Limited Resources: KTK Draft #6

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Limited Resources

“I guess I don’t take my drafting too seriously.” – Salman Khan




You can follow Marshall on Twitter @Marshall_LR
or check out the Limited Resources podcast at lrcast.com

 

  4. misplay city. makes no sense to sac a token to gain 5 life. you’re at 10, just put him to 1 with your goblin tokens, to play around him having a creature/removal spell and stablizing.

    a

  5. During round 2, it was absolutely the wrong decision to arrow storm the abzan battle priest.
    The act of treason/suspension field play would have allowed you to swing that turn for at least 8 points of life-linked first-strike damage. Given that he was effectively tapped out, that would have forced him to either take the eight or trade a morph for a bond-kin and take 5 with either line gaining a ton. Instead, you elect for a line of play that has you putting no pressure at all, despite the fact that you have the very aggressive Ankle Shanker in your hand.
    Additionally, you throw away the arrow storm, unconditional removal in this format, in favor of keeping the suspension field, which ends up being stranded in your hand. You justify this by saying “We’re not gonna win this game by arrow storming him”, which is exactly what happens.
    Then later when he offers the same situation with the similarly 5/4 roughrider you make decide to make the play but in much worse conditions (without most of the lifelink). Still it’s this play that pulls you ahead, and would have won you the game much more easily if you’d done it sooner.

  6. @rite: Saccing that token to the Butcher was imo clearly the correct play.
    Putting him at 1 nearly does nothing, because he can gain life with the butcher anyway. (Especially on the block. Attacking with all tokens in an untapped Butcher gains him life!)

    Gaining 5 makes it much more dangerous for his opponent to race. Since his opponent’s clock was pretty low this makes it even better: even if he wins that game he will probably clock out.

    @M1G1: Playing the Bloodire Expert turn 3 was imo clearly wrong. You didn’t watch it, but your opponent revealed the Mardu Hateblade for unmorphing his guy. With that information playing a morph looks better, because you can actually attack into the 1/1.

    @M1G2: I just kinda need to comment on that since you said it during G1: you played your lands in the wrong order. Playing the Plains turn one allows you to play two Mountains in a row to go Seeker of the Way into Hordling Outburst, while still allowing you to play turn 2 Swamp to go with the Chieftain if you don’t draw Outburst or don’t want to make that sequence.

  7. Round 2 was amazing – those games had critical decisions made by both sides that led to game states won or lost by a razor’s edge. I am going to re-watch that several times to learn about correct order of play. At some points it was just top decks, but I think there were plays made at several points that could have made the games play out quite differently.

  8. Tip for morph cards during the draft portion: drag them underneath the actual 3-drops so that you avoid the awkward re-arranging that the program does with the CMC piles. Less micro-management.

  9. Will all this talk in the comments about Marshall sac’ing to Butcher or not, I think it’s worth pointing out that the opponent really should have thrown away his newly-cast morph (or maybe another creature) on his last turn to give the Butcher lifelink as well and go up to 10. I don’t think Marshall has any outs if the opponent had done that.

  11. I would have taken the Wooly Loxodon over Act of Treason in the first pack. At that point, with the Rhino and Abzan Charm and before the last-pick Ambusher, it was looking likely that you’d have at least 5 green sources in your deck, at which point Loxodon is almost fully powered up. And Act of Treason isn’t usually a card one misses, because it usually isn’t good enough and it’s fairly common to end up with two.

    Christian: I don’t agree with your comment about Bloodfire Expert vs. Morph. Opponent may have the Hateblade, but that doesn’t mean they’ll play it. If they play something like an Alabaster Kirin, you’d rather have the Expert in play to trade with it. There’s also the possibility of drawing Hordeling Outburst, Defiant Strike, or Bring Low (if the opponent plays Morph and Hateblade). Not to mention the chance of having the sequence of draws Marshall did, where he had things to do on turns 4 and 5 and ended up saving two mana to hardcast the Brigade.

  13. In Round 3, Game 1, you once again misplay act of treason.
    Right after he tapped out to play Snowhorn Rider, you should have played act of treason to steal it. This would have brought him down to 2, you up to 23 and left you with 3 lethal attackers and a Hateblade on the board with the certainty that he would have to block or kill the seeker next turn to ensure value off of Hordemate.
    There was a good chance that in such a morph heavy format that he would block the 2/3. Even if he did block the seeker, it’s a play that applies less pressure and allows him much more room to deal with your threats and possibly even counterspell or Crippling Chill in response to your act, which would could have gotten him back in it.
    Once again you can not identify that you were the aggro and instead of applying consistent pressure against his control-oriented deck, you try to set up one risky coup-de-grace.

  14. Correct me if I’m wrong but match 3 game 1 could have been won a lot sooner (4 minute mark)by taking the snowhorn rider and attacking him for 10 bringing him down to 2. From here you have two outs to winning.

    The first which killed me is to just have a creature advantage. The next is attack with the mardu heart-piercer alone. The piercer gets blocked and then you timely hoardmate him back dealing 2 damage to your opponent. You missed the win by doing this at 7:33 as well….

  16. Hey Marshall, I respect you as a player but I have to say that you are pretty terrible at keeping track of what kind of deck you are actually drafting :) Like this time when you do not realize until deckbuilding that you want to be just RW. Had you paid more attention to your fixing you would never take Ponyback Brigade over BR dual and so on.

  17. You need to realize that taking Green duals is *not* fixing for your deck. If you remove your green splash you’re just a Mardu deck with zero duals and 3 lands that come into play tapped. It was absurd to not only pass the Crag + Caves at the end of pack 2 (which should have been seen as no less than a miracle), but then even more absurd to be happy to get another RG land which does practically nothing for you.

  18. GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP GRUMP i guess u won or whatever but ur STILL A BAD PLAYER MARSHY