GTC Draft Debate - Wrapup Interviews

Daily Draft Debate

KrazyCaley

14 March 2012

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Hello.

Rather than stick to my old formula of asking the same questions to everyone, I thought I'd conduct a more conversational interview with everybody. You should also feel free to ask questions of the drafters in the comments below; I'll e-mail them out and post the responses.

Let's start with our winner.

Elaine

KrazyCaley: Mill deck.

Elaine: Mill deck. The tricky thing about mill in Gatecrash, I think, is that if anyone else drafts it, or even makes a decent effort at hating it, you're going to lose, but if you manage to get it all to yourself, you'll have a strong deck.

KrazyCaley: How did you usually win games? Milling or killing?

Elaine: A little bit of both. One of the things that has nothing to do with milling that was good about my deck was that I had, I think, seven or eight creature answers, including AEtherize, which is as good as a wrath a lot of the time. A lot of the time against the slower decks, and there were a lot of slow decks in this draft, I could just cast a few things, then keep killing everything from the other side and pressing through damage.

KrazyCaley: You easily had the most removal of anyone in the draft. How do you think that happened?

Elaine: I picked up a lot of the undervalued removal, and I think that's why I won the draft. Grisly Spectacle got passed to me frequently, and that's silly. It's a flat kill spell. People see that it costs four and think that makes it a lower value card, but it's still removal. And of course, in my deck, it has the added mill advantage. Agoraphobia is another card that should have been drafted by someone besides me. I think you guys passed me that, in fact.

KrazyCaley: We did, and also AEtherize, I think. Now that you see the decklists, any surprises?

Elaine: I didn't give enough credit to your deck. It is really fast, and obviously was hitting roadblocks when I played you. It also fit really nicely into a niche that wasn't heavily-drafted. And (Grim)'s deck actually was very subtle. It's a very unassuming deck, but it runs very consistently.

KrazyCaley: Did you learn any interesting lessons from this draft?

Elaine: Soul Ransom is a much better card that I gave it credit for, and it won me at least three games by itself. It's either Control Magic, which is an overpowered card, or it draw 2 and your opponent has to discard 2, and they have to HAVE the two to discard, which is really good for four mana, and for a mill deck. I could usually keep the creature for at least a turn or two as well. It was a really nice card. I also didn't appreciate how easily Call of the Nightwing could completely take over a game just by itself before playing with this deck. It doesn't even need a pre-existing creature to cipher onto.

KrazyCaley: I see from the draft history that you did not start out drafting Dimir cards. What made you switch?

Elaine: I started out just trying to draft the best cards there were in each pack, like I usually do at the beginning of a draft, and then in pack 3, I think, was the AEtherize?

KrazyCaley: That's correct.

Elaine: I picked up AEtherize and I started to think that the players passing cards to me weren't running blue. I was wrong about you, of course, but you must not have been thinking about blue yet, or else you drafted something better than AEtherize.

KrazyCaley: That would be Frontline Medic.

Elaine: Yeah, that's about as good as an AEtherize under the right conditions. Anyway, I took some halfway-decent blue cards for a while, then I noticed that almost certainly no one was going for any kind of mill strategy. So I started picking up Mindeye Drake and Sage's Row Denizen and Balustrade Spy and just went with it. I got lucky and picked up a Wight of Precinct Six and a Paranoid Delusions later on, and just ended up with a solid deck.

KrazyCaley: Any last advice for the other drafters?

Elaine: This is a fast format. You can't get away with casting nothing until turn 5, or having unfixed tricolor decks. My deck wasn't particularly fast, but it was fast enough to blow away a lot of the decks I saw just with removal.

KrazyCaley: Awesome. Thanks again, and congratulations.

Elaine: Thanks!

Grim