I threw my annual birthday party last night. I’ve been doing less well as the years roll on at

[Read the whole thing]]]> Today marks another orbit around the sun for me, and this year I’ve turned the age of The Answer – a frivolous connection, but one I was happy to play up when talking about it.

I threw my annual birthday party last night. I’ve been doing less well as the years roll on at planning my party in advance, I think because I get back into the swing of work after New Year’s, then get distracted by things like my book discussion group, and then worry about inviting too many people, or too few, or something. Anyway, this year I didn’t send the invitation until last Wednesday night. On the other hand, a late invite does tend to polarize the responses – people are either available or not, and probably not going to have something else come up. Anyway, maybe I’ll do a little better next year.

We got a pretty good turnout this year, spread out over more than 8 hours: My cow-orker Joar and his wife arrived earlier with their infant daughter E. E was very well behaved, and was fascinated by the cats once she saw them. (The cats, of course, took one look at her and said, “Oh hell no.”) And our friends Lisa and Michel came by with their daughter I, who is now three, and who loves when she visits to spend the whole time playing with me. So I had to tell her every so often that I was going to go talk to other people for a while. She was very well behaved about it, too. She was full of energy, so I did play with her for a while.

We broke out the cake (from the Prolific Oven) and ice cream (from Rick’s) before the folks with young kids left. An eclectic group of folks from in and out of work showed up, which was nice since for a little while I wasn’t sure many would show up. But the usual fun time was had by all, and I’m grateful to everyone who came.

Today was my actual birthday, and I threw the party yesterday so that I could pretty much sit on my ass all day. Other than the Patriots utterly collapsing against the Jets (reminiscent of their “barely showed up to play” Super Bowl performance against the Giants a few years ago), it turned out to be a pretty good plan. Debbi took me out for brunch, we took a little walk to Starbucks, and otherwise just stayed home. I cooked dinner, did some reading, petted the cats, and hung out with Debbi.

I also did a Scars of Mirrodin draft on Magic Online, and my birthday gift to myself was that I won the draft, after never advancing past the second match in previous tries! It wasn’t even particularly close, as I had a decent bit of luck but also felt like I was generally playing better than my opponents, playing patiently much of the time and pressing my advantage when I had the chance. I only lost one game of the seven I played. Definitely a nice outcome – maybe I’m generally getting better.

Seems like the weekend has just flown by. Unlike some folks, I don’t have tomorrow off from work. Still, despite my worry about lining things up for my birthday each year, I always do enjoy celebrating it. It’s been a good time.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Since I recently introduced my cow-orker Sean to our Monday night Magic group, I decided to take him up on his suggestion to go with him for a Magic 2011 draft yesterday afternoon. Sean goes to Legends of Comics & Games, a store in Vallco Mall which somehow has survived and even thrived as that mall has come near to death and then slowly come back to life. (Oddly, the store seems to lack both a web site and a Facebook page.)

I’ve done drafts at a couple other places in the area, and this one seems like the friendliest and lowest-pressure among them, so I’ll probably go back just for that reason. It would be nice to draft once a month or so, if Debbi is willing to sacrifice part of a weekend every so often for me to go off and do so.

This week’s draft was Magic 2011, and it’s my first draft on about two years, since Shadowmoor. Despite visions of first-picking a Grave Titan, in fact my first pack was not very exciting, and I decided to take Corrupt and see if I could force mono-black. In fact, the black poured in from the right, and I did indeed end up mono-black, only taking other colors when there was no black left in a pack. My one big decision came in deciding whether to take a second Corrupt, or a Nantuko Shade. Others agreed it was a tough choice, and felt the Shade (which is what I took) was defensible because if I actually dropped it on turn 2 it would be hard for any decks to deal with. In fact as things played out Corrupt would have helped more, but that was purely situational.

My deck seemed so-so, in particular it felt light on creatures. But I did have a Demon of Death’s Gate, which I looked forward to playing. I also had a pair of Duress.

I won’t detail the games greatly; I lost my first match 1-2 against a blue/white deck; in the deciding game I double-mulliganed, got him on the ropes anyway, then stalled out and finally lost. The second match I won 2-1 in three lightning-fast games against a red/blue deck. My big lesson from the first two games was learning how effective Quag Sickness is in mono-black.

The third match was the most interesting, against a green/white deck which was nearly all creatures. So after the first game I sideboarded out Duress in favor of a pair of Deathmarks (woo-hoo!). We split the first two games, and played the decider. I got out three creatures, but he was starting to build up defense, so I played my Demon of Death’s Gate, which put him on a 2-turn clock. He winced, said he wasn’t sure how he’d get out of this, drew for his next turn – and Pacified my demon. Ugh. Then we each started building up creatures (I sacrificed my Demon to a Viscera Seer, hoping I could bring it back with Rise from the Grave), and were in a stalemate. I was at 5 life, he was at 11, and I started just drawing land. Oddly he decided not to attack – I think he could have won if he started applying pressure – and I observed that the dam was going to burst soon. As I was drawing, he remarked that I could draw the right removal and break the deadlock. I looked at my card and said, “Or I can Corrupt you for 12.” He put his head in his hand and we shook hands.

I was slightly amused that I was quite a bit older than most of the players – I played against two high schoolers and a 20-year-old. Though there were a couple of people older than me, there. It was also an object lesson in, well, financial means, since most of the younger folks were interested in trading cards (imagine that, trading trading cards!) whereas I tend to just buy most of the cards I want (except for the most expensive ones). Still, as with any game, once you sit down to play you’re on equal footing.

So I had a lot of fun, and won a free pack of M11 for my efforts. By the next time I draft, Scars of Mirrodin might be out, and that ought to be a completely different experience.

[Read the whole thing]]]> The new Magic set, Alara Reborn, has a new mechanic making a lot of buzz: cascade, in which when you play a spell with cascade, you can play another spell of lesser value – but (usually) selected randomly from your library – for free. Every Magic player loves to play things for free, right? So I had to build a deck with this.

Of course, it took practically no time for someone to come up with a tournament-competitive deck using cascade, which is surely a lot better than my deck. But what the heck.

This deck is based around what seems to be the most popular cascade card, Bloodbraid Elf. The main feature of Bloodbraid Elf is that it’s a 3/2 with haste. So I decided to build a deck around creatures with haste:

My goal in building this deck was to minimize the number of cards I could cascade into which would ever be unplayable. Since our metagame makes enchantment and artifact removal a must – especially since this is a largely creature-based deck – I needed a Naturalize-like card, and the enchantment Seal of Primordium was perfect for that. I also like Incinerate and the withering Puncture Blast to clear the way for the creatures. Colossal Might is really the only card which might not be playable (since it can’t target the cascading Elf), but it’s so useful in pumping up the relatively small creatures that I wanted to use it.

With all the hasted creatures, Primal Forcemage is quite potent (and if an Elf cascades into it, then it pumps up the Elf!) – especially with Viashino Sandstalker. Tattermunge Witch provides an outlet for any extra mana and a way to run over blocking creatures.

In play, the deck is a little under-landed – deliberately, since no spell costs more than 4 – and it lacks a true finisher, or a way to deal with big threats. It might do pretty well in duels, but it runs out of steam in multiplayer, relying on drawing 1 or 2 elves for card advantage.

When I rework it, I think it needs a finisher, like Overrun. But larger spells would require more mana. (And then there’s Protean Hulk, which seemed like a great idea when I thought of it, except that creatures fetched when it dies don’t get played, they get put into play, so their Cascade abilities wouldn’t trigger. Alas.)

I’m not sure what I think of the Slith Firewalkers. They’re so vulnerable until they get going. Then again, any 3-cost creature with haste is going to be relatively wimpy; the Boggart Ram-Gangs are really the best you can do in that category.

So it’s an interesting base to start from, but I’m not sure how much potential the deck really has. It is fun to play out a lot of hasted creatures, though, so I’ll tinker with it a bit to see what I can do with it.

(Incidentally, the deck is pretty close to being Standard-legal. Swap in Hell’s Thunder and Jund Hackblade, and replace the Seals and Gaia’s Anthems with something appropriate – more burn, perhaps – and it would probably work pretty similarly. The big loss would be the Primal Forcemage effect.)

My deck is largely similar to his, but I did make several changes:

[Read the whole thing]]]> Kicking off my occasional series of Magic deck lists is this mono-green beatdown deck based on Jacob Van Lunen’s “Dear Giantbaiting” deck. For an explanation of the environment I play my decks in, read this.

My deck is largely similar to his, but I did make several changes:

The neat thing about Van Lunen’s deck is that it’s built around a single card – Giantbaiting – but the cards it uses to enable that card also fit together very nicely, so it’s actually a pretty potent deck even if you never draw Giantbaiting, because ultimately it’s built around Elves and Warriors, who play together quite well.

The major changes I made to the deck are these:

• I took out the mana-generating elves (Llanowar Elves, Boreal Druid). This deck is pretty cheap – only 2 spells cost more than 4 mana, and it runs only 22 lands – so I was rarely happy when I drew one.
• In multiplayer, the original deck didn’t have a lot of staying power; it would stall out easily. To mitigate this, I added some Essence Wardens, since life gain works well in multiplayer, and works well with Giantbaiting, too. This tends to let me stick around to try to reload if I stall out, and I added to Harmonizes to help me reload.
• Our environment tends to have lots of enchantments and artifacts, so Naturalize was needed. (Beatdown decks are really sad if they get thwarted by Ensnaring Bridge or Meekstone.
• The deck needed some sort of damage-dealer, so I went with 2 Hurricanes.
• Chameleon Colossus, Talara’s Battalion and Nacatl War-Pride are there to add some beef. Arguably I could replace any or all of them with Wren’s Run Vanquisher (which Van Lunen used). I’m not sure whether the Vanquisher or the Battalion is the better card.

Ideally the first few turns involve dropping Essence Wardens, Nettle Sentinels and Bramblewood Paragons, before either playing Giantbaiting or re-stocking with Harmonize.

This deck destroys opponents who start slowly; turn 3 or 4 Giantbaiting can put another player on the ropes even in multiplayer when unblocked. The Obsidian Battle-Axes are a little hard to use without the elvish mana acceleration, but they also tend to draw opponents’ Disenchants and Naturalizes in our game, so their utility is somewhat limited.

Bramblewood Paragon and Imperious Perfect both make Chameleon Colossus devastating, since he’s pro-black and too big for many burn spells.

I keep hoping I can play a Bramblewood Paragon/Obsidian Battle-Axe/Nacatl War-Pride combo sometime just for fun, but it hasn’t happened yet. A second Chameleon Colossus would probably be better anyway, but I don’t actually own one. But I have managed to swing for 18 in one turn with Giantbaiting (and that was after they Naturalized the Battle-Axe).

I’ll probably play around with the high-end creatures a bit (candidates include Jedit Ojanen of Efrava, Roughshod Mentor, or even Sosuke, Son of Seshiro), or see if I can add some sort of removal (a challenge in a green deck), but the core of the deck is pretty solid, and a lot of fun to play.

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’ve mentioned that I play Magic with some friends on Monday nights. I want to write about Magic more than I do, but in order to do so I ought to give a primer on our competitive environment, since that’s very important for understanding the kinds of decks we play. So here I go!

(Anyone who doesn’t care a whit about Magic can just move on. I expect most of the traffic I get on my Magic articles will be from people surfing in from Google anyway.)

At a high level, our metagame environment looks like this:

• Constructed decks.
• Vintage format: Any card ever published (other than the Un-sets) is technically legal.
• Multiplayer games, especially 2-headed giant and 5-way star
• No card penalty for mulligans, but we rarely mulligan for reasons other than <2 lands or extreme color screw.
• Proxy cards are allowed.
• Some people play the same set of decks every week, some bring new decks regularly.
• Most people play a different deck each game.
• Quite a few decks are based around cards from the powerful Urza block (I’ll probably see at least one deck with Rancor each week).

Basically, we play games for fun, and try to keep everybody involved. If you get an initial draw that would just be no fun to play, then you can get a new draw. We rarely play the top tournament-competitive decks, for two reasons: First, they don’t always do as well in a multiplayer environment as they do in duels, and second because if you have a deck that can win almost every time, what fun is it to keep playing it?

Most of our decks are creature-based because it’s hard to get off a combo which can kill multiple other players. And that means that creature removal is very popular. So we see a lot of Lightning Bolts and Wraths of God and similar spells, as well as creature defenses such as Caltrops, Ensnaring Bridge, and AEther Flash. And that means that enchantment and artifact destruction spells like Naturalize are necessary, too. We do have a few entirely creatureless decks lurking around.

One thing I like about multiplayer is that games often go on for a long time, so you frequently make your 7th or 8th land drop even without mana acceleration, and thus you can play some more expensive spells than you can in duel. I think the large amount of removal accounts for this: There’s usually at least one person interested in killing your creatures, so it’s difficult to kill anyone in just a few turns. I think the fact that the game can progress over many turns (sometimes many, many turns) leads to some very interesting games, and makes some decks viable that wouldn’t be in a duel, or more strictly competitive, environment. (I like limited play for much the same reason.)

My own decks have the additional constraint that I almost never play proxy cards, especially of powerful and rare cards like Damnation. This means that I run 1-of or 2-of many cards in my decks, since that’s all I have, so I don’t build decks around those cards. But it also means my decks tend to have several modular parts that interact in different ways, depending on what draw I happen to get.

Also, since I’m still buying new cards and most of the group isn’t, that means that I’m usually introducing completely new cards into the metagame which they haven’t seen before. I think the card I’ve introduced that’s made the biggest splash has been Austere Command, since it can wipe the board of creatures as well as cripple decks which rely on enchantments or artifacts.

By convention, we tend not to play some of the unusually powerful cards in Magic’s history, such as the Power Nine cards, or Sol Ring. This is partly because only one of the group owns many of these cards, but he doesn’t find playing unbalanced decks very fun. Plus he’s the host, so he sets the house rules.

All-in-all it’s a pretty challenging environment, but it also allows a lot of flexibility in deck construction. And it’s a fun bunch of people.

I’ll run an article on one of my better-tested decks from time to time, with the thinking behind the deck and how it’s worked out in practice.

Funniest thing I’ve found on the Web in weeks!

The long weekend

[Read the whole thing]]]> I haven’t been very good about updating this week – sorry about that. And with plenty on my plate for the weekend, I might not be so good about it for the next few days, either. So to be a responsible journaller, here’s a roundup of what I’ve been busy with:

The long weekend was nice. We mostly took it easy, although I did put a few comic book collections up for sale on eBay. Sunday we got together with Subrata and Susan for some dinner and gaming. Subrata and I have been playing the occasional Magic sealed deck duels, with 4 Shadowmoor packs and 2 Eventide packs. We tend to find that we can get 2 or 3 (or even 4) decent decks out of this mix, so there’s plenty to keep us busy; the hybrid mana costs allow for a lot of flexibility – almost too much, it sometimes seems. I think I’ve decided that I prefer pure Shadowmoor for sealed deck, though; you get to make better use of the hybrid auras and generally have more synergy among your cards. I bet pure Eventide would be fun, too. I’m kind of sorry they decided not to make Eventide a “big” expansion like Shadowmoor was, especially since the enemy hybrid colors can be a lot of fun. (I ought to write a whole article on what I think of the Shadowmoor and Eventide sets, actually.)

Speaking of games, last night I played poker with some other friends. It was a mostly-nondescript evening, as far as the game went, and I was mostly entertained by the livelier-and-snarkier-than-usual conversation. But around 10:45 when I announced I was going to leave soon, I went on a big winning streak and didn’t leave for another half an hour. I managed to stack one of my friends, and win some other decent pots besides, and ended up with probably my most successful session yet. Good deal!

Have I mentioned we’re getting our complex’s exterior painted at home? We are. It’s taking a while, since they’re repairing and replacing some of the siding, and although that’s a pain, I’m glad they’re doing a good, diligent job with it. It’s not something you want to scrimp on. The place will look nice once it’s done. Still, I will be glad when it’s done and I can move my plants from the patio back up to the porch where they belong.

I had a weird glitch with the ol’ journal last night: My site was unable to contact Akismet and so my spam trap stopped working. I get hundreds of spam per day, so this was really annoying. It was fixed by this morning. My hosting service has no idea what happened; I suspect some bad data got propagated around the DNS and it got stuck in their servers overnight. Probably not their fault, and hopefully it was a one-time thing.

Lastly, we’re having another heat wave this week – not as bad as last week’s scorcher, but still pretty hot. I’m hoping today was the peak and that it will cool off over the weekend. Fortunately, it always cools down at night so it has to be a really bad heat wave to really interfere with my sleep.

I think that about cover it. Now to get a good night’s sleep so I can bike in to work tomorrow!

The bittersweet part of last weekend was going to two Red Sox/Athletics games, which I’d been excited about since

[Read the whole thing]]]> The days have been just flying by, lately! I realized this weekend that I never wrote an entry about last weekend, partly because I’d been busy catching up on posting photos from my Dad’s visit!

The bittersweet part of last weekend was going to two Red Sox/Athletics games, which I’d been excited about since this is a rare year in which my Red Sox visited Oakland twice in the same season. Unfortunately, we ended up seeing two games of a three-game sweep by the A’s, with the Sox losing 8-3 on Friday, and then 3-0 on Saturday. The Saturday game was almost very exciting as Justin Duchscherer came two baserunners away from pitching a perfect game. But he hit Jason Varitek leading off the 6th, and David Ortiz singled in the 7th. Huston Street replaced Duchscherer for the 9th, and that was it. Bummer. On television we watched the A’s finish the sweep by winning 6-3 on Sunday. Alas.

On the bright side, the Sox have gone 4-2 since then, and they still have the second-best record in the American League (behind the Rays, who seem to finally be capitalizing on their substantial talent base).

Sunday we also had Subrata and Susan over for the day. We hadn’t heard from them for a few days and we’d figured they might be going stir crazy waiting for their child to arrive. (As I wrote over this past weekend, he arrived last Thursday.) We met at The Counter for lunch and then came back and played Magic (Subrata and me) and dominoes (all four of us) for the afternoon, winding up having dinner at Marie Callender’s.

The Magic session was interesting, my second time really playing Shadowmoor. We played a sealed deck game. Subrata had two viable builds from his cards, while I thought I had three or even four, but part-way through one game I realized I just didn’t have the right mix of stuff to make a white-blue deck work; it kept wanting to be write-green. So I did that instead and it worked quite well, better than the black-red deck did. The red-green version might have worked, too, but I didn’t try that. Anyway, it does feel like Shadowmoor is a slower format than Lorwyn or Time Spiral were. But since I enjoy creature-based decks, that’s not really a bad thing.

This weekend as I said we went to the hospital to visit Subrata, Susan and Ajay on Friday evening. Saturday we went out and did some shopping, including buying a new cat bush (half-height cat tree) for the downstairs. Even though it’s nearly identical to the old one, the cats still had to sniff it all over. But it seems to have passed muster!

I also went by a sale at Illusive Comics, an area store which I hadn’t visited before. (Well, I might have visited them years ago under their previous incarnation and previous owners, but I honestly don’t remember.) The owners are very enthusiastic, which is a great thing in anyone doing small retail! I’ll probably go back every so often, even though my I already have a regular shop I patronize (Comics Conspiracy). As most stores today do, Illusive seems to be focusing on new books and paperback collections. Unfortunately I’m an outlier among comics fans: the main thing that brings me back to a shop is a good and constantly-changing back issue selection, and the comics retailing biz has moved away from back issues over the last 15 years. And every store has pretty much the same set of paperback collections, so you don’t really need to go to multiple stores for those.

Anyway. Comics retailing is hard enough without listening to me moan about how comics shops aren’t like they were back when I was a teenager, so enough about that.

We spent a good chunk of Saturday doing chores around the house: We did a whole bunch of long-awaited cleaning, throwing away the little things which stack up on bookshelves and in the garage and in nooks and crannies elsewhere. I put up a bike hanger so we could reclaim some floor space by hanging Debbi’s bike above mine. Now Debbi wants to hang the step ladder and our spare folding chairs, so that may be another project soon! Debbi fixed up the shadowbox with my old Mardi Gras beads and coins, and it looks great!

Sunday we had a quieter day. I spent a lot of the afternoon and evening up in the study paying bills, putting together some Magic decks, and doing some cleaning up (though not nearly enough). We also cooked dinner and watched Sunday night baseball.

So that about covers it. We have some more projects to take care of around the house (for instance, replace the long-broken kitchen dispose-all), and I hope we can get a bunch of it taken care of this summer. It ought to keep us busy!

Meanwhile, happy June, everyone!

Friday Subrata and I got together to play Friday Night Magic. Meanwhile our partners Debbi and Susan got together to do Friday night scrapbooking at a store they discovered. We each had a good time, and although Subrata and I went to Game Kastle, which started its game about an hour later

[Read the whole thing]]]> Busy weekend!

Friday Subrata and I got together to play Friday Night Magic. Meanwhile our partners Debbi and Susan got together to do Friday night scrapbooking at a store they discovered. We each had a good time, and although Subrata and I went to Game Kastle, which started its game about an hour later than where we’ve been going to play before, we didn’t finish a lot later than they did, so it all worked out well.

Friday was the release day for the new Magic expansion, Shadowmoor, which is the complementary set to the previous block, Lorwyn. Rather than having interactions among creatures in a tribe (elves, goblins, etc.), this block involves colors which work closely together. That gives it a different dynamic in draft, since the “hybrid” color mana costs mean you can play more cards that come your way than in other blocks.

I had a pretty good draft putting together a green-red deck which had a few good tricks but basically came down to putting big creatures in play before my opponents could deal with them. I won my first match handily, lost my second match by a very thin margin, and got crushed in my third. So not too bad a showing. My third opponent isn’t impressed with the set, feeling that it’s a set which plays slowly at first, but then a single card can win the game for either player if they get lucky. To some extent this is always true in Magic, but it does seem like the power curve leaps rather suddenly at a certain point. On the other hand, I enjoy creature-based decks, so the slow progress early in a game suits me okay. I’ll have to play more to see what I think about it. It does feel like the set is very light on creature removal, though, which might make red-black the color combo of choice.

Saturday was a day of running around doing errands, followed by going to an engagement party for our friends Josh and Lisa. Some friends of theirs put together a very nice party at their house, and many friends of each showed up. Josh has been one of the more avid boardgamers at Subrata’s weekly session since he started coming a couple of years ago, so there were several people Debbi and I knew there. It was a fun time, at least until my cold meds started wearing off around 8 and I started wearing down.

(I can’t wait to shake this cold. I’m slowly getting better, and not really wiped out by it by the end of every day, but it’s sill a drag, sniffling and coughing.)

And last but by no means least, today it’s Debbi’s birthday!

I’d been teasing her all week about the presents I’d bought for her, all the while hoping that I’d actually get them in time, since I’m becoming the world’s worst procrastinator when it comes to buying presents. However, I’d come up with a couple of neat gift ideas, and hoped to pull it off.

Fortunately, I was able to make time to go by Lisa’s Tea Treasures on Thursday morning and picked up a nice English-style tea pot for her, since she’d talked about getting one so she could make larger pots of tea. (Lisa’s Tea came at Susan’s recommendation, for which I thank her since otherwise I had little idea of where to go!) And my order for Corner Gas seasons one and two on DVD arrived from Amazon Canada on Friday afternoon, somewhat to my surprise since they’d just shipped earlier in the week. Corner Gas is Debbi’s favorite show these days, and we watch it most nights on TV. A lot of its humor is based on wordplay, which means I enjoy it a lot more than most sitcoms.

Anyway, somehow I’d managed to not give her any hints about it all about them and she was completely surprised! And loved them all! Yay!

In the afternoon we had a small group of people over for grillables and cake to celebrate, keeping it small to not drive ourselves nuts with preparation. (I still drove myself nuts by insisting on mopping the tile floors this morning, but that’s my problem.) We had a fun time, and our friends Lisa and Michel brought their infant daughter over, which especially amused the cats, since Newton had no idea what to make of this not-a-lot-larger-than-he-is human sitting in the carrier on the floor. Isabella also was fascinated when I brought out the radio-controlled helicopter later on.

It all went smoothly, and after people left we had a quiet dinner, and of course some cake and tea and watched tonight’s Corner Gas.

Happy birthday, Deb! I’m glad you had a good one.

[Read the whole thing]]]> The last two nights have been competitive ones. For those who don’t want all the cory details, suffice to say that Thuesday night we had out first ultimate frisbee game of the season, and it went really well! And then last night Subrata and I went to Superstars for Friday Night Magic, which also went surprisingly well for me.

For those who do want the gory details, read on…

Frisbee was one of the better first-nights-of-the-season I can recall having. Although I was not in top condition, I was not nearly as exhausted by the end of it as I’d expected, and I was still playing decent points as things were winding down. In the last game I even had a three-point run where I made a hard cut to catch a score, and two points later icked up a turnover and hucked it into the end zone for a score – very rare for me since my arm is mediocre and so I don’t huck much. Subrata and I also hooked up for a score in the first game, when I caught a turnover and saw him break in the end zone – he made a nice catch to grab it as it flew past the guy covering him.

I think we were lucky that the rain held off ’til Friday; it was actually a terrific night for frisbee. Next week is our team’s bye week, and then we’ll play every non-holiday week until the end of the year. (The spring half of the season’s schedule will be up around New Year’s, I assume.)

Magic featured a 10-person booster draft, and Subrata and I were in the same draft for a change. This was our first time drafting the new Lorwyn set, which has a tribal theme, which means in addition to the color divisions there are also “tribes” of creatures (goblins, merfolk, faerie, treefolk, elves, etc.) who span colors. So you can get additional synergy among your cards by having many cards from the same tribe, or from tribes which interact with one another. I’d done many single-player practice drafts of Lorwyn and felt ready to try the real thing.

Unfortunately, coming out of the draft I felt like I’d blown it completely: I ended up with a mix of blue/white/red with very little tribal interaction. I felt like the colors coming my way changed every 8 picks or so, and I had extended stretches towards the end where I was getting few-if-any cards in any of my three colors! So I worked to cobble together a deck, deciding to punt on white and going blue/red, mainly because that’s where most of my tricks and creature removal lay.

Things didn’t look much brighter after my first match, where I quickly lost the first two games (in best-of-three), and aso lost the consolation game, although I put up a good fight there.

For the second match I was up against Subrata, and to my surprise my deck suddenly came together, and I beat him 2 out of 3 games. The final match was against a regular at the store whom I’d played before, and again to my surprise I won two out of three, and the loss was by the slimmest of margins. So despite what I thought was a mishmash of a draft, I ended up with my best showing at a draft at this store to date!

I think I enjoy draft the best when learning a new set, since finding the emergent properties of some of the cards is a heck of a lot of fun. I’d reasoned out some of them in my practice drafts, but nothing beats actually playing with the cards. I think my deck’s best bit of interaction went like this:

1. Played Flamekin Harbinger and searched my deck for my Changeling Berserker (which, being a Changeling, is also an Elemental).
2. Championed the Flamekin Harbinger with the Changeling Berserker, removing the former from play.
3. Played my Mistbound Clique, championing the Berserker (which counts as a Faerie since it’s a Changeling). This brings the Flamekin Harbinger back into play, so I get to search my library again, this time for Consuming Bonfire – an Elemental sorcery.
4. Kill Subrata’s Changeling Hero with the Bonfire, since he’d just searched for it with his own Harbinger so I knew he was going to play it. He knew I had a way to kill it, but he had little choice at that point in the game, since I had a 4/4 flyer on the board.

(n.b.: Any game in which my opponent says “Damn you!” is a good game, regardless of whether I win or lose.)

Between our decks, Subrata and I both learned the value of Harbingers and Champions in Lorwyn. Green has two terrific harbingers: Elvish Harbinger also produces multicolored mana, and Treefolk Harbinger lets you search for Forests as well as some killer Treefolk, such as the Dauntless Dourbark that Subrata had, not to mention the Changeling Titan. (Happily, Changelings are also Treefolk, so Consuming Bonfire can take down the Titan easily enough.)

Subrata also noted (indirectly) that my deck had some nifty acceleration in it. The Inner-Flame Acolyte can target itself when it comes into play, meaning you get a 4/2 creature with Haste for 3 mana, making it highly desirable to make trades in the first two turns so the board is clear for it to thwack your opponent on turn 3. (I had two Acolytes, which was awesome.) And the Blades of Velis Vel can give two creatures +2/+0, which can work really well in trading small creatures for large creatures, or thwacking your opponent hard if he chooses not to block.

The other new mechanic in Lorwyn that I like is Clash. There are several good creatures in Lorwyn who are reasonably priced for their basic stats: I had two of them, an Adder-Staff Boggart which is 1R for a 2/1, and a Paperfin Rascal, which is 2U for a 2/2 – both perfectly reasonable. But when you play them, you Clash, which means the following occurs:

1. You reveal the top card of your library, and have the choice of leaving it on top or putting it on the bottom. This is like doing a Scry 1, except that your opponent knows what the card was.
2. Your opponent gets to do the same thing, which obviously isn’t good for you, but isn’t the worst thing.
3. If you win the Clash, then your creature gets +1/+1, permanently. This means the creatures I had would be a 3/2 or a 3/3 respectively, for the same cost.

I was very lucky in winning my Clashes, I probably won 2/3ds of them, which helped make my desk faster. Clash is even niftier if you have what I think of as “Clash enhancers”, like Sylvan Echoes or Entangling Trap. Subrata had some of these enhancers, but fortunately they didn’t get into play early enough to hose me. Also fortunately, I didn’t play against someone with Hunter of Eyeblights, which would be death to such creatures.

(There’s some interesting stuff about the background of Clash here.)

I’m less impressed with the other major Lorwyn mechanic, Evoke. It’s sort of a “consolation prize” for a creature card if you don’t have the mana to play the creature, which is better than nothing at all, but it’s not usually a reason to draft a card. I don’t think I played a card with Evoke once during the night. It would be more useful if playing a card for its Evoke cost allowed you to play it as an Instant, but that’s not the case. Bummer. Contrast with the Champion mechanic where the “additional cost” of removing a creature to play the champion can actually be a useful bit of trickery rather than a penalty.

As for the other two Lorwyn mechanics, I think Hideaway is a neat idea, but the cards using it are of questionable value. Future cards might use it more effectively. On the other hand, the new Planeswalker card type is undoubtedly cool, as are all five of the Lorwyn Planeswalkers. Subrata drafted Jace Beleren, but fortunately I never saw him. (You can read pretty much everything you need to know about Planeswalkers here.)

So from first experience Lorwyn gets a big “thumbs up” from me. I still think I could have drafted better than I did, but I’m very happy that I fielded a competitive deck, even if I did sort of stumble into it. Next time maybe I’ll actually come out of the draft feeling like I have the building blocks of a solid deck. I still feel like I have some sort of mental block when drafting quality cards that work well together. If I ever figure out how to get past that, then I’ll be in a happy place.

And I had probably the worst draft I ever had. A green/black deck with big creatures and not enough stuff to let me survive to get them out.

I got kinda screwed because the first pack there seemed

[Read the whole thing]]]> Magic draft tonight. Onslaught block – our first time drafting that block. We had 8 players.

And I had probably the worst draft I ever had. A green/black deck with big creatures and not enough stuff to let me survive to get them out.

I got kinda screwed because the first pack there seemed to be plenty of green and black going around, so I thought I was in great shape. Then the second pack had no black – because the guy on my left was filtering it out – and the green was very mediocre. And the third pack had no black – because the guy on my right was filtering it out – so I ended up with big expensive creatures and not enough removal and no real combat tricks. I got completely run over in both matches I played, so I bailed after that since I wasn’t having any fun playing.

I should have ended up in green/blue, since there was a huge amount of blue going around. But not in the first pack, so I assumed one or both players on my right were in blue. (They were actually in red/black and red/blue.)

I feel like my drafting ability is going backwards – both of my last two drafts have been awful – and I don’t know how to get better at it. It sucks.

Ugh, it went astoundingly poorly. I started off drafting white/green/blue in Time Spiral, then got a flood of white in Planar Chaos and abandoned blue, and ended

[Read the whole thing]]]> I went to Superstars today for their noon Magic draft. Only 4 other people showed up, so one employee played so we could do a 6-person draft.

Ugh, it went astoundingly poorly. I started off drafting white/green/blue in Time Spiral, then got a flood of white in Planar Chaos and abandoned blue, and ended up with a green/white deck. I didn’t really draft any bombs at all (just three Lucent Liminids), didn’t have enough removal, and lost all 6 games I played. A couple of them were close, but my best games involved getting off to a fast part, stalling, losing my creatures to various kinds of removal, and not drawing any answers to my opponent’s stuff. I could have played a little better, but probably not enough to win any of the games.

On the one hand, it was terribly discouraging. On the other hand, the other players told me that they’d all been playing (and drafting) for years, so it was actually a tough field. I might do better sticking to Friday nights, when they have a larger field and probably more people closer to my level. Also, I went through this with poker a year ago, feeling like I was stuck and not getting any better, but I think I have gotten better since then.

My play is getting a little better, but my drafts are decidedly mediocre these days. I need to figure out how to draft better. One guy there suggested trying a site called BrainBurst.com, which it looks like is an alias for TCGPlayer, which appears to have free single-player draft. So maybe I’ll give that a try – it couldn’t hurt (much), right?

[Read the whole thing]]]> Although some of our other friends organized a poker game last night, Subrata is closer to my frame of mind and is more interested in playing Magic, and he suggested that we go last night to play the Friday Night Magic booster draft at Superstars (I found a list of their tournaments, although the URL of that page makes it look pretty temporary). Neither of us had gone before, but it was all pretty easy: We showed up around 5:30, signed up for DCI membership, and at 6:00 they seated everyone (18 players) for two drafts and we began. Subrata and I ended up in separate drafts, but that was fine.

The draft was in the Time Spiral block, which I mostly enjoy, although I find Future Sight somewhat disappointing. I had a mediocre draft, partly due to mixed signals I was getting: My first two picks were from mediocre packs, but I ended up solidly in green through the first pack. Planar Chaos – as it often seems to be – was my strongest pack, although I ended up moving into black and then blue during it. Then in Future Sight I didn’t seem to be getting many interesting cards.

Well, there was a reason for all of this: The player to my right was drafting white/blue, and the player to his right was drafting red/green, and the player to my left was drafting black/white. So I did well when there was a surplus of green and blue coming around, but poorly when there wasn’t. I ended up with green/blue deck more heavy in green. I drafted a few good black cards and one good red card which I therefore didn’t use (which was too bad mainly because I always enjoy playing cards like Enslave).

After the draft we play three matches as chosen by the store organizers. My first match was against a green/black deck, and other than my getting smoked in the first game, we were pretty evenly matched. In particular, Frozen Aether totally shuts down combat tricks using Flash, or one-shot creatures like Groundbreaker. Unfortunately, my mind had trouble getting into the mechanics of the game, and I could have won the third game had I played slightly differently, but instead I lost 1 game to 2.

(This opponent did point out that the Tarmogoyf I drafted, which is currently selling for over $20 on the secondhand Magic card market, so in theory I could turn around and sell it ad recoup my entry fee for the tournament. How about that?)

The second match I played against a boy who was there with his father, also their first event at the store. (Subrata ended up playing the father in his draft.) I suggested that they should check out the columns on the Wizards web site for tips on drafting and playing. Anyway, he was playing a black/white deck with a number of tricks, and he got some help from one of the observers at the store (which I tried to be a good sport about). I turned out to have just enough answers for his threats (three Utopia Vows saved my bacon a lot) and won 2-0.

The third match was against a green/blue/red deck, and again we were pretty evenly matched, but he ended up with somewhat better draws then I had, and I went down 0-2. He had a lot of green cards that I had really wanted (I still don’t have a Nacatl War-Pride, sigh), so now I know where many of those went in the draft.

So overall I won one match, and it turns out that players get one free booster pack from one of the blocks in current Standard expansions, so I took a Planar Chaos one. Subrata also won one match in his game. We were both fairly competitive, but not among the top players. But we had fun!

The store is actually quite nice to play in, with plenty of tables, and it’s clean and bright (a lot of specialty stores in the gaming and comics areas can tend to be a little dark and dingy, and it’s always nice to visit a store that’s working hard to be pleasant and welcoming). All the other players were nice, too.

I still need to work on my card evaluation, and also getting better at reading which cards are being filtered out to my right. There’s a lot of randomness in the packs, which makes the latter difficult: One pack might make it look like blue is open, while the next make it look like blue is closed. Obviously I’ve got some work to do there.

Plus, now I know I have another outlet for playing Magic when I have the itch!

But I promise not to relate the details of every draft I do.

Sunday I went over to Lee’s to play poker. We played our usual low-stakes no-limit cash game, with 5¢/10¢ blinds and a $10 buy-in. Five hours later I was out

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m feeling gamed out right now. I’ll probably get over it soon. But I’m happy for a break for the rest of the week.

Sunday I went over to Lee’s to play poker. We played our usual low-stakes no-limit cash game, with 5¢/10¢ blinds and a $10 buy-in. Five hours later I was out $20 (I rebought once). It’s not the loss of the $20 I lament, it was my crappy luck and my not-much-better play.

The defining moment of the evening came just half an hour in when, I drew a pair of Kings, and lost almost my whole buy-in to Lee when he slopped a set of Eights. Lee suggested that I should have re-raised him when he raised my initial bet before the flop, which makes sense; it would have been a reasonable pot to take down right there. But I didn’t, and I ended up pushing on the turn, and obviously didn’t river a miracle.

Anyway, I rebought, but things kept going downhill. I won a few small pots shortly after rebuying, and at one point I did flop a set of Kings. But those were small consolation.

Adam suggests that I should play more aggressively, and also loosen my standards of what cards I play, since he points out that when I open a pot, he knows I tend to have high cards, and he can play low cards against me profitably. So that’s something to think about. It’s awfully hard to look at Q-7 and play it, though; what sort of a flop am I hoping to hit?

Monday a bunch of us gathered at Subrata’s to play Magic. We did a Ravnica draft (one person arrived late and assembled a Ravnica sealed deck to play with us on roughly even footing). I ended up with what I usually seem to end up with in Ravnica: A blue-green deck with a splash of a third color. I ran out of energy around 11 pm, so I only played against Adam and Subrata, winning against Adam and narrowly losing against Subrata (who always seems to end up drafting the most powerful guildmages in the block – I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to grab one).

So that was fun. I’d like to do a 7- or 8-person Time Spiral draft sometime soon.

But maybe not this week.

So then, there’s Magic Online,

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m enjoying my return engagement with Magic: The Gathering lately, but it is sometimes a drag to have to organize draft sessions, and although I could conceivably go play at a nearby store, I doubt Debbi would want me vanishing for, say, every other Friday evening to do so.

So then, there’s Magic Online, which supports drafts and constructed and all that good stuff. So I could conceivably play while sitting around watching baseball or having a quiet afternoon.

Except, of course, according to the FAQ it’s not supported on the Mac. So I’d need to run Windows to play it. And besides my fundamental distaste for Windows, I don’t want to lay out money to get Windows just to be able to play Magic.

Besides which, I could probably spend a lot of money and time there, both of which are arguably better spent elsewhere. At least playing Magic with actual cards is a social activity.

Sigh.

On the bright side, Starcraft II is going to be released for both Mac and PC. And it’s probably at least a year out (no release date has been announced), so sinking time into it is not imminent.

Last weekend Debbi invited some people over to dye eggs for Easter.

[Read the whole thing]]]> April has been a little less busy then March, but the difference is that it hasn’t been due to a bunch of things all scheduled well ahead of time; instead I’ve been keeping busy with more spur-of-the-moment (or at least spur-of-the-week) activities.

Last weekend Debbi invited some people over to dye eggs for Easter. She likes to do this every year. Josh and his girlfriend Lisa came by first, and then Susan and Subrata came by around the time they were leaving. I’d already dyed all the eggs I’d wanted to, so Subrata and I ended up playing some Magic instead.

Before dying eggs, I went out to the nursery and picked up some plants and flowers. (While I was out I got a snootfull of the fire at the scrap yard in Redwood City which stunk up peninsula and valley air for part of the day. Eew.) Then on Sunday I turned over the dirt in my planter and put them all in. This year we have three tomato plants, a cucumber plant, marigolds and snapdragons. I was happy to get the snapdragons; it seems like I can rarely find them this early in the year, I don’t know why. I love snapdragons. We also have space for one more vegetable plant, but we’re not sure what to plant yet, if anything.

We’ve gotten some rain this week (it’s raining right now, actually) which is helping kick-start the plants. The tomatoes are taking off right away, which they always do, and the snapdragons are starting to bloom. Hopefully the looming drought won’t deep-six my growing plans this year.

Wednesday evening we had our annual homeowners association meeting, which was quite routine this year. We’ve got a few projects in the planning stages, so we were basically just talking about how they’re going, and that was it.

Debbi came home early Thursday afternoon since we had cleaners coming in. Neither Debbi nor I are very diligent about cleaning the house, especially deep-cleaning it: We keep things reasonably neat and it’s not like the place is a sty, but we do accumulate more dust and cat hair then we’d wish, and we do hate cleaning (say) around the stove. So Debbi finally convinced me to get some cleaners in, and they really did a great job! The kitchen is cleaner than it’s been in years, the bathrooms look great, and all the bookshelves are dusted. So the place is virtually gleaming for my Mom when she arrives next week. And we’re considering having them come in monthly to keep the place clean.

Thursday night we played Magic. There were six of us who gathered at Lee’s for another Time Spiral/Planar Chaos draft. At the end of the draft portion of the evening, I felt like I had a very strong green base, but mostly a big pile of cow flop as far as an actual deck was concerned. After starng at my cards for a while I realized I needed to give up on my first overall pick, The Rack and any hope of building a discard deck, and instead create a green/white/blue deck with my three Search for Tomorrows to make the extra colors work.

And boy, did it ever work.

The backbone of my deck was Verdant Embrace combined with Gaia’s Anthem, which resulted in an incredibly fast 2/2 creature generator (these are, in my opinion, two of the very best cards in the Time Spiral block so far). I had another creature generator in the Benalish Commander (the creature generators combine well with Essence Warden, too), a card drawer in Aeon Chronicler, a wacky all-purpose creature in Stuffy Doll (combining it with Ophidian Eye is just ridiculous), and a variety of good supporting creatures. I ended up winning all three matches I played, despite not drafting a single flying creature, or any creature removal. I basically just beat my opponents to death.

I got incredibly lucky to assemble this combo, really, although I do take credit for figuring out how to assemble them into a decent deck. But whether it ws luck or skill, it did result in a very fun evening of gaming for me.

That catches us up to today, where Debbi is busy at a scrapbooking event with her friends, and Subrata is hosting another Magic day. Which is not a bad thing to spend a rainy Saturday doing.

Last time I played I

[Read the whole thing]]]> My friends have been playing Magic from time to time lately, but I’ve been too busy to join in, due to my extremely busy March. But last night we got five people together for a Time Spiral/Planar Chaos booster draft (TTP), and I made the time to join in.

Last time I played I had wanted to end up playing Red/Blue, but blew it completely and ended up drafting a mediocre Black/White deck. Tonight I resolved to stick to my plan. Well, sticking to two colors from the outset isn’t so much a plan as a desire, but I definitely wanted to give it a try.

Fortunately, my first pack made it easy for me to jump into Red, as it contained Jaya Ballard, Task Mage. I’ve drafted Jaya before, and she’s a terrific card: She’s relatively inexpensive, is absolutely brutal against Blue decks, is a good general-purpose card against other decks, can wipe the board clean later in the game if things have gone against you, and she’s a 2/2, which makes her harder to kill and a semi-useful creature all by herself.

Another early pick was Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician, which made me think I might be able to assemble a decent goblin deck, maybe picking up one or two Empty the Warrens. Alas, I never saw a single ETW, and although many Time Spiral goblins are decent low-level creatures, it’s hard to assemble a deck around them. So I ended up never using Ib, or some of the goblins I drafted.

At the end of the first round of drafting, I was feeling pretty bummed about my deck. I had some Red and Blue cards, but my last five picks were from packs which no longer contained any such colors. I ended up drafting some White cards due to lack of choice, and getting Momentary Blink and Gustcloak Cavalier made me think I may need to go Red/White, or even three colors, but I wasn’t very enthused about it.

As it turned out, the second round ended up providing me with the backbone of my draft: A pair of Keldon Halberdiers. These are very nifty creatures who can do a lot of damage, and since they have first strike (i.e., they deal their damage before their opponents do), they’re very hard to kill through mere combat. They’re also suspendable, which means they can come out quite early in the game without worrying about ramping up your mana supply. I also ended up with a variety of creature-removal spells (Lightning Axe, Grapeshot, Disintegrate), which (as Subrata pointed out) by taking them out of the draft pool helped ensure that my Halberdiers would survive. (Had I thought about that further ahead I would have taken some Black creature removal too, just to get it out of the hands of my opponents.) Fortunately no one ended up with Sulfurous Blast, which would have been devastating to my deck.

The final round of draft was from Planar Chaos, and it netted me some very useful supporting creatures: A pair of Prodigal Pyromancers (i.e., Red Tims), a Brute Force (a Red Giant Growth, one of my favorite cards, due to its efficiency), and a Body Double (which could potentially be a third Halberdier, among other interesting things).

I also ended up with Timecrafting, and Keldon Marauders (to go with my earlier-drafted Clockspinning) which gave me some nifty tricks to play with the Suspend and Vanishing mechanics. I think WotC did a good job designing these mechanics, and they yield some powerful combinations in Limited drafts.

I also ended up with a pair of Reality Acids. I’m torn about this card: Anything you really need to spend it on is going to do you a lot of damage in the three turns it takes to play out, unless you speed it up with Timecrafting or Clockspinning, or you have a card to bounce it back to your hand (of which I had none), and it’s kind of expensive to cast on its own. I think it’s just not very useful without some cards to speed it up, although it is a useful card to discard to power Jaya Ballard.

So I ended up with a deck that was 2/3 Red and 1/3 Blue, which isn’t bad. One advantage of a lopsided deck like this is that when you have cards which take two Red to cast, you’re more likely to end up with that two red when you need it. I assembled a 40-card deck with 10 Mountains and 7 Islands and started playing.

My first game was against Adam, who was playing a Black-with-some-Blue deck, designed around the Madness mechanic with some cards to search for other cards. He was surprised that it worked so well, but he had more than enough creature removal to take care of my Halberdiers, which left me stuck in neutral, and eventually he accumulated enough creatures to run me down. He did have to burn through quite a few cards to do so, though.

I then moved on to playing Daniel, who was playing a Blue-with-some-Black deck. Daniel has a tendency to draft control decks which I think of as puzzles: They’re challenging to figure out both for himself and for his opponent. Since my deck contained a lot of creature removal, this meant we played a couple of long games. The first game I ended up mana-screwed (only two land), but Daniel inadvertantly helped me out by playing Braids, Conjurer Adept. This allowed me to play Jaya Ballard on my next upkeep. No one else had known I had her, which resulted in a round of “ooooh, aaahhh” from the room. That’s always good to hear! I managed to plunk down a Halberdier as well as some of my supporting creatures, and Jaya and Lightning Axe picked off some of his big creatures. I Grapeshotted one of his morphed creatures, which turned out to be a Slipstream Serpent, which probably saved my bacon. At that point it was only a matter of time.

The second game was similar to this, although I got a Halberdier suspended on the first turn, and spent several turns Clockspinning the Keldon Marauders to keep them around smacking him for 3 – a terrific cheap combo early in the game. The game went on for a while when he killed some of my creatures, but I built up too big a lead to overcome, especially when I brought Jaya out again and between her and the Pyromancers was able to finish him off. (Disintegrate, by the way, is a very useful card to kill the Weatherseed Totem, since it removes the Totem from the game when it’s a creature, this preventing it from returning to its owner’s hand. This probably ensured my victory in the second game, since a 5/3 trampling creature might have let Daniel come back against me.)

Next I played Subrata. I’m still not sure exactly what his draft strategy was, but he ended up playing me against his reworked deck, which was either 4- or 5-color, and contained Slivers and at least one Ivory Giant. I played Subrata in two games, and basically Halberdier’ed him to death. The first game we both got out quite a few creatures, and I happened to get both of my Halberdiers out by the time my Veiling Oddity came in from being Suspended to render my creatures unblockable for a turn, which allowed me to hit him for 12 points. He retaliated, but I had two untapped creatures (a Pyromancer and a Crookclaw Transmuter that I’d flashed in during my attack to do one more point of damage to him), so he only did 6 points to me, and then I could swing again and it was over. I think the second game was similar, and Subrata was mana-screwed as well, which made it shorter.

By this time it was 10:30 and I was getting ready to leave, but my final opponent, Andrew, convinced me to play one more game. Unfortunately it wasn’t much of a game, as we both mulliganed out hands, and then both got mana-screwed. I ended up with five 3-cost cards in my hand and only 2 lands when he got his third land and just ran me over. That’s the way it goes sometimes. But by then I really did need to leave, so no rematch.

Overall I was both surprised and happy with how well my deck worked. I probably could have drafted even a little bit better, but I’m still trying to get into the mindset of thinking ahead and thinking more broadly when doing the draft. But really it’s hard to go wrong with powerful creatures and lots of creature removal, as well as two or three cards which can finish off the game (and Jaya is powerful enough that she’s useful both early and late).

Now I have to knuckle down to prep for my fantasy baseball draft (on April 1, heh-heh), but next month I should be ready to try to build on my success last night!

We had another one on Sunday, a 7-person draft at Subrata‘s. My goal was to have a better all-around draft than I’ve had recently,

[Read the whole thing]]]> We’ve been playing semi-regular games of Magic lately, I’m almost sorry to admit. Lately we’ve been doing booster drafts using the two most recent expansions, Time Spiral and Planar Chaos.

We had another one on Sunday, a 7-person draft at Subrata‘s. My goal was to have a better all-around draft than I’ve had recently, drafting a deck with more possibilities and fewer limitations than in the past. For instance, I’ve read up on the color combinations and how they work in a TTP draft (a draft from two Time Spiral packs and one Planar Chaos pack).

Unfortunately, I really flubbed it this time around, and ended up drafting a Black/White deck, which is really one of the weakest combos. Heck, Black is an all-around disappointing color in Time Spiral, and Black/White together lacks both clever tricks to play, and big monsters to crush the opposition with. I ended up drafting a halfway decent deck, but mainly because I sort of backed into a couple of tricks which could lead to victory if I could stall the opponent long enough.

Nonetheless, I ended up drafting a number of cards which just weren’t as useful as they looked: Expensive but underpowered creatures, and some artifacts that look cool, but in practice don’t provide enough bang for the buck. So overall I didn’t have as much flexibility as I’d hoped. Sigh.

Practice makes perfect, I guess. But I still need a lot of practice.