Drafting Morningtide or My Winless Saturday Night

As always when a new block of Magic cards comes out, our little gang of players get together to draft, and so last night we did indeed draft the last set of the Lorwyn block called Morningtide.

Morningtide is a 150 card set, which breaks down as follows..

White- 28 cards

Blue- 28 cards

Black- 28 cards

Red- 28

Green- 28

No Multi-color

Creatures- 93

Artifacts- 6

Enchantments- 8

Lands- 4

Instants- 19

Sorceries- 20

Tribal- 18

Now, notice the last category, Tribal

Tribal was something that was to make this block of cards more interesting and create a better synergy between cards relating to one another and actually working better together.

And so I decided to try this out and I went with two tribes, with the thought that each tribe would work in and of themselves, each tribe having their own synergy and with some pretty tough power cards.

There were only a few problems with my plan…

a) The first problem was I had chosen to play with less than a 50 card deck, and after losing the first round, I went to 60 cards adding additional land to the deck.

b) I actually wound up playing three colors…this wasn’t the worst thing…but it didn’t help the deck in the end, actually requiring me to add the extra land cards to the deck.

c) The worst offense for me was the Mana Curve of the deck, which happened to be no less than a 4 drop, which in the environment that I play in, which is usually pretty quick decks ( usually no less than a two drop ) pretty much was a recipe for disaster.

Some key cards I went for…

Green

Reins of the Vinesteed- Enchantment Aura

The mechanic of the card is that you would be able to attach it to another creature of the same creature type when it went into the graveyard.

Leaf -Crowned Elder- Creature- Treefolk Shaman

Kinship is the cards mechanic, letting you in the beginning of your upkeep look at the top card of your library, and if the card happens to be another card that shares the same creature type, you can play it for free.

Guardian of Cloverdell- Creature- Treefolk Shaman

When the card comes into play, it generates 3 1/1 white Kithkin Soldier tokens. It also has ” 1 Forest, sac a Kithkin and gain 1 life. gaining life is always a good thing.

Red

Roar of the Crowd- Sorcery

This card allows you to do damage against a creature or a player, based on the amount of creatures of a particular type, you do that much damage. This is your basic direct damage card.

Hostile Realm- Enchantment-Aura

You enchant your own land, and than when you tap that land, you select a target creature, and that creature cannot block for that turn. Great card to give yourself some easy damage points to your opponent.

Boldwyr Intimidator- Creature- Giant Warrior

This is a great card, but it will come out late in your game, unless you have a way to get it out early.

The card reads Cowards cannot block Warriors, and it has two abilities…

a)1 Red- target creature becomes a coward till end of turn

b)1 Red 2 Colorless- target creature becomes a warrior till end of turn

Spitebellows- Creature- Elemental

When Spitebellows leaves play, it deals 6 damage to target creature.

Another great creature, with 6 power for 6 mana, or to do the straight damage, you can play it for it’s evoke cost of 3 mana ( two red and a colorless )

Again, in the end for me, I needed to maybe play two out of the three colors I had chosen ( the other color being white, and I won’t bother listing those cards here ) and have a better mana curve for the deck.

And I will end this post by saying that there will not be another Magic block release till May, with a pre-release in April.

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