Jan 17th, 2025
FIN Draft Report (UGr Towns/Ramp)
Jan 17th, 2025
FIN Draft Report (UGr Towns/Ramp)
Off to town!
Off to town!
Last wednesday was another pretty fun flashback draft at the bar - Final Fantasy again! We were a bit undecided going into it whether we wanted to run Tarkir Dragonstorm or Final Fantasy, but Final Fantasy won out in the end so that's what we played. There was also a contingent lobbying for a chaos draft, but the organizer was trying to use up old boxes and not split them up so much, so that didn't really get off the ground, haha. I like Final Fantasy as a format a lot - the colour balance is great and you can kinda do whatever you want without worrying that it isn't supported well. It's one of the few formats I played enough on Arena to hit mythic for drafting!
Pack 1 Pick 1 was from a pretty weak pack, so I ended up taking a fancy alt-art Summon: Shiva. Next up, I grabbed Summon: Fenrir from another kinda soft-ish pack, and kinda set my sights on either some blue or green-based deck. I got passed an Omega mid-way through the pack, so I decided to just fall into both and do maybe some kinda towns/big mana strategy. Also late into the pack, I got passed a Terra, so I had a slight edge towards maybe a red splash perhaps.
Pack 2 was pretty on-rails, since I got passed a bunch of solid stuff for my strategy, like Travel the Overworld, and Summon: Titan. Apparently, the player to my left hate-drafted a Sin, which was too bad since I could easily have splashed it and think hate-drafting is pretty much never worth it, but hey, that's what it's like drafting with other humans sometimes! I was able to grab a bunch of solid town lands during this pack too!
The last pack was pretty unremarkable other than grabbing some more interaction and a Gladiolus. I was pretty happy with my deck going into the draft, since I had a pretty cohesive strategy with a good amount of interaction, card draw, and top-end power. Here's where I ended up:
My first opponent was a bit of a newer player that I think usually sticks to commander that was playing an aggressive White-Red deck focused on combat tricks and Blazing Bombs. Our match was pretty fun, with a pretty cool play by him in the 2nd one!
Game 1 had him start out with a quick curve, but he got stuck on 3 or 4 lands and pretty quickly ran out of things to do. I did end up losing a few key blockers to the amount of combat tricks he was running, since I don't typically expect people to play more than maybe 2, but he had probably 4 or 5! That said, once I stuck some big creatures, I quickly ran him over.
Game 2 played out much the same, but late into the game he played a Genji Glove, which I pretty much thought would be a do-nothing card that got picked up because "cool in commander". I swung out my team into an empty board and followed up with a 6/6, but on his turn, he cast Unexpected Request on the 6/6 to steal the game! People usually don't play threaten effects, so I didn't anticipate this, and the extra text on this threaten usually never comes up, so this was pretty out of left field. Good beats!
Game 3 once again played out pretty similarly, with me stabilizing against a kinda scary curve-out. He was basically dead and played the Genji Glove again, so this time I just opted to not play out an irrelevant 6/6 to play around the threaten. This proved the correct play, and he was taken down by a bunch of little guys instead.
Result: 2-1 in my favour
Round 2 was against my tournament grinder buddy that I've had as a player in a previous D&D campaign, and we got to catch up about his latest tournament results in Atlanta the previous weekend. He was also on a Blue-Green multi-colour big mana deck, but his was featuring Bahamut!
Game 1 was a very long and grindy game, with both of us having a pretty slow start to ramp out our threats. Eventually he cast the Bahamut and started wrecking me with it. I was able to weather it by tapping it down for a while until it ran out of time to live, but the card advantage it provided plus the extra damage from the final chapter took me down. Oh well!
Game 2 was pretty funny. We both started with mostly do-nothing hands other than a Fenris, and both played out our respective Fenrises on curve with no follow-up plan, so we had a little laugh about that situation. Eventually I drew into a bunch of good top-end stuff off of a Travel the Overworld, but he also had Bahamut this game. I was able to tap it down and mostly just go around it to take the win this game, but it was close!
Game 3 was pretty similar to Game 1, but it was extra long and grindy. I got Bahamut-ed again, and the final chapter hit me for 15 damage! I semi-stabilized at 4 life and almost milled out my opponent, but they drew their whole removal suite eventually and got rid of enough blockers to squeeze out the last few hits to take the match.
Result: 1-2 in my opponent's favour
My final opponent for the night was my friend who was directly to my right during the draft. He ended up in a very removal-heavy Red-Black deck with a white splash for Joshua.
Game 1 was pretty sweet, since I got to pop off a bit with Terra and some sagas for a while. He had a pretty sluggish start, and I stuck Terra plus a Shiva, and got to copy the Shiva with Terra's flip to really put the pressure on. I had a lot of my threats removed though, so this game was actually pretty close by the end of it, with my reserves of threats running pretty dry by the time I was able to push the final few good attacks through his defenses.
Game 2 was pretty lopsided, since I needed to mull to 5 against a pretty removal-heavy deck. Even though I was able to scrap a bit and found a few ways to claw back some card advantage, I eventually couldn't deal with the 5 or 6th removal spell, and just ran out of gas. I almost got to do cool Terra stuff again, but this time she ate a removal spell pretty much right away, haha. I mostly died to a Seifer that I couldn't deal with!
Game 3 was another grind-fest, and I kept a pretty risky hand without any blue sources for my Sleep Magic that I started with. He landed Joshua on curve, and the game was pretty much over if I didn't draw an untapped Island, which was pretty unlikely. I got lucky and did just that, but then he played out a Black Waltz that I wasn't able to slow down, and got nickle-and-dimed to death by a pile of interaction spells. That's magic!
Final Result: 1-2 in my opponent's favour.
I had a fun night with my deck! Despite a less than stellar final result, it got to do some pretty fun things and play some powerful magic. I got a bit unlucky with my last couple of matches to have to play against some of the more skilled players that tend to show up, but I always have fun playing against them since we generally don't make all that many gameplay errors that lead to lopsided games too often. Our games were pretty much always close in one way or another, so I was pretty pleased with the experience, if not the result. I'm looking forward to next week when we'll be doing a lorwyn prerelease sealed!
Final Result: 1-2 (4-5). Oh well, had fun anyway!