Booster Draft Day

There are a lot of things I like about Magic, from opening up new packs to collecting cards to building decks and getting together with friends to play, but I don't think I've had quite as much fun with Magic as I did yesterday at our booster draft.

Drafting

Drafting, for the uninitiated, is a form of Limited play (limited, as opposed to Constructed, being a format in which the players don't have knowledge of the cards they'll be using until they start). The draft format we followed goes like this. Each player brings three unopened Time Spiral boosters, and a pile of basic land. Players sit around a table with their three packs in front of them. Each player opens one pack, looks through the cards in it, picks one and put it face down in front of them. Then they hand the other 14 cards to their left, and take 14 cards from their right. Then they pick another card and keep it, and pass left. Continue until each player has 15 cards in front of them. The second pack goes to the right, and then the third to the left again.

Drafting is done without discussing what you're seeing or what you're trying to do. Since Magic has 5 colours and spells are tied to a limited resource, land, which is colour-specific, you have to adapt quickly to what you get handed, picking out good cards that you can use in the deck that you'll end up building with all of them, which is itself a moving target as components pass in and out of your hands. You're trying to guess what other people are up to, based on what you see passed to you and what you can infer may have been taken already and by whom.

When you have 45 cards in front of you (and you keep those cards when you're done), you have to build a deck of at least 40 cards composed of those 45 cards and as much basic land as you like. Then, a tournament is played with those decks.

The Warmup

Yesterday's draft was attended by Optimist Prime, Null, Serdic and myself. My lovely wife had a curling bonspiel. Foran Object's lovely wife Pigtails was joining my lovely wife for that game, meeting us at our house. As it happens I asked everybody to turn up at 1, so Pigtails, Serdic and Null all showed up literally within one minute of one o'clock. Prime turned up a little later, but since he brought six Caledonian 80-shillings and since we were chatting with Pigtails anyway, no worries.

Pigtails' shoes. No, seriously.

We reviewed the rules of the draft quickly, and got started.

Draft Away!

The rare in the first pack I opened was a Squall Line, basically a slightly recosted Hurricane. I picked it, thinking that Green was a good acceleration colour and I could probably use a little. I got passed a rare Spike Tiller and took that too, and then a card later someone handed me a timeshifted Call of the Herd. Call is an awesome green card and can give you amazing momentum if you get it early; I couldn't believe it was passed to me. Clearly green was looking like a major colour for me. I took a timeshifted Flying Men and a Conflagrate, keeping my options open for green/red, green/blue, or all three. I picked up a red Sulferous Blast and then we were getting to the bottom of the pack, so I ended up with a couple of black and blue cards that I probably wasn't going to use.

I opened up the second pack and shuffled through the cards, then saw the rare.

New Hotness.

Easy decision to make.

I saw a Bogardan Hellkite go past; it's a really sweet card in red but there's no way I could expect to cast it, at a CMC of 8. Not in this format. I picked up a bunch of efficient red including a Blazing Blade Askari, Plunder, Undying Rage and a Viashino Bladescout. The Hellkite came back around to me so I took it just because. I picked up a little green -- Molder, Strength in Numbers -- but at this point I had gone from green and maybe red, to red with some green.

We got to talking about the Timeshifted cards and Null made fun of the fact that they included Icatian Javelineers in that set. Fallen Empires had a few decent cards, okay, but that wasn't one of them. Why bother timeshifting that?

So, naturally, he ended up getting handed the Javelineers.

Javelineers! Sweet!

The third pack didn't contain anything terribly exciting. A few more red burn spells, another Askari, a Brass Gnat and a Venser's Sliver. I snagged a timeshifted Dragon Whelp, and saw Norin the Wary go by. The timeshifted card from my pack was Enduring Renewal, which I took the second or third time it was passed to me. This card was a monster in Constructed, but you really need to build a deck around it. In Limited it's not so hot and the rules are a little hard to figure out when you first look at it.

Each of us then took to building 40-card decks with our new-found booty, which is harder than you'd think given that we had to build them face down and just remember what was where.

The Tournament

We ended up playing one-on-one duels, with everybody playing everyone else at least once, and then a two-stage seeded final.

Main Round:
Null vs Prime (Null wins), Serdic vs Nail (Nail wins)
Null vs Serdic (Null wins), Prime vs Nail (Prime wins)
Null vs Nail (Nail wins), Serdic vs Prime (Prime wins)
Null vs Prime (Null wins), Serdic vs Nail (Nail wins)
Null vs Serdic (Null wins), Prime vs Nail (Nail wins)
Null vs Nail (Nail wins), Serdic vs Prime (Serdic wins)

Semi-Finals:
Null (seeded 2nd) vs Prime (seeded 3rd), Null wins
Nail (seeded 1st) vs Serdic (seeded 4th), Nail wins

Finals:
Null vs Nail for 1st, Nail wins
Serdic vs Prime for 3rd, Serdic wins

Final standings:
1st - Nail (7-1)
2nd - Null (5-3)
3rd - Serdic (2-6)
4th - Prime (2-6)

The games were a lot of fun. Serdic had his deck set up to do blue, green, and black, and switched between combinations of two of those colours. Null played white/black and Prime put together a four-colour sliver-heavy thing that I didn't take too seriously until he kicked my ass with it.

All of the games were lots of fun, and real nail-biters. Every single action was carefully calculated to be as efficient as possible. Most of the games could have gone either way. If I had dropped Sulferous Blast one sliver earlier in my first game with Prime, I could have won that one. If I hadn't Plundered Serdic's swamp in my last game with him, I could just as easily have lost. My first game with Null was really the only exception, as he was screwed for land and couldn't mount an effective defence.

My deck worked out to have a fantastic curve. My early games were all about Sulferous Blast, Askaris, Bladescouts and the Spike Tiller. My Lotus didn't show up until my second game with Serdic, when I used it to get my Hellkite into play and destroy a 5/5 fattie he was bringing out of suspend. Call of the Herd was missing in action until the last two games, but when it did turn up it was a powerhouse. Squall Line, the card which got me started on green at the very beginning of the draft, never got played.

Everyone drafted and played very well. Serdic did extremely well, especially considering that he's a new player and the rest of us started a decade or more ago. Almost every game was close and they were all extremely fun.

Loot

I picked up two Mirrodin boosters as prizes. The first place prize was one of the boosters; the second through fourth players would then draft the other booster in ranked order, so each would get 5 cards. There were a few decent cards in the one that got drafted.

In between the fourth and fifth games of the main tournament, we stopped for chicken wings. We had buffalo wings and tequila lime wings. The tequila lime were very good, tasting mostly like a light and not overpowering lime plus garlic, and not so much like tequila, which to my limited memory tastes like throw-up.

After the prizes were divided up, Prime had to leave. We bid him adieu and the rest of us settled in and had another beer, and decided to give Battlestar Galactica a try.

Battlestar Galactica

Null and I broke out the BSG cards he'd picked up and tried to figure it out. We tried to go through the scripted introductory sample game that the starter is set up to play, but it didn't work out, so I just went through the rulebook and we learned it the hard way.

It's a really fun game and I'm going to be picking up some cards. It captures the feel of the show very well, with infighting between the colonial survivors for influence and power, interrupted by the occasional Cylon attack.

Null had an issue with the rule that ships can only fight ships and personnel can only fight personnel, after I told him he couldn't push Billy, the President's aide, out an airlock to counter an attack by Vipers.

After that we retired downstairs to eat pizza and watch Aliens. Always a good time.

Good times.

Today

My lovely wife enjoyed her game, as did Pigtails; after the game they went shopping and then the spiel put on dinner and dancing. The schedule is a bit of a cluster-fuck, being done at the last minute and without a massive amount of competence, and consequently they have a game again this morning.

So here we are.