Going to try something new and start with the end and then work backwards to see what happened. Bad draft? Lost equity on gameplay? I’m still bouncing around a 50% win-rate on Strixhaven, which is certainly lower than I want to be.

1-2

And frankly, it’s a generous 1-2. I went 0-2 in straight sets and played a “rage” round three seeking redemption. Played against a weak oppo and still barely took it in three. It felt like the deck was… not good.

What’s weird is that looking at this… it looks fine! Lots of individual pieces of power: a good learn/lesson suite, bookworms to finish, reasomable removal. But it played absolutely miserably because it did not have a plan. You can see it in the mix: some really powerful high-end, but no good ramp (missing Field Trip, Eureka Moment etc.). Some fun early power: Quandrix Pledgemage + Mage Duel and other magecraft enablers… but not nearly enough of it. Thus the deck awkwardly bridged two plans, neither of which work well together.

The Draft

This was one of those irritating drafts where a lane presented itself in the third pack with aboslutely no warning. Hofri Ghostforge is an absolute bomb and when it showed up at P3p3 I just started swearing.

The draft itself felt like it was going pretty well, with securing a solid Lesson suite in the first few picks. Then it got a little hairy

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Stayed open after the Lesson suite and sort of backed into Quandrix early in pack 2 but never really felt like it got there. If I drafted differently I could have had a 5x Biomathematician deck, but I never saw the fractal-makers and that didn’t seem like it would make much of a difference. Right lane, bad luck.