To be honest, I was going to write this up a few hours ago while the draft was still fresh in my brain, but I also didn't realize how tired I was so I crashed for a few of those hours first. But without further ado, lets get right in to this recap. Although some details might be a little hazy after my nap. So just bear with me.

Jubilations! The last in-person draft was a 7-man draft, but this time we got to get the full 8-man pod. Haven't had one of those in years due to the difficulty of gathering 8 people to draft with.

Unfortunately, my draft recap for this session isn't going to be as detailed as the last one because I wasn't able to check out as many of the games as I wanted to. But I feel like I got some pretty valuable feedback.

I went in to today's draft fully intent on trying to test either my newly supported Blink or Token archetypes or the new Golgari cards I added in. As I opened up my first pack, I saw a Lagrella, the Magpie staring right at me and I jumped on to the opportunity of locking myself in to a Bant Blink deck. Best of both worlds - being able to test out how strong Blink was while testing Lagrella as well. She looks like a powerful card but also at the same time, seems a little bit durdly. I also dislike locking myself in to 3 colors on my first pick, but this was all for science. My gambit was then rewarded because it seemed that every Blink card in the cube was passed to me and I ended up with a monster of a deck. The only card I didn't get was a Ghostly Flicker that I ended up passing in favor of some fixing which didn't wheel.

After the draft, I built a pretty spicy deck using the likes of Lagrella, Soulherder, Ephemerate, Against all Odds, and a few other blink tools. I also picked up things like Micromancer and Mulldrifter for value plays and picked myself up a Rust Goliath to help close out the game. As for the other decks that people drafted, it looked like there was a value oriented Esper deck, an Izzet deck, Jund, Bant Ramp, Orzhov Reanimator, Rakdos Sacrifice, and a Gruul Stompy deck. A pretty wide variety of decks.

For the first round, I paired up against the Izzet deck which actually had some very aggressive plays and the first game started with me on the backfoot after they had a 1 drop in to a Sprite Dragon and Splatter Thug. Due to a greedy keep, the only play I had in the first few turns was a Circuit Mender and a Momentary Blink to stem the bleeding. After hitting a chain of fortunate draws, I stabilized at 6 life and proceeded to "go-off" with Lagrella. The entire day, I played Lagrella only in this round, but I was actually very impressed with the ability to remove a threat while also supporting my own shenanigans with the appropriate support to go along with it. Of course, effectively O-Ringing one of my own creatures did feel a little dubious, but when properly managed, the downside hardly impacted me at all. In the end, I hard casted the 10/10 instead of prototyping it, and smashed my opponent after a few more turns of maneuvering. The rest of the games were somewhat uneventful as I can't quite remember the details, possibly due to my nap earlier, but I do remember we went in to game 3 because my opponent had a pretty aggressive draw in game 2 while on the play so I was steamrolled in to the ground there. Whereas in game 3, my opponent didn't have a one-drop so I had some breathing space to position myself to nab a win. Unfortunately, because the round went pretty long, I was unable to check out the rest of the games. Additionally in all three of my rounds, I was sitting away from the other games so I couldn't peek at the duels going on next to me. So then I just grabbed my deck and playmat and jumped straight in to round 2 to face the Esper player.

Now that I had seen Lagrella in action, it was time to see another crazy three-drop in the archetype flex itself. Soulherder seems a bit polarizing as many players either say that the card is too fragile to get going or too oppressive. Because I hadn't yet played with it, I wanted to try it out before I drew any conclusions. And my goodness, did it perform. To make things short, I drew the titular card in games 1 and 2 against my opponent and it went virtually unanswered both games. With plenty of value ETB creatures, I just drowned my opponent and crushed him in both games. From there we shook hands and I had some time to go over and talk to the other players about their decks and to watch some of the still ongoing games.

In hind-sight, I think I might have been a bit mentally fatigued due to a rough week, because I had forgotten to ask some questions that I had been meaning to ask. Such as if players felt that the amount of removal in this draft environment felt just right or if it needed to be more or less. There were some ONE cards I wanted to get opinions on but it had completely slipped my mind today. Additionally, the round seemed to go a bit faster than the last and the third round was about to begin.

In the third round, I faced off against the other undefeated player that also just happened to be piloting Jund. In the last session that we had, the deck that went 3-0 was also a Jund deck but with a different pilot. I had seen some of his deck when he was facing off against the Bant Ramp player in round 2. If I recall correctly, the Jund deck from the last session was more of a value oriented deck whilst this one that I was facing down seemed to be a bit more controlly using disruption such as Dreams of Steel and Oil or Icy Manipulator. In game one, I can't quite remember what happened here, but I do remember having just overwhelmed my opponent with card advantage from a few ETB creatures and Soulherder. In game two, my opponent played a pretty annoying Cunning Sparkmage which actually dealt with a surprising number of creatures in my deck as quite a few of my key ETB creatures were X/1s and of course Soulherder was also quite threatened by its existence. But I played my Eldrazi Skyspawner in to it anyways, and Path of Exiled my own creature to find a second forest to resolve a Rust Goliath. Prior to that sequence, I was also keeping my opponent from doing much of anything by bouncing his Goblin Anarchomancer with my Reflector Mage while he was stuck on two lands. I then set up a trade with said Mage then resolved a devastating Against all Odds leaving me with a 10/10 and bringing back the Mage, thus closing out the game.

Unfortunately, because I wasn't able to keep track of the games. I don't know the final records for some of the players but this is what I could get from what I know.

Final Standings
Bant Blink | 3-0
Jund | 2-1
Esper | 2-1
Bant Ramp | ?
Orzhov Reanimator | ?
Rakdos Sacrifice | 0-3
Izzet Aggro/Spells | 1-2
Gruul Stompy | ?

Final Thoughts:
So on the Blink archetype - Soulherder is pretty nutty. But to be fair, it did sit unanswered in all of the games I had resolved it. And this could just be a symptom of the recent cutting back of removal spells. It isn't like Spiritmonger where, even with available removal spells, it's just impossible to get rid of. Quite the opposite really. So I think for the moment, I am going to keep an eye on it, but I won't be removing it just yet. If I do remove a card though, I will be removing Cloudshift. It looks like an odd choice, but hear me out. Cloudshift is similar enough to Ephemerate where it can be a little redundant. Additionally, with the addition of Micromancer in my cube, I noticed that there could be some potential for some unwanted shenanigans as I had all three of Micromancer, Cloudshift, and Ephemerate in my deck. So I'm going to head it off pre-emptively and replace it with something like Otherwordly Journey or bring back a removal spell or something else. As it stands, I think Blink is a pretty strong archetype but this is a bit of an outlier as I quite literally had every Blink support card in my deck except a Ghostly Flicker.

I might also look in to re-adding some more discard outlets in to either Black or Green to help out reanimator as the Orzhov player pointed out that once he had cut blue from his deck, he had very little in the way of enablers for his deck. Another thing to remove is Ghoulish Procession. I was just trying it out because it seemed interesting but I had a feeling that most of the time it would just be a turn 2 do nothing card and the Rakdos player confirmed my suspicions. All in all though, while I wasn't able to glean as much information as I wanted from this draft, I still had some pretty valuable feedback. I believe next month, I will be doing another draft with another group of players and I'll finally make the decision of whether or not I want to also remove signets from my cube. If I do though, I won't be removing all of the fixing however. I'll still be running cards like Coldsteel Heart and the like. It's just that signets are just a bit too efficient and removes some of green's color identity. That and it'll free up some slots in my cube for some more interesting artifacts.

But for now, we await the new MoM cards and I think I'm going to be trying out a couple of the battles so I'm pretty stoked for that.

Man, I missed drafting cube. This was a blast. A lot of the new playgroup had never played a cube before and the ones that had drafted ones before either played with proxied cubes or had never seen so many cards pimped out. Always feel fuzzy inside whenever people compliment my cube because this thing truly is a labor of love.

Unfortunately, not everything was perfect as our 8th had something come up and we couldn't find a replacement in time. So yeah, we had to fire off the cube with just 7 players. After checking which 45 cards were missing from the draft, there were some role-players like Goblin Bombardment or a few signets that didn't make it in. So some of my suspect tests didn't really pan out. Well, it's hard enough getting at least 6 players together for a cube let alone 8, so I'd say this was still a resounding success.

As for the decks that were drafted, my cube had recently undergone a revamp of sorts, removing a lot of "too" efficient removals and some two or even three for ones to let other strategies have a chance. And I think it definitely showed as there were three bonafide aggro decks drafted and piloted to varying levels of success. Although the third one just had some random seven-drops in it since that particular drafter just wanted to play some cool stuff and isn't well versed in playing Magic just yet. But the important thing is everyone involved had fun and there wasn't any games where things felt overwhelmingly terrible for the opponent except in a few instances.

And that brings us to those instances - So with the release of Dominaria Remastered, a lot of cards in my cube got some upgraded foil treatment which was great, but there was one other addition to my cube that I kind of put in with great trepidation. Man. Spiritmonger. What a creature. I was kind of undecided on whether or not I would put it in my cube but I decided, hey lets just try it out. Granted, the person that drafted it had a very solid Golgari deck, he and his opponents said that whenever Spiritmonger hit the board it just felt like an unlosable position. So for now, Spiritmonger will sit in the sidelines.

As for the other suspect tests, I think a few more games need to be played before reaching a verdict.

Anyways, lets get to the decks played.
I personally went with a Grixis deck that made tokens using Saheeli, Sublime Artificer and made use of those tokens with Hobblefiend, Legion Vanguard, Fallen Angel and a few more sac outlets and of course other token generators. Lagomos, Hand of Hatred was a card that just kept providing a lot of value that felt fair most of the time. When behind, it was pretty lackluster since the opponent would just take the 2 from the token and just run over my poor 1/3 and that would be my only complaint with the card. I also wanted to test out Gut, True Soul Zealot but had to pass it up to grab some fixing for my deck. Ironically, my first opponent had it in his deck and soundly defeated me 2-0 with Gruul Stompy. Funnily enough, because his deck wasn't built around sacrificing for value, he mostly just used Gut as a Gray Ogre with the threat of possibly getting more value. But hey, when your opponent is at 2 life with no blockers left, a Gray Ogre is just fine. Gut will need more testing in a deck that would work well with it before any conclusions can be drawn here.

So yeah, my opponent in the first round was that Gruul Stompy deck. First game, he was on the play and I was pretty creature light pre-sideboard so he soundly trounced me. After sideboard though, I was getting in to a good groove, but I hit a pocket of land and was defeated. Of course, that wasn't the only factor. On turn 3 where I was resolving my Saheeli, my opponent took that opportunity to resolve a uncontested Rhythm of the Wild, and while I did have the lead for a little bit through the value of my planeswalkers (I also had a Tibalt), I had 2 dead counterspells in my hand so I eventually lost. I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of Halana, Kessig Ranger however. When I added this card in, I thought that the statline of being 1 more power than a Giant Spider was pretty acceptable, but the effect might be too slow. Boy was I wrong. Sure on curve, it's just a 3/4 getting in or keeping fliers at bay, but once the game gets to a standstill, it starts opening up holes that the player can then exploit. Another thing I was happy to see was vehicles doing good. General consensus to the cube community I think is that "yes, vehicles are pretty great" but I hadn't seen it in a cube setting just yet for myself. Well, my Gruul friend here just happened to have both Renegade Freighter and an Untethered Express. Needless to say, both trains ran me over pretty handily. All in all, I lost that round, but both players had a blast so everything is good. We only played two games, but surprisingly our games went long compared to the other matches so I wasn't able to take a look at how the other players were doing except for maybe a few glances to the game happening next to me.

But hey, we got 7 players and that means someone gets the bye. I rolled dice with the other player that went 0-2 and I won the bye for the round. I wanted to play more Magic sure, but I own the cube. I'll have more chances to play whenever. The other players getting more chances to play with my cube leaves me satisfied. Also now, I get to look at the other games to see how the others drafted their decks. Gruul Stompy was playing against the player that had the previous bye and they were using an Azorius Midrange deck and the man was curving out in to some well timed counter spells and had managed to draft both Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile. Gruul lost to Azorius in the first game but rallied around a pair of trains that ran the Azorius guy over. In the end however, the Azorius player won 2-1. Great showing from both players however. One thing I was keeping an eye on though in this match was the effectiveness of Icy Manipulator. Don't get me wrong, I love the card, but sometimes the Icy Manip may just be a bit too oppressive for aggressive decks. I was thinking about switching it out for something like Pacification Array instead as the Rishadan Port mode for Icy Manip isn't used very often and when it is used, it just feels bad for everyone involved. Those vehicles however seemed to combat the Icy pretty well and is what helped the Gruul player squeeze out a win even with the pressure from the tapping machine.

Right next to them, there was a Bant Aggro and an Abzan Midrangy-Aggro-token thing going at it. Bant Aggro was probably the one I was paying attention to more as they had a fantastic Selesnya shell with some cards I recently added in, namely Good-Fortune Unicorn. And that unicorn did seem to provide some fantastic fortune as I think he curved out with the Unicorn in every game. That card was absolutely disgusting but honestly curving out like that every game is also pretty disgusting too if your opponent is missing land drops or flooding. The Bant player was also taking advantage of some blink strategies with the likes of Ephemerate and Soulherder and man. Value. Bant won pretty handily with a 2-1 record. His one loss was because he amusingly, didn't RTFC and just looked at the pretty art. He thought one of the creatures on his opponent's side had flying when in reality it didn't and just took free hits from it and when he had realized, it was too late. Unfortunately I don't know which card in question he was taking hits from for free as they had already shuffled up and started a new game and neither told me the name of the card.

The 3rd game in round 2 was between the Golgari Graveyard matters deck using Spiritmonger and a Jund deck that suspiciously looked like the Jund decks of old during the Alara/Zendikar Type 2 format. Got that Bloodbraid Elf in to Lightning Bolt or Vampire Nighthawk action going on. The Golgari player used some new cards I added in to great effect like Bone Shards to discard things like Spiritmonger then reanimated them with Necromancy or brought them back to the hand with the adventure side of Order of Midnight. As previously stated, whenever Spritmonger hit the board, it immediately took over. Fortunately for the Jund player, while missing a few rares and mythic rares, the constructed Jund deck is pretty powerful so he grinded out two wins with one loss and took the round. That one loss had a pretty early Spiritmonger that just ate him alive so yeah.

Round three. Another bye. The Abzan player is supposed receive the buy this round, but the Bant player has to leave early and takes the bye instead letting the Abzan player play another game. U/W Midrange plays against the Jund player and that leaves Gruul Stompy vs Spiritmonger.dec. Unfortunately, my games didn't feel very impactful as I had hoped because every game had some form of mana screw or mana flood for either player. I won in the end going 2-1. The other player assured me that he had fun, but man still feels bad. Also he had a lot of x/1 tokens and creatures. Mayhem Devil was pretty ridiculous in the game where he tried to put up a resistance. The Jund deck outvalued the Azorius Midrange deck and won the entire draft and Spiritmonger stepped on Gruul Stompy pretty badly.

The results were
Jund | 3-0
Azorius Midrange | 2-1
Spritmonger.dec | 2-1
Bant Blink and Aggro | 2-1
Grixis Sacrifice and Spells | 2-1
Gruul Stompy | 1-2
Abzan Tokens and Aggro | 0-3

In conclusion, everyone said they loved the cube and had a blast. I'm pretty happy with the results and it was almost unanimous that Spiritmonger should get the axe. In the meantime, I'm putting back in Catacomb Sifter but I want to eventually replace it with something that fits what I want Golgari to do a bit more.