Was able to fire off a 6 man draft yesterday, decided to go with a quilt draft. We created two 9x9 grids and split ourselves into 2 separate pods of three. Only the outer ring of cards was face-up, the inner portion was all flipped upside down. Until a card had an edge facing out into an opening, it was left as hidden information. Like usual, the only cards that could be picked in any given round were those with either the top or bottom (narrow edge) exposed outwards. Each pod went through 14 picks on each quilt before scooping up the rest and laying out another one and both pods through 3 quilts for a total of 42 picks for each player.
I'd say that this format is less like a draft and more like a sealed variant and depending upon what the quilt reveals, you could sometimes end up with the very best version of a given archetype. It becomes easier to plan future picks that are revealed on the quilt if you know that those in your pod aren't within your given colors or archetype. We ended up with six pretty solid lists:
Emrakul Ungiven [Me]
UR Kiki Combo [Bertrand]
Jeskai Tempo [Leo]
5C Cruelty [Kenny]
GW Midrange [Alex]
4C Pod [Nolan]
DRAFT
Early on, I didn't have a whole lot of exciting picks available so I just settled on a
Watery Grave with my first pick. I didn't really have a good direction for my deck with my first 5-6 picks, mostly filler cards here and there like
Fyndhorn Elves and
Mind Stone until I saw a
Living Death. I then looked into more looting effects and ways to put cards into the graveyard and lucked into things like
Mesmeric Orb and a
Grim Flayer, but no real big payoffs. Near the end of Quilt 1 I picked up cards like
Ob Nixilis Reignited, Hissing Quagmire and Dragonlord Silumgar so I was leaning more into a Sultai Control build and was going off of the Living Death plan. Then when we laid out Quilt 2, I saw a Liliana of the Veil that would work great with both Flayer and Living Death and snapped it up. It was until we were a few cards in that I saw the card that I'd be building around.
Emrakul, the Promised End was flipped up midway through my Quilt 2 (around pick 5-7) and I immediately went all in on it. I already had decent support and if I focused on enablers and strange card types, I thought that I could cast it for 7-8 with regularity. ULD having Artifact Lands available also helped. I managed to snag a
Volrath's Stronghold somewhere along the line so I had the possibility of playing the Mesmeric Orb subgame to push creature types into grave and hope to be able to cast a cheap Emrakul from hand or recur from the graveyard if necessary. Later on I got cards like
Control Magic to help me branch to the late game by buying time (and potentially getting another tough card type into the graveyard via creature removal/combat),
Walking Ballista with the sweet Artifact-Creature dual typing and a way to keep pace with aggressive starts, and
Crystalline Crawler as another means of ramping out a quicker Emrakul. I even managed to pick up an
Exhume and
Traverse the Ulvenwald to help supplement a reanimator backup plan.
I ended up with probably the most amazing Delirium shell I could possibly have made. The only thing that would have topped it off were if I had seen
Ishkanah Grafwidow at some point or had additional support with something like
Grapple With the Past. Other than that, deck operated like a fucking machine. Incredibly efficient and powerful, all my trades in combat, removal spells and perceived "losses" of key creatures or permanents just helped to fuel my late game into Emrakul.
The decks drafted by each pod ended up being the following:
Pod 1: UR Kiki Combo, Emrakul Ungiven, GW Midrange
Pod 2: 5C Cruelty, Jeskai Tempo, 4C Pod
ROUND 1
In the first round I was paired up against the 4C Pod deck and had no clue what I was up against since the drafter was within the other pod. They started off pretty decently by putting out threats and establishing a board presence little by little as I kind of durdled for the first few turns by fetching up a
Sunken Hollow on T1 and then bolting myself to get an
Overgrown Tomb on T2 in order to kill a potential threat in
Voice of Resurgence with a
Grasp of Darkness. At some point he plays out a Bitterblossom, but I follow it up with a
Pernicious Deed in hand that I crack for 2 the next turn to sweep his board away. I then play out a
Vault of Whispers post Deed (which would have been blown up) and
Hissing Quagmire the next turn, but I don't really have a whole lot of cards to actively play in hand with 3 mana. Emrakul is stranded there needing around 10 mana to be deployed with 3 card types (Land, Instant, Enchantment) in the graveyard. He uses
Kolaghan's Command to blow up my artifact land (4 types) and recur his Voice before playing it out again. I
Control Magic the Voice to get a blocker and hope to cash it in at some point for a token and just buy some more time to draw into lands. I do not draw into a 5th land yet but still manage to deploy a
Crystalline Crawler with 3 counters on it which gives me a virtual 11 mana for Emrakul at this point (3 counters + 4 lands + 4 types). The next turn he plays out a
Murderous Redcap to shoot down the Voice, giving me a token. I draw into an untapped land and excitedly play it, activate the Crawler to put a 4th counter on it, remove them all to add 4 mana, tap my lands for an additional 5, and then count up types (Enchantment, Artifact, Land, Instant
) to deploy my Emrakul with him at 14 life.
Up to this point, he had no idea what my deck was trying to do. I
Mindslaver him, look over his hand with Burn and other cards and he's sitting there kind of dumbfounded and decides to scoop before I get to do anything. It was awesome.
Game 2 was a little different in that I didn't really get a chance to go all-in on Emrakul Ramp because I didn't see it at all. I ended up playing a more midrange-y gameplan at this point and played removal to answer early threats, stuck and cracked a Deed on a turn to help clear the board, then presented a Crawler with 3 counters again. This one was promptly killed on site, but that was fine because I was hoping to bait out a kill spell or removal to clear the way for a
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet to help me stabilize a bit. We chip back and forth for a little, Kalitas dies to a removal spell, and I'm at 5 while he's at around 9. He plays more of a value game this time around and is able to generate some action through cards like
Filgree Familiar, a
Renegade Rallier and
Goblin Dark-Dwellers and some burn spells, but I manage to steal it at some point with
Control Magic and wack him down to 5 on an attack. I have a Walking Ballista in hand, 6 lands and some Manland on the board, but I can't really find an opening to kill him at 5 life if he goes wide enough. He also sees that as his route to victory and deploys a Pod and some other threats, then goes super wide with other bodies and Pods up the chain paying 2 life before ending the turn with no mana up. I just show him the Ballista in hand and 6 mana and he scoops them up.
ROUND 2
I'm paired up against Jeskai Tempo this time around and he's already seen the Emrakul that happened at our table so he's ready for it. I haven't seen any of his deck yet so I'm not quite sure of what he's working with. I drop T1
Fyndhorn Elves and a T2
Mesmeric Orb and we play the strange game of minimal creature deployment and milling which seems to work in his favor leaving up counter mana most turns and only tapping out for
Tamiyo, the Moon Sage and using the +1 on my Elves. I use that opening to deploy a
Verdurous Gearhulk and go with 4 counters on the Elves to create two meaningful threats. We fall into a weird subgame where I can't really attack past into Tamiyo easily with mana and Colonnade available to block and the +1 locking down a threat every turn. Eventually, we're at the point where we are both running low on cards in library and he's since deployed
Geist of Saint Traft and a
Vendilion Clique. I think at some point he Cryptic Counter + Tapped me to get in for a huge chunk of 9 damage with Tamiyo up near her ultimate. I draw into a
Dragonlord Silumgar and it looks like I might be able to do something if I steal the Tamiyo, Ult it and shoot my
Essence Extraction at a ton of bodies to stabilize my life total. But then I read the card again and sadly Tamiyo's Ult is not the same as Bantmiyo's
Omniscience and I can't really do anything relevant with the Ultimate because I'll die either via damage through Clique + Geist + Angel + Colonnade or deck myself next turn.
Game 2 I completely side out the
Mesmeric Orb +
Essence Extraction to bring in
Hero's Downfall and
Remand. I think I used the Downfall at some point but it didn't take much as I mostly just curved out and was able to fill up my grave for Emrakul shenanigans off a Crystalline Crawler that was deployed when the shields were down as he answered other threats. My Mindslaver Turn consisted of casting a
Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and then casting
Miscalculation on it, and
Wastelanding his
Hallowed Fountain to take him off WW and put him down to 3 lands with Fumigate and Archangel Avacyn stuck in hand. He can't do anything with his turn other than play out another land. I untap, play Verdurous Gearhulk and grow Emrakul to a 17/17 and swing to bring him down to 1 and turn off any potential topdeck
City of Brass or Fetchland. He doesn't get a 2nd white source untapped and I win the game.
Game 3 I bring back the Mesmeric Orb. I start the game off by playing out a shock and
Fyndhorn Elves, T2 deploy the Orb + a tapped land to set up the mill standoff. He deploys one of the Thalia in his deck, I Essence Extraction it when I get the chance and we're not really doing a whole lot either way. I self-mill some big dudes, he counters another threat, but I have a Living Death in hand and wait for him to tap low enough to deploy. He does so in a later turn and I flip the board and bring back Dragonlord Silumgar, Gearhulk and Tasigur with nothing on his side. He calmly untaps and
Fumigates them away. We mostly play draw-land-go for a bit until I get the chance to cast a
Traverse the Ulvenwald with many card types in the grave. I tutor Emrakul, can't quite deploy without another land, but I take the opportunity to play out
Liliana of the Veil and
Ob Nixilis Reignited in subsequent turns. He doesn't use up a counterspell on them because of the Emrakul coming along soon and thinking he can keep them in check with manlands. I draw into
Remand soon and pull off one of the greatest plays I've ever made in Cube by casting Emrakul and leaving up two mana, having my opponent try to Dissolve the Emrakul, and then Remanding the Emrakul while on the stack to get the Mindslaver trigger and keep the Emrakul. It's at this point we realize that he had a potential kill since I had 3 card left in library with a
Compulsive Research in hand. That would have decked me and won the game. Instead, I kill him two turns later.
ROUND 3
In this round, I play against a five color deck that just seemed like it picked all fixing early in the draft and then picked up and played whatever it wanted to. Surprisingly, it didn't seem to stumble on mana in the games that we played. In the first game I was on the Orb Mill plan again and had a Living Death in hand that I was hoping to set up for a big turn later in the game. That plan fell apart as I saw him stock up his grave with relevant threats and good ETB effects while I wasn't really hitting much (to be expected with so few creatures). I spent some time using Control Magic and removal to keep his threats in check until we got to a point later in the game with him running low on cards left in library. Even then, he had assembled a pretty decent board and put me down to 3 life where I would be dead the next turn. I think there may have been one too many loots with Copter in the early game because he passed to me with one card left in his library. I paused, quickly scanned his graveyard, and saw that he had a
Baleful Strix. I fire off the
Living Death, he's forced to draw his last card, and then he's out of cards when it comes to his draw step.
In game 2 I figure that he'll be playing around Orb more heavily and can't rely upon it so I side it out like usual and bring in some more removal. Nothing relevant happens much in the early to mid game with myself mostly fetching and setting up my mana base and him pecking away at me down to 13. We're at a point where I've cast Emrakul and taken his turn with him at 18 life and an active
Sylvan Library and
Sorin, Grim Nemesis. I make him take 8 from the Library to drop him to 10, O-Ring his own Sorin, then crew and attack Copter into Emrakul and loot away a relevant card and make him keep a land. I present him one turn to deal with my finisher or lose. I believe he topdecks the
Sower of Temptation to steal my Emrakul and completely flip the tables on me. I answer his card with my own Mind Control effect with
Dragonlord Silumgar to take back my Emrakul. Then he plays a
Banishing Light to exile my Silumgar and regain control of Emrakul and hits me with the Sower + two tokens he had gotten from an earlier
Lingering Souls (I'm at 5 life). He draws and casts a
Bloodbraid Elf, however, and just beats me down for the final points of damage.
Game 3 mostly consisted of me trying to stick a Mesmeric Orb to try and ride that to victory, but that was quickly answered by an
Oblivion Ring. I then thought that I needed to set myself up for a Turbo Emrakul since I wasn't about to win a beatdown race, but I wasn't really drawing into relevant cards. That was until I flipped a
Gifts Ungiven off the top and fired it off for this pile:
And I let my opponent agonize over the split and make the decision. I get the land + Emrakul and I deploy a
Walking Ballista on 3 (thanks to the Temple) and fire it off in the face of an incoming
Banishing Light to give me two more creature types. I topdeck a land the next turn and am able to cast Emrakul and close out the game shortly thereafter.
ROUND 4 (Finals!)
I get paired up against the same drafter who wrecked my Mardu Aggro deck from a month back with UR Kiki and have to play against nearly the same deck in the Finals. Oh, except now he has also got
Pestermite so there are two ways to infinite combo kill me. Most of the 1st game was spent with me trying to play around the combo later in the game and trying to stick threats in the mid-game, but he usually had the counterspell or some means of dealing with it. The only real threat I managed to stick was a
Verdurous Gearhulk and he had already countered my other threats and even used
Torrential Gearhulk to flashback another counter. I distributed the counters 2 and 2 between my Gearhulk and another creature and thought I'd be able to begin beating down, but in comes
Dack Fayden and steals my guy, the other creature gets bounced, and I'm looking at a
Go For the Throat in my hand and thinking FML. I promptly lose the game not long after after finding an answer for one creature but still getting beat down thoroughly.
Game 2 is more interesting as it becomes the Orb Mill battle again and I'm able to stick an early Tasigur, the Golden Fang and apply some pressure. It is dealt with promptly and I start to tap out to self-mill more aggressively with a
Traverse the Ulvenwald in hand to hopefully turbo out an Emrakul. He mills out Kiki-Jiki at one point, so I no longer have to worry about the combo. But because of that and a few other creatures in graveyard, my
Living Death in hand is a mostly dead card that I won't be casting anytime soon. He has a
Ral Zarek just ticking up continuously in the meantime and reaches 7 loyalty, but ends up not ultimating it and just playing it safe. I try to make him pay by playing a
Dragonlord Silumgar and stealing the Ral. He has no countermagic in hand, but he does have an
Into the Roil to stop me. I draw into an Emrakul. I play out my turn and put him down to 13 life through attacks and cast it, but come to the realization that I'm going to deck out on my draw step with 5 cards left in my library and 6 tapped permanents. I scan my graveyard and see the
Volrath's Stronghold starting right at me so I can't tutor it up with Traverse to set up anything at all. I look through his hand to figure out if there's some way for me to survive, but he has only one blue source on 4 or 5 mana and I can't deploy any combination of Ral Zarek +
Pestermite or Pestermite +
Phyrexian Metamorph to keep myself alive. I couldn't even use
Dack Fayden to steal away my Artifact Land because that would put me on 5 tapped permanents which would still lose the game on draw step. If there were another blue source I think I had an out, but no good here. Still, great games all around!
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Quick Hits and Thoughts:
- I was originally planning on just doing 4 packs of 11 each for the draft process, but then quickly realized that that was probably not enough cards viewed to allow for people to construct meaningful or powerful decks. Any given draft pool would only have a total of 264 cards, and any given player would see a maximum of 51 unique cards in each pack. That's just way too few when my overall cube if 420. I think quilting was the right choice here as it led to less filler in decks, some more interesting decision-making with an open information format, and the ability to really plan out and craft synergistic payoffs.
- If you're planning on quilting anytime soon, make sure to flip the inner cards upside down. For my pod we were able to finish up Quilt 1 quickly since we planned out picks ahead of time on the fly and thought through other options. I don't think that was the case for the other pod as they took REALLY long to finish their 3 quilts. We changed from a completely flipped open info quilt in the first round to ones with only outer cards available in the subsequent two and those went much quicker. I guess after a certain point there might be some information overload for certain drafters, worth seeing what your playgroup prefers.
- Being able to consistently cast and deploy Emrakul, the Promised End is an absolutely insane option to have. I don't think there will ever be a Delirium deck as packed as mine in a traditional 8 man draft, but damn was it a blast to play. It was a fun puzzle to try and figure out the way to deploy Emrakul for a reasonable cost and most everyone I Mindslavered was relatively fine with it. Not as obnoxious as it was in Standard and there's more set-up than you'd think. It was more or less my only win condition aside from grinding people out in the late game with beats + walker control. I still think it was just fair as a win-con and there were even times when I just couldn't do anything all that crazy with certain hands and boardstates. I don't imagine that I'll see a Sultai deck as all-in on the plan like this in any normal 8-man draft, too many of the more versatile cards would likely be snapped up elsewhere.
- On that note, Crystalline Crawler is incredible. It's kind of ridiculous being able to ramp yourself from 4 to 9 mana over one turn cycle and presenting itself as a ritual on legs. I was really lucky to get as much on color fixing and valuing it as highly as I did throughout the draft, I think the card is far less impressive if you end up casting it with two colors versus three. Even though I was able to do a ton of work with it in many matchups, I still feel like it's mostly a fair card at my power level because you're putting most of your eggs in one basket. There is definite blowout potential and Aggro decks (of which there were none in this field) can heavily pressure you early, but if you manage to untap? It opens up a world of possibilities. I'm looking forward to someday using it to play a T5 Cruel Ultimatum. Just don't get it snatched by Dack Fayden.
- Walking Ballista is a damn good Magic card. Like most people, I underrated it when I first saw it spoiled, but being able to represent a ping, Shock or even Bolt on a stick gives you so many options in actual gameplay. I'm just waiting for the day that I can play a Verdurous Gearhulk and just create my own machine gun of death that just eats blockers and shoots people to death. Being able to curve out and keep x/1 and x/2 creatures in check, keeping your opponent from wanting to deploy them at all, is an amazing gain in tempo. It has some sweet interactions with cards like Volrath's Stronghold to rebuy a pinger on a stick, allows you to easily set up Delirium at instant speed, and it also is an excellent mana sink and topdeck in the late game. It just scales way more effectively than I thought it would, excellent card.
- I forgot to write it down on my notes as I played, but I did manage to fire off Gifts Ungiven another 2 times in previous matches but I do not recall the exact cards that I had picked. Most of the time it was just to fill the graveyard with card types for Delirium and/or early Emrakul. Gifts is more or less a package deal with reanimation cards and it does a good job helping the Graveyard decks branch from the GB base into blue for more payoffs and ways to fill up the grave alongside looters. I think the card will get even better with the release of AKH and a the new Liliana right on curve and ready to reanimate a threat that you dumped in the grave. Please give us a sweet reanimate-able creature this block that isn't retarded strong like Griselbrand.
. The ULD seems like a good outlet for
