7-24-17 Draft: as mid-rangey as it gets

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Or if you want to cruise through at your own speed:

http://draftsignals.com/draft/-KprqOb2XbuYBSZ0V-Ii

Pack 1

Pick 1

   

Well that's a lot of gold cards and functional gold cards. Driven to Despair and Obelisk Spider are both good cards but they are more payouts for being in those colors rather than reasons to jump in and force it (like one of the OP evil gods would be in this set). Unquenchable Thirst can be very good removal in a slower, more controlling deck. Vizier of the True is nice in a deck with lots of exert, i.e. the red/white aggressive deck. But it's not as good in your average white deck without the internal synergies. I still take it because I have no idea and I'm bad at magic.

Pick 2

 
A pretty interesting pick 2. Do I stay on color with pretty good situational removal or do I take a more powerful card in a different color? I take the Tenacious Hunter because I think a four-mana 4/4 with upside is significantly better. Stay open! Hold the course!

Pick 3

And I get paid off basically immediately. Ha! Take that karma!

Pick 5

Oooo. It's probably too much to hope for that the P1p1 Spider will wheel (almost certainly someone in one of those two colors will speculate on it) but I can dream! And there WERE two gold cards in those colors.

I stay in my BG lane for the rest of the pack and it seems reasonably open. In hindsight (more on this later) it looks like red is really open too.

Pack 2

 
I stare at this for a while. Sifter Wurm is pretty good, exactly what a ramp deck wants. I'm just not sure if I am a ramp deck, what with my zero pieces of ramp so far. Grind to Dust does require a splash, but given how the Grind half is superbly playable on its own, it's a safe splash. I go with it.

Pick 6

   

Ay, this feels a little bad. That's a lot of pretty solid red cards going very late. Also zero green and only a single mediocre black card.

Pick 7

 
Arrrgh! It starts to feel worse! Survivor's Encampment is the closest thing to a BG card fyi.

Fortunately it starts to lighten up a little and I get some deserts and borderline playables. But I'm worried that red is just super, duper open at the table. The resolute warriors (1RW) wheeled until pick 11 btw.

In pack 3 the green flowed pretty nicely but almost nothing of any other color of note. The Trial of strength did a full wheel which astounded me. I get it, it's not as good without cartouches to recast it, but really? A full wheel?

I'm a little worried I misread the signal and should have gone into red instead of black. But looking back all I see is a P1p5 Khenra Scrapper (where I took the spider) and then nothing until pack 2. I dunno.