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QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #5 [MTGO]

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Josh Rayden, Forrest Ryan, Daniel Cecchetti and Johnny Vang attempt a series of group drafts to illustrate the power of some of the best archetypes in Innistrad Draft and to learn about the format together. Hopefully you can learn from these antics as well. Their second draft is a wonderful example of a U/B mill deck.

Key takeaways:

  • Skaab Ruinator is a bomb, but don't be deceived. Cackling Counterpart was probably the better card of the two and Sever the Bloodline was the best card in the whole deck. Sever is one of the top five cards in the format. Two unconditional removal spells that also happen to exile the target in a single card is absolutely incredible.
  • Stitched Apprentice and Selfless Occultist are both generally underrated cards. People are starting to catch on that blue is fairly powerful, so this will likely change soon. The blue cards are mostly just odd and it's taking people a little bit to figure the color out.
  • Armored Skaab and Forbidden Alchemy are the two best enablers for this archetype. You need a couple of these to make sure your deck functions in the early turns. Having some Deranged Assistants, Stitched Apprentices, Selfless Occultists, and Civilized Scholars helps, but the other cards are fairly essential. You want to hit your turn 4 Makeshift Maulers and Stitched Drakes.
  • Playing on MTGO is still painful. The UI is awful, sometimes the functionality of the program is unexpected, and losing the social aspect of the game is sad. You can't make up for that with trolling, as fun as that can be. We somehow managed to not time out of a match, even despite F6ing through two turns like masters. We also won that game. The fact that MTGO doesn't even properly save replays all the time means you can't feasibly record these videos after the fact. Also, check out the game where our opponent tries to run down our clock by trading off creatures while we have a bunch of Selfless Occultists in play. You should be able to assign the same target to multiple abilities on the stack at once. Maybe you can do this already? If so, do tell!
  • Be careful to get enough creatures with this archetype. Ones that trade favorably are fine, such as Typhoid Rats, Markov Patrician, and Rotting Fensnake. You have plenty of cards available to you that will give you card advantage and it's key to survive the early turns against aggressive decks. Trade off one for one, cast your under-costed zombies, gain some card advantage, profit.
  • Hot chocolate is delicious. If you have free hot chocolate in your apartment lobby it will only take a few pitchers to exhaust the supply of hot chocolate flavoring in the machine. Think of the hot chocolate dispenser like your Innistrad removal. You need to ration it out appropriately.

Note: Draft 5 was recorded prior to Draft 3's improved sound quality, so expect a return of improved sound quality in future videos.

Other drafts:
QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #1
QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #2
QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #3
QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #4
QS Drafts: Drafting Innistrad #5

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