I still don’t fully understand why this set was so brief in time. Apparently it was so big they decided to split it in two pieces?

Trophies

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Nine trophies! This tops my personal best of 8 (tied with AFR and Zendikar Rising) so that’s nice. Looks like a pretty fair reflection of the format, with blue and black both showing up 5 times, red 4, white 3 and green 1. Zero splashes and the winning decks were tight, focused decks. Plus, I got to add to my all-time Hall of Fame with The Sifter Horde.

Most Drafted

Commons

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The Awakener is a bit of an oddity, as I did two late Bo3 drafts where 5 Awakeners wheeled around to me despite black not being open. That’s too good of a common to be anyone’s “most drafted” common. The Sentry definitely feels like me though: a solid little 2-drop that can actually do a surprising amount of work.

Uncommon

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I got a shocking amount of mileage out of Lunar Frenzy. The quasi-“Oops, you’re dead” along with some surprising flexibility as a 1-2 mana trick was just great. And Midnight Hunt was not the *best* home that we’ve ever seen for the Alchemist, but it could definitely close out game with some flashback action.

Rare

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This card never stopped being hilarious. Incredible board presence, completely flips the dynamics of any sort of life-race. Just great stuff. Even had it in my one IRL draft of Midnight Hunt. Clearly we’re meant to be soulmates.

personal lessons

About halfway through the format, I tried writing down a sentence fragment on something I either learned from that game or something I need to work on. So in no particular order:

maximize instant-speed removal

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Fateful Absence wasn’t great, as it gives back the card in the form of a clue token. However there was at least one instance where I grossly underutilized it. I sniffed out that the opponent had a trick, but I maximized my mana by casting Silversmith instead of keeping my mana up and gunning for the 2-for-1 by casting my removal in response. A classic example of where the “usually right heuristic” of Maximize Mana wasn’t the best line.

Clear Shot was more on the opposite side of things: I loved maximizing that thing. The number of times I could make a reckless attack, let oppo set up blocks and then use Clear Shot to win a combat with the stats AND wipe out a double-block leading to a series of stunning victories… the card was very good. Do not underestimate “bite + stats + instant” in future sets.

take a breath when tilting

Okay, so Liesa is just a ridiculous card, A/A+ bomb. But my deck was also really good, with my own angel and a huntmaster &c &c. I was doing great and I just chocked when this card showed up and made bad play after bad play, throwing good magic cards after bad. Take a breath, let your timer rope, and come back with a clear head.

Bad Drafts lead to bad games

When I was really into Starcraft 2, Day[9] had a really great piece of wisdom. Always make sure to focus on the right “bad” part of your game, otherwise you can draw the wrong conclusions. In starcraft, this was all about finessing the macro (the strength of your economy) and the micro (proper control of your units). If your macro had hiccups, your overall level of resources would be constrained and you would go into a fight with artificially small forces. If you just focused on the fight, you might draw the wrong conclusions and change your game in suboptimal ways instead of focusing on the real problem. You need more supply depots!

The parallel to magic is pretty easy to draw: a bad draft will lead to bad games. Don’t try and glean lessons from a bad deck. Go back to basics: card evaluation, finding the open lane, synergies between cards, etc. Then when entering battle with a reasonable deck, THEN look at gameplay decisions.

overall record

35 drafts, 9 trophies. 59% win rate in Best of Three, 62% in Best of One