Draft Report: wheel of fortune

In Musee d'Orsay, I saw a pretty sweet Renaissance artwork entitled Wheel of Fortune by Edward Burne Jones



Basically fortune turning a giant wheel. Kings, once mighty, are now being inexorably ground under the wheel. The great are laid low and the weak are made strong; it's nothing personal. Now I'm not much of a fatalist but sometimes things clearly happen that are beyond our control.



For example, last week's draft at Nird. Look at this pile of junk:

We call this a 17 land "pile". Basically I sit around and hope my Fen Hauler can hit the field and win for me. I did get some cool rares but only because I was lucky enough to open them. This happened because I grossly misread the table. Blue was colossally open and Elliott, sitting to my right, also went white/black. So, yet again, I am drafting the exact color pair of my neighbor upstream. Thus carefully guaranteeing that I will always get the second-best card in those colors.


In my defense, I feel like I was totally tricked.

The bait & switch

Yes, that's a pack 1 pick *5* Call for Unity.

Loyal reader, see if you can tell the difference between these two cards.
 

Me neither! Now I'm not saying that Call for Unity is on the same level as one of the most ridiculous bombs in recent limited memory, but it's pretty damn close. It's certainly close enough to "win the game" where it's worth putting a bit of work into triggering the Revolt. PLUS when the Revolt condition is ongoing, that gives you a lot more flexibility. It goes to show to never get *too* attached to your assumptions. There's more out there than dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Come for the tragic magic plays, stay for the slightly mangled Shakespeare quotes.

Where was I? Right, the result! My karmic reward for drafting this dogpile? Why I went 3-0 of course. Again, a hefty dose of luck was involved. My handful of good cards showed up disproportionately often (<3 Marionette Master) and twice I had opponents with better decks that made arguably Bad Calls that lost them a key game.

Discussion

I still can't tell which way the insect is facing fyi

The very definition of build-around-me-C. You feel like you're getting away with something when you drop a 5/5 for five or six mana but it's not tremendous. There are mild black/white artifact synergies but I would never seek out drafting this deck.



This card plays backwards because you want to get the +1/+1 counter when you sacrifice your own creature, not by killing enemies. So sometimes he's too small to get the +1/+1 trigger and just gets blanked by an x/3. But if you can force a trade, or use hard removal, he becomes a 3/3 and fearlessly dashing in with this guy with some servos to spare feels very, very good.

This card has gotten a lot better in Aether Revolt drafts. The same limitation applies, it doesn't want to be in an aggro deck. But there's a lot more white controlling decks it seems.