Here's how it went down, roughly. :) Actually, now that I am looking over my notes, I have no idea what half my opponents were playing. I know that Dimir didn't do well across the board as no one from my "guild table" was in the top 8 (I believe). Compared to some of the other guilds, winning with Dimir was tricky (as it should be). One guy was really bent out of shape. He kept saying, "This is annoying," and, "I can't believe I'm not winning." Oh, Dimir. So true to form.
You know what worked well? Green / Red with Bloodrush. Top 2 decks. Only guy who beat me was running that and it was close, 1-2. Mana was a problem for me first game and for him the second game. He beat me in the end, though. Otherwise, I won most other rounds 2-0. To be fair, I felt lucky all day.
As it turns out, the Black primordial, Sepulchral Primordial, does in fact animate a creature from each opponent's graveyard. I pulled one and actually got to cast it in a game. Took a creature. Then, had Voidwalk encoded on one of my unblockables. So, I got to use his trigger more than once. By then, it was over anyway. But, still cool.
I got the most headscratching from my opponents about Voidwalk. They was a lot of, "Wait, what?" and, "Can I see that card again?" If you follow what it says on step at a time, it's not too bad. But, in a pre-release where no one has had a chance to play with it yet, what it was doing seemed to confuse the people I played against. It goes a little something like this:
Cast Voidwalk and exile one of your opponent's creature. Now, encode Voidwalk on one of your creatures. Your opponent's best blocker is now out of the way, so attack. Your creature with Voidwalk encoded on it gets through and deals combat damage to your opponent. Cipher triggers. Now - here comes the fun part - target one of your own creatures with the Voidwalk copy, a creature with a comes into play ability. It gets exiled. When your turn ends, your creature and your opponent's creature will come into play, triggering your creature's ability.
I did this in several matches. The Ciphered Voidwalk copy triggers Consuming Aberration when cast. Sepulchral Primordial works well. And Sage's Row Denizen can really grind away if one or two creatures are coming into play every turn. Balustrade Spy coming into play turn after turn really eats away at a library.
Mind Grind and Consuming Aberration are as crazy as they look. I can't wait to see them in action in my next commander deck.
Congratulations on the high ranking! It sounds like you had fun with Cipher. It's a cool ability, especially in a deck with a high percentage of flyers and unblockables.
ReplyDeleteI played at a prerelease this weekend and went with Dimir, too, and had much less luck.
I did pull Consuming Aberration (in addition to the promo, so I had 2), Balustrade Spy, and Sage's Row Denizen, but I did not pull Mind Grind, Paranoid Delusions, Grisly Spectacle, Sepulchral Primordial, or Voidwalk. I didn't even get Dimir Charm!
I was able to stall defensively a little with Mortus Strider, counter an early spell in preparation for Aberration with a Psychic Strike, sneak in some damage with Deathcult Rogue and Dimir Keyrune, and...that's about it. A little late game fun with Undercity Plague, but late game draft means that my opponents already have a nice collection of smaller, synergistic creatures out, so they were happy to sacrifice lands at that point. And they already had the creatures they needed to beat me with on the table, so discarding wasn't that big of a loss, either. If anything, it would prompt them to burn me with what they had in hand before they had to pitch the land or the spell.
I was sad to pull a black rare in the form of Ogre Slumlord.
I was mostly defeated by Battalion and Evolve. Everyone I played against was running red in some combination or other, and it felt like a giant Banding party that I was not invited to (or, rather, I was invited, but for unpleasant reasons.)
It seemed like with each of my opponents, and in each individual game, three or four lands was enough to put out common/uncommon creatures that interacted quite nicely with each other to win the game. Something like:
Turn 1, Foundry Street Denizen
Turn 2, Bomber Corps
Turn 3, Wojek Halberdiers
Turn 4, Ordruun Veteran
Meanwhile, I'm fumbling with tapped gates and keyrunes.
In retrospect, I wouldn't run those common gates, nor the keyrune. I would just play swamps and islands. In all cases, I wasn't sufficiently able to hold off the early onslaught to get to the late game.
I think another part of my problem was not having enough cheap blockers up front, or removal. I think I was trying to rely too much on shitty counter spells like Spell Rupture (which was completely useless early game, as should have been obvious to me during deck construction.)
I tried running WUB, but abandoned it after the first match. Cards like Angelic Edict weren't doing my milling any favors, let alone my Aberration or Death's Approach (a great card, IMO.)
In retrospect and in sum, while I would say that I had an underwhelming pull at draft, especially in regards to removal and milling (such is life), I also made tactical construction errors. Tentatively:
1. My white removal/combat trick cards ran counter to my deck strategy. Exile is bad when your creatures are feeding off of a graveyard (duh) and combat tricks are not that helpful when most of your creatures have evasion, anyway. Plus, blue has Gridlock (which I pulled.)
2. Bad counters are, indeed, bad.
3. When you're running a two-color deck, think twice before including slow, inefficient color fixers. 13 Swamps and 12 Islands are probably going to get you the right balance of mana you need--although it is true that few things are more frustrating than NOT getting the source you need early on.