So I don’t really do cube. There are several reasons for this. It always seems to land right around times where I’m busy and/or need a break from magic (i.e. the holidays). The time-investment to familiarize myself with the cards, the ‘known combos’ &c is just too steep. Also, I highly suspect that my inner Spike would trump my Johnny and I would just be the fun-police with RW aggro over and over again, promising to either win or lose by turn 5.

This is an elaborate setup to explain why Kaldheim has felt really difficult for me lately. My happy-place drafting is Gruul in RNA. You curve, you have tricks, you beat people in the face with a clear plan. I get a little less comfortable in control decks, as I’m not as conversant with the ingredients, but I can get the job done. The more prince-y a format is, with powerhouse bombs that you have to figure out how to make work, the more I fall apart. And now drafting lands is a major priority since the Snow payoffs in this set are pretty real. Which brings up to Kaldheim.

I was listening to LR when LSV quasi-jokingly referred to this card as “Cruel Ultimatum“, the classic game-ending-but-impossible to cast. Normally, a card requiring WUBRG+2 would be categorized as unplayable in Limited. But this set is grindy enough–and dual-landsy enough–that it’s one of the best uncommons, a virtual four-for-one. That presupposes that you already did you homework, snagged dual-lands, and did a lot of heavy thinking. In short, you drafted like a cube draft.

I had a good coaching session with Ethan where he made a really interesting point. In most formats, “5-color Good Stuff” is your emergency parachute when a draft goes off the rails. Take some mana-fixing, take best available cards, and hold on for dear life. In Kaldheim, “5C Good Stuff (with Snow)” is Plan A. That snow lands can both fix and provide an additional avenue of power really makes a difference. Again, this is very far from my traditional draft approach of find a lane and put the pieces together. Or rather, I need to open my mind to the “5C Snow Lane” which doesn’t look like a traditional two-color pairing.

The other thing that Ethan recommended I work on is try to aggressively identify when the Snow Land is the “best card” in the pack. Obviously it’s not the best card per se, but rather a necessary stepping stone to the 5C Snow Lane. Sultai lands are the best, dual-snow are really good, plains are pretty useless. So let’s see how I did on the first try here

draft log

Huh, I guess it stopped capturing P1p1 again. Well an easy Elvish Warmaster, solid Quadrant Theory All-Star since it’s good at literally every stage of the game.

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Okay well P1p2 was the first hard choice. Rune of Might is good and it follows the rare nicely versus a dual-land in the Temur colors. I honestly don’t know what I should have picked here.

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P1p3: Took Crush the Weak, though I would have taken any non-plains snow dual over it.

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P1p4: Ooof, this is getting harder. Not great green in the pack but a reasonable dual is in the pack along with the best black common. I took the land here, but maaaaaybe you take Feed? I can already see this is going to be hard.

Snow lands dried up after that with some decent blue that I didn’t take (Mistwalker being the big signal)

performance

Lost round one to Koll and a single Goldvein pick with the lifelink rune. Man that card is good (Koll). Really speaks to the grindy nature of the format that just constantly recycling creatures is nigh-unbeatable.

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Round two didn’t go much better, facing UW. game 2 I had a pretty sweet Alpha Strike with the Warmaster giving +2/+2 to a whole host of 1/1 Elf tokens. Eked out game three through sheer cunning and guile. And King Harald’s Revenge was shockingly relevant in buying me time by throwing it on an otherwise suicidal lifeliker.

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Round three was a pretty convincing loss to a 5C snow deck. I couldn’t pressure enough early before their overwhelming value ground me down.

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