Roto #4: Plagon and Monstrous Rage, Together At Last (part 1)
Time for another roto!
This draft follows the format of the first one that I did: five pods with a playoff amongst the top finishers in each pod playing off in a finals bracket. I managed to make it to the final table last time, losing in the quarterfinals what was functionally a mirror match, making me feel that I at least can hang.
Humorously, I'm in a pod with people who I've played with before, so I think I came in with a meta as someone who forces mono-green. I would call that a half-truth - while it is my favorite color to draft by a lot, my goal in each roto is to find/forge an open lane as quickly as possible, and then to do my best to stay in it while leaving room for players in my colors to take other cards that I don't want. It just so happens that in my first two drafts, that lane happened to be mono-green.
I'm in seat 9 out of 10, meaning that I was one of the last people to take my first card. By the time my turn came, the first eight picks that were taken broke down as: 2x red, 2x white, 2x black, and 2x green, with blue still untouched. Well ok then.
Pick 1: Quantum Riddler
I started out by picking a really good blue card. I don't really think there was much more to it than that, as Riddler seems to be a fairly consistent first-round pick in these drafts. The thing I specifically like about it in my particular spot is that it would stand to reason that Aspi on my right would also go blue for the same reason I did - it was the least touched color by other seats - and Riddler can slot into pretty much any archetype that I might consider going into.
Aspi did, in fact, wheel two blue cards - Wan Shi Tong (the 5cc one) and Memory Lapse. This implied to me that she would be drafting a control deck with countermagic that aimed for card advantage to win in a longer game. Which, in turn, told me that the best way to cooperate with her would be to aim for a more aggressive-leaning blue deck.
Pick 2: Cori Steel Cutter
So I decided to carve out Izzet tempo early by taking what I think is that deck's best possible card - Cori Steel Cutter. Not only is this card stupid strong, it's a card that rewards building a deck to optimize for it. My goal is to have a UR prowess shell - lots of cheap creatures, cantrips, and interaction, with a goal of tapping out every turn and ending the game quickly. As such, I will be more or less ignoring counterspells or cards that cost a lot of mana, allowing other blue drafters to fight over the controlling cards while I snag the aggressive ones.
Picks 3 and 4: Stock Up and Lightning Bolt
This round was simple enough - I took one card from each of my colors that I thought was mostly likely to be poached by someone else if I didn't grab them soon. Given the spread of colors so far (the only blue drafter is on my right, all of the red drafters are on my left), the plan is to take a blue card first and a red card second each round so that I can get the card I want with less fear of being sniped.
If I can get a stranglehold on Izzet (which I think is feasible?), I have lots of options:
- prowess (stormchasers, soul-scar mage, monastery mentor + cheap interaction)
- artifacts (urza, third path, saheeli, trinkets)
- wizards (vivi, snapcaster, thunderclap trainer, flame of anor)
- self-discard (monument of endurance, currency converter, inti, ivora, looters)
Most of the cards listed above overlap archetypes, so I should be able to pick two or three of them as a subtheme for what I'm doing. So, my general priority at this point in the draft is to take cards that will work in any of those archetypes that are generally good, and to wait to zero in on a specific plan until later on in the draft when I have more information.
Humorously, my original plan for the deck was to draft a package of 9-10 creatures that trigger Plagon (red prowess guys, blue looters, vivi/urza/riddler) as a neat little synergy piece that helps me not run out of gas mid-game. And while I still might do that, I've noticed that flutter in seat 3 (despite currently being G/W) appears to have a similar idea regarding Plagon, and I think my lane is open enough that I don't have to force it. We'll see.
Pick 5-8: Chrome Mox, Scalding Tarn x2, Steam Vents
As readers of this blog should know, I really like ramping my mana. Chrome Mox is a way to accelerate my deck by a turn while also being a 0-drop to help me trigger Steel-Cutter that also slots well into all four of the aforementioned directions I can take my deck. I took it here because it's a card that non-Izzet drafters might also want, so it felt like now or never.
For the next few rounds, I decided to get boring and snag up the Izzet duallands. This serves two purposes - to fix my mana, and to dissuade other people (specifically Aspi and Max, both of whom appear to be fighting for UW control and may want to pivot to Jeskai) from moving into my terrority.
It's all about preserving the sanctity of the lane. At this point, I haven't had anything poached from me that I specifically wanted, so hopes are high.
Picks 9 and 10: Brainstorm and Chain Lightning
Similar to picks 3-4, I used this round to take two generically good cheap spells that will slot in nicely to whatever type of deck I end up settling in on.
Looking over the draft at this point, there are some very interesting trends worth noting:
1. TripleB took Snapcaster Mage, slotting himself into U/B - meaning there are now 4 out of 10 people in the draft playing blue. Not great.
2. Since opening with Fable/Fury, Fabio appears to be very heavy black with a green splash, meaning he's either going for Jund or possibly abandoning red altogether?
3. With Max/Aspi on UW decks and Flutter doing something interesting with GW, the only other red drafter (Monerstor) seized an open Boros aggro lane and appears to be moving into heavier white than previously anticipated
4. After my picks, Max took a Stormchaser's Talent, meaning there's a lot more danger of his deck overlapping with mine than originally thought.
In other words: while blue is looking a lot less open than it looked at the start of the draft, red is looking a lot more open than it looked at the start of the draft. So now it's up to me to choose what to do with that information - do I start leaning heavier red to take advantage of the lane? Or do I start prioritizing blue cards while they're still there knowing I can probably get good red cards later in the draft?
Picks 11 and 12: Winternight Stories and Inti
At this point, while I'm still looking for generically good cards, I want to start adding synergy packages to the deck. I think the first group of cards that I want to target are Vivi-Cauldron-esque cards: ways to draw cards, discard, add counters to creatures, and, of course, Vivi and Cauldron. That said, I don't think anyone else is in the market for Vivi at the moment so rather than reach for it, I took two cards that support that archetype while still being fine if it doesn't come together.
I took Winternight Stories a bit higher than I normally would, but I'm concerned that TripleB (who firstpicked reanimate and recently moved into blue, taking Malcolm) is going to start taking looting effects, so I took the one I wanted most since it also can generate card advantage. And while Inti isn't exactly a Vivi Cauldron staple, I feel like it's too good of a card to be going this late and works well enough in my deck to be worth taking.
...
Sometime after I take Inti, Max declares "Murmur is going to hate my next pick" - ruh-roh - before taking Profts' Eidetic Memory. For the second pick in a row, he took a card the round before I was going to take it.
Not to be hyperbolic, but Max is basically now the devil. A physical manifestation of the sins of mankind, who must be stopped at all costs.
Elsewhere in the draft around this point, Agatha's Soul Cauldron is sniped, so there goes that plan. Back to the drawing board.
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Picks 13 - 16: Kitsa, Vivi, Lutri, and a Mishra's Bauble
Going into this round, bedtime for me was looming and, not gonna lie, I was a little bit on tilt. I was fully expecting Proft's to not only fall to me late, but to be a centerpiece of my deck, and losing out on it had me full-on reassessing if I needed to change up my strategy. I was heavily pondering abandoning blue altogether and switching into mono-R, but the thing that stopped me was the realization that that's exactly what I did in the 100 Ornithopters draft (giving up my original color to go mono-R) and I ended up heavily regretting it.
So, instead, I decided to suck it up, ignore the missing Proft's, and bank a few cards that would be good with my existing pool no matter where my deck ended up. With that said, it appeared that Flutter had stopped drafting Plagon-friendly cards (maybe he never was?), which made me decide to go for it. There aren't a ton of them - probably like 10-12 available creatures with higher toughness than power in UR - but they all fit well within the baseline of the cards I had already drafted.
That said, I didn't want to just start taking a bunch of Plagon-qualifying creatures in a row. Legit - I was afraid of wasting a bunch of picks on a build-around only to have someone ambush me by taking it. So instead, I made a mental note to prioritize those creatures a little bit more going forward, and if I get there, I get there.
Anyways.
For the next few rounds I took three creatures in Kitsa/Vivi/Lutri that get better in decks with a lot of cheap spells. At first, I was afraid that I was losing value by taking Vivi so early when I was the only Izzet drafter, but I realized: it would be a complete disaster if I waited so long on Izzet cards that someone else decides to move in on them.
Lutri is obviously great since it doesn't cost a spell slot. But also it's a hybrid spell that any other red or blue drafter could feasibly take, so I wanted to make sure I got it.
And finally, I decided to start the Mishra's Bauble run. With Steel-Cutter, Vivi, and Riddler (which benefits from an empty hand), 0-drops are clutch. I didn't need all four of them but I knew I wanted one at the very minimum, so I decided to take one and see if other people snag the rest of them.
Picks 17 and 18: Consider and Fading Hope
I realized that although I was drafting a deck based on having cheap spells, I didn't really have as many cheap spells as I wanted. While there are still plenty to choose from (especially in red), at this point I was fully in the mindset of "take all the blue cards you want now while they're here, get the red cards you want later". So I took two nice little 1-mana instants to help keep my curve nice and low.
Picks 19 and 20: Jace, Vyrn's Prodigy and another Mishra's Bauble
Jace is another card that synergizes with a lot of parts of my deck. He helps dig through cards, he helps re-cast cheap spells, he becomes a planeswalker (a type that some decks struggle to remove) and he's both a wizard (for the Flame of Anor I plan to target) and a creature that triggers Plagon.
I took the second Mishra's Bauble because I think it benefits my deck quite a lot, and knew that this would likely be my last shot to get it. Unfortunately for me, I had completely overlooked the fact that playing a second bauble would invalidate my ability to companion Lutri, so uh.. oops.
Picks 21 and 22: Astrologian's Planisphere and Plagon, Lord of the Beach
I knew I was going to want Astrologian's Planisphere in my aggressive spell-based deck so I decided to grab it here. It's basically a better prowess creature, easy peasy.
But then..
My original plan for pick 22 was going to be Soul Scar Mage - a nice one-drop that I definitely will want in my deck. Plus, I figured, it triggers Plagon - sweet. But then I asked myself two questions:
1. Is there any shot at all that Max is aiming to run Plagon in his deck? I'm pretty sure he's building a Yorion deck, I know that white has a lot of high-toughness creatures, and it's a perfect creature to blink. Plus, he has Proft's, which is a great card to pair with it - something I am painfully aware of.
2. Am I worried at all about anyone else taking Soul Scar Mage? Or Monastery Swiftspear? Or Dreadhorde Arcanist?
And as I realized "yes" and "no" respectively, I decided to lock in Plagon now instead of worrying about him getting sniped. It doesn't matter if I have enough qualifying creatures yet - I'm fairly certain I can round out my next few picks with the rest of the good ones. It's not like you need a lot of creatures in play for Plagon to be good - his floor is a 3/3 (that you have to play U to attack with) that cantrips, which is basically Hard Evidence. But I also think it should be completely feasible to drop Plagon with 3-4 creatures that trigger him in play, and that seems really really good to me.
After taking Plagon, I had a brief conversation with Max - I told him that I specifically took it out of fear that he was angling for it, and he confirmed to me that Plagon was indeed on his "pick soon" list, which felt pretty good. I feel like I specifically internalized a lesson from the Profts pick (if you're going to build around a card, just take the card instead of assuming no one else will want it) and applied it favorably, which is all you can do.
Picks 23 - 27: Ledger Shredder, Fear of Missing Out, Dreadhorde Arcanist, Soul Scar Mage, Monastery Swiftspear
With both my bedtime and the pick-two rounds fast approaching, I banked five creatures that:
- are aggressive and low-curve
- are Plagon-qualifying
- get better in decks with lots of cheap burn spells and cantrips
Picks 28 and 29: Mizzium Mortars and Flame of Anor
Since I have two lightning bolts already, I wanted to score some interaction that could bail me out in the late game. Specifically, Mortars gives me an answer to decks that dump their hand (I know, having been absolutely wrecked by it as mono-G last roto), and Flame of Anor can break artifacts (like Dissection Tools or Esika's Chariot) and kill problematic 5-toughness creatures (with Sheoldred in particular crushing me if I can't kill her) while often doing both.
...
At this point, I had a functional deck that I would be comfortable submitting. However - in the back of my mind was the knowledge that in the first two rotos I did, the rough draft (heh) version of the deck was usually very sub-optimal, usually because I reached on bad cards in rounds like 20-30 chasing a vision of a deck that didn't function right.
With that, a loose plan was formed to draft a second "deck" that overlapped well with what I have already.
...
Picks 30 and 31: Third Path Iconoclast and Saheeli
The plan starts with vacuuming up the rest of the Izzet gold/hybrid cards. These two are both really good, and, notably, work really well together - if I were simply playing the cards with what I think are the best in-a-vacuum winrate, I would have taken these awhile ago.
They both happen to generate a lot of artifacts. Like if I were to snag, say, Urza - a card that, while obviously powerful, doesn't appear to have a home in anyone else's deck. Much like with Plagon, this idea is still in the brainstorming phase - but I think I have a good way to use Urza that doesn't involve drastically changing what I'm doing?
Picks 32 - 35: Ivora, Currency Converter, Marauding Mako, Monument of Endurance
In a nice little package, I then grabbed four separate cards with the "whenever you discard a card" text, to pair with Inti / Ledger Shredder / Kitsa / Jace / Winternight Stories. Three of them (all but Mako) can generate artifacts, and two of them (Ivora and Converter) double as discard enablers.
Picks 36 - 39: Urza, Aether Spellbomb, Unholy Heat, Expressive Iteration
Urza came back so I decided to take him here. Is he good enough to start? Right now my gut says no and that I already have a solid game plan without him. That said, options never hurt.
I wanted another bounce spell in my deck and decided I like Aether Spellbomb slightly more than Into the Flood Maw, because (a) it's an artifact should I go the Urza route, (b) it can target my own creatures (specifically Plagon), and (c) if it sucks, I can cycle it.
I took Unholy Heat as one more 1-mana piece of interaction - it kills things like mana elves early, but can also kill things like Sheoldred or a high-loyalty planeswalker in the late game, which seems huge.
Finally, I took Expressive Iteration as a generic good card that will almost certainly make the deck. The only reason I didn't take it prior to this was out of confidence that no one else should want it.
Picks 40 - 43: Thought Scour, Mischievous Mystic, Monstrous Rage, Spirebluff Canal
For the last few picks, I had been hedging a little bit between a UR prowess build and a UR grindy discard/artifacts deck. With some downtime, I played some scrimmage games against LastAbzan's deck from a prior roto with my original prowess build, and my deck absolutely popped off. So, having realized that, I decided to take cards that support the original gameplan - Thought Scour is a third good cantrip, Mystic is a really good threat in a deck with cantrips, Monstrous Rage speeds the deck up by a turn or two (and is great with Vivi specifically), and with my two colors split more or less down the middle, Spirebluff is a nice hedge against color screw.
Picks 44 - 45: Legion Extruder, Pia and Kiran Naalar
At this point, I couldn't really find anything that I felt would specifically improve the prowess deck, and I was already having a lot of trouble making cuts to that deck. So I decided to finish things off by adding two really good cards for the grindy build, just in case.
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I did, in fact, end up constructing two different decks out of my card pool:
Deck 1: Prowess (aka "Izzet Plag-gro")
This is the deck that I submitted and is, in my opinion, the stronger build. The premise is pretty standard - cantrips, cheap spells, and cards that reward me for playing cantrips and cheap spells. The main 'weird' part is Plagon, but I have plenty of creatures in the deck (2x prowess guys, 3x looters, dreadhorde, vivi, riddler) that I would be playing anyways. If he comes in and draws me 3 spells, I think that makes him insanely good. There are a lot of ways to gain card advantage (Iteration, Flame, Stock Up, Riddler, Plagon) that should allow me to quickly churn through my deck, which in turn will help ensure that I see the stuff I need.
Deck 2: Self-Discard
After establishing the prowess deck, I started from scratch, this time trying to build an Urza deck. It capitalizes heavily on discarding cards and playing things that pay off for discarding cards. Unlike the first deck, this one is trying to kill with inevitability rather than speed. It has a lot less removal, and a lot more permanents. While I think this deck is a lot weaker aggressive decks, I like the additional package of threating cards that aren't creatures (Saheeli, Converter, Monument) that control decks will have to deal with, and see it as a viable backup plan for some of my slower matchups.
Notably, with all of the 1-mana spells in the sideboard, Lutri gets a lot worse, hence the second Mishra's Bauble.
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I think I'm going to break this up into two posts, making this one primarily about the draft (and posting it before I play any game) and the next one about the matches themselves. So with that said, I'll finish Part 1 with some thoughts about the draft.
First off - I'm cautiously optimistic? I certainly feel like I carved out a good lane in Izzet tempo and think my deck is competitive. Obviously there's a small fear of talking big game and then going 0-8, but if anything I think this deck looks way better than my other two green ones. Hopes are high.
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So how does one "carve out a lane"? I use a technique that I highly recommend to people in future rotos: think about the good cards in your color that you don't want, and draft in a way that encourages the people in your color(s) to draft those cards instead.
In my first roto, I first-picked Icetill Explorer and immediately moved into a mono-green landfall deck. I basically wanted to maximize the effect of putting lands into play, so in my head I had a target list of cards I wanted. This meant that I was actively choosing those cards over stuff like Esika's Chariot and Surrak because I simply didn't have room for stuff that was simply good-in-a-vacuum.
In my second roto, I first-picked Badgermole Cub and also went into mono-green, but this time there were two other people taking landfall-centric cards at the start of things. Since I had just drafted that style of deck, I had a fairly good idea of what cards those decks would be looking for, which in turn allowed me to focus on a more simple "green beats" build.
In this draft, sitting in the 9-seat, being able to do this was really important. I feel like taking Quantum Riddler first was a no-brainer as blue was untouched vs. two drafters in every other color. But I also knew that probably the correct play for Aspi (the 10-seat) would probably be to wheel two blue cards, meaning that I wanted to be mindful of avoiding a situation where we were drafting overlapping decks. It was important for me to see her picks and recognize "she is aiming for a deck that plays the long game", which is the reason I immediately chose to declare a second color / clear archetype by taking Cori Steel Cutter.
If I were to guess, Aspi (who I also know played UR prowess in the last draft) saw that pick and immediately had a pretty good idea of what cards I'd be prioritizing, allowing her to move into a UW control deck that had very little overlap with mine in terms of desired cards. Specifically, I wanted proactive cards (like creatures) and she wanted reactive cards (like counterspells). I'm ideally tapping out every turn, she's leaving mana up to deal with threats. All in all, I feel like we cooperated really well for two neighbors in the same base color, and both ended up with really cohesive decks as a result.
...
This draft had an interesting trajectory in terms of trends. Going into round 20, 70% of the draft was either near-mono-B, near-mono-G, or U/W control. Which - I certainly wasn't complaining about it.
Looking over my colors specifically - blue was heavily contested (something I realized when I lost out on Stormchaser's Talent and Proft's Eidetic Memory), while there was only one other person drafting base-red. So I think an important question that I had to address in the draft was: what do I do with this information?
I came very close to abandoning my first few blue picks and moving straight into mono-R. But, after thinking about it (and also remembering doing basically the exact same thing and regretting it during the 100 Ornithopters draft), I decided that the way to adjust was actually to push harder into blue. Run in, get the stuff, run out. I also stopped trying to float strong Izzet cards - while I was the only person in my space, it would be tragic if someone took Vivi or Third Path as an in-road to blue or red as a third color, so I needed to shut that down.
Once all that was taken care of, at the start of the pick-2 rounds, I was able to move in on red cards. Sure, I definitely lost a few of them that I would have liked (Flame Slash, Fiery Confluence, Detective's Phoenix, and Grim Lavamancer to name a few specifically), but relative to any other color, I had an extremely wide array of options to choose from.
I don't think I was alone in doing this general sort of thing (paying a lot of attention to draft trends and adjusting based on them). Going into round 12, I noticed that even though four different people had signaled intent to draft white, only seven mono-W cards had actually been taken. Then, the bubble burst, and all of the white drafters started moving in at once. The W/x drafters decided to focus on their other colors that were being contested, and then once there was a threat of losing out on good white cards, people started prioritizing them.
The idea of reactive drafting came into play specifically in my interactions with Max. While I definitely got wrecked by him taking Profts Eidetic Memory, on examination of it I kind of wrecked myself by taking Winternight Stories the round before he did so. Max was absolutely paying attention to what I was doing and wanted Profts in his deck, so he knew he had to take it then. I, in turn, realized that he was going for Plagon, so I took it before I had any qualifying creatures, because I was (rightfully) worried that if I started taking high-toughness creatures, he'd pick up what I was doing and snag the Plagon before I could.
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That's all I got for now! Stay tuned for part 2 to find out how things went.
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