Fresh on the heels of teaching Baby Raptor High five, a new core set is in! Apparently it’s called Core 2019 with the acronym M19. That seems clear.

Draft

Draft Recap

I honestly liked how I navigated this. No wickedly clear lane, P1p4 Luminous Bonds is a pretty good signal for white that was borne out. Red seemed open in pack 1 (P1p9 Lightning Mare is a little late) but there was never A Reason to switch lanes so radically. Early fixing set up to get REAL greedy in pack 3 later (P3p2 Chromium baby!.

Mistakes looking back:

 

This was a tough call. I knew Dryad was great but I already had one and I felt like I needed some power level to get there. If I knew I was going to get an elder dragon in pack 3, I would definitely take the Greenseeker. In fact, I think I should be taking the greenseeker no matter what.

Here I just freaked myself out. I knew I had to figure out how to make Chromium work but since I was ‘splashing’ blue and black to cast, does a blue/black dual land help? Uh, yes it does since then just one manalith/etc. gets me there.

Another self-freak out. Still unsure what happened here. An 0/4 that can also act as a (admittedly clumsy) win-condition is strictly better than a 1/3 lifelinker without a LOT of lifegain payoffs. Which I didn’t have.

Deck

This looked good! Some greedy splashes for the Chromium and Poison-Tip Archer, but it has a decent plan of “stall, then win with something big”.

Learnings

First, I had some horrific misplays when I used my Take Vengeance on the wrong card. It’s funny how mentally I think of it as “destroy target creature that attacked” but it can kill that Suspicious Bookcase! Just a lazy mental error. A bit disappointing that I never got to cast Chromium even once (I either won the game or didn’t draw it). No other real surprises. Dryad Greenseeker is great, but if you’re reading this you knew that already probably.