Thinking about adding a third wheel to this blog: cooking! Just in case my Venn diagram overlap between Magic cards and raising toddlers wasn’t quite narrow enough, let’s shave another demographic off. Because I made a hell of a Bolognese last night.

Draft log

P1p1

Fun series of picks! I think these are all solid B+ cards in the right deck. They are all narrow (gold, party-deck, landfall) and I’ve seen Orah do some serious work against, so I take it as having the highest ceiling.

P1p2

I think this is a pretty easy Deadly Alliance, as it can be fast, efficient, AND unconditional. All beautiful things.

P1p3

This was a tighter choice. Bubble Snare is more powerful in a vacuum (quasi-physics pun there I guess. Sort of) and Malakir Blood-Priest is a solid player in both a party deck and clerics. It’s also a great bridge card that can go in many decks, so I narrowly take it over the snare. Close choice.

P1p4

This was also close. Rabid Bite is a solid removal in this set. You also can’t have too many Stonework Packbeasts. The removal of the bite is higher, but the packbeast goes anywhere. I take it.

p1p5

This pack was devoid of good black or white cards, so I take Falconer as having the highest ceiling.

p1p6

I don’t love my choices here. I take the Mind Drain as it’s a playable card in my black core, but the other colors look weak with no clear signal anywhere to be found.

p1p7

Black is drying up, though this looks a touch late for all of these very good 2-drops. I take the packbeast, under the “you can’t have too many” rule. However, the roilmage might be the most powerful card.

The pack rounds out with a VERY late Geopede in P1p9 and a Bug-Catcher in P1p10. Pack 2 I see a surprisingly amount of red, but never quiiiite enough to lure me off Dimir. Then I get the shame: pack 3 pick 10 Thundering Rebuke. It WHEELED. That was deeply disrespectful.

Summary

Well my awkward Esper deck started out by beating a different awkward Esper deck. Hooray for responsible(ish) mana bases! And then, uh, I played them again right in a row. Alas poor Mordak, I hardly knew thee. So a bit of an asterisk on THAT 2-0 start. Roost got me out of a sticky situation in round 3 and then manascrew brought me home. Whew!

Interesting Moments

p2p1

I think this was the potential opportunity to jump into red, for the Thundering Rebuke. The signals from earlier were the wheeling Geopede (which was in consideration for P1p1) and a rather late Bug-Catcher. But ultimately I flinched, I felt more certain in the blue. The red then proceeded to flow–gush, if you will–for the rest of the packs and I felt bad.

3-0

3-0 physically, but not spiritually. The repeat match against the same player was fate really driving that point home.

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