All aboard the Gravy Train

With the draft finished, I thought we’d have a look at where the deck ended up and how the draft went.

First, here is the rough sketch of the deck:

All of the cards are there. I may move a few things around or adjust the mana a bit, but this is the basic framework of what we came up with for the Modern Rotisserie Draft.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I don’t think it’s a ridiculous deck, but it’s well rounded and I think it can go toe-to-toe with any of the other decks. Early in the draft, after taking black cards and then Tarmogoyf, I envisioned a bit more of a “Rock” style deck. A grindy midrange deck that had a lot of answers while also being able to apply pressure. My deck didn’t quite end up there, though.

The deck morphed into more of a ramp deck, based on elves. Some of my choice grindy cards went to Sam and Chris, leaving me with the elf decision. I decided pretty early that I’d be taking the elves, but wasn’t sure how long I could float them for. As it turned out, I could float them for about as long as I wanted, because almost nobody else was interested in them. I figured I’d be fighting Chris for them as he had two swords and a bunch of good three drops, but he didn’t prioritize them as highly as me and I ended up with my pick of them for the most part.

Questions

So I have elves, but what am I ramping into? I tried to balance the threats out a bit. At the five slot I have these:

Batterskull was our first pick, and remains one of our better threats (and answers). It’s just good against almost every deck we’ll face.

Sidisi, Undead Vizier was a card I had my eye on from the early stages. Being an elf deck with a lot of ramp cards, finding big bombs to cast can be tricky. Sidisi does a great job of holding down the ground while searching up the right bomb, and works *so* well with mana elves as they become less useful later in the game.

The old Slimeball is one of my favorite cube cards to ramp into. You can set your opponent back on mana, cut them off from certain colors, and of course destroy pesky swords and enchantments.

Whisperwood Elemental is a powerhouse card that makes its own boardstate and also gives you some protection from sweeper effects. Really happy to have this guy on my side.

For six drops, I went with main man the Gravy Train:

The closing power on Grave Titan is such a trump versus any deck that doesn’t put a clock on you. This guy just ends the game in a few turns, and is relatively easy to cast as well. Against creature decks he does a great job of keeping the ground clogged up.

For big finishers, I’m going with two dominant, colorless, planeswalkers:

Karn Liberated, aka the Karnfather is a complete house. He comes down at massive loyalty, can take out problematic permanents, and is great at tearing apart opposing players hands as well. A great finisher, he does it all.

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon has really impressed me. I’m not sure how good he’ll be in this deck, but I’m willing to try it. The worst case scenario doesn’t feel that bad with Ugin. Though I will likely be taking him out against some of the decks I may face.

Answers

I have a pretty diverse suite of answer cards lined up here which I hope will give me game against all of my competitors. Part of the strength of this kind of deck is that many of our threats are also answers. Scavenging Ooze, Karn, Acidic Slime, Liliana of the Veil, Garruk Relentless, and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon can all help mitigate certain strategies while also applying pressure to our opponent.

As far as direct answers go, we start things off with our hand disruption:

The best in the biz. Takes anything away making it great against essentially all decks.

This might be better than Thoughtseize in some spots. In Modern Rotisserie I’d rather just have another Thoughtseize, but Inquisition is still fantastic.

Duress is maindeckable but I’ll likely start it in the board. When I do bring it in, I expect it will perform very well indeed.

For creature removal, we have a few variations on this:

We also have actual Doom Blade as well. I always feel like Doom Blade is underrated in cube style drafts. Considering that essentially nobody else is playing black at all, Doom Blade is exceptional in our deck.

A Little Help

One annoying thing about playing ramp decks like this is when you ramp out a threat quickly, but it’s then dealt with and you are left begging the top of your deck to provide you with some punch (and not some more elves). I tried to lightly incorporate some card advantage into the mix, mainly through these three cards:

Night’s Whisper is just cheap card draw that I can fit into my curve pretty easily. Nothing fancy; just cards.

I picked up Courser of Kruphix fairly early; earlier than I think its power level warrants. I felt like Chris may be interested in it, and I really wanted powerful three drops to cast after a turn one elf.

Oracle of Mul Daya is one of my favorite creatures ever. The virtual card advantage you get off of the extra lands flowing from the top of your deck to the battlefield is insane. Especially when you actually have places to put all that extra mana. Love this one.

Final Thoughts

A few cards that I wish I would have taken:

In some matchups Phyrexian Arena isn’t that great, but in the ones where it is, it’s *really* good. Like almost unbeatably so.

My plan of ignoring mana came together pretty well. I got two key mana fixers, but the one sticking point I have is that casting a turn three Liliana of the Veil won’t happen quite as often as I’d like. Urborg doesn’t help my opponents and would have been nice to have.

I didn’t want any untapped lands in the deck (mana elf on turn one can be really important), but I think my deck would be better with a Treetop Village in it. It gives you a place to put extra mana in the late game and can be really annoying for the control decks.

Overall I’m happy with the deck. I can’t wait to play it!

Marshall

Well that got interesting.

Here is the spreadsheet as it stood winding down the first 15 or so picks of the Modern Rotisserie draft:

From our perspective, things went pretty well. After the first pick Batterskull, we saw that black was the most open color after everyone else had had two picks. In fact, there were no actual black cards taken (Glimpse the Unthinkable doesn’t count) so we moved right in taking Liliana of the Veil and Thoughtseize. From there things proceeded nicely as we picked up two more threats in Bitterblossom and Tarmygoyf.

Green felt the most open at the time and even though other players have since moved in on it, there is enough room for all of us here I think.

My main competition for picks has come from Chris Pikula who is on a green white midrange deck not that different from our own green black midrange deck. Chris is overlapping with Randy and Adam for white, though, so he has to tend to those matters here in the early stages of the draft.

Randy’s deck is heavy red but may end up being fully red white by the end of it. It’s looking solid and is a deck everyone is keeping their eye on for sideboard cards down the line.

Adam’s deck is mono white and looks solid as well. He has the fixing to take some black cards, or just flash back his Lingering Souls. My guess is that we’ll see him splash black just for Souls and maybe a few cards like Sorin, Solemn Visitor.

Aaron’s deck started out mono blue, but has now morphed into heavy blue with some white. Aaron’s position at the table looked fantastic, as he has the majority of the powerhouse blue cards and even has free reign on the blue/white cards.

But this is where things got interesting: BDM was looking to be blue red Splinter Twin but has now moved in on Aaron’s territory picking Wrath of God and Supreme Verdict back-to-back! Aaron’s next pick was Sphinx’s Revelation—a card he was previously getting very late—showing us that the signal has been received and that the Azorius fight is on between those two.

Rashad broke the internet when he first-picked Glimpse the Unthinkable with the simple message: “Flag planted.”

Unthinkable indeed.

I have no clue how this is going to turn out for Rashad, but I suspect poorly. He used his early picks to take cards that he could literally take last in the draft if he wanted. Also, when you use individual cards to mill your opponent you gain speed but lose inevitability. People can sideboard 60+ cards pretty easily which weakens their deck somewhat but effectively blanks many of the cards in Rashad’s opening hand.

Also noteworthy: All three legendary Eldrazi are gone. That said, Rashad is tricky and knows these older cards very well, and I know he’ll have a plan to combat these issues. I’m super curious to see where he takes the draft from here.

Sam’s deck might be more off the wall at this point than Rashad’s. Sam has taken four colors thus far, and might have enough fixing to go for five if he wants. His deck seems to be pretty dependent on Primeval Titan at this point, though it’s not clear where it goes from here. Sam has a plan, and that plan will be revealed as we proceed through the draft.

As mentioned earlier, BDM started off planting a flag for Splinter Twin, but now may be moving in a more controlling Jeskai direction, but with Splinter Twin Combo still there as a win condition. Since white has some options to combo off with Twin, he may be able to make a sort of hybrid deck. We’ll see what Aaron has to say about it.

As for us, well we’ll keep picking up powerful midrange cards and hope to end on a solid balance of threats and answers that will power us through to the victory.

I also want to note that since starting this, at least five other playgroups have started doing one of these. I know there is an East Coast group doing one, there’s one on the LR subreddit, there is one for Wizards R&D, and also an East Bay Area playgroup doing one and they plan on playing it out in paper form!

Pretty awesome and I love to see the community doing cool stuff like this..

You can follow along with the live spreadsheet here: Modern Rotisserie Spreadsheet

At GP Cleveland, a bunch of coverage people were out at dinner and got to talking about what would be the first pick in a Modern Rotisserie draft. (Rotisserie draft is where you draft all of the available cards face up)

The standard issue arguments and discussions ensued and after the dust settled, it was decided that we simply had to make this happen.

With Randy Buehler’s recent experience running the Vintage Super League, he was the obvious choice for who to run the thing.

He came up with a great lineup for the draft: Chris Pikula, Adam Prosak, Aaron Forsythe, Rashad Miller, Sam Black, Brian David-Marshall, Me, and of course Randy himself.

So what will happen is that we’ll be drafting decks, using the entire legal Modern card pool as our booster pack. We’ll draft 40 cards total to build a 40 card deck.

Our initial discussion broke down into two camps:

Camp 1: Plant a Flag. People in this camp advocated for taking a hard archetype card with your first pick in order to signal your intentions to the rest of the field. Cards like Splinter Twin, Cranial Plating, and Glistener Elf are good examples.

Camp 2: Stay Open. People in this camp advocated for taking generally good cards that go in multiple decks. Cards like Lightning Bolt, Snapcaster Mage and Path to Exile came up a lot.

My first inclination was to be in the first group; plant a flag in a super strong archetype and push everyone else out of it. This way you can use your early/mid picks on value cards and clean up later with key pieces to your deck that nobody else wants.

For example, if you take Glistener Elf first, you’ll want the Inkmoth Nexus as soon as you can get it. But then you can take cards like Noble Hierarch, Remand, Serum Visions, while saving the other infect creatures and pump spells for way later down the line.

After considering how the decks would actually look, I changed my mind. Even though this is called a Modern Rotisserie, we aren’t actually building Modern decks. Many decks in Modern require critical mass of key components to be good. Playing Splinter Twin with *one* Splinter Twin and *one* Kiki Jiki, Mirror Breaker isn’t super consistent. Especially when you consider that you only get one Pestermite and one Deceiver Exarch. There are other cards that are capable of completing the combo, but they are white or cost five mana—not ideal at all.

Also the nearly perfect mana bases we play with in Modern aren’t available. This is a big game changer as we tend to take it for granted how good the mana is in Modern.

I decided that while this was constrained to the Modern card pool, that the decks would be built more similarly to a Cube deck than a Constructed Modern deck.

P1P1

As it turns out, I got the first pick in the draft. The nature of this kind of draft is that it “snakes” back and forth. So I pick my first pick, and then wait for 14 picks until I get another choice.

When I do a normal Booster Draft, I put a premium on staying open. In Rotisserie that premium is reduced, since everyone can see all of the picks. But when you have the first pick, it’s easy to plant a flag in a color and then watch your color get over-drafted for 14 picks until it’s finally back on you.

With relative openness in mind, these were my three frontrunners:

Lightning Bolt is perhaps the most efficient Magic card ever printed. It also goes in many different decks and never really disappoints.

Snapcaster Mage is in a color I’d like to be in, and provides a relatively unique effect with effectively no downside.

Batterskull is expensive by comparison, but is good in virtually all matchups.

I decided to stay open, and take the card that I felt had the most power while not committing to a color or strategy. I took Batterskull.

I figure that this gives me the best chance to keep an eye on how the draft is developing and then take a hard line at whatever I feel is being underdrafted. I also feel like Batterskull is effectively irreplaceable.

Cards like Lightning Bolt are great, but ultimately replaceable by slightly less efficient versions.

I don’t love taking a five mana card with my first pick, but I do love staying open and taking an outright powerful card that is good against effectively all of the decks I plan on facing in the draft.

We’ll be playing the games out on April 22nd, live on stream where you’ll be able to root for your favorite personality.

You can follow along with the picks by looking at the picks spreadsheet here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vce9vdhxqtu6zrptp_GmTyq3ik79wdqNxc4iXPF5DUk/edit#gid=0

Freshly minted Constructed Resources co-host Eric Froehlich found one artists rendition of Harold the bicycling bear:

LR Listener Garrett Gardner made an interesting survey on the lrcast subreddit. The information is super interesting.

You can take the survey here if you want (you don’t have to be a reddit user, but you should be!): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EYqvcuojHxNJ8uwfxoqDcw7VkJ_1fbYfyHCdMj0Ytnw/viewform

You can view the results here (whether you take the survey or not): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EYqvcuojHxNJ8uwfxoqDcw7VkJ_1fbYfyHCdMj0Ytnw/viewanalytics

Hey all, we’ve got three Dragons of Tarkir preview cards for you today!

We’ll take a quick look at them now, but rest assured they’ll be discussed at length on LR 275.

First up we have a blue uncommon that doesn’t exactly pass the Vanilla Test but could definitely play a role in the upcoming format:

Quarsi Deceiver enables some pretty cool stuff while holding the ground game admirably. The awkward part is that it costs two mana, so you can’t power out morphs any sooner than you normally would be able to. But down the line a little you get to start flipping things up a turn sooner, which is huge.

The real question is how many of this kind of effect do you need to make it worth playing?

Our next card is also uncommon, and also helps you pay for things. Sort of:

Warbringer definitely brings some war. At first it looks like a Hill Giant with some upside.

And it kind of is. But there are some crazy turns you can enable with this guy. You coud even set up a turn where you cast him using dash, then dash in like two Goblin Heelcutters or whatever and swing a game that looked like you were going to lose.

Warbrigner doesn’t make it easy to get full value from him, but he will be scary to stare down from the other side of the table, that’s for sure.

Our last card is a white common:

Artful Maneuver hails the return of the rebound mechanic in Dragons of Tarkir. First things first: this is just an OK combat trick. It’s one that is certainly playable, though, and the fact that it has rebound makes it a lot more desirable.

Even though Dragons of Tarkir won’t have the prowess mechanic in it, we can still use it for multiple triggers with the prowess cards from Fate Reforged. 

Luis and I will talk about these cards (and more) on episode 275 of Limited Resources!

– Marshall