Rather than waiting for the new season to begin, yesterday I jumped straight into my first Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) Draft after all the preparation. The result could definitely have been better…
I got off to an exciting start by first-picking King T'Challa // Black Panther, Hope Enduring , but I think I committed to a little too quickly without considering whether other archetypes were actually more open. Looking back over the draft on 17Lands, I think I might have been able to draft Villains instead.
That said, I genuinely felt I had ended up with a pretty solid deck.
I won my first match because my opponent conceded at the beginning of their fourth turn after missing their second consecutive land drop. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. I lost the next three matches in a row, all following a remarkably similar pattern.
They were all long games (13, 17 and 11 turns), with crowded battlefields where neither player had profitable attacks. Little by little, each game slipped away because of a threat I simply couldn’t answer.
In the second match my opponent was playing Izzet Artifacts. Once the board stalled, they slowly chipped away at my life total thanks to two HYDRA Assault Robot s.
The third match was against Villains, where an unanswered Arnim Zola, Bio-Fanatic kept producing Villain tokens until I was eventually overwhelmed.
The final match, against a Selesnya deck, played out a little differently, but I think it actually went even worse. My opponent gained a lot of life while deploying increasingly larger creatures. I managed to keep them under control for a while with removal such as Spider-Woman, Secret Agent and Web Up , but eventually their board became too much to handle.
Maybe I wasn’t aggressive enough in the second and third matches, allowing decks with stronger late games to take over. Maybe I needed more interaction, or perhaps another combat trick or two.
King T'Challa // Black Panther, Hope Enduring was the only card in my deck that consistently felt capable of swinging a game in my favour.
Oh well… every Draft is a learning experience. But I think I’ll wait until the July season begins and the ranked ladder resets before jumping back into another one.