Zvi and the Magic Invitational, Part 3
**Solomon Draft is probably the hardest Magic format of all time. Pat Chapin said "Solomon Draft is definitely the best skill tester for who's good at Solomon Draft" and I can't argue with that. I am very bad at Solomon Draft. It's the most skill-based format, in the sense that the better player is most likely to win. The problem with the format is what makes a player better. A lot of it has to do with memory, and my memory for this type of thing is horrible. Regardless, I'm going to look at my selections. Keep in mind the background: Mark Rosewater chose the card pool, and we thought for the first draft the card order, so you know there's plenty of weird interactions and the colors are probably somewhat balanced. Other than that, you don't know what cards are coming. Also keep in mind that you have only sixty seconds to divide the pack, and it's never enough.
Pack 1, Me vs. Steve OMS: Coastal Piracy , Forbid , Time Elemental , Red Elemental Blast, Deranged Hermit , Bull Hippo , Ivory Mask , Maggot Therapy.
The key unknowns in this pack are Coastal Piracy and Ivory Mask . Are they worth it? The Mask is probably marginal, but it's also possible that there will be serious direct damage, discard or other effects. Coastal Piracy is even tougher: If the cards are this high in quality, the creatures may be too big to make Piracy a very good card, but then again it could be a power card. I felt the best card in the pack was Forbid , since you can use it to counter whatever proves to be your opponent's biggest threats (and you know what they are), and the anti-blue cards in pack were good but knowing Mark I doubted there would be any more. So I divided the pack between the blue and anti-blue halves. The anti-blue half had matched up well against the blue, but it was spread across colors. So I got the blue pile, which was the three blue cards and Ivory Mask. Steve OMS got the other four.
Pack two, Steve divided. Pile one had Flare , Wild Aesthir , Mind Harness and Sanctum Custodian . Pile two had Lawbringer , Suq'Ata Firewalker , Gerrard's Wisdom and Jungle Wurm . Again, it's all about anticipating the card pool: Is Firewalker the bomb or does it mostly hit players? Will the life from Gerrard's be game breaking or useless? What will Lawbringer take out? The piles seemed more or less even. I decided I wanted the Firewalker and the Wurm to break up Steve's green from pack one, with the Custodian not being all that great with such big creatures in the pool. In addition, Gerrard's Wisdom could prove to be huge. I may have taken the wrong pile due to all the double casting costs, I'm not sure. Sign of a good division.
Pack three I divided into: Yavimaya Elder , Arcane Denial , Darkwatch Elves and Order of the Sacred Torch (my pile), and Deepwood Ghoul , Sacred Mesa , Contagion and Astrolabe . Again, I thought counters were highly valuable. The Elder was probably really good with the colors we'd have to play, and the Order could be really good too. The Mesa I figured wouldn't be that much of a problem with such multi-color decks. The problem was that I forgot he had such good early white.
At this point, I'm going to stop going over every card; the exact card lists are online if you want to continue to follow carefully. Pack four put two good red creatures and the Stasis for the Time Elemental up against Staunch Defenders , Wall of Air and Blanchwood Treefolk . I thought the non-red pile was clearly better, since the Stasis was only good with the Elemental (although seeing a Serra Angel later wouldn't have been a shock) and I got a great card in each of three colors while he got only two.
Pack five was my first huge mistake. I didn't have a solution for No Mercy, I hugely overrated it, and I grossly overpaid for it, handing Steve several solid cards for it. I also totally forgot about the cards he had and thought several of them were useless or splash cards to him when they weren't. Pack six had a Hammer of Bogarden in it, and I'm not sure if he paid enough for it or not. I really like Crenellated Wall , I got several other solid cards and figured I could prevent him from having enough red to reliably recurse the Hammer. In addition, I thought I was building a fat deck.
Pack seven was Steve's big mistake. It was a very weak pack by comparison to most of them, and I slightly misdivided, but he thought Helm of Obedience was Helm of Possession and took the wrong pile. It didn't make much difference. Pack eight I continued to take the solid cards over the gamebreakers, pack nine I undervalued Necrosavant , and pack ten I thought I got the Cloud Djinn a little cheap.
The sum total of all those packs was that Steve's deck was a lot better than mine was, and he rolled over me.
My second draft was against Nicolai Herzog, and this one was a lot closer. Pack one he paid heavily for Meteor Shower , I think a little too heavily. Pack two he got Bounty Hunter , a real game breaker, but I got the Blue Blast for the Shower and a Rhox . I think I divided that pack pretty well. Pack three I thought I got the better of him again, although it wasn't too bad. Pack four had a Living Death ! I put it with just Dehydration with some pretty good cards in the other pile, and he took it anyway. I almost put the Death by itself. Pack five was his turn to deal with a bomb, in this case Rainbow Efreet , and I thought he definitely overpaid for it. Pack six was pretty weak and didn't matter much. Pack seven I think he ran out of time dividing (I remember that did happen once) and I got a big edge. Pack eight I lost badly because of my bad memory; I thought he wasn't going to play blue, and looking back he clearly was. Pack nine I lost again, overvaluing Rath's Edge and taking Reprisal even though he had no targets. Pack ten I think I gave him the two bombs, Kor Chant and Dark Hatchling , a little cheap. I should have split them up. At the end, he had an edge but I don't think it was gigantic. First game I got Whispers active early on, and was dominating the game with it slowly until he got Living Death . I used Reprisal to kill off my Rhox , and drew into Empyreal Armor in time to kill him with the Rhox that turn (I also used Wizard Mentor to fill my hand). If the game had gone on, he would have quickly dominated the board.
Games two and three I don't get Whispers up, however, and my letting him have too many good blue cards too cheaply comes back to haunt me big time. His defense is too strong to break through without the Whispers active, and eventually he deals with everything stopping the Rainbow Efreet with his Illusionist (UUT: Target creature phases out), Master Decoy and other similar effects.
Third draft I played against Pat Chapin. This one didn't get on the web for some reason, but in general I picked up the good blue in an early pack but he managed to buy the blue for the rest of the draft. My big mistake was giving away an Armageddon way too cheaply. I ended up with all the black and red cards and Pat had most of white, blue and green. Game one I was attacking when he cast Armageddon to force me into topdeck mode instead of starting to cast my really expensive spells like Corrupt and Drain Life ; Armageddon was really bad for my deck. But I topdecked two lands to stay in the game and then Mogg Fanatic for the win. Game two he won easily with Armageddon after some good creatures. Game three I got out two creatures including Arc Mage but stalled on land. He killed them both with Ray of Command (letting me take back a Bloodlust I cast without specifying exactly when), and was in his words 'karmically rewarded' when I couldn't draw any land and lost. He had the better deck, so he did deserve to win, although I think mine did have some shot. Going 0-3 in Solomon Draft left me at 4-5, and having lost to Pikula, Chapin and Finkel I knew I had little chance to make the finals even if I went 6-0 day three. On the other hand, I got to play the bottom half of the field day three, so I liked my chances to go 4-2 or better to get to a positive record.
Coming up in Part 4: Classic Constructed (Type 1!)
All questions, comments, and responses welcomed at
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