Xandor's Stuff

Another Blue/Black Avatar Draft!

I had another nice draft night this week at the bar draft. I did a bit of trading with friends prior to the draft, and there was also some birthday cake from one of the attendees for their birthday! I ended up trading my slice of cake to cover the remainder of a trade I made, haha. Anyway, the draft was fun and I got pushed into playing blue/black for the 2nd time in a row.

Draft

Pack 1 was kinda interesting. I started out with a pretty soft pack 1, so I ended up taking Avatar Destiny. I'm not the biggest fan of the card, and it definitely has a few cases where it's not very good, but it was fun enough to try building around for a weak pack 1 pick 1. A lot of solid blue cards came my way, including Spirit Water Revival, and green kinda dried up, so I gave up on the green plan kinda quickly. I opted to go mainly blue and see what happened in the next pack to settle into a colour pair.

Pack 2 made my choice in that regard pretty easy. I had a choice between a foil alt-art Fire Lord Zuko and the rare Azula in an otherwise weak pack for pack 2 pick 1, and I ended up rare-drafting the Zuko, since it was worth a nice bit of money and might make a fun commander to build later. If this was a more high-stakes event, or even drafting online where cards don't really have value, I'd definitely have grabbed the Azula. I got passed Koh the Face Stealer next, and pretty much forced my way into black to support playing it throughout the rest of the pack.

I had another choice between a card to vastly improve my deck, or $10 in Pack 3, opening both Day of Black Sun and Ozai. Once again, I picked $10, haha. throughout the night, I frequently thought about how much better my deck would have been if I was drafting to win rather than drafting $10 bills. The rest of the pack wasn't too exciting, and I picked up some servicable filler. My deck wasn't super exciting, but I thought it'd do the job well enough. Here's where I ended up:

Round 1

For round 1 I got paired up a fellow who tried to force a mono-red strategy during the draft, but ended up missing a few key pieces of the deck due to red being heavily contested.

Game 1 I ended up needing to mulligan and kept a pretty unexciting hand to start, so I was on the backfoot for a majority of the game. Luckily, my opponent also had some unfortunate draws past a certain point, and seemed to draw nothing but lands despite running only 15, so I was able to stabilize and turn it around. One highlight of the game was getting to use the extra waterbending on the Spirit Water Revival to one-sided timetwister myself. That was really fun. I ended up winning the game after a fairly long grindfest.

Game 2 played out much the same, with another mull to 6 and playing from behind for most of the game. I ended up stabilizing around 11 life or so with Koh, and my opponent was never able to deal with subsequent 6-drops, despite dealing with Koh the following turn. The Mechanist played a nice role for me this game, holding back a War Balloon for quite a while.

Result: 2-0 in my favour

Round 2

My second opponent was playing the deck that this player basically always plays: White/Green beatdown. I think it's interesting playing against the same folks week in and week out and getting to know what kind of stuff people are likely to play and how they like to build their decks. It adds a nice little meta-game aspect that you really don't get online. This was a pair-down, so I was relatively confident going into the match.

Game 1 was pretty close, despite needing to mull to 6 again. We matched threat for threat for a while, and we ended up in a pretty nice board stall about 6 or 7 turns into the game. They played the uncommon Aang, and I just ended up not having any answers for the 3/2 flier for long enough that I got overwhelmed by it plus a growing board state I wasn't keeping up with.

Game 2 was pretty rough for me. I needed to mull to 5, and ended up keeping a pretty bad 5 at that. Despite semi-stabilizing with Koh, I was still way too far behind and got run over pretty quickly. Oh well! That's magic sometimes!

Result: 0-2 in my opponent's favour.

Round 3

My last opponent ended up being another pair-down somehow, with my 1-1 record against their 0-2. They were playing a pretty removal heavy but creature light White Blue Green deck.

Game 1 had some nice back and forth, and I was able to keep my first full opening 7 cards of the night, which was a nice change of pace. Both of our decks were pretty slow, with neither of us doing much of note until turn 4. I managed to stick enough threats and remove enough of theirs that they just ran out of gas, and I ended up winning the first game.

Game 2 was cool. I did need to mull to 6, which was unfortunate considering all the other games I needed to mull that night despite a pretty reasonable 8-9 split on my mana base. I made a pretty fatal error this game, where instead of keeping mana open to cast Quench on their 4/5 drop they were clearly lining up with a ramp creature on turn 3, I played out my own 3 drop. They proceeded to play the rare 3-color Aang on their 4th turn, and hit an Earth Kingdom General off the trigger. I was never able to deal with Aang effectively, despite scrying a Swampsnare Trap to the top of my deck since they played an Southern Air Temple just in time to keep Aang alive. I got run over on this one. Ouch!

Game 3 was a lot easier for me. My opponent never really was able to draw any creatures past their first 2 which I quickly countered/removed while I got The Mechnaist pumping out clues. They even (late in the game) cast Seismic Sense for x=9, and whiffed on finding any creatures. Turns out they were only playing 9 creatures, so that's a bit more understandable, but still, ouch. This was a bit of a landslide victory on my end.

Result: 2-1 in my favour

Final Thoughts

I had a good time this draft, but I feel like I passed a way better version of this deck in favour of a couple $10 bills. I got my value, but my deck was noticably worse, haha. There were a bunch of times I felt myself wishing I had the board wipe or big Azula I ended up passing while I was far behind in a couple spots. Regardless, despite my deck being mostly janky and needing to mull more than usual, I ended up with a positive record for the night (barely). I had a good time chatting with friends and casting spells, so I'd say it was a good night. Maybe next time I'll get to play the stuff I raredraft, haha.

Final Result: 2-1, 4-3 (just fine!)