Welcome to the third week of the Team Draft League. Our opponents this week were the Quietest Spikes who were composed of Hunter “Rolex” Slaton, Monique Garraud, and Sam Werbalowsky.
Before we get to the action I wanted to tell you a little story about how before the draft started I placed an order for some Indian food. The food was supposed to arrive in 30-40 minutes after the order was in. However, I kind of forgot about it while we were playing and didn’t realize it never showed up. I called them and explained that my food never arrived and they tried to blame me because I was calling three hours later. Anyway, they agreed to get it to me “right away”. After over an hour of waiting I called up the delivery service, explained to them what happened and they immediately refunded my order. Ten minutes later my food arrived but it was too late in the evening to eat. The moral of this story is to never order from the restaurant “Heart of India” unless you want to wait five to six hours. Also never play hungry.
Now back to the action. I was seated between Rolex (who was passing to me first) and Monique. My FRF pack was pretty terrible. The rare was unplayable and other than the BG land the only decent card was Lotus Path Djinn which is what I took. My second pick was more interesting since it had the choice between Tasigur, the Golden Fang or Shamanic Revelation. I took the Tasigur and followed up with Reach of Shadows along with some other blue and black playables, also I was able to table the BG land which would give me access to Sultai in the following two packs. After it was over, I ended up with what I thought was an OK Sultai deck. My teammates both drafted very solid Mardu decks and I was hoping that they would do most of the heavy lifting for me.
Sultai Deck with a shy Treasure Cruise
My first opponent was Sam who drafted a BG deck. His deck was extremely powerful and featured cards Wildcall, Whisperer of the Wilds, and the mythic bomb Whisperwood Elemental. In game one he had a slow start and I was able to grind him out and beat him with zero cards left in my library. The next two games in our match did not go so well for me. With an unanswered Whisperwood Elemental in both games he was able to flood the board with enough 2/2’s that it was only a matter of time for him to beat me.
I played Monique next. Monique is a player who basically always beats me, no matter how good I’m playing that day or how good my draft decks are she always wins. She drafted a solid Temur deck that had Arc Lightning, Temur Ascendancy, Savage Knuckleblade and Pyrotechnics. Her deck also had plenty of four power creatures to fuel the Temur Ascendancy. To no ones surprise she beat me to a pulp in two quick games.
Field of Battle
The final match was against Rolex. We were not able to finish the match because their team already racked up five wins at this point, but there was something interesting/funny that happened in our game. The game was going long and I had drawn a bunch of cards thanks to Tasigur and Treasure Cruise but our game was basically a stalemate with the only damage coming from an Archers’ Parapet from me once a turn. I drew the last card from my library and it was a Tuskguard Captain. I cast it and then swung with the team. Rolex blocked everything he could and I was able to kill the blocker on my Longshot Squad that had two +2 counters on it and trampled over for the win. Before this I couldn’t tell you how many times (or even if) I’ve won a game with zero cards in my library, but tonight it happened twice.
That’s all for today. I will see you next week and I hope that I will be writing about a win.
Andrew Longo has been playing Magic: The Gathering at a mediocre level since 1994. He managed to get lucky on the backs of his teammates to win Grand Prix Providence. When not playing Magic he runs a D&D campaign, plays video games, and reads comics (a real triple threat for the ladies).