By: Jason Waddell
Today is a holiday in Belgium, and we managed to scrape together an 8-man cube draft. We had 7 players commit in advance, and were able to wrangle a player named Glenn to be our 8th at the last minute. Over the last month or so the skill level of our drafters has risen significantly, and today’s draft was filled with local PTQ grinders. I was not up for the challenge, and was punished all day long for leaks in my play and a couple of outright punts.
I opened the draft with the following two picks:
The seat I was in was likely best suited for some Gravecrawler archetype variant, but I’ve played the deck a lot in recent weeks and wasn’t really in the mood to do it yet again. I had been itching to play Blue, and wormed my way into a mishmashed BUG tempo deck that was fairly high on card quality.
The deck itself was pretty solid and flexible, but as a pilot I really didn’t do it justice.
The biggest punt occurred in Game 3 of Round 1, midway through the game after a flurry of removal that had dealt with every threat I attempted to pose. My opponent’s board read Liliana of the Veil, Sower of Temptation and my Deathrite Shaman (stolen, of course). I had a Jitte with two charge counters. Somehow I got it in my head that I could not afford to have him use Liliana to make me sacrifice my Deathrite Shaman, so I was going to kill the Sower on end step.
This is horrible for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Liliana’s -2 ability says “target player“, not “target opponent“, so the timing didn’t matter (if he had another creature to play). Secondly, letting him untap with my Deathrite Shaman allowed him to gain two life (off of Gemstone Mine, of course). Lastly, his Liliana was at 1 loyalty. Pretty much the perfect storm of punts.
Naturally, I get him down to 1 life, get milled to 0 cards by Nephalia Drownyard and die on my draw step with lethal on board. Poetic justice.
Our last-minute player Glenn swept the draft with this Gruul dino-deck, undoubtedly inspired by Triple Scars of Mirrodin draft.
In the end I went 1 – 2, with a deck that deserved better. I’m sorry deck. I let you down.
