Every year for the past seven years, I’ve attended DragonCon in Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. Each year, it starts off the same: all of my friends showing up, finding our hotel room, unloading all of our stuff. Then we do my two favorite things for three and a half days straight: drafting and drinking.
For the past four years, Kali and I have attended together, and each time has been better than the last. If you have never been to DragonCon before, I would recommend it. If you are nerdy enough to read articles about Magic (which is a good thing), then there will be plenty of awesome stuff for you to do no matter what your nerdy longings. Starting on the Friday before Labor Day, DragonCon is a three-day nerd party where you do whatever you want, dress however you want, drink however much you want, and game however much you want. There are comic book panels and artists’ events during the day, as well as ridiculous things like the live Rocky Horror Picture Show. This year even had a "walking party," where hundreds of people followed around three guys carrying boom boxes who were covered in speakers. It’s fun.
If you haven’t ever been to DragonCon, you should go at least once in your life. There’s plenty of stuff to do no matter what your hobby of choice is, and I usually find myself drafting constantly for the better part of the trip.
After seven years of drafting, you would think it gets old, but it really doesn’t, and that’s one thing I love most about Magic. The formats are always changing and always keeping things interesting. As for DragonCon, Magic hasn’t been the biggest part of it in the past, and I’m not really sure why. Lucky for us, Sunmesa Events (headed by Glenn Goddard, a.k.a. “the man who singlehandedly revamped State Championships”) decided to step in and take control of the Magic scene for the weekend, which made me very happy. I’ve seen Glenn around the block a few times, and the man knows a lot about making people happy. There were plenty of tournaments to be had, including the Grand Finale: a fifty-person Rotisserie Draft using all of Zendikar Block and Rise of the Eldrazi.
I might be getting ahead of myself, so let me explain:
Rotisserie Draft is a format where every player knows all of the cards in the card pool to select from, and you take cards much like how you would in a Rochester Draft. If you’re not familiar with Rochester, the pick order wheels when you get to the end of the players, and snakes back towards the beginning. The "wheel," or the last person to pick, gets to pick two cards, and then the person who was next to last picks again, and the person who picked first gets to pick last on the return trip. You repeat this process until every card in the known pool is gone, or everyone reaches a certain number of picks.
Afterwards, you use these cards to build a forty-card deck (people use sixty in some cases) and battle it out in a Swiss or Single-Elimination tournament. Now, with eight people, this can take a while if the card pool is big enough. Glenn decided that, instead of cutting the number of registrants in order to accommodate the card pool, he would just add three boosters (one from each set in Z/W/R) to the prize pool for each person above twelve. While this might make the draft take longer, it would make it much more of a spectacle – and more importantly, it makes it a lot more fun overall. So if you pick first, almost a hundred cards have been taken before you get your second pick? In these scenarios, you have to constantly update your pick order, because any person in front of you can take whatever card they want, completely messing up your strategy.
Now, for clarification, we began the draft with fifty people – three complete sets, plus a lot of opened boosters on the table, and a dream. Luckily, with Worldwake being on the list of sets, that meant someone would get a Jace, the Mind Sculptor! In even more of a twist, another Jace was opened in the packs, meaning two people would win the Jace lottery! If you were in the top five picks, you were guaranteed a Vengevine or Gideon Jura, which was nice too.
Me? I got fourth seed. Nice life, I know.
At this point in my mind, before the draft starts, I decide that instead of just money drafting, I wanted to win. So for my first pick (which was after the three people in front of me took the two Jaces and a Vengevine), I took Gideon Jura. I don’t know if you’ve ever played a game of Limited with Gideon, but he can pull victory from the clutches of death, and I have literally never lost a game where he has come into play, nor have I seen anyone lose when they cast Gideon. For five mana, he is the best card for Limited in a very long time, and he still has a decent price tag attached to him.
As far as the draft itself, my plan was to go white, just as long as it wasn’t really overdrafted. There were plenty of Journey to Nowheres and solid creatures to go around, but you really have to try to find a read on what people are picking in order to get an edge on a draft pod this size.
While I don’t think a draft this size has ever been done before, it was run very smoothly and professionally. The judges timed people very well, and enforced the rules of "if you don’t pick it in time, you get a basic land." In the first round of picks, a friend of mine called out "Fauna Shaman" when he was walking around trying to find it, and a Judge laughed. My friend proceeded to describe what the card did, and then the joke was out of the bag and the Judge said, "That card isn’t in this format." After that, he had five seconds to make a pick and ended up with…Forest! Horrible for him, but a great story for everyone else.
Closer to the end of the first wheel, I found myself trying to remember what every single person had picked, and I was doing a fine job of it. Someone actually managed to get both Comet Storms, which was pretty ludicrous if you think about it. It was pretty awesome to see people forget certain cards existed, specifically Mordant Dragon and Conquering Manticore, as those cards went absurdly late (not even in the first three rounds). I actually ended up wheeling an Admonition Angel in the first round, which was just awesome. After taking a white fetchland to go along with the Angel when it was my turn again, I decided that I wanted to delve into a second color and try to start picking up removal. After most of the bombs were gone, it got back to me, and I began taking things like Staggershock, Burst Lightning, and every other good removal spell in red, since I found that red was incredibly underdrafted in this field.
About five picks and two hours later, Glenn decided to speed up the process by allowing everyone to start picking two cards at a time. This sped things up considerably, but also allowed people a bit more breathing room when building a deck. People started taking multiple of niche cards and began snagging the best removal in multiples, while I moved all-in on Mono Red with three Kiln Fiends and almost every good removal spell in the format. One girl actually ended up with multiple Archive Traps and four-plus Hedron Crabs, while another guy snagged six Halimar Excavators. It was a sight to behold, and they did quite well during the tournament. Here is what my deck ended up looking like:
3 Kiln Fiend
5 Goblin Shortcutter
2 Torch Slinger
1 Magmaw
1 Kazuul, Cliff Tyrant
1 Rapacious One
1 Devastating Summons
1 Burst Lightning
2 Punishing Fire
1 Staggershock
2 Inferno Trap
3 Spire Barrage
17 Mountain
I ended up abandoning white after the fourth pick, when all of the Journeys to Nowhere had been taken, and all of the solid removal and bombs had been taken. Mono-Red was my desire after wheeling all of the Kiln Fiends during the part where we started picking two at a time, and I never looked back. It was wide open, and I even got the Spire Barrages around twentieth pick or so. (I probably should have taken them earlier, but I just didn’t want to eliminate the possibility of still playing white, since Gideon and Admonition Angel are just so ridiculous.)
After about five hours of drafting the cards, we began building our decks and playing the six rounds of Swiss. The prize for first place was the only thing that really mattered, so a single loss would probably eliminate you from the tournament. I ended up crushing the first two rounds, then picking up a loss in the third round against someone who ended up splitting the finals. After picking up the loss, I realized it was already almost 10 p.m., so Kali and I jetted from the event room in order to initialize the partying.
While the weekend was full of debauchery, I don’t think I can regale you with all the gory details. Suffice it to say that Sunday night was one of the coolest nights of my life, and most of it is due to amazing friends and an even more amazing wife. Jager Bombs. The Woodruff Suite. Fill in the rest with The Hangover, and you’re probably close.
Go to DragonCon. Take off the entire weekend and just let loose. It’s amazing, and I can’t recommend it enough. Special thanks to Glenn Goddard and Sunmesa Events for running the Magic area with great efficiency… And also to Adam Racht, for giving us a place to crash when our roommates decided that staying until Monday was too much for them.
….
As most of you know, Pro Tour: Amsterdam was this past weekend and I didn’t qualify for it. I had a slew of close-call finishes, but came up short – which is one of the reasons why I was at DragonCon instead. I wasn’t able to keep up with the coverage much, since Internet in our hotel room would have cost us about $24 a day, but I’ve been devouring the coverage since I got home.
Brad Nelson is on some kind of amazing streak, and I find it only fitting that he defeated Kai Budde in the Quarterfinals, giving him another notch in his Awesome Belt. While he hasn’t won all of his tournaments, putting up consistent results will almost assuredly make him Player of the Year, barring someone going on a ridiculous run in the next few months. There are still a few Grand Prixs and Worlds left on the list, but he is outperforming everyone and I don’t think it will even be close. Brad is an awesome guy and really deserves it more than most people I know. Congrats on your finals appearance, bro!
As for the Extended format as a whole, I don’t know how largely relevant these tournament results are going to be for the Magic community at large. Once Scars of Mirrodin comes in, Time Spiral Block and 10th Edition will rotate out, taking with it many of our favorite friends. Tarmogoyf leaving Extended makes me infinitely sad, as well as the powerful combination of Grove of the Burnwillows and Punishing Fire (although only the former is actually leaving). Faeries is set to dominate Extended, since mana bases are much worse than normal, Grove of the Burnwillows is gone, and a lot of the more aggressive green decks will wither due to the lack of Tarmogoyf. Where does that leave us?
If you look at the Top 8, you can see a variety of different decks, but mostly I see Standard from two years ago. Doran? Faeries? White Weenie? 5-Color Control? Merfolk? I’m not saying that the new Extended format is boring, but it seems like a rehash of every deck I’ve played over the last three years. Nothing new. Nothing exciting. Hopefully with the upcoming rotation, Scars will bring something fresh to the table (God Forbid they bring back Affinity!), making the next Constructed format bearable.
Standard has been really boring for me as of late, and I’m looking for Scars to shake things up. I’ve always been an advocate for larger Constructed formats, if only due to the amount of diversity that brings in playable decks – so I will be disappointed if the "New Extended" tastes like "Old Standard" when January rolls around.
A few spoilers for Scars of Mirrodin are already up, and the set is looking quite interesting. Limited play will likely be a surefire blast, and I expect to win my first game due to Poison Counters in the very near future. Unfortunately, I never played with Virulent Sliver, so I never got to experience the thrill of saying "Kill you with Poison Counters!"
Infect and Proliferate go very well together, and my only hope is that they’ve tested the set enough that neither is absolutely broken. Old Mirrodin Limited was actually my favorite personal favorite limited format of all time, and I’m really looking forward to how this block shapes up. Will Stoneforge Mystic become a $10 card? Will Affinity become a real Legacy deck? Will Steel Overseer be the next Arcbound Ravager? You tell me.
Thanks for reading,
Todd
strong sad on MOL