The LiquidLegends Lounge - Page 1804

To my left is the guy who forced Merfolk last week, to my right the guy who told him it's the best tribe (and left guy took it to heart) and tends to get in whenever it looks open.

I get passed some cards and aggressively cut merfolk ('cept P1P1 is Scoundrels over Lannery and passing Watertrap Weaver, and P1P2 is Ixalan's Binding because let's not be dumb here). I pass some U because there are always good cards over it, like I pass Boon and Shaper Apprentice P1P3 because there's a freaking Vineshaper Mystic in it, and afterwards I pick a bit of U but it's drying, and in the last third of the pack there's none.
Signals clearly tell me U and B are picked and I should be RG, 'cept my G is mainly merfolks and merfolk-buffing stuff. I figure I should get served in pack 2 since I cut merfolk and G, so even if U is played to my left I'll get the merfolks and all the G ones.

Pack 2 has nothing. Literally jack shit in over half the packs. After pack 1 I realised I was forcing things but figured G would be open packs 2 and 3 and I'd get at least some U pack 2 so I'd make do with a decent deck.
Then while I expected U to be played, even G has nothing. I'm forced to pick some R (which isn't great either) in case I really can't get enough playables.
Marauding Looter fucking wheeled. What the hell are people doing.

Pack 3 is annoying: open River's Rebuke, ready to force UG again, then get passed Charging Monstrosaur. 'k UG splashing Red then?
And now there's absolutely no G aside from a couple dinos and barely a bit of U too. I get Firebrands and stuff though. I get some Headwater Sentries but they come with superior cards such as Trash of Raptors so it's hard to make choices.

In the end I'm RG splashing One with the Wind, Shaper Apprentice, River Sneak, River's Rebuke and potentially Run Aground off a couple lands, Blossom Dryad to UU, and New Horizons.
My cuts include 2 Boons (keep a 3rd), Jungle Delver, in my finals games Kumena's Speaker. I was even ready to play Gilded Sentinels in case of short on playables.
My merfolk package is great with Delver, Speaker, Apprentice, Sneak, 2x Deeproot Warrior, Vineshaper, 3x Boon, but no Wayfinder or even Wind Strider wheeled and Champions dried up too.

On the plus side my creature curve and (on paper) quality is good, and since I lack synergy and punch Angrath's Marauders and Spineback dinolord can make use of my 17 lands (for fixing) + New Horizons.

Now here's the fun part, the archetypes played at the table:
GWr Gishath - BR pirates - BW vampires - BW vampires - BW leftovers (lifegain/axis of mortality strat) - UG merfolk - RGu (me) - UG merfolk
We opened 5+ Boons, 2+ Vineshaper, 3 Deathless Ancients, 3 Call to the Feast, 3 explore boats, etc. but somehow only one Anointed Deacon, RIP.

What happened is that in the pack with Vineshaper Mystic, Shaper Apprentice and Boon I picked Mystic, my neighbour picked Apprentice and my right neighbour wheeled Boon (well yeah I'd been cutting merfolk fucking hard) and decided Merfolk was open.
He P1P1'd Hostage Taker, was cut off B by 3 people to his right so he moved into G after the wheel.
Left neighbour took Tempest Caller from my pack, then some cards like Apprentice and Depths of Desire, noticed B was dry, and somehow didn't touch R even when I passed it at the end of the pack. Only one G card. Then pack 2 he noticed G was open (no shit sherlock after I locked it as hard) and decided to move into merfolk and take it all. Since packs were kinda weak for this (B flowing though) I didn't even get 2nd-rate cards for a bunch of the packs.
Then during pack 3 I got passed packs with multiple good cards but I had no chance to wheel one since even if there were 3 of them, the others being merfolk-specific/mediocre ones, my neighbours would take one right after and the other right before I wheeled.

I remember a draft in KLD where I made my left seat mono-B, picking a bit myself near the end but majorly G aside from that and in a way that set me up for the BG counters archetype.
Then in pack 2 my neighbour out of nowhere decided to go into G after seeing a couple good cards in the first 2 picks. Pack 2 alone was strong than my packs 1 and 3 (he got Cub, Nature's Way, Riparian Tiger, Armourcraft Judge, the counters-granting enchant and the Trumpeteer for fuck's sake). He drafted completely ignoring the signals since he got maybe 2 G cards from pack 3 but it didn't matter, his deck was baseline stronger than mine off all the bombs.
This draft felt like that.

I'm pretty fucking mad at my right neighbour, who remembered that there was a Vineshaper Mystic in the pack so somebody would try Merfolk and Boon would only mean that there normally wouldn't be two others on the pair; it'd still be a bad idea to move into it since he'd have to fight. But he decided to take it as a signal and moved in G off that alone, fucking me over in pack 3 since it was too late by then for me to know G wouldn't be open anymore.
And I'm pretty mad at the neighbour forcing merfolk on my left because he did that last week too.

I just can't ever get a fucking break, even when we open enough cards to sustain 2 full merfolk deck in the pod for once, I have to deal with that fucking shit. I try to stay open and play as many archetypes as possible to get a feel for them but it's getting maddening to only have so few available.

Round 1 I beat BR (another new-ish drafter), he didn't draw well game 1 and took ages to get to the board, and game 2 Bonded Horncrest + LRC (with a cutlass) stopped me cold until I got Angrath's Marauders to force him to keep blockers, then Spineback dinolord to win the land topdeck war.

Round 2 against my right neighbour, he played monoG game 1 but it was enough since I mulled to 6, kept a 4-landers, and proceeded to make all my land drops until turn 10, ending the game with 2 lands left in hand, 12 lands 7 spells (3rd one drawn on turn 5 on the draw, yay).
Game 2 he was monoG again and I closed it quick with Firebrand -> Dryad -> t4 Monstrosaur and I had Surestrike Back-up the next turn.
Game 3 he curved out perfectly (Warrior, Watertrap Weaver, One with the Wind + Warrior, Run Aground). My hand looked great: Apprentice, Vineshaper Mystic, Boon, New Horizons, 2 lands, Crushing Canopy, all I needed was a 2-drop or one of these lands to be an island and I had a potentially stronger start. That wasn't an island and I topdecked my 2-drop on turn 3.

Round 3 was against my left neighbour this time. Games could have been close, especially since I couldn't attack through 1/4 Diviners and he managed to make a 5/6 Siren Lookout with OwtW and Savage Stomp (to survive my Charging Monstrosaur's pressure). I managed to stop him when I sticked Cerotops and put OwtW on it, taking damage one more turn for the setup and risking lethal if he topdecked a bounce. Dinolord then gave me a way to close the game, and River's Rebuke sped it up although I hesitated to reveal it.
Game 2 he was a bit slower and could only chump to not die after Monstrosaur showed up again. My 7th land was the 2nd island and I had Angrath's Marauders and River's Rebuke stuck in my hand so it closed the deal.

Not sure how my bad deck 2-1'd, but I doubt I'm in a position to complain after the complete fucking trainwreck I went through.

- Got passed Kindslaver twice in pack 2, picked one, but never got to play it
- Blurry Beeble is strong in a 12-man pod with only 2 people wearing glasses, including you
- Urza was opened but noone dared to try going for it
- sweet GW die roll deck made "GO TO JAIL!" player exclaim "I made a grave mistake" when his removal set up a turn with at least 4 die rolls for the squirrel that get buffed if you hit a 5+. Routinely crushed with a 16/16; didn't manage to win games with the die-Helix Pinnacle card
- the "biggest creature this round" award still went to the 23/23 animated Library
- biggest number of contraptions for a single player was 6
- Contraptions are fucking broken. My deck lacked big creatures but having the damage doubling one + the +1/+0 flying one pretty much made me one-shot people and won half my game
- Especially since they usually came together as out of my limited ways of playing Contraptions I had Incite Insight, cast for X=4 (had 5 contraptions including the "assemble more" mythic one) most of the time.
- 2x Blurry Beeble + the contraption that looks at top X and lets you keep one (X = your number of artifacts, including contraptions and the "make 2 gnome artifact tokens" from the one I cranked before) actually make you draw so fucking fast. Incite Insight for X=4, next turn look at top 11 in my upkeep and keep one.
- Red assembles so fast! And considering how broken contraptions are, the 1/1 rigger for R is actually strong, sets you up early for more cranking.
- Last Word is fun! Screw gotcha cards and stuff, just whisper 4 upkeeps in a row then forget and try not to laugh as you hurriedly whisper the word before attacks.
- t1 R rigger assemble the ramping contraption, t2 "do you like squirrels?", t3 ramp and assemble "+2/+0 trample to team" and "+3/+3 to someone" contraptions, t4 a variable-size creature, t5 crank in the upkeep and swing for 15 lethal damage WHAT
- So, yeah. Get artifact destruction guys.
- By the way, that game? I won. Traded our boards, used some of my 6 pieces of removal and won with unblockable beats. The "RG waterwarks shock something" card left me at 1 life.
- One guy drafted the "high fives for lifegain" card and played it 5 times I believe. My opponent remembered after that game that we did give high fives. And that player later denied him a squirrel. I smell a feud.
- In the finals I faced a guy who drafted 3+ "Sacrifice Play" or whatever the white common's name was, and a couple "outside intervention thoughtseize." Sadly he hadn't been mean enough to his girlfriend yet that she didn't make me sac my best creatures turn after turn. D: "At least have chi... tokens."
- Five-Fingered Discount never did much for me, but I played against RG the first two rounds so their expensive spells were the ones making contraptions or a ton of tokens.
- I only saw one Slaying Mantis cast, it bounced right over the creatures, RIP.
- Ol' Buzzbark also missed everything with the dices, the controller let the die go from higher than required and didn't anticipate how bouncy things would get.
- Hosts, even Augmented are a goddamn pain to remove with capital punishment. Pick your Finders Keepers, guys.

The less good:
- in the finals my opponent was BW mainly discard/sac/deathtouch control, with multiple rat hosts, and the contraption that let a creature blow something up if it hits a player as well as the one that forces a discard. It proved pretty a atrocious as it turns out it's actually ridiculously easy to playd discard off these hosts; he played Humming Bird on the rat and thanks to the Master Ninja in his hand he only needed one creature in play to just keep making me discard. I didn't play one of these games and just sat there feeling bad about all the fun cards I had to discard. I wouldn't mind it in another format (I actually hoped BR would play like this in XLN) but in Unstable and all its silly fun cards it doesn't seem great.
- not that I ended our night on a silly fun note: I played the "make your own keyword soup, but quick and no repeating" rare, while we were on the clock (probably in extra turns or near it), and had to choose a single keyword. I wanted to go for something to hit so I could clock him, but unblockable doesn't protect from the sac card so I needed something else... and the first thing to jump to my mind was "Annihilator 6" since it was mentioned all over on reddit for the last couple weeks. My opponent was tapped out with 6 permanents in play... so yeah. He didn't know Annihilator by heart and scooped upon looking at the board, and I think we were the last match and way late on schedule (1:10 AM, considering we're usually done with the whole thing by 10 past midnight), but I felt bad immediatly upon realising that I'd blurted such a spiky thing instead of going for the dumb ones.