Don't draft 5 color monstrosities
Uhh, did you see my insane mana fixing? I didnt have a problem with mana at all. And my overall card quality was insane because nobody was taking multicolor cards. I do think I should have started another card over the ascendancy, though.
Anyway, I don't intentionally draft 5c, i just stay open and once I see multiple trilands and other odd passes I go for it. Taking offcolor lands over medium picks at the end of pack one helps a lot
My philosophy for FRF is kind of like this:
- There is fewer mana fixing than in KTK
- Rares are stronger, but commons are weaker than in KTK
- This means more people first pick bombs and try to stick by them.
- This means more two color aggressive decks, and more multicolor gets passed.
So what happens is, lands go a lot later than they used to despite there being less of them, and the tricolor cards go late in packs two and three. And since the 7th-15th pack one picks are so bad you generally hope to not start them anyway, you can easily take speculative lands. So 5c is often more open than in triple KTK, and the power of your deck can get crazy.
In my case, double sultai charm is nuts. It's definitely improved to the best charm with FRF in the mix.
GB: What are your other cards? When you say "full grip," are you talking 7 cards? How many lands/creatures?
Your opponent is on Temur - you're on seven, so you die to a lot of things here if you don't block. On the flip side, you lose your "dragon" if you block and he has anything.
Here's the thing. Even if you don't block and don't die to the attack, are you really in that good of a position? Even if you just go to five, you're now dead to Arrow Storm. You can't even start attacking with the Aerialists realistically (unless you just hope he decides to play into removal, but attacking would be a pretty clear tell).
I think the decision is very close. I think the tipping point is your estimation of the amount of burn in his deck. How many copies of Arrow Storm, Master the Way, Arc Lightning, etc have you seen? If you think his deck has a realistic chance of burning you from 5 and below, I think you have to block and hope. It's not like you're presenting a super fast clock - he's got time to draw relevant things.
Either way - you're a underdog and taking a big risk. It's possible that it's 50/50.
Two lands, couple ground creatures valorous stance treasure cruise i think. The tiebreaker for me was that if it was pump its bad either way, but I would at least buy up to two draw steps from not dying immediately and I had a couple other fliers to draw into.
The only burn he actually showed me was relatively small, but he showed me the ability to deal 2-3 to the face several times in game 1 and 2. Master the way, mardu heart piercer. So it was super high risk not blocking and him having a pump spell plus basically any burn.
But the main thing making it hard was that he hadn't shown me any spell that could straight up kill anything on my top end, he always had to two for one himself or use tricks. Riverwheel was a massive wall the first two games and bought me a ton of turns.
And riverwheel actually is a huge clock. Once i stabilized in game two i killed him from 22 to 0 in two attacks from three creatures.
Game two didn't go much better for him.
