Theros Draft

A buddy of mine had never drafted, yet has spent a great deal of time learning about drafting as a format. He'd always wanted to try it, so I took it upon myself to set up a draft for him. I usually get people together after every new set to play, I just usually do Sealed. Changing to Draft wasn't a problem. I read a bunch of information on and linked from the reddit forum and found it to be pretty interesting so I was hopeful that this would be a fun set to draft.

And now that I've gotten one whole draft done...I don't really care. I managed to make a U/B deck that I thought had enough cheap flyers to make an interesting aggro deck but it never panned out. I had opened Curse of the Swine in pack one so I figured; hey why not? I also included in my build a Triton Fortune Hunter that probably shouldn't have been there. I probably should have played more black, as I had some discard and decided not to play it thinking that a 1/3 creature for 4 really wasn't worth my time. My error was not realizing that discard was a form of removal. On further reflection, I was seeing a lot of green early on and probably should have gone into that color over black.

Other things I've learned: Bestow is a pain in the ass. It made all the games go long and felt very grindy and uninteresting. I have a dude. Three turns later I have a much bigger dude. You're killing my dude so now I have a smaller one that isn't all that awesome. Great.

Big effects are ugly; Noah drafted a deck that essentially got to 6 mana and then blew opponents out of the water. It worked (it certainly helped that he had an Elspeth), and kudos to him for taking that strategy but it didn't really feel very engaging when I played him to make decisions that didn't matter for 5+ turns and then lose.

I guess this would be a drawback for most of my games: I would play weaker creatures, try to get a toehold in and then wait and wait until I could Bestow bad creatures in order to try and Voltron a decent creature. Sometimes that worked but mostly it just wasn't much fun, even when it did. Waiting too long means the opponent has time to get their board set up and I didn't have effects that could really recover from that, despite having more Griptides and Voyage's Ends than I knew what to do with. The scry never felt like it mattered and Griptiding a creature that has been Bestowed means that yes, they have weaker creatures now...but they also have more.

Maybe I should try it again but I don't really feel encouraged to do so: this format didn't scratch an itch in my brain. Perhaps the Theros-Born of the Gods run will be different and I'll take a swing at it then.