose, Forbidding Watchtower, Stronghold Discipline, Mountain

More card advantage.

Pick: Counsel of the Soratami

Pack 36: Rushwood Dryad, Sage Owl, Goblin Sky Raider, Angelic Blessing, Stun, Contaminated Bond, Rule of Law, Deluge, Forest

I loves me some Sages.

Pick: Sage Owl

Pack 37:Twitch, Stalking Tiger, Remove Soul, Unholy Strength, Raging Goblin, Honor Guard, Overgrowth, Swamp

Blue Terror?

Pick: Remove Soul

Pack 38: Sea Monster, Bloodrock Cyclops, Dusk Imp, Wall of Wood, Mind Rot, Smash, Island

Pick: Sea Monster

Pack 39: Fugitive Wizard

Pack 40: Twitch

Pack 41: Peek

Pack 42: Robe of Mirrors

Pack 43: Duct Crawler

Pack 44: Forest

Draft recording done by Blargware's MTGO DraftCap. Support Blargware!

Game 1-I play turn 2 Spiketail into Wayfinder into Ascetic. He played nothing other than card drawing and conceded on turn 7. There may have been a Horseshoe Crab. A Looter from him may have been countered by a Spiketail Activation.

Game 2-I played turn 2 Spiketail into turn 3 Ascetic (2nd Forest off the top) into turn 3 Phantom Warrior into turn 5 Persuasion on your Rootwater Commando. I never needed the Terror in my hand. Wow! I must be good at draft!

Match 2. Game 1-I get down Ascetic, he gets down Mortivore, Icy and enough removal to keep me to one flier at a time. I concede when it gets silly. I board in Treetop Bracers (I know it's a 2 for 1, but ground stalls were inevitable with us both playing green fat) and Viridian Shaman.

Game 2-He gets stuck with no green for 4 or 5 turns, and when he finally gets it, I have 8 power on the board and the Ascetic chumpies for his Spined Wurm. And he's at, like, 6.

Game 3-Removal for my early beats. Icy. No Viridian Shaman. Yuck.

So I got a couple packs, and can still draft MED-X-X. Hawesome. Also, Icy just dominates. I really wish I was better at opening it. Or drawing my V. Shaman, I guess.

My Last Draft as a Free Man

The title isn't technically true, as I haven't been "free" for four years, but hey, there's some sort of marriage next weekend and I'm told I will be there in a tux waiting for some chick to walk down the aisle. So I am supposed to be shopping for wedding supplies (just like I'm supposed to be cleaning my old apartment right now) but instead I play Magic. XXXth draft, to be exact. We have six people, so no sanctioning, and cheap packs. Tony McRome wants to team draft, so we randomize and sit down. First pick is a Civic Wayfinder over Sift and Midnight Ritual. I feel like forcing blue and end up passing some quality red (Shock) and green (Craw Wurm) to do so. I get a Cloud Elemental, Dehydration, and a Counsel of Soratami for my troubles. I see no black removal. My last four picks are middling red cards. Pack two I have a tough call between Sift and Mogg Fanatic. I pass the Sift reluctantly, knowing that it's the worse card. Six picks later the Sift comes around and I'm fine with taking it on the lap. I also pick up some decent green including Spined Wurm, Rampant Growth and Enormous Baloth. Looks like Civic Wayfinder might be getting to the deck after all. Third pack opens with a foil Reya Dawnbringer. I take the Guerrilla Tactics and ship her. Then I pass a Lord of the Pit. Geez, guys, can you not draft the good cards in my colors? I am finally rewarded for cutting blue up front with a third pick Air Elemental. Hot. Then I am forced to hate a foily Lord of the Pit. He eats your opponent's whole team, but he also 7/7 flying and trample. I would hate to kill one of them and then have the dude lay down another. As it turns out, the first Lord of the Pit tables. In the end I draft a Green/Blue deck with a heavy splash for Shock, Guerrilla Tactics and Lavaborn Muse. I had double Rampant Growth and the Civic Wayfinder for fixing. Turns out my whole team drafts base blue. Good job guys! We know what the best color in Xth is. Collin (skinny kid with cool glasses) drafts Doubling Cube. With double Looming Shade. And Consume Spirit. This is not actually terrible. It's pretty damn cool. Tony McRome does okay; the usual, double Merfolk Looter, Platinum Angel, and Whispersilk Cloak to make her stylish. Seems okay.

I play Kelvin round one, who wins the first game with one card in his library. Then my deck comes to play the next two games and flyers get in there. 1-0.

The next match is against the guy with 15 removal cards and 8 creatures. Seriously, the dude has dubs Terror, Essence Drain and is still splashing white for Pacifism. His two Gravediggers cycled around while he searched for his two Ghost Wardens to make them 4/4. Awful. No, actually what's really awful is when I swing with my Civic Wayfinder into his Severed Legion. The man has an active Ghost Warden, but it's cool, I have the Guerrilla Tactics in hand, and frankly I need to kill the Legion before it starts swinging away. He blocks my Wayfinder with the Legion, pumps with the Warden, and I respond with the activated ability on the stack, hitting the Legion with the Tactics. He bins the Legion, then tells me to bin the Wayfinder. I then realize that I have not specified where in the combat phase we were when this whole routine unfolded. I argue that we had not yet stacked damage, since neither of us said anything to that effect and if I were pumping a guy I'd do it prior to damage. He calmly replies, "Yeah, well actually I always pump after damage in situations like that." Whatever, I am mad at myself for obviously not specifying where we were at (since then we both would have seen if he really would have waited until damage was stacked or if he would have walked into the 1 for 1 trade). I let it go mostly because I feel like it was shoddy play on my part (I really think most guys would take a prompt like "it's declare blockers and I'm ready to move to damage" and throw the +1/+1 on there right away) but I also feel like the dude was slimy for weaseling it into his favor. Am I out of line here? At any rate, the fact that I can't either a) trade with the Warden the next turn or b) get an extra two damage in that next turn becomes very relevant when I have him at one life and can't quite off him before his Grave Pact with recycled Gravediggers overwhelms my team. So now I have to win the next two games. I mull the six and keep a four-lander with a Rampant Growth for the double blue on the Air Elemental also in my hand. Turn four, right on schedule, down the Air Elemental comes. I'm really pinning a lot on this fatty but it seemed like a better play than mulling to five. Yeah, he has the Terror. Yeah, that's pretty much game.

Next match. This gentleman is playing lots of weenies, which my big guys outclass. He's running light on creatures but has just enough to hold my land borne monsters back. Eh, I could start making some big swings, but I have Mr. Cloud Elemental doing okay for me. I get him down to 8 and then he plays Reviving Dose to go back up to 11. (Who plays Reviving Dose? Honestly, a few of his creatures seem pretty sub par, so I think it's an easy win and see if he can actually find an answer to my flyer instead pressuring him. He's at 5 now (still Cloud Elemental all the way) and then he plays Natural Spring going to 13! I actually say to him, "Don't you know that life gain is bad?" and continue my air assault. Then he plays Wrath of God and drops four weenies, the first of which happens to be Soul Warden. I have been sandbagging guys so it's not a blowout, but all that life gain turns out to be good for him. He swings all out and I elect to go to four, then he Lava Axes me. Ouch. Game Two I mull again to six. I drop a Spined Wurm and Cloud Elemental early, but he just Wraths them away. I proceed to draw one more creature the whole game. But I'll tell what I did draw, land. Fourteen of them, to be exact. Now, this is not a bad beats story. This is a "see how making stupid mistakes in the first game of your last two matches have caused you to get screwed by bad luck later" story. If I win the games I should have, I go to game three and we see if the deck can get there or not. But instead, it's my first 1-2 draft in a month. All my fault.

This story does have a happy ending. My team pulls it out (Collin goes 3-0 with Doubling Cube.dec, and Tony 2-1, winning more than one game with no cards left in his library and/or at negative life. Platinum Angel with Whispersilk Cloak gets things done)! Collin takes the Wrath, Tony, the Plats, and I get... a Battlefield Forge. Could be worse. Thank you team drafts. Hey, if you have to go 1-2, at least do it a team draft. You've got a shot at a decent pick that way.