If you are a regular listener of East West Draft Cast, you know that we love to draft our cube Rotisserie-style. We’ve recently updated our list and wanted to get a Roto event on the books to see how the new cards played. A total of twelve drafters has proven to be the magic number for this format, but a last-minute cancellation left us with an odd number. We’ve drafted with eight and ten before, so eleven players was still pretty good. The biggest problem this posed was with forming teams after the draft, but 6-on-5 meant that the odd wizard out never had to wait long before he could find a match. In this post, I want to recap and critique my draft. For your reference, here’s a link to the spreadsheet with the entire draft, which includes another link to the full cube list:
EWDC Cube Roto Draft, 12/20/2014
In the weeks leading up to the event, I landed the 12th overall pick, which became the 11th pick on draft day. Keep in mind that Rotisserie is a “snake” draft, meaning that the draft order from the first round reverses in the even-numbered rounds. Having the last overall pick in the first round (and all other odd-number rounds) meant I had the first pick in the second round (and all other even number rounds). Picking at the extreme ends of the draft, a.k.a. “the wheel” or “the turn”, is generally a very good thing in this format. Back-to-back picks afford you a lot of opportunity for synergies, as it’s much easier to select cards that complement each other when you pick two at a time. Of course, there are a plethora of picks between each pair of your own, so there is still ample opportunity to miss out on the cards you desire for your deck. While last pick is nice, I generally believe it’s worse than the other wheel pick at the top of the draft. Nevertheless, there are advantages to having a later pick and any draft slot can lead to a great deck if your plan is fluid and well-conceived.
My plan for this particular draft was to draft around the freshly added blue enchantment Opposition. In addition to adding good ol’ Oppo, we’ve recently increased support for token-based strategies, particularly in red and white. I had a feeling someone else in the draft would be trying for a red-white tokens deck, so my plan centered on remaining base-blue before eventually dipping into a second color, preferably green. Green offers the benefit of mana dorks like Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, Llanowar Elves, etc.. These cheap creatures help you get ahead on mana – always important in cube – and stick around to power up Opposition. Green also gives you access to some solid token generators like Awakening Zone and Deranged Hermit (SQUIRRELS! SQUIRRELS! SQUIRRELS!). Most importantly, green features the other cornerstone of the deck I wanted to draft, Prophet of Kruphix. Once the Prophet is in your deck, all your creatures are granted double-duty with Opposition or the ability to attack on your turn, then tap something down on your opponent’s turn. Prophet also opens up ludicrous possibilities with another card I was targeting, Tradewind Rider.
Ultimately, the key to the Opposition deck is to draft plenty of dudes, preferably ones that carry some other value upon being cast because the deck generally plans to skimp on spells. Blue decks in cube Roto don’t typically feature a lot of creature spells, so I felt confident I wouldn’t have to fight too hard with my fellow drafters for the cards I wanted. The green cards were probably going to be harder to come by because most cube veterans understand the value of ramping. Still, I was confident that if green was being over drafted, I could change lanes slightly and go for a blue-white Opposition deck with more emphasis on blink effects from Venser, Sojourner and the like, while still being able to splash for Prophet of Kruphix. Going into the draft, I knew I wanted to walk away with Opposition, Prophet, Tradewind Rider, and Master of Waves. Everything I drafted beyond that simply needed to synergize well with the pillars of the deck.
The first few picks of the draft had a couple interesting wrinkles this time around. In a format where Sol Ring, Black Lotus, and Ancestral Recall have always gone first in some order, Ryan threw a curveball by taking Fastbond 3rd overall and Jason followed with a Mox Ruby changeup at #4 before Dan brought the draft back to business-as-usual with Recall 5th. Most of us knew that Ryan was planning to brew up a Fastbond deck and it’s safe to say at this point that Fastbond is completely justifiable as a top-3 pick. It essentially turns all of your lands into Moxen that zap you for a point of damage when they come into play, which is pretty busted. Of course, you must spend a green mana and a card to get that effect, but in my limited experience with the card, it has proven itself a fair rival to Moxen in power level. As far as I’m concerned, if you draft around it appropriately as Ryan did, Fastbond is as good as or better than a Mox. Jason taking Ruby over Ancestral may seem innocuous, but it sent a strong signal that he was planning to draft red and that he wasn’t planning to pair with blue. Those types of commitments are not typical in the first round of rotisserie drafts and Jason isn’t a huge shill for basic mono-red aggro/burn strategy in cube, so I made a note to keep an eye on his future picks and the direction they took him.
The balance of the first round was fairly standard. The next picks before mine were Mox Jet, Mox Sapphire, Time Walk, Mox Pearl, and Mana Crypt. Jeff’s entire draft was based around casting as many Time Walks as possible, so he absolutely had to take it in the first round. I haven’t asked, but I’m curious what he would have taken if Jordan had taken a different Mox at #7 and left Jeff to choose between Time Walk and Mox Sapphire. He probably would have still slammed the Time Walk, but it might have been tempting to see if Time Walk would come back to him after the turn. Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t have. I was also planning to lead off my draft with Time Walk and follow it up with Snapcaster Mage. Jeff killed that plan, but his pick and Graden’s pick of Crypt left me staring at a piece of power I didn’t expect to fall to 11th pick. I gladly scooped up the last remaining Mox – one that was on-color if I could live my dream of blue-green – and then punted away some of the value gained from that late Mox by stupidly staying on target with Snapcaster Mage as my second pick. With Time Walk off the board, my incentive to get Snapcaster was much lower and I should have simply taken a card with more raw power. Jace, the Mind Sculptor was the obvious on-color choice and I missed it. I spent the rest of the draft waffling between creature picks to stay on target with Opposition and spell picks to play with my 2nd-pick Snapcaster. Go ahead and read down my list of picks. You’ll see I only ended up with five instants and sorceries. There were never more than three of those spells in my library at a time, so the Snapcaster Mage wasted away in my sideboard for the entire event.
Luckily, there weren’t too many misses after that. Vendillion Clique was my next pick at the end of the third round and I was surprised to see it fall that far, especially with three other drafters staking claims to blue cards in the first two rounds. Jeff and I have discussed this on the podcast before, but I credit local magician Michael Boland with first making the case to me for drafting Clique early in the Rotisserie format. There is so much redundancy among the blue spells in our cube that it generally seems more important to lock up the best blue creatures like Clique and Snapcaster early. I obviously took this too far with my 2nd-round Snapcaster pick, but Clique in the 3rd is very justifiable, especially considering my plan to build a creature-heavy blue with plenty of blue mana symbols for Master of Waves. Along with the Clique, I scooped up Opposition to cement myself in that deck. Like Ryan with Fastbond and Jeff with Time Walk, I couldn’t afford to wait any longer before selecting the crux of my deck.
My next four picks were straightforward: Master of Waves, Treachery, Fact or Fiction, and Tradewind Rider. Through those rounds, I made sure to keep a pulse on what my opponents were drafting in an effort to find the best second color for my deck. By the 7th round, it was pretty clear that Jason was going for the white-red tokens deck, despite having zero red cards in his pile. What he did have was Skullclamp, Big Elspeth, Enlightened Tutor, and Brimaz. Remember also that he took Mox Ruby in the first over every other Mox and Ancestral Recall, clearly signaling a preference for red. It came as no big surprise when he scooped up Purpheros and Goblin Rabblemaster a couple rounds later. Jason was going to make it difficult for me to pair with red. Meanwhile, Jeff snagged three green cards I had wanted for my deck before the 5th round in Eternal Witness, Noble Hierarch, and Birds of Paradise. I could live with missing on the Witness, but I had been confident I’d land one of the two green mana-dorks in our cube that could fix for blue. The time to make a choice on my second color was upon me. Fight with Jeff for blue-green or move into white and battle Jason for token makers and ETB effects?
I hedged for a few picks by taking lands. Flooded Strand plus Tropical Island essentially gave me two copies of the UG dual while leaving me open to pick Plains-based duals later. By the time the draft came back to me, the only useful fetch left was Wooded Foothills, which I paired with Breeding Pool for the full suite of blue-green fixing. At the very least, those lands would enable a free splash of Prophet of Kruphix, but it was at this point that I decided to dive headfirst into green. After taking Crystal Shard, I grabbed O.G. Garruk, Wall of Blossoms, and Scavenging Ooze. In hindsight, Awakening Zone may have been the correct pick over Garruk, but I was confident that no one else wanted to get in the Zone. In fact, the only reason John drafted the card was because he thought it made artifact creatures, not colorless Eldrazi spawn. There was nothing wrong with Garruk, though, and his easy-to-achieve “Overrun” ultimate was very powerful in my build. WoB was an easy choice, as it helps against aggressive opponents and plays well with Opposition, Tradewind, and Crystal Shard. Ooze was a nod to the fact that I might be paired up against Jeff or Ryan and their graveyard-powered decks. The sideboard-type cards that happen to be good on their own are always quality picks in Rotisserie because you have perfect knowledge of what every player is playing and can sideboard accordingly. Ooze slotted into my deck well because he is an efficient creature with devastating upside against certain strategies.
After drafting the Ooze, I couldn’t pass up one of my favorite cards in the Cube, Tangle Wire. It essentially acted a second-copy of Opposition in my deck, which was a welcome addition considering that I missed out on most of the best tutors and card draw available. After that, my draft veered a little off course. Llanowar Elves was a solid addition to my archetype, but Channel and Rofellos pulled a bit too hard in the ramp direction. Powerful, off-plan cards are typically a trap in the Rotisserie format. Channel and Rofellos would have been fine picks if I was fully diverging from my original plan and moving in on a ramp strategy, but trying to make those cards work in a blue-based tempo deck simply nerfs the power level of the cards in the first place. There’s something to be said about making sure that no one else in the draft lucks into a 25th-round Channel, but hating cards in a format where we break into teams after the draft is a foolish endeavor. As it turned out, the players best suited to the Channel and Rofellos, Spencer and John, both landed on my team in the end. While excellent cards in their own right, they didn’t jive with what my deck was trying to do, particularly in terms of their double-green casting costs. I would have been better served by taking cards like Man-O’-War, AEther Adept, or Deranged Hermit (all of which later landed in Jeff’s pile).
My draft got back on the rails after the Rofellos pick, but it wasn’t moving full steam ahead when I picked Bribery and Glen Elendra Archmage. Both had similar utility to the Scavenging Ooze. Bribery was, first and foremost, a spell that I could potentially flash back with Snapcaster Mage (albeit for 7 total mana, a fact that I dismissed based on my flawed ramp picks in the three rounds prior), but it was also a great sideboard option against opponents looking to cheat in huge monsters like Cartmill with his sneaky attackers or John and Ryan with their Eldrazi. Glen Elendra is simply a solid, redundant creature with awesome applications against spell-heavy opponents. In the end, the Archmage made my main deck, while Bribery lived in the sideboard until the right opponents came along.
After that, I felt great about the cards I picked to round out my deck. Prophet was a no-brainer, but the next run of 10 picks were all on point. I often sided out the Pilgrim, but he was crucial in my match-up against Alex’s land- and hand-hating Braids deck. Sower and Looter are great creatures in a tempo deck and Capsize good enough when I had it to justify taking over Jeff’s pair of Man-O’-Wars. All the picks from Edric to Beast Within more than pulled their weight, but Thassa and Teferi were particularly good and (obv) played well together. I had hung myself up on the ability to untap an extra time with Prophet of Kruphix, but the flash ability granted by Prophet and Teferi was tremendous with my glut of ETB-effect creatures. Not only was I stealing dudes with Sower of Temptation and bouncing things with Riftwing Cloudskate inside of combat, my opponents couldn’t respond with reactionary spells in those phases if Teferi was in play. The cost to play him is significant, but in a deck like mine built to cast heavy-blue creatures, he was a welcome addition.
At this point in the draft, most of the decks are fairly well built. Most picks in the last ten rounds are sideboard or mana-curve considerations. Because I threw away earlier picks on Snapcaster, Channel, and the like, I was able to find some starters in this range with Trygon Predator and Kiora’s Follower. Access to late gold cards is a distinct advantage of drafting an atypical color combination in Roto. Jeff was the only drafter I needed to worry about snaking me on those cards, but he had more direct ways to deal with opposing artifacts and enchantments (Reclamation Sage & Acidic Slime) and he didn’t have any use for the Follower. Jason took his sideboard very seriously at the end of the draft. He picked up Stonecloaker, Revoke Existence, Parallax Wave, and Vandalblast with four straight selections. Another theme you’ll see at the tail end is the prominence of multicolor pinpoint removal like Maelstrom Pulse, Vindicate, Warleader’s Helix, Detention Sphere, Sultai Charm, and Abrupt Decay. The cube is full of exceptional 1-for-1 kill spells, but you can afford to wait on the double-color options unless you know you’re fighting someone for that specific combination.
One strange part of this draft was how much of the mono-color removal was left to the last few rounds. The premium spells like Swords to Plowshares and Go for the Throat were long gone, but Faith’s Fetters, Shriekmaw, Nekrataal, and Earthquake all went later than my memory tells me they typically go (I could, of course, be wrong about this). As we draft in the Roto style more, it seems players are learning to devalue the redundant effects like spot-removal, counterspells, and expensive creatures. For example, I knowingly waited and waited on Man-O’-War and AEther Adept thinking that if I missed out on one, I could simply take the other. I whiffed on both, but I was still able to draft Capsize and Riftwing Cloudskate. I enjoy the current makeup of our cube, but it’s possible we should look to pare down the list to fewer cards and see what happens if some of the more superfluous spell types become scarcer.
Another interesting trend from this draft was how all the dedicated blue drafters landed outside of the first four draft slots. It’s not especially surprising considering that they all passed on Ancestral Recall, but I think there is a reason that later drafters tend to wind up blue. Because it is the best color, it seems likely that the later picks in the first round and early picks in the second round would tend to be blue more than any other color. The fact that the players at the end of the first round have the first picks of the second round means that more of those players will be able to “declare” themselves as blue drafters before the rest of the table can take a second card to go with the artifacts they likely drafted with the first overall picks. The player who selects Ancestral Recall is, of course, the exception to the rule, but should the likelihood that downstream drafters are going to scoop up Time Walk, Jace TMS, Snapcaster, etc. incentivize the player who would take Ancestral to take a Mox instead? Probably not, because passing on Ancestral gives one of those downstream drafters a better chance to pair it with a care like Time Walk or Jace, but it’s an interesting thought exercise.
To wrap things up, I want to offer a pair of superlative awards to each player’s Roto draft. Before we get there, I want to make it clear 1) I’m often wrong, 2) I have no idea the drafters’ rationale behind any of these picks, and 3) everyone’s final deck was competitive and fun. A single pick will never define a draft and all the cards in the cube are powerful, so my opinion on any of these selections is not especially important or relevant. With all of that said, here’s why everyone’s deck was amazing/horrible:
Spencer:
Best Value: Chain Lightning, 18th round. For reference, Lightning Bolt went in the 4th round.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Heliod, God of the Sun; 36th round. It’s not like he was giving up a ton of value at this point in the draft, but his deck was never turning Heliod on with devotion and it seems like there are simply better things to do with mana in this deck that make 2/1 cats.
Cartmill:
Best Value: Fireblast, 31st round. Can I really pick another burn spell? I can when it’s the greatest card of all time! In truth, Cartmill found a lot of good values (Sneak Attack has never gone this late), but Griselbrand in the 19th is probably the best. Our cube supports reanimator so well, so it’s hard to believe that its best reanimation target barely made it into the top half of all cards picked.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: All the burn spells taken over Chain Lightning OR Sneak Attack, 18th round. Cartmill had a nice red-white aggro deck coming together before he jumped ship and dug in his heels on playing Sneak Attack. It’s insane that the card was available so late, but the tools to support a deck based around the red enchantment were all gone by the time he chose it. In a vacuum, it’s a steal that late, but Cartmill spent a lot of his subsequent picks attempting to move his archetype cross-country from Aggroville to Combo City.
Ryan:
Best Value: Primeval Titan, 40th round. It didn’t even end up in his pile (thanks, Canal Dredger) and I was tempted to give the nod to Bazaar of Baghdad in the 5th, but Prime Time in the last rounds is just silly.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Gavony Township, 34th round. It’s hard to find fault in any of Ryan’s picks, as most were lands and he knew exactly what other cards to target for his stupefying strategy, but Township makes the least sense to me. Sure, he could potentially grow tokens from Battlesphere, Decree of Justice, or Avenger of Zendikar, but those tokens tend to do enough on their own. Township would be more at home in a “fair” green-white creatures deck.
Jason:
Best Value: Land Tax, 15th round. Whether you can abuse it or not, this card is busted in the early game. Graden could have grabbed it before Jason to go with his Armageddon without giving up anything too important.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Coalition Relic, 8th round. This is a fine card and I’m sure it wasn’t bad in Jason’s list, but it doesn’t seem to fit the token theme all that well. It seems like Jason was caught between an artifact-centric deck and the token deck, so perhaps picking the Relic was an attempt to stay open.
Dan:
Best Value: Ancestral Recall, 1st round. By default. It has never gone this low before.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Sword of Fire and Ice, 3rd round. I suppose it’s not a true head-scratcher, but I don’t agree with the pick after opening with Ancestral and Force of Will. I’ve written a lot of words about devaluing redundant effects in this format and I believe the Swords have that distinction. There are so many powerful pieces of equipment in the cube, including all five Swords of Blank and Blank, that you don’t have to pick them this early. Furthermore, in a base-blue deck with Ancestral and Force of Will, what are the odds you’re going to play enough creatures to justify playing equipment? Vendillion Clique, Mana Drain, and a number of other blue or red cards would have made more sense to me in this spot.
Alex:
Best Value: Pack Rat, 12th round. Bitterblossom in the 5th deserves mention, but I want to take this opportunity to highlight a card that keeps rising in value the more I see it played. Pack Rat turns any hand into a winner at the low cost of 5 mana. Pair that fact with the dumb things it can do in a reanimator shell and you have one of the most underappreciated cube cards I can think of.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Slaughter Pact, 24th round. I’m picking nits here, as Alex’s deck was as streamlined and focused as they come, but I question the decision to take Slaughter Pact in a deck that is willing to give up lands on both sides of the table. He obviously doesn’t need to cast it if he doesn’t have the mana to eventually pay, but I did see Jeff use Venser, Shaper Savant on Alex’s third land to win a practice game. In general, it’s a risky card and he might have been better off with Murderous Cut.
Jordan:
Best Value: Library of Alexandria, 7th round. Drafters avoiding the consensus “most powerful” cards to take on-plan cards was another trend in this iteration of cube Roto. Library rarely falls out of the first 3 or 4 rounds, but it fell to the 7th this time. I had personally lost track of the card when I wandered over to the table with lands in the 6th round. I was sure that the other drafters forgot about Library, as well, before Jordan nabbed it four picks before I could pounce. Well played, sir.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Miren, the Moaning Well; 31st round. Frankly, I don’t understand why this card is in the cube or what creatures Jordan was planning to sacrifice to it. I suppose that Sundering Titan makes sense, but if you have that card in play, you’re probably already won.
Jeff:
Best Value: Regrowth, 18th round. I’m mad at myself for not drafting this sooner for my deck.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Shardless Agent, 26th round. Two-for-ones are never fully dead, but this card whiffs a little too much in Jeff’s build. He’s got two counterspells, three mana dorks, and an X-spell that would provide little or no benefit off the Agent’s cascade. The Agent could also cascade into an underpowered Regrowth. Again, it’s a fine card, but it would be better in a deck that could more commonly use it as a tutor for a specific type of effect.
John:
Best Value: Metalworker, 7th round. Johnny Two-Homes missed out on some of the cheaper fast-mana artifacts, but Metalworker is a fantastic consolation for a dedicated artifact deck. Jason and Jordan probably could have made good use of the ‘Worker, but lucky for John, they invested their picks elsewhere.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Mirari’s Wake, 4th round. The Wake likely would have lasted into later rounds. I would have rather seen John use this pick on one of the cards Jordan took next (Tinker or Phyrexian Metamorph) or a cheaper artifact like Sensei’s Divining Top or Scroll Rack. Both of those cards also went later, but after starting the draft with three straight colorless cards, I don’t agree with John’s choice to slam a 2-color enchantment in the 4th round.
Graden:
Best Value: Armageddon, 4th round. A true-build around card capable of singlehandedly winning games is hard to find in the 4th round. ‘Geddon, in particular, severely punishes some of our cube’s most popular archetypes.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Banisher Priest, 11th round. I can appreciate Graden’s desire to get some removal on a stick for his mono-white deck, but Fiend Hunter went 14 rounds later. The other white drafters at the table were also playing red, so they were unlikely to need a fragile and conditional removal option like the Banisher Priest. Graden could have waited on him.
Greg:
Best Value: Tangle Wire, 20th round. This card would have been great for a lot of the other players in this draft. I was lucky to get it so late.
Biggest Head-Scratcher: Snapcaster Mage, 2nd round. See the 3000+ words above recapping my draft. This was a dumb pick.
