Chaos drafting in Late July
This post was written while listening to one of my favorite Shakey Graves songs: Late July
Another Friday, another dip into the Missoula game store scene. Earlier this evening, I headed to Muse for a chaos draft. I chose: Foundations, Edge of Eternities, and Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
I spent a lot of the last week thinking about how to help improve my game. I played out my match 3 from last week a few times in my head, though to be completely honest, between work and all of the things on my plate, I didn't always get too far into the analysis. (I've been a sleepy guy lately)
Some of my reflections are that I can get a little too eager, play out my resources too early. I think I am getting decent at drafting and sometimes surprise myself with deckbuilding creativity, but the gameplay can still get me into trouble. One of my takeaways was to look for cards that made more game objects like tokens and counters, and to try and think about how to win longer games. I tend to get into a bit of a tempo or aggro gameplay trap and then get out-valued. With that mindset, I tried to go into the chaos draft thinking about how to grind longer games.
I first picked a Kamigawa enchantment called Roaring Earth. I figured that it was a cheap payoff for landfall, it could probably help me accrue value, and it had a channel mode that could be useful for a late game top deck. It's not sexy, but honestly, Nice job Joe, that was a good P1P1.
From there, I ended up with Stump Stomp, Eusocial Engineering, and a few other cards that wanted lands to come into play. I found a few not amazing rampant growth style effects and I felt like I had a deck going. I knew I could probably make robots. Now, in retrospect, I wonder if I should have played another land to make sure I hit my land drops?
I kept thinking to myself-- Look for removal and find creatures that can hang, Joe! I was drafting a cool and techy package of landfall-matters, but I was struggling to find playable creatures in Red and Green. At some point, I took a Temur Battlecrier, which seemed really cool if I could pull it off. In retrospect, I should have felt comfortable starting to draft blue cards earlier. I could have probably splashed red instead of being a dedicated gruul deck (second week in a row!) but I was having fun with it.
Once we got to the games, my deck functioned, but inconsistently. After a few rounds, I finally started just putting in these 2/2 menace creatures for 3 mana that I had been avoiding. With the counters from my enchantments, it would have been good to take advantage of that. I lost round 1, tied round 2 to turns (but we decided to roll off for the win and I lost the die roll), lost round 3, and finally won round 4. It was humbling after feeling like I was on a bit of a hot streak. I'm tired today after an early morning airport dropoff too, which may have made me a little less tactical.
It's funny though, even though my deck wasn't operating, it was fun to play. I loved searching up lands, building landfall triggers, and having some fun lines. In one game, I used Lithobraking to create a lander token, so I could hold priority, sack it, and fund another land which made a creature big enough to blank a removal spell. I still didn't have an amazing amount of card draw, but I definitely felt that my goal of trying to think more about the long game was working. The games were going less well, but I was enjoying them more. I was trying to just play good clean magic. My record was worse and it didn't matter.
So yeah, I don't know what that all means. There is something going on here with the Dunning–Kruger effect. I know more now, I understand more of how all of this works, which means sometimes I am bad at it, but mostly because I understand it more? It's a more interesting space to be in but also a more frustrating one.
I feel like I am settling in here a little more in Missoula. I still don't know my way around town, but I can find new pathways to run and can drive home without a GPS. It's nice to feel that parallel in my magic games too. I'm not fully settled in, but I am starting to know what I don't know. I think that is what makes the game so satisfying. Here I am, feeling more engaged going 1-3 than I did going 2-1. What can you do?