To celebrate the International Day of Play, from June 10th to June 12th Arena is hosting what they call a Phantom Draft. It’s a draft with no entry fee (a regular Premier Draft costs 1,500 ), but the cards you pick are not added to your collection and there are no meaningful prizes either: you can earn an alternate art style for a card, with the reward depending on your number of wins.
It’s not a particularly exciting event, but at the end of the day it’s an opportunity to draft a different set. In this case, Foundations (FDN) , so I decided to give it a try, with much more success than I expected!
I quickly realized that the draft was pushing me mostly towards mono-blue, although at some points it looked like both Azorius and Dimir might be open. In the end I ended up with a primarily blue deck splashing a bit of black. In practical terms, and in terms of gameplay strategy, it was a Blue Tempo deck; an archetype I don’t usually play, but one that I enjoy a lot because when it works, it’s incredibly satisfying. The main idea is to slow the opponent down with counters and bounce effects while chipping away at their life total with creatures. Some of my most important cards were:
The strategy worked wonderfully, and although I played a few very close games, I eventually finished the draft undefeated!
The fifth match was especially exciting and closely contested. We were both playing similar decks, both at a precarious life total, and both holding interaction in hand.
How would you approach attacks on this board? We were both at 5 life. I had Uncharted Voyage and Bake into a Pie in hand, while my opponent had three unknown cards and four untapped lands.
During the game, I assumed that if I attacked with everything, my opponent would trade their Erudite Wizard for my Bigfin Bouncer , and I also assumed they would have some sort of interaction spell in hand to survive the attack. My plan was to cast Bake into a Pie after combat to remove their 3/4 and survive one more turn before attacking for lethal.
What I failed to consider (mistake!) was that they could block one of my 2/2 creatures without losing their defender, leaving them in a much stronger position to counterattack if they had the resources to survive my attack. Fortunately for me, in order to stay alive they had to cast Run Away Together , which forced them to return one of their own creatures to their hand, and that ended up saving me. Even though they followed up with a Tolarian Terror on the next turn, I was still able to win the game thanks to Uncharted Voyage .
