Pilot

It's noon and drizzly outside of the Starbucks on Ditmars Boulevard. I'm thinking the only way to beat the draft at Jim Hanley's Comics this afternoon is to just get everything I'm thinking out there and see if we might create a hive-mind of our own. It works for Standard, can it work for Limited?

The format is usually double Mirrodin Besieged and one Scars of Mirrodin. Three matches, first place gets five packs. I've yet to win those five packs. This afternoon will be attempt number five. 

I think there's a number of set archetypes that are pretty well understood by everyone in the pod. Infect is an obvious one. I've never seen a deck that didn't have a black base, but that kind of gives me an idea. I think that every 8 man pod can easily support 3 infect drafters. They'll either be black/green, black/blue, black/white. 

Solid green/blacks will have rot wolfs, blightwidows, scourge servants. The strategy is straight forward, but I don't like drafting infect unless I open a bomb rare, like the infect hydra, phyrexian crusader or inkmoth nexus. Other variants will use white for priests of norn, tine shrike, and maybe some removal. I feel like the best of these decks are the ones that can continuously provide threats. First, from having 17 solid infect guys and second, from being able to keep them coming. You can achieve this by using moriok replica to draw cards or morbid plunder to reuse your guys. Viridian claw should be a high pick for this desk as being able to instantly shrink a blocking creature in combat is difficult to deal with. 

The next deck that comes to mind received some exposure from Pat Chapin and seeks to bury opponents in card advantage by abusing ichor well spring. There are a number of different directions this deck can go, as each of the colors offers some nice options to get greater value out of it. White has leonin relic-warden, glimmer point stag, glint hawk and razor hippogriff if you can get the wellspring to the graveyard. Blue doesn't have any options outside of steel sabotage. Red has some nice sacrifice outlets in oxidia haste guy, the sac an artifact for three 1/1s, the big guy who gains trample. Can't forget about the 4/1 guy that regenerates as well. Ideally, you can combine your dudes that care about returning artifacts to your hand with other artifacts like tumble magnet, living weapons, contagion clasp, peace or pierce strider, sphere of suns, spine of ish sah, trigons. 

Mortapod is awesome. That's it. 

Mono-blue is a strategy that I've been seeing less success with as people recognize that blue has been under drafted in the past. I've seen opponents boards be shut down by a mirran spy holding off their blisterstick shaman, mirran 3/1 battlecry guys, etc. The 3/2 fliers that make people discard if they kill them are solid beaters, especially combined with the 2/1 artifacts that fly for 1 blue mana. Add in a few 2/2 unblockable dudes from scars, the flier that bounces things, the geyser and you have yourself a deck. 

I typically haven't seen hyper aggressive decks do very well, so the red-white speedy decks I don't see getting there too often. More often then not, I think it pays to stall up the ground and let your bombs or card advantage take over. Going second feels right in this format. But I'll let you know how it goes.