Drafting Conflux With MTG Pro, Shuuhei Nakamura
February 22, 2009
Wizards has some great coverage of Grand Prix Rotterdam. This limited tournament is going on right now this weekend and the players are into day two.
Day one was sealed with 3 Shards of Alara booster packs and 3 Conflux packs. Day two is Alara/Alara/Conflux booster draft.
In the opening draft, David Sutcliffe stood behind one of the top Magic The Gathering players today, Shuuhei Nakamura, and watched him make his picks.
Shuuhei likes Esper so his first pick was Sanctum Gargoyle. He drafted Esper in a previous big tournament. That decklist was aggressive with multiple Glaze Fiends.
I won’t go over his entire draft. Just the interesting picks.
His fourth pick in pack one was Obelisk of Esper over Welkin Guide. This was surprising since many people don’t like to play Obelisks, much less pick them early. I guess he felt that Welkin Guide was not very good in Esper.
He passed Empyrial Archangel and Oblivion Ring in the first pick of pack two for Agony Warp. This is very unconventional since most good players seem to value Oblivion Ring higher than Agony Warp. It was a close pick for Shuuhei since he took a long time to decide.
I wonder what his reasoning was. Agony Warp can give you 2-for-1s but Oblivion Ring deals with just about everything including the powerful planeswalkers.
One of the traits of good drafters is balancing their deck as they draft. The best draft decklists in Shards of Alara have a good mixture of removal, early and late creature drops, and mana fixing.
We can see Shuuhei balancing his deck in the beginning of pack three. His first two picks in this pack were both mana fixing lands since all he had for mana fixing at that point was the Obelisk.
For the rest of the Conflux pack, he took a lot of cheap aggressive creatures. He ended up building a cheap aggro decklist.
How Did He Do?
I checked the standings and Shuuhei won the first two matches and then lost the next match to go 2-1 for his draft pod.
I think the takeaways from this draft is that you can definitely do well with aggro. I thought Conflux would make five control control very strong but Conflux also has a bunch of aggressive cheap creatures. With the five color players are fixing their mana in early turns, these creatures can kill them before they have a chance to stabilize.
Also, Esper now has a much stronger aggro identity. In triple Shards of Alara draft, you usually played the control role with Esper (unless you got lucky with infinite Glaze Fiends). However, Conflux brings many aggressive Esper cards to the table so keep that in mind as you draft the first two Shards packs.
Finally, aggro should be stronger since there are no pingers in Conflux whereas Shards of Alara had Vithian Stinger in the common slot and Esper Battlemage and Blood Cultist as uncommons. This makes cards like Aven Squire pretty good.
Source: Wizards.com
3 Responses to “Drafting Conflux With MTG Pro, Shuuhei Nakamura”
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This also makes pingers an even earlier pick. First picking a Vithian Stinger might be a good idea.
I think it depends on your local metagame. If the drafters in your area like to play small aggro creatures, then pingers should definitely be high picks.
[...] still can’t get over a top Magic The Gathering pro taking Agony Warp over Oblivion Ring. However, as I thought about it, I came up with a reason why he did [...]