Agreed. This is going to be fun to read.

TRUST IN OUR FEARLESS LEADER!

Also, thank goodness that Slaughter Games isn't in this draft.

I agree with landgrafb about the land. Blue is more important than red. As for playing the decks, all the leaders have given Caley our available times for this weekend, so hopefully we can get at least one or two matches in. Still no confirmation on that though. Also, the observer group Caley's been leading has been placing odds for each deck throughout the draft, so those numbers might be revealed soon. I have a good feeling about that. Anyways, that's all I know for now, will post when I know more. Until then, hang tight. It's been great drafting with you guys.

I'm just imagining the observer group's comment wall being something like a 1920's speak easy in some back room with a big chalk board and a bunch of guys wearing zoot suits and fedoras, smoking cigars and drinking bootlegged whiskey while they place bets and take odds on our matches.

I want to go there. * sigh *

So, matches won't start until after the weekend. Taking care of a few details first, like publicity, observer group, etc.Our first match will be against GureiSeison. I'm in contact with him to figure this time out.
In the mean, Caley has given some questions for us to Ponder and get back to him with.
1 - What colors do you predict were most open, and least open?

2 - How many match wins (7 total possible) do you think you'll accumulate in this round-robin event?

3 - What do you suspect to be the colors of the player to your right (that you were getting your cards from in the first and third packs), and the player to your left (that you were getting your cards from in the second pack)

4 - Pick apart your own draft a bit for me. How did it start, what strategies were you thinking of, how did they evolve? How did your discussion process go/how did your group work together and come to decisions? How did you like the Cluestoney madness of DGM-DGM-DGM? etc. etc.

My thoughts:

1 - Well, obviously Izzet was obviously very open--Blue in particular. Green and White seemed pretty cut off for most of round 1, which is why we had to abandon our Wurm, and migrate to Izzet. Black also seemed pretty closed. I feel that everyone was fighting over Black, Green, and White.

2 - I genuinely think we'll hit 7 or all 8 wins. We might get screwed out of a game or two, but we have a beastly deck. If we go lower than 6 wins, I'll be absolutely shocked.

3 - Junk and Jund, respectively? We can go back and analyze it in more detail, since we have records, but that's just the gist of what I'm feeling.

4 - We got a bomb pick 1, pack 1, and a very solid Beetleform Mage in pack 2, so we aimed for green. From then on, white was cut off, and a few of us argued hard for RUG Cyclops (Guilty!). The group settled on it, and when we got nothing but Izzet in the next few packs (and very little green) we knew U/R was incredibly open, so we pounced on the Cyclops archetype (splashing green for one bomb/removal card). Since we were all thinking on the same gameplan, we all came to the same conclusions on picks in most cases. Near the end, there was a bit of schism between those who wanted more of a combo deck versus those who wanted to keep our creature count as high (and safe) as possible, but we worked it all out via civilized discussion and votes. All in all, though, I think we're all pretty dang satisfied with the deck. Right guys?

1. Blue was most open, which is why we went to it instead of forcing green/white.
   

2. I think that we will win 6 of 7 games. Any deck with instant speed removal, Aetherling, or just plain old bad luck could rob us of some matches. Based on the cards we saw go by, I think we have the most consistent deck and that will be to our advantage.
   

3. Honestly, I couldn't tell exactly what the people to our right and left were taking because 3-DGM makes it very hard to read signals. I think that both teams by us were taking green and black, but I couldn't tell which one was taking white and which was taking red. I think the guy on our right was in white (junk) and the guy on our left was in red (jund).
   

4. I thought, HOLY #### Advent of the Worm! Then we took the Beetleform Mage and I was thinking we could go Bant Flyers with control cards and fatties. And then our group decided to go Izzet, and then eventually RUG. I wasn't happy about going away from BANT to RUG, but the Izzet cards kept coming. I feel a lot better about our draft now. As for our team, I think we did very well. We were almost on the same page for every pick. It felt like the deck drafted itself for us. I think the team aspect to the DDD as compared the the entire site as one team was a positive change, and I'd like to see this again in the future.
   

I'll just ditto TiredTofu, he seemed to cover all the details pretty accurately. I'll add that early on (around the middle of pack 1) I was still hoping to splash white in our deck to get the wurm in. All that was over though by the time we got to pack two and it was VERY clear that no other team was in izzet colors and we were going to have complete dominance in that area. We didn't have much to discuss after that point as the cards just kept coming to us. It was a 3 step process on basically every pick: Step 1: Look at pack. Step 2: Pick amazing card and look around wondering if I'm on camera. Step 3: Crack a beer and smile. I don't know if other teams had to actually DEBATE their picks between about pack 1 pick 6 and the end but we really didn't. Our only real debating was which cards made the maindeck and the land base, but really the only argument was over 2 card slots out of 40 so I wouldn't put too much into that.

In summary: once we settled on blue and red the deck more or less built itself. If we don't go undefeated I think it'll be because of bad luck shuffling or some other team drafted 5x Debt to the Deathless and 4x Putrefy .

actiontech has a good point about things falling together once we had our first few skyclops. The cards we pulled, particularly the run of Hidden Strings in pack 3, were falling from heaven once we set into Izzet.

I'd say an important part of our draft group was a sense of playfulness/humor throughout. The art, energetic posts, and imaginative plotting all lent to a wonderful experience.

I like and agree with all these points. If anyone else wants to add something, feel free, but I'm going to be organizing and summarizing everyone's answers and giving them to Caley by tomorrow.

All the important points pretty much got covered. We can mention how we more-or-less ignored color fixing because of our lucky 2-color build.

Also, I believe that if we lose it will be because of our lack of decent removal. We have a TON of evasion, but no way to remove a threat completely once it passes 3 toughness.

...except for Blood, I guess. But that's better as a finisher anyways.

If your opponent has zero life removal becomes irrelevant ;-)

I desperately hope our deck gets to hit someone for a 10+ Blood. The feeling of watching the opponent think they could win to immediately losing is going to be ecstasy.

Any word on when the matches will start up?

Still nothing concrete. This week, hopefully.

I've emailed Gurei about scheduling a match but haven't heard back. Haven't been able to collect our cards from Caley either.
Also, after work today I'll be compiling the responses and sending them to Caley; speak now or forever hold your peace.

Caley is in the process of giving us our cards :)

Just picked em up :)

Nice, I was afraid that I would miss two or three matches due to moving but it seems I got my computer up and running just in time :) Although living on the eastern side of Europe I doubt that I'll watch that many matches live.

Oooohhh are we gonna get to watch them live? Like on twitch or something? I have an MTGO account I never use but I'd sign on to watch if I could.

We can watch through MTGO?

I've been trying to playtest our deck for fun, but it keeps crashing on me. I'm using Chrome . . . could that be the problem?

I can't get it to load in Firefox. The playtester's been pretty buggy lately.