I played MTG Draft w/ the Bloomburrow set last night. If you, like me 48hr ago, know about Magic: The Gathering as a card game but don’t really know what “Draft” is, here’s my high-level explanation: you craft your deck from a limited pool of cards along with a bunch of other players. Here’s the actual draft algorithm:
- Each player gets 3 booster packs, 14 cards each
- Repeat following steps for each booster pack:
- Open the booster pack
- Pick 1 card from the pack
- Pass the remaining cards to the next player
- Repeat the above two steps until there are no more cards in the pack to be picked
Because each booster pack is random, and any broadly good cards will likely be taken early, this format naturally leads to more “casual”-style and -power decks, which is definitely more my speed. Also, this set more than others is very tribe-heavy, u just gotta pick ur cute animal & roll w/ it, very beginner friendly!!
unfortunately i did not get the cutest animal (that would be rabbits), ended up doing something midrange-y with squirrels and the black half of a bats package. Overall, I didn’t find the drafting part too hard, or the “identifying the best cards” for the deck construction part, it was the act of actually playing Magic: The Gathering that set my brain on fire & made me feel like I had no earthly idea what I was doing.
Game 1
For both rounds, my opponent gets two 2/3 fliers on board by turn 4, and is able to use targeted removal on any fliers I put up to block (not that I get any big enough fliers those rounds), and none of my guys have reach, and also I don’t get any of my own removal, so ggs no re onto the next. Despite this very simple description, it still almost went to time because I take a long time to make all decisions because I am new at the game (all other games went to time)
I actually had this guy in my deck and so learned so play him in future games.
Game 2
Stomped in the first round due to the above card and also this guy (aggro flyers my beloved):
But then got stomped in the second due to a “board wipe” (it was a Blue deck so just a “return to hand” effect but basically same thing for me).
Last game went to time, and I was doing pretty badly again, hanging on with just 2 life & an empty board against 19 life & a full board when the turn limit hit. I thought I would have lost at that point but turns out it’s a dice roll-off? which i won?? which seems dumb but i’ll take the undeserved W ig
Game 3
Got stomped in the first round due to an extremely wide rabbits board. Rabbits are the cutest clan but also extremely scary thanks to the following card:
so yeah once I was facing down a 6/6 version of that (due to creature token creation elsewhere) there wasn’t any coming back :P ggs onto next.
My curve the next game was out of this world, got to play this guy with full stats on turn 4:
and activate this guy’s ability:
So yeah. My board was pretty juicy otherwise too, able to stomp out opponent’s board development before it could happen. ggs onto round 3
This final round was a lot closer. At this point in the night, despite having fully burnt out my decision-making circuitry, I was getting the hang of building boards & managing resources and we were tied at around 14 life apiece. However, it being 10 minutes past closing time and I being the only one eligible for prizing, I generously gifted one of my “yay you went 2-1” booster packs in exchange for officially being recorded as going 2-1 (the other person had a 0-2 record going in and we wouldn’t have gotten prizing otherwise).
Concluding Thoughts
Despite being very overwhelmed for the entire process, I ended up having a pretty fun time and came out with a much better grasp on the game. “Trial by fire” ‘n all. The friends I went with (friend in town from out-of-state who to experience a different scene, and a local friend who hasn’t drafted in maybe 7 years), were not in my pod, and are much more experienced MTG players than I am, and ended up doing very well (3-0 and 2-1 respectively, with the only loss being from when they were paired up against each other). All in all a great time all around, probably not doing it again any time soon tho :P