Allllllrighty then. So this past weekend Hipsters of the Coast celebrated it’s one-year anniversary in good ol’ Brooklyn at a place called Brooklyn Bier Merchants. It’s a place that has beer for drinking. We had about twenty people including writers, significant others, and fanboys (Alex Owen) attend a great event. Special thanks again go out to Hunter Slaton, Dave Bones McCoy, Zac Clark, Matt Jones, and everyone else who make HOTC continue to thrive and grow. The party was also an introductory meeting to our new sponsor; CastHaven, who we couldn’t be more excited to be working with.
The main event of the party was a wacky draft with a truly great mix of sets. I wish I had taken a picture but believe me when I say there were at least 30-40 different sets represented in my estimation. We formed two draft pods of ten people each. The winners of each pod would then play in the finals for a grand prize of a 25-dollar gift certificate to twenty-sided store with second place receiving a generously donated pack of Italian “The Dark” from one Zach Barash.
Now I readily admit as I have before that I am a pretty big spike and as such even though this was a casual event amongst my closest MTG friends, I simply do not have the ability nor the desire to play magic casually. I am truly in my element and getting my “fix” whenever I have a clear goal in mind: winning. With that said, obviously at the end of the day, wacky draft is a casual format at it’s core and having fun is paramount to success…as long as fun of course involves winning. I went into the draft with pretty much the same mentality I have in cube drafts; if I can force mono red or a heavy red deck, do it.
I ended up with a quite solid Rakdos deck featuring such Return to Ravnica hits as Rix-Madi Guildmage, and Hellhole Flailer. Sometimes you just gotta put people on the backfoot! I won my first three rounds against, Dylan, Carrie, and Shawn respectively then had to play non-Hipsters writer and perennial good-looker Alex Owen in a playoff round since we had two 3-0’s in our 10-person pod. Thankfully he never drew control magic and I eked out a victory and the honor of playing Hunter Slaton in the finals. By that time most people had left the bar but we still had a match to play! Game one I was able to finish him off before he could stabilize thanks mostly in part to Rix-Madi Guildmage making blocking nigh impossible and forcing him to try to race me (which he did come pretty close to doing). Game two when Hunter had a very full grip and declined to add to his board of zero creatures, even going so far as to discard two of them to a ninjitsu’d Okiba-Gang Shinobi (one of my favorite magic card names) I figured something was up and he probably had a wrath. Thanks to a Blistering Firecat two turns later I was able to get in just enough damage (13 total) figuring he would wait one more turn on his wrath to see if I could get anymore value on it and guessing his other three cards were creatures that he would play on the following turn. Turns out he totally had the wrath and it was a super cool one to boot!
Talk about discard piles and Shakespeare! Hunter extended the hand and I thanked him again for organizing the event and letting me be a part of HOTC! I took my $25 gift certificate over to Twenty Sided Store a few blocks away and immediately bought 25 chocolate chip cookies.
SO. Now onto some exciting news (well I hope you find it exciting). I have finally figured out how to record draft videos and upload them! Not only does this make my life easier since I much prefer to record than to write about all my draft picks. Now I will be able to discuss deck-building and the all important matches all in real time! Go Team Venture!!!
For my first HOTC video I did a Modern Masters draft since they’re on magic online all week (hot damn!). Special thanks go out to Jon “Fungasaur” Fung for helping my computer-illiterate self figure out how to actually get videos up and running. Hope you enjoy and learn from my sick plays and misplays!
Drafting Part 1
Drafting Part 2 and Deck Building
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3