Gamma Ray Draft: 8-19-17

I leave my adorable daughter for the afternoon and hit up the gamma ray for some post-parenthood midday beer and magic cards. Let's see what we can put together!

As a P1p1, you can definitely do worse than Adorned Pounder. Does decent early aggression and eternalizes for the reasonable CMC of 5. Pick 2 was Open Fire vs. Unquenchable Thirst. I like RW more than UW so I take the open fire.

Then came the interesting, quasi-build-around choice.



I kind of like this card. It comes in as a near 2-for-1, since putting an eternalize creature in your graveyard is like drawing a card. Plus if you get to pull off the eternalize, it becomes a 3-for-1. So let's give it a ride. What gives me pause is whether or not I should take it above an Unquenchable Thirst. I might be putting my neighbor in blue with running blue removal.

Getting a second Vizier was pretty sweet. The rest of the pack was a little confounding, it felt like white was pretty open (unless I wildly overvalue the Solitary Camel) The pick 6 ambuscade also felt like a signal but then no green really followed up.

I open up the Hydra with no real impressive cards to compete against it. So hoping to get a little more green on the return I speculate on it. I pick up some more deserts and then see some good, late geen (seriously, the Tenacious Hunter should not be at p7, nor Bitterbow at p10).

I get somewhat to extremely paid off in pack 3. Mouth to Feed is great, especially in a more controlly deck. I get passed Angel of Sanctions, so at least I read that signal correctly from Margo. The white is pretty good as is the green, but there isn't ANY blue in sight. Quite a switch from the three earlier Unquenchable Thirsts. Also a bonus pick 14 Impeccable Timing. So white was clearly open at the table.

I build this Bant-ish nonsense:

I love that I have 4 cycling deserts and 2 evolving wilds (apparently I was the only splasher?) This encourages me to go up to 17 lands. Not counting the wilds, I have 7 white, 6 green, and 2 blue. This feels pretty good. The only comic oversight is the total lack of playable spells. I have, uh, 4 spells. Everything else is a creature. I ditch the manalinth as well as I didn't think my high end was good enough to justify it, though maybe I cut one of my 3 drops for it in hindsight.

This deck plays surprisingly good. The Solitary Camel with Lifelink is just solid gold against faster aggro decks, blocking well and granting some. Being able to use the Vizier to go fetch my killer angel feels... really really good. It's like I have three copies of it!

Unfortunately I drop round 1 against a very good RG aggro deck that has a great answer for all my eternalize/embalm nonsense.



Three of them! That's... a lot of answers for a deck trying to slow down the game and drop 4-toughness fatties. I take the first game off of Lily but I lose the other two when I stumble on mana and never quite get it together.

I do easily take the next two rounds, against a Grixis mess that Tim was piloting and then a semi-mirror in Chris. A small bit of irony there was the Chris was to my left and (quite reasonably) took all those unquenchable thirsts as a sign that blue is open. Then he jumped into white when he got passed an Adorned pouncer. So we sat there in mirror colors just fighting each other and sapping the decks. Unfortunate, but sometimes those signals get crossed.