Magic the Gathering

Drafting

The Magic Walkthrough – Drafting Double Worldwake

By Lauren Lee ⋅ February 2, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I hope everyone’s Pre­re­lease was excel­lent! Mine involved sleep­ing in, eat­ing Chee­rios, play­ing some Halo 3 ODST, and then head­ing out around 1:30 PM for the after­noon drafts. I love it when I don’t have to rush in the morning.

Today I have a cou­ple draft walk­throughs for you, which should be inter­est­ing since they’re in a soon-to-be-obsolete for­mat! (D’oh!) In fact one draft was ZWW, and the other was WZW. How weird and crazy is that?

How­ever the lessons to take away are still valu­able. Since get­ting any kind of expe­ri­ence with World­wake cards will reveal how World­wake will change Zendikar Lim­ited. The true power level of the cards starts to come out.

New York World­wake Pre­re­leases can get really crowded, and this Pre­re­lease was excep­tional because it was even more crowded than at the Zendikar Pre­re­lease. The venue was Fight House, a mar­tial arts stu­dio where peo­ple were mar­tial arts-ing while the Pre­re­lease was going on at the other side of the room. As peo­ple boxed in the ring, play­ers were bat­tling it out Planeswalker-style at the tables. Unfor­tu­nately there was no space to draft at the des­ig­nated time, so I had to wait an hour or so before a draft got underway.

I opened a Hideous End, which I took over other good cards. I still had a thing for black in Zendikar; I fig­ured it would be quite good even with World­wake.

I pro­ceeded to take some more heavy black cards: Gate­keeper of Malakir, Kali­tas, Blood­chief of Ghet. Expect­edly, how­ever, black quickly dried up. I guess I wasn’t the only one with a fond­ness for black cards. How­ever the turn­ing point was really when I noticed a Blade­tusk Boar, and it was clearly bet­ter than my black option. It was the best card in the pack, that I recall. It was risky, as I had passed Burst Light­ning and an Inferno Trap, but I decided to head into Black-Red. Per­haps it was a greedy choice. But I am a greedy, greedy girl.

I con­tin­ued to feed off a stream of red: 2 Gob­lin Short­cut­ters, 1 Hell­fire Mon­grel, and almost a last pick Spire Bar­rage. I didn’t think I’d run the Bar­rage, as my black cards needed a very heavy amount of Swamps, and my red cards could more-or-less be splashed. I was plan­ning on run­ning maybe 7 Moun­tains.

My risk was not rewarded, how­ever. Look­ing through my deck now, I see 11 cards from Zendikar, and 11 cards from World­wake. So the qual­ity of my cards from World­wake dropped con­sid­er­ably. And I ended up with a lot more red.

Here is the decklist:

The curve is quite high for an “aggres­sive” deck, but I felt it was more a deck that was meant to “ping” the oppo­nent for incre­ments of dam­age, through cards like Cosi’s Rav­ager and Blood Seeker. And the eva­sive four-drops would pro­vide a more solid approach to get­ting in dam­age. Occa­sion­ally it could get more aggres­sive starts with Short­cut­ter backed up by Smol­der­ing Spires.

Eval­u­a­tion of World­wake cards: The Zendikons are ridicu­lously aggres­sive. In par­tic­u­lar, Crusher Zendikon, which is tech­ni­cally a 4/2, haste, tram­ple. As a 4-drop. I played it on Smol­der­ing Spires, to add insult to injury and a way to push in more dam­age later when the Zendikon died. I never did this, but I could’ve also played it on an untapped Quick­sand to have dou­ble the Quick­sand.

Quick­sand is one of those cards I com­pletely hated when I first saw it. It felt very nar­row and easy to play around, but I was very wrong. It is just a solid removal “spell.” Not par­tic­u­larly excel­lent but very playable and very use­ful. It can stop an army along with some block­ers, to present trades favor­able for you. Its weak­ness is to fliers and to pump spells. For­tu­nately it does deal with a lot of the land­walk crea­tures that can present prob­lems for cer­tain decks. Also Sur­rakar Marauder and Blade­tusk Boar. I would never first pick Quick­sand – there is a need to find spells to play before pick­ing use­ful lands, but it should still be picked fairly highly. It also clashes with hav­ing high cast­ing cost cards (like my Kali­tas) since if you ever want to cast those spells you would rather not sac one of your own lands. But you just need to weigh cost-benefits to see when you should use it.

I think the real trick is know­ing when to run into a Quick­sand with­out any tricks of your own. Obvi­ously, if the oppo­nent only has 3 lands, you run into it because your oppo­nent prob­a­bly isn’t going to want to lose that tempo. At four lands, it’s a lit­tle less cer­tain, but I think I nor­mally don’t mind risk­ing it. Your oppo­nent loses quite a bit of tempo, los­ing the 4th land drop. At 5 it is prob­a­bly too late. But on the play, it might still be worth it as you’ll have 2 more lands than your oppo­nent if your oppo­nent cracks it. This puts you in a pretty favor­able posi­tion if you don’t mind los­ing a creature.

Quick­sand is just a very com­plex card in itself. Whether to use it or not, it is up to the spe­cific sit­u­a­tion pre­sented. When­ever there’s a Quick­sand on the table, you must think very hard about what to do and think about what your opponent’s deck may have.

In the first round, I went 2–0 against a mono-white deck. First game went pretty fast. Had a lot of Smol­der­ing Spires to push in dam­age. Sec­ond game I got out Kali­tas and stopped his fliers from peck­ing at me. In the sec­ond round, I think my opponent’s mana was not as good as he would like since he was play­ing three col­ors. I noticed that both drafters on my left and right picked red cards. This oppo­nent was on my right in the draft. His Cal­cite Snap­per was very annoy­ing, but I stole the games 2–0. In the last round I got pretty crushed by a GR deck. First game was mar­gin­ally close, and I made one big mis­take. (I think I could’ve destroyed his Trusty Machete with my Ham­mer of Ruin one turn, but com­pletely for­got about it. Real­ized the next turn, a turn too late.) He made his own mis­takes, too, appar­ently. The board got very com­pli­cated at some points. Never-the-less, I kept los­ing to his Bes­tial Men­ace. As soon as that dropped, I was men­tally, like, “Well, I can’t win against an ele­phant, a wolf, AND a snake.” They were all rep­re­sented by different-sized pieces of Sty­ro­foam, too. It was an urban jun­gle, and it was tram­pling all over me. I also got screwed for black game two, but I kept a risky hand. So I’m prob­a­bly to blame there. We played another games after­wards, and I had a decent hand, but he had a start of Arbor Elf into turn-two Leatherback Baloth. That was kind of a pain, but I had a Hideous End. But he then dropped Terra Stom­per. I lost to exactly three cards basically.

I’m not sur­prised I lost to that deck. Bes­tial Men­ace and Leatherback Baloth are incred­i­bly pow­er­ful uncom­mons for green in World­wake, and really, I think it some­what needed them to be more viable out­side of mono-green. Well, I sup­pose Leatherback Baloth can only be played in a very heavy green deck, again. But Bes­tial Men­ace can cer­tainly be played in Gx decks just fine. He also ran Explores, which boosted the deck, gave it some dig­ging power for bombs, and seemed pretty solid over­all. He also had mul­ti­ple Graypelt Hunters, which are very solid by them­selves or with other Allies.

The sec­ond draft was WZW (I went to a dif­fer­ent store), and I was a lit­tle weirded out by that. It also did weird things to the draft, I think. But any­way, I did a 180 and went UW! A favorite color com­bi­na­tion of mine.

My first pick was a lit­tle unset­tling how­ever. I took a Sear­ing Blaze over Kalas­tria High­born. Maybe I should’ve playtested the rare and went for a black Vam­pires deck. Any­way, red def­i­nitely died after that. So my Sear­ing Blaze didn’t see my deck. Here’s the list I ended up with:

Look at all those tempo spells! Sheesh! It has life gain, bounce, tap­ping, dif­fi­cult block­ers, and lots of fliers. It cer­tainly looks like a UW fliers deck.

My mem­ory is a bit hazy on my first round. I know I went 2–0 pretty eas­ily how­ever. My oppo­nent was green; prob­a­bly couldn’t han­dle the fliers. It might have been against this oppo­nent I had one of the fastest kills I’ve seen a blue deck pro­duce. It was turn one Welkin Tern(?), turn three Hori­zon Drake, turn four Wind Zendikon (8 dam­age). And then a Hori­zon Drake or some­thing to finish.

The sec­ond round was a lot more inter­est­ing. My oppo­nent was BR, but his deck seemed to full of removal spells rather than threats. He had Smother, Urge to Feed, 3 Cun­ning Spark­mage(!!), and Marsh Casu­al­ties. In game one, it started a bit slowly. I stalled the board a lit­tle with a Wind Zendikon on my Quick­sand. I left mana up for AEther Tradewinds both times in case he tried to kill my crea­ture. When he went to Urge to Feed it, I bounced it and his Quag Vam­pires. How­ever when I replayed it, I had two other 2/2s on the board. He played Marsh Casu­al­i­ties and killed all 3 of my guys. Oops. I recov­ered later, when I used Refrac­tion Trap to pre­vent Giant Scor­pion’s one point of dam­age and pointed it at his 0/1 Cun­ning Spark­mage. The Scor­pion died in com­bat. Even­tu­ally I won with a really big Apex Hawks. Game two, I used Refrac­tion Trap for his Cun­ning Spark­mage again. And swung in over­head. While a bigass Guardian Zendikon was left on defense. At some point I also tapped a guy with Kor Hook­mas­ter and bounced it with Sur­rakar Ban­isher the next turn.

Third round I got utterly crushed by a mostly white deck with a slight blue splash. My deck was great at defend­ing against ground crea­tures, but against his deck of 3 Fledg­ling Grif­fin, 2 Kor Sky­fisher, and what­not, I couldn’t really do much to defend myself. My turn one Perime­ter Cap­tain never blocked once. I got a lit­tle stuck on mana at some point. But I’m not sure what I would’ve done if I hadn’t been stuck any­way. I feel my deck would’ve had a chance if it had the right defen­sive cards, but I had too many irrel­e­vant ground dudes.

The BR guy might’ve had more of a fight­ing chance perhaps.

I real­ized one thing. Max­i­miz­ing fliers is very impor­tant since there are almost no good answers to them. The best block­ers gen­er­ally don’t fly. Which is why I was dis­ap­pointed in Perime­ter Cap­tain and Guardian Zendikon a bit – they just weren’t any good against fliers. Same with Quick­sand.

I was still very pleased with my deck over­all. I think I won one game while man­ascrewed. That was the “fast kill” draw I had. I didn’t have white mana and got stuck on three lands for a while or some­thing. Tide­force Ele­men­tal, Refrac­tion Trap, and Light­keeper of Eme­ria are also very pow­er­ful cards; although I never got to play the Tide­force Ele­men­tal. They’ll be much harder to find in ZZW draft, though, unfor­tu­nately. So one can­not rely on get­ting these pow­er­ful cards to fill out a UW deck.

I imag­ine UW got slightly more pow­er­ful with World­wake. The for­mat is still incred­i­bly fast, how­ever, so one can­not really waste too much time wait­ing to play Guardian Zendikons. Cards like Fledg­ling Grif­fin should pro­vide a way to speed up the clock and fill out a UW fliers deck. And Kor Sky­fisher, if this is pos­si­ble, prob­a­bly got even a lit­tle bet­ter with World­wake. My oppo­nent bounced his Hal­i­mar Depths back to his hand to replay it. Get­ting back most of the com­mon lands in World­wake seems pretty good. And imag­ine play­ing a Kor Sky­fisher with Archon of Redemp­tion out. You can get a lot of value bounc­ing per­ma­nents back to your hand with World­wake. Get­ting back Mul­ti­kicker crea­tures to play them even big­ger? Sounds good!
As peo­ple start to play the “real” for­mat of ZZW, more infor­ma­tion will come out as to which arche­types are now the best. Will BR reign as cham­pion still? Or will peo­ple start fight­ing for white cards? Allies also seem nuts with what’s avail­able in World­wake, but will it become more reli­able to try to force Allies? How does World­wake shake things up for Zendikar? We’ll hope­fully find out soon!

Lauren Lee, editor of Mulldrifting, has been playing Magic competitively since Conflux and in that time has developed a strong passion for the game and in teaching others to be the best players they can be. Sightings of her have been recorded at various events around NYC.

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