Zendikar Draft #5 with Andrea Fonseca

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Show Round 3 »

Lost

 
  1. It is nice to see a draft that did not turn out to work so well. In hindsight what would you do different? Do you feel you missed an opportunity to jump into another color? Where the packs weak overall or did you fight with someone else for the good cards in your colors? I also agree with your comment on rare drafting. If you want to draft smart you have to keep an eye open for opportunities to maximize your expected value. Taking a rare that is worth a pack might pay off as long as you don’t ship a bomb in your colors. This is especially true for Swiss and 4322 drafts but should not be overlooked in 84 drafts either. I see higher value rares shipped quite late in 84 drafts when they should really be taken.

  2. Your main problem is that WB is a very difficult deck to fall into in the middle of the second pack since both colors want to be dominant. You usually want to run something like and 11/7 or 12/6 mana base and limit double costed cards to the dominate color. By falling into WB as late as you did you did not have this luxury and instead were scrambling for playables.

    As far as signals go I think your mistake happened on P1P4&5&6 when you convinced yourself that green was open, passed reasonable WB cards and then picked the artifact removal over the Timbermaw Larva – passing a Larva in pick 6 tells the person next to that green is wide open. This ultimately caused the eddy that you got caught up in at the start of the second pack. P2P2 archer over larva was also bizarre – archer is good with allies but likely wheels if green is at all open.

    Despite all of the above you deck actually had a fair amount of play to it. It may not have been wonderful but it had a chance in most matchups. Unfortunately you ran into a very solid Boros build, and also had to mulligan to 4. It is worth noting though that if you had not followed the red herring that was green in pack 1 you probably would have been able to cut into his card quality (you passed sky fishers etc. that would have been great in your final build).