Vintage Rotisserie Draft Report

I went 3-4 in my first of what will hopefully be many Magic Vintage Rotisserie drafts. I did the thing I normally do with any new game - I charged ahead and made a bunch of mistakes, but saw a lot of them about 5 minutes later and I'm now eager to play again.

For those who don't know, Vintage Rotisserie is a Magic draft format where there's one copy of every card ever printed available and you gather 8 people to draft those cards in a 60-75 round snake format. You then play a full round robin of matches with those decks. In our particular case, we did the draft live and I think this was an incredibly good innovation. All the previous drafts I've heard about have been conducted via email and/or Google docs and they drag on for many days where everyone is constantly annoyed that whoever is on the clock hasn't picked yet. In our case we enforced a 30-second shot clock, drafted 60 cards each (which accidentally turned out to be 59 cards each), and the whole draft was over in about 2 hours. (!) To facilitate all of this we were gathered around a big conference room table at Wizards that contained most of the cards that were expected to be drafted. Most people spent most of their time between picks walking around the table to see what was still available, plus once you picked something the card was conveniently right there to pick up and put into your pile. (You were also free to go "off the table" and draft something different, which mostly came up when you were drafting an archetype (like Goblins or Merfolk).) Major props go out to Dave Guskin for organizing the whole thing. It worked shockingly well. I actually had 6 of my 7 matches played by the time I called it a night around 1am, and as of the next afternoon it sounds like most people have already finished most of their matches.  Anyway, I highly recommend the "live" variant of Vintage Rotisserie, especially if you can set aside an 8-10 hour session to complete the draft and play all at once.

Here's the link to all of our draft picks. When you study this, please do keep in mind that we were playing with a 30-second shot clock. Every one one of us is confident that we made lots of mistakes, and some cards went way later than they should have. I feel particularly bad for Dave Guskin because for the second half of the draft he was recording all of our picks on his laptop instead of spending his time thinking about his own picks.

Greg Marques began things by taking first pick Necropotence, which even he knew was not a card that should go that early, but he wanted to send a signal. That part of his plan worked pretty well — everyone got out of his way and let him draft the mono-black reanimator/disruption deck that he wanted to draft. Unfortunately, things didn't work out all that well for him and I believe he only has 1 win.

Dave Guskin went second and took Black Lotus. He then took Mana Crypt and Mana Vault 15th and 18th over all. When Timetwister and Tolarian Academy fell to him with his next picks he was well on his way to the fast mana / storm combo deck that I think he had in mind the whole time. The competition for those cards is pretty severe, though, and I in particular hurt him by drafting the Memory Jar and Mind's Desire after he tried to float them for too long. Atter the 'twister he wound up with just Windfall and Meditate for (significant) card drawing. He had a couple of nice tricks for generating nice storm counts (Hurkyl's Recall or Rebuild with all his artifact mana was decent, and he pulled off High Tide / Palinchron more than once) but his deck just wasn't consistent enough and I'm not sure he's won a match yet.

One of the big lessons of this format so far is that the "clever blue decks" are really hard to win with. They're very tempting as they do have the most broken cards, but I'm not sure there are enough of those broken cards to feed even two drafters, much less the 3-4 that each draft seems to have. Based on our results and the other results I had heard coming in, creature-based aggro decks have been winning pretty consistently. Of course, as always, draft is self-correcting. If multiple people fight over goblins then goblin decks will suck too. The real key to the format seems to be finding an archetype that's powerful enough, but that no one is fighting you for.

Mark Globus went third and took what I think is the best card in the format: Sol Ring. He then took Mishra's Workshop 14th, Strip Mine 19th, and proceeded to draft what he called "mono-grief": an almost colorless artifact-based deck full of disruption elements like Sphere of Resistance, Smokestack, etc. His deck was good at annoying people, but not super great at actually winning the game. Last I heard he was 2-2.

I had the 4th pick and I showed up fully intending to draft a creature deck, but I felt like Ancestral Recall was clearly the right pick in that spot. I see the format as having an obvious top 3 cards (Sol Ring, Black Lotus, and Ancestral) and somehow one of them was still on the table 4th, so I took it. It's still a plenty flexible card, anyway, so I would definitely make that pick again. For my second round pick (13th overall) Tinker was still on the table and I couldn't imagine that there would be much competition for the Darksteel Colossus. I figured my already at least slightly blue deck should just have an "Oops, i win" combo included (plus I liked the way this all set me up to draft the various blue tutors) ... so I took Mox Jet. (!?) Like I said, the 30-second shot clock plus no prior experience means these drafts are full of mistakes. Moxes are really good, and I don't think it was bad to take that one there, but I saw how consistently great Tinker was during my matches and I now believe if you're already blue and/or artifact-y that it's probably better than all but the Sapphire. Of course, Tinker came back to me 6 picks later so I wound up with the best of both worlds.

I almost got another gift in the 4th round, but Forsythe took Yawgmoth's Will with the very last pick before mine. I'm pretty sure that card is supposed to go early than round 4 as it's probably the single most powerful card in Vintage, but then again Aaron wound up putting it in his sideboard so maybe it's just too hard to abuse it in this format to justify a much earlier slot. With Tinker already in my pile and most of the good artifact mana gone, I then took Grim Monolith 4th. Looking at the spreadsheet, I think Tolarian Academy might have been a better pick but this format is really tough ... Academy without a density of quality artifacts would obviously suck. My next pick was Voltaic Key, which is good with my Monolith + Tinker package, I figured I'd probably get more stuff (which I did), plus this kept it away from Forsythe's Time Vault, which was particularly scary with Tezzeret also still on the table. I then felt great about Metalworker in the 6th round and had my direction for my draft: base-blue big mana and artifact brokenness. I screwed up the 8th round by taking Darksteel Colossus at least 20 rounds before I needed to, but my next 10 picks all look pretty good to me in retrospect: Mystical Tutor, Mox Diamond, Ancestral Visions, Mindslaver, Memory Jar, Goblin Welder, Personal Tutor, Mind's Desire, Thirst for Knowledge, Lotus Petal. It's possible that I should have snuck Academy Ruins in there somehow, and I felt bad for not noticing that Time Spiral was still on the table until round 10, but I have no real regrets about those picks. (Still staring at the spreadsheet.) Maybe 'Slaver is another one I could have waited on ... Fact or Fiction in that round would have been nice.

One of the tricky things going on was that I felt like I was pretty squeezed with Guskin drafting a Storm deck that wanted many of the same blue cards I did, plus I thought Globus would want my artifacts (though it turned out he had such a different artifact deck in mind to go with his Workshop that we just weren't competing for much), plus there were two other blue mages on the other end of the table in BDM and Zac Hill who between them were scooping up all available permission spells. In retrospect, though, I think I navigated the first third of the draft quite well. While I sat down intending to draft an aggressive deck with creatures, I think I was right to wind up in the colors and theme that I went into. Before I talk about the places I think I punted (those places being the middle third of the draft and the last third of the draft ) I think I'll introduce the rest of the players.

Aaron Forsythe drafted 5th and I think his draft is really, really interesting for trying to understand this format. He took Time Vault in the first round. He then took the Pearl 12th and Balance 21st. The Vault and the Balance both wound up in his sideboard. So did his (previously mentioned) 4th round Yawgmoth's Will. Meanwhile, despite putting 3 of his first 4 picks into his sideboard, he's 5-1 and 1-1 in his last match. If he wins game 3 versus Worth Wollpert then he wins the whole draft (on head-to-head tiebreaker over Zac Hill). With 3 of his first 4 picks in the 'board! Basically, after realizing that there were too many of us trying to draft clever / broken decks, he audibled into Doran. The other two aggro decks had been pretty firmly established by this point as Goblins and Fish so it was really the perfect move. All the green, white, and/or black monsters that he wanted were available (including Knight of the Reliquary falling all the way to an absurd 24th round selection.) The only match Aaron has lost was to me where I pulled off turn 3 Tinker-for-Colossus in game 1 and then turn 3 infinite Banefire in game 3. The first one is not atypical for my deck full of tutors, but game 3 felt like a pretty flukey/lucky draw and never came together that fast in any of my other matches.

Zac Hill had the 6th seat and his picks were also quite interesting. Zac has done a couple of these and clearly has a more evolved sense of what actually matters in the format. After taking Time Walk in the first round, he took Jace, the Mind Sculptor 11th overall and Mana Drain 22nd. He wound up with a really sweet mono-blue control deck full of a good curve of permission, most of the control magic effects, nice artifact-based creature removal, and the 'Oops, I win' combo of Grindstone / Painter's Servant. Also, Thada Adel, Acquisitor is ridiculous in this format and completely worthy of going in the first 10 rounds. Zac went 6-1 overall, losing only to Forsythe in what I'm guessing was the archetypical control versus beatdown battle that we've all been playing for 15 years now (and looks like it turns out to be what this format is actually supposed to be about).

Brian David Marshall went 7th and took the Sapphire. He then surprised and disappointed Zac by taking Force of Will 10th. BDM's next picks showed a clear commitment to the Fish archetype that he sat down prepared to force: round 3 Daze, round 4 Remand, round 5 Aether Vial, and round 6 Vendilion Clique. He was competing with Zac for permission, but they had such different archetypes in mind that I think they both wound up happy. All in all I liked Brian's strategy and his deck looked like a lot of fun to play. He thoroughly smashed me so I was a bit surprised to hear that he was just 2-4 overall.

Worth had the wheel, which seems like a really good spot to be in one of these drafts. You get to see what everyone else has signaled so far, plus you get the opportunity to send your own signals loud and clear with double picks. I was not at all surprised to see him signal aggro creatures with Ruby plus Skullclamp. With his second wheel he got to take Wheel of Fortune plus a gift of a 24th pick Mox Emerald. He took the good burn with his next few picks, Goblin Lackey in the 10th, and the rest was pretty easy. I suspect that the only cards he took that anyone else even wanted were the Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast (which he took in the 18th and 23rd rounds). I damn near beat him, but he blasted my turn 3 Tinker in game 2 and my turn 4 Mind's Desire for 6 more or less whiffed in game 3. Of course, "I almost had him" is what almost everyone says after playing against a good goblin deck, right? The only person who actually did beat him was Zac, thanks in large part to a game 3 Chill (a card that had been haunting Team Deadguy for about 13 years now). If Worth beats Aaron in their looming third game then Worth is X-1 but loses to Zac on head-to-head tiebreaker. If Aaron beats Worth, though, then Aaron wins the tourney since he beat Zac.

All in all I felt like my deck was "almost good." Like I said before, I still think my first 20 picks were mostly reasonable. The problem is that I then decided to fill things out with cantrips (so I could thin the deck and draw my tutors/broken cards more often) and random mediocre artifact mana (figuring this would let me play some of my expensive cards even without broken things going on to cheat them into play). It turns out that neither one of these plans actually works. The opportunity cost of spending my time cycling through cards like Spellbombs and Baubles was way too high, and Signets just don't provide enough mana acceleration to play things like Stroke of Genius or Mindslaver for any real value.

Instead of going all-in on the broken elements of my deck what I should have done was to have a plan B that was capable of working on its own. I think I could have build an artifact-creature aggro deck with stuff like Arcbound Ravager, Atog, Megatog, Su Chi, Juggernaut, Myr Enforcer, etc. This would provide plenty of fuel for Tinker and Metalworker if I drew them while also giving me game in my other draws. Attacking and blocking would have been very relevant to pretty much all of my losses and my Covetous Dragon was quite good in several games so I know that basic strategy can work well.

The other thing I messed up at the end of the draft was just forgetting some basic picks. I should have drafted artifact removal at some point and I just plain forgot. Rack and Ruin crossed my mind at one point, and it was still undrafted at the end of the draft, but somehow I found myself losing to Mark Globus's Chalice for 2 ... twice ... with no way in my entire deck to even bounce it for a turn so I could play out Grim Monolith plus Power Artifact for infinite mana. I also should have drafted Inkwell Leviathan as an alternate Tinker target (I would have won game 1 versus Globus with a quick Tinker draw, but he answered with "Crop Rotation for Maze of Ith"). Finally, I definitely should have placed a high premium on Muddle the Mixture as it's the only way in my colors to tutor up Power Artifact, but it just never even occurred to me until BDM drafted it in round 41.

Despite constantly kicking myself for all the mistakes I couldn't see until 5 minutes too late, I had an awesome time. This is a really fun format for anyone who's been playing Magic long enough to know most of these cards, and I don't think anyone has really figured out how exactly it works yet. We know some stuff now, sure, but if everyone starts drafting beatdown decks then being the one clever combo player, or the one heavy artifact player, should be absolutely amazing. Plus in addition to having quite an interesting draft format, the games tend to be really cool too. Highlander decks make for lots of diverse scenarios without nearly as much degeneracy as normal constructed Magic.

Mostly I just hope I get to do this again really soon.
Posted by Randy Buehler at 9/22/2010 10:14 PM
Categories: uncategorized

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