Let’s Play Magic Online: 3 Failed IPA Drafts

Posted on June 27, 2012 by ChrisKool and PlanetWalls

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  3. I take it as a lesson that I shouldn’t take my trainwrecks so seriously then.

  4. I’ve never drafted IPA, so massive grain of salt inc… but, it seems like you guys are picking based upon the assumption that fixing exists that actually doesn’t? I see no reason in the card pool why anything but 5cc green should be able to get away with anything but 2 colours and maybe a slight splash. The actual fixers are even worse than existed in Alara, and the 6/6/5 mana base is absolutely atrocious in every format ever.

    I love watching you two drafting together, though, so failed or not, keep it coming!

  5. Fixing is actually fairly common in blue, and in white (Helionaut) and red (Tundra Kavu) in the third pack, and there are also lands, etc., for fixing. As I remember it, though, two-color drafting was quite tough, and was made that way because the third pack features enemy-colored cards while the prior two packs focus on allied colors. If you were going to try and stay in two colors with a small splash– to take advantage of the third pack’s higher power, you either would need to wait on which second main color you were drafting until then, or you would have to dance around in the first two packs trying to keep in enemy colors of some kind.

    Then again, maybe I’m misremembering.

  6. No, there really is quite a bit of fixing in blue and a bunch of uncommon dual/tri-lands, so going 3+ colors w/o green is very realistic and actually desirable to not miss out on the power of the 3rd pack. You just need to pick fixing highly, you can’t assume you’ll luck into some. Cards like dream thrush, sea snidd, and reef shaman don’t “seem” like high-picks but sometimes you have to take them very early if you want to end up with a consistent deck. Same goes for the dual/tri-lands and the artifact mana.

  7. I drafted white-red with a hint of black last night and ran into mana issues with total land count. I even had double Lashknife Barrier and a Zap to dig. :(

    But I did notice something that I really, *really* hate about this format: the print run in Apocalypse is so janky. I saw 5 packs that were the Living Airship and Gaea’s Skyfolk run. It seemed like Temporal Spring, Llanowar Dead and Consume Strength popped up as a part of these runs a lot too… so green ended with landslide of playables, and I was scrambling for grey ogres to fill out my removal-heavy deck.

  8. Walls – I hear you about the fixing, but these cards don’t make 6/6/5 good – most of them either reward something like 8/4/4, or two colours + two light splashes. The difference between fixers that require you to have a colour to fix, and something like an Alara tri-land, is really big.

  9. IPA is a very bomb intensive format. Sometimes the games come down to who drops a bomb and makes it stick. I 3-0′d a draft winning each game with fervant charge. Then i lost first round the next draft to a guy who… gasp… played fervant charge. Decent videos at the least :P