Conspiracy Draft (final)

Last Sunday I got to hold a draft of Conspiracy with the box I'd bought; we had nine players and all in all, things were pretty cool!

Once again, though, I got a lesson in seeing things from the other player's point of view.

Lauriel has 3 Lurking Automatons on the board set to 9/9. So that's scary. Caitlin has the most life, at 31 via Sevala shenanigans. Merrick is sitting tight with token creatures and Scott has all but nothing going on and is dwindling on life until he takes my Magus of the Mirror, via Extract from Darkness.

Well, someone's got to get this party started, right? So I cast Drakestown Forgotten, netting me a 15/15. Nobody does anything for a bit except Caitlin, who starts building up walls including Vent Sentinels.

I put Unquestioned Authority on the Forgotten and now I have a choice; attack Lauriel, who's got the most (and largest) creatures on board or Caitlin, to bring her down to a regular life total so that when Scott activates the Magus, he doesn't just leap ahead. I'm at 13 life.

And I choose poorly, attacking Caitlin with not nearly enough mana available to me to keep her Vent Sentinels from doing damage to me.

Scott has no reason to take Caitlin's life, Caitlin proceeds to do 15 damage to me via Sentinel and I'm out.

Sigh. The correct play would be to wait until I had all my mana open, then attack Lauriel. I'm threatening but until I take action, I'm nothing and Lauriel couldn't kill me outright without opening herself up to losing, unlike Caitlin's board state. Let Scott swap Caitlin's life and be (briefly) the hero of the day for eliminating the swarm of huge creatures that were going to end us all.

I swear, one of these days I'll get it right.