Bronze to Mythic | Foundations | Draft 19 | Platinum 3 Start

[@thelifedragon2156]

p1p1, i think id give the nod to stab here over the gold 6drop. its just alot cheaper, and mono colored. niv is reasonable though, and filling out the collection is a nice bonus. p1p2 not going to say this is the wrong choice, but i would not recommend going gold card into off color gold card, locking yourself out of alot pathways that way. they share one color but eagle is not a good splash. so its still gonna make it hard to play all your early picks and also take the best cards of your early packs. which are going be on avg the strongest cards in your deck. berserker seems like a better follow up, imo. p1p7 this is why taking gold cards early is not necessarily the best. now you have to make a tough choice of "do i want to add a nice card to my deck", or "do i take a card that will enable me to play my splash card". taking land here is prorably right. it kinda sucks to have to take it this early as you can sometimes get these on the wheel over filler but it is what it is. p1p8, aetherize is not really a good card, bit of a noob trap from both sides of the table, sorry to say. it just looks better on paper then it tends perform vs experienced players. basically, the big problem is it can go horribly wrong. sometimes its great. but sometimes it bonces 1 cheep creature, or a creature with an etb. or they attack with nothing and you just wasted 4 mana. and even if it does bounce say a 3 drop and a 5 drop. you spend 4, they spend 8, thats is good tempo but still card disadvantage, so its just ok. and it tends to not be better than that, at least in the higher ranks. on avg, its not unplayble but still best to avoid i think. (that being said, it might do very well for you at the lower ranks) better pick would be abriture of woe. woe is pretty late. alot better than anything else here. so black might be wide open for the taking. worth speculating on i think. (but if you move into black you would most likly have to sideline the eagle. case in point to why gold cards can be limiting) 8:21 "grab the cheaper one" love to hear it. good stuff. just cant go wrong with that mentality. witness protection is pretty mediocre but not much else here for you. filler removal, you run it if you have to p1p10 same thing here. decent card or fixing. tough choice ok so hindsight 20/20 i miss read niv. i though it was combat damage not non combat damage. that makes it a very bad splash card in this case. so taking any duel lands was not correct this time around. and niv was probably not the right first pick either. oh well. 22:00 i think id build this a little differently. i dont like imprisoned by the moon, card is almost unplayable i think. and you have better interaction in the board. uncharted voyage. its not removal but thats blue for ya and interactive tempo is good enough to get the job done, and its still better than the negative tempo of moon. witness protection is pretty bad too but at least its cheap and doesn't give your opponent mana ahead of curve. so its good enough. make your move is also abit better than moon i think. aetherize. again i dont like the card very much, so yeah, 2 voyage's and move over the two moons and aetherize. all that being said, this deck looks fairly solid. lots of good flyers for the eagle and a nice low curve. should do ok. 4 wins maybe? i could see 5 with the different build i wrote above

[@half_pump]

The draft felt good in the moment, but we will see otherwise as I move through the gameplay. In hindsight there is definitely a better direction to go. I agree I could have definitely fixed the "removal" and dropped some of the Imprisoned in the Moon for Voyage. I like the mindset of it gives negative tempo because it gives them land ahead of turn where Voyage puts some hard decisions on them and would have been the better removal in this case. Thanks for the thought out comment!

[@moocowp4970]

Gameplay notes (im not going to provide a play by play this time 😅 just the main notes): -On board resources are more important than in-hand resources generally, which are more important than life, usually. (Obviously a 1/1 on the board isnt necessarily better than a 4/4 in hand, but worth thinking about). So when considering whether to lose life, sacrifice an on-board permanent, or discard a hand card, try to think about what the next few turns might look like but definitely ask the question "is my life important right now? Am i in danger?" and obviously if you're above 10 life most of the time the answer is "no" and it's usually worth sacrificing life instead of going down a whole card. -dont play out your lands until you know what you plan to do for the turn. This deck had a lot of draw/discard effects, but you kept playing your land so you couldn't discard them for spell if you wanted to. Usually i will try to play lands up until my highest cmc card in deck (so in your case 5), and then hold lands until I have two lands in hand. This helps for draw/discard effects, but also for bluffing (they can easily make decisions when they know you have no cards in hand, it's much harder for them if you have 2 cards in hand and 4-5 mana open... They dont know theyre just lands in hand haha) -try to deploy your creatures to your board first before trying to remove their stuff if possible unless you're a Control deck (but youre a tempo/aggro deck in this case, so not Control). So in game 1 for example you were happy to remove their stuff (while ramping them i might add!) before playing to your board, and then you were happy to trade off your creatures, leaving you with only one creature for Kaito (who needs creatures to function).

[@half_pump]

I definitely felt the mistake of not holding lands. I think I started to realize that halfway through game 2 that I really should hold land but then I still couldn't help myself and would play them. I really like your trick about the highest CMC and then hold a couple for bluffing or looting. That makes a lot of sense to me. I definitely overvalued removing first. I think I got in the mindset that I am blue so I must be control when reality I was definitely more a tempo/aggro deck in this build. Thanks as always for the great comment!

[@moocowp4970]

Man from the draft its already clear how much youre improving! Keep it up! I agree with the other commenters that i would have been choosing between Stab, Felidar, or the Reinforcements for p1p1, not Niv, which the stats will probably show isn't very good (again, you gotta look at the stats, Untapped Draftsmith lies to you for p1p1 for some reason). But the deck looked good enough in the end, obviously better removal would be nice, but your creature quality is great! I would say Aetherise should pretty much never make your deck though, so I wouldn't want it in my deck, it's borderline unplayably bad. I probably would have ended up Black/Blue as a result of my first few picks (Stab > Vampire Gourmand > either Arbiter or Scavenger), but the deck you drafted was great with 2 mystics, kaito, and eagle with a bunch of other flyers (the sunblessed healer and spectral sailors are great too). You also seem to underrate Refute a lil bit, it's definitely an overperformer in this set (as in performing better than most reviewers thought it would) and one of blue's best commons. Fyi, post draft: Blue/White can be a great deck (it was the most winning colour pair to start this set), and you had great cards for that archetype. It's great that you're reviewing the draft and seeing what other options were available, it will help in the future, but the deck you drafted ended up good! There were some gameplay things I'd change, not sure if they would have helped or not, but sometimes even the best drafters go 0-3, all we can do is identify as many potential errors as possible and keep an eye out for them in the future.

[@half_pump]

This was a weird one for sure. I felt pretty good about the deck (minus the removal pieces and having to leave up some bombs I noticed in other colors that could have been signals to move out of what I was doing) but then the performance was a little disheartening. I always appreciate the insight. Thanks for the comment!

[@thelifedragon2156]

34:24 the phoenix has to attack if able so just leaving back the angel seems pretty strong when you have the "oh no" button of aetherize if something goes wrong you also could have just popped off aetherize right there anyway. you could get more value off it later but your losing out on alot of mana here, and life points, that be ok if you get to eat the phoenix for free. but thats the downside of aetherize, you have to just pop it off, regardless of how good or bad it is. you might get a huge tempo swing later but your also just giving away free tempo here, so your not really going to gain an advantage. 34:44 and now they're also going to draw 2 more cards by recasting their cards. not trying to be mean, this game is just showing off the problems of the card. ok so, 1st game, you got mana screwed fairly bad. and your removal ramped your opponent. 3rd game mana screwed very bad, so pretty unlucky. 2nd might have been winable if you had been running a different card over aetherize. hard to say, but so i think the removal suite of the build killed this draft. might have done a little better if you were running other cards/maybe just playing a little tighter, as you could have won the 2nd game, which then could have lead to a win in a 4th game etc etc. but it still would have been tough with this luck. 43:25 falidar saivor also good. again, not going to first pick a gold card unless its a bomb. id still give the nod to the 1mana stab over the 4 mana spell. can only run so many 4 drops. but saivor is perfectly reasonable 46:39 reinforcements would have been a fine speculation as well, doesn't necessarily mean RW is open though, could be that there are both red and white drafters in the pod but just no RW drafters 49:00 does look like red was open, yup.

[@half_pump]

Doing the reviews after bad runs has been incredible help in seeing the open paths and is a great reminder to take a step back. I definitely felt myself zone in a bit on my draft and not see some open lanes on this one. I think a Rakdos draft could have been a really strong choice here. I definitely agree on my removal really affecting the game for me on this one. The Uncharted Voyage would have been a much better choice. Thanks again for the well thought out comments!

[@thelifedragon2156]

@@half_pump you're welcome. just trying to help. i dont think voyage or make your move are a ton better than your other interaction, but enough better to point out. bule's interaction, with the exception of the counter spells (which ironically enough are usually much worse), are unfortunately pretty sub par this set. even the blue cheap bounce spell this set is not very good(run away together. was good in BLB with etbs, but not so good here. tends to have negative tempo attached) blue tends to be rough around the edges with it come to true removal. but this set, its a tic rougher. makes it a tough main color. much better as a support color.

[@michaelwilkerson1287]

AETHERIZE is bad...... like bad bro

[@half_pump]

I concur.