Zvi Mowshowitz at Worlds - Day 2, Rochester Draft
** As day two begins, Scott Johns, Alan Comer and I are having breakfast and discussing our draft strategies. The topic is what to aim for at various draft tables and how to adjust for the quality of the table. For example, I’m expected to have a pod of weaker players, but I need to win one of my two draft tables. Should I try to win the first table or the second table? We agree that I shouldn’t try too hard to make sure I win the first one, although I fully intend to go for it if I get the chance. Then we go to check out the pods, and what I see does NOT make me happy.
In my pod, at a record of 3-3, are the following eight players:
Ho, Ken - US
Pollock, Elijah - CA
Delere, Andre - DE
Mowshowitz, Zvi - US
Vienneau, Matthew - CA
OMS, Steven - US
Parker, Brock - US
Clegg, Daniel - US
This is probably the hardest table out there. I’m feeling a little persecuted but there isn’t much that I can do about it.
The packs throw us for a few loops. In the first one, the only green card is Serpentine Kavu . After the Probe goes to Brock and the Kavu Runner to Pollock, Vienneau stubbornly refuses to accept the need to take a green card and takes the second black/blue one. Ken Ho also doesn’t feel like taking it, so I’m shaking my head as Clegg snaps it up in position five. The only green mana symbol left is on a Tinder Farm , but in seventh position I have to take the two decent cards left in the deck, both of them red. That leaves Steve OMS the Tinder Farm on the wheel, which is horrible for me but there’s nothing I can do: The alternative is to give him two good red cards. Then the second pack has no green cards in it period. I keep taking red cards and Steve starts taking white ones. I get passed a Soul Burn and take it, intending to go Black/Red, but when Ken Ho clearly goes into heavy Black/Red and Brock decides that his perfect Blue/Black seat would rather draft red as his main color, I know that’s not an option.
Meanwhile, there was nothing I could do to stop Steve from getting a free Fertile Ground . I start taking the solid green creatures as per the plan, and Clegg turns his green into a splash. On the down side, after I’d done that Elijah decides to be the second Red/Green mage. I open up a Rout and have a big decision to make. Finally I decide that me and Steve O can get along just fine and let him have it, taking Scorching Lava and staying on target. He stays out of red, I stay out of white and everyone’s happy. He opens up a Shivan Wurm , and ships it back, taking a Fleetfoot Panther . My deck is shaping up well but without any real bombs in it other than the Wurm . Then a second Shivan Wurm gets opened with no one in the way who can use it. Except that Steve is under the impression that not only can he play it, he wants it more than the Voice of All he can easily cast enough for him to leave me nothing at all I can play. I’m in shock, and I take the Voice to avoid running out of time.
At this point I no longer know what I’m doing with Apocalypse. I was going to go G/R/b to support the Soul Burn , but now I have a Voice of All to go with my Rith’s Grove and Steve has essentially given me the green light. I keep bouncing around the three possible third colors, and finally I get passed two Dead Ringers and I settle on black. I also pick up an Illuminate . My deck is left with an abundance of fat and very few color requirements, and I get to use seventeen land and a Star Compass for my mana. It’s a solid deck if a little slow and light on removal. The one non-pro at the table has four Hunting Drakes.
Round 7: Pollock, Elijah
We have a history dating back to the Junior division, where I managed to lose to him three times in the course of a PTQ and a PT and not lose anything but the PT final to anyone else. This guy can play. At any rate, he has one of the decks I’m fairly sure that I can beat. The problem is that this format is half about drafting and playing and the other half is not getting mana screwed. I have a good mana base, but I still lose a game to it. I take one game with the Shivan Wurm . In game three, the Haunted Angel out of his sideboard comes out and gets an Armadillo Cloak . I can’t get enough mana to Soul Burn it and I can’t find the Illuminate . I also can’t find green mana but that’s beside the point. If I find a way to kill the Angel then I get my own flyer and I basically just win the game with a Forest but I don’t draw an answer and it kills me.
Round 8: OMS, Steve (Feature Match)
Me and Steve joke about the Shivan Wurm a little. I didn’t get a chance to punish him in the draft for taking it, and he does have Harrow and Fertile Ground. I didn’t think that was enough to justify it, but his mana base turned out to be retaliation enough. Steve ends game one discarding. The second game I get a ton of good stuff on my draw, but just as I manage to get control over the board he casts Rout . I don’t have much to recover with, he does and I die quickly. Game three Steve once again gets neither the fifth land or the first Forest , and when he dies I’m holding three solid creatures in case of Rout.
Round 9: Vienneau, Matthew
Matt didn’t exactly get a good deck, and so far this pod he had a loss and a draw. I just play out a bunch of big creatures, and they just stomp all over him. Game one I lock down his one Island with a Slimy Kavu to make matters even worse. He manages to take a game on a really poor draw, but then I come back and run over him again.
Pod two is a lot more reasonable:
Geertsen, Svend - DK
Bethencourt, Daniel – ES
Olivieri, Nicolas – FR
Mowshowitz, Zvi - US
Lippert, Christoph – DE
Cunningham, Jeff - CA
Ruel, Olivier - FR
Hay, Matthew - SCO
Now that’s more like it. It’s not perfect, but I’ll take it. This one starts out great, and I take Nomadic Elf in the first pack and start taking my solid green cards. I do have to win the table, but this is the strategy I’m prepared for and I’m in a perfect position for it. Or I was, until someone started taking Red/Green cards two to my left and then opened a Rith. Apparently my taking green and red cards convinced him I was 5cG, which was in the context of the situation strictly a misread. In general the cards fall horribly for me, with bomb after bomb dropping on the table and none of them going to me. I do however manage to assemble a great mana base and a ton of efficient green creatures, again with a G/R/b deck. I’ve had better, but it’s quite solid and no one else seems to have a good mana base.
Round 10: Ruel, Olivier
I mulligan all three games. He draws his one Dead Ringers a lot. I win the first one despite a Dead Ringers on two Stone Kavu . I lose the second one because of a Dead Ringers on two Stone Kavu . I lose game three because I draw nothing. I end up having to call a judge on him twice. One of them was in game three, where he plays a third Ana Disciple , I attack before it goes active and he tries to use it. I lost directly to the mulligans, since if I don’t have to discard Order/Chaos to Ravenous Rats I win game three. The other was when he failed to shuffle his deck. Both times the judges did nothing, but I caught both of them so no harm was actually done.
Round 11: Hay, Matthew
We have a great time, especially once I realize just how bad his deck actually is. It turns out it’s actually impossible for him to win a game even if his mana works out, since all his good cards are removal and he has no creatures: Even if he manages to stop me for a while, he still won’t be able to kill me. Soon he runs out of Terminates and the remaining fat green guys go in for the kill.
Round 12: Geertsen, Svend
Svend also has a very poor deck. While our table had a lot of powerful cards, it also had a lot of people drafting all over the place without mana bases and without the cards to fill their decks out. SO as it turned out, the table only really had two good decks at it. One was mine, which was solid but unspectacular, and the other was the guy on my left who had the four Silver Drakes. At any rate, Svend just watches helplessly for two games as I turn the fat crank.
In short, the draft plan I worked out worked perfectly in getting me two solid decks that I easily 2-1ed with. I could easily have won one of the tables, losing both lost matches at least in large part to mana issues in decks with the best mana this format has to offer. I played against about one and a half real mana bases all day, and I think that’s about par for the course. It’s going to feel so good to go back to having real mana bases again, say on day three?
My day had come. It was time to break out TurboLand.
- Zvi Moswshowitz
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