u/CronoDAS

Because I'm a masochist, I'm going to show you my second The Hobbit draft, in which it turned out that I had no idea what I was doing until I had to make something out of a three color disaster of a card pool.

The draft: https://www.17lands.com/draft/16498231a8874a768573eea374a288d9

The card pool I ended up with: https://www.17lands.com/pool/16498231a8874a768573eea374a288d9

Before you look at what I built, try to come up with a build yourself, because it wasn't easy for me to decide what to do with this mess.

The deck I played: https://www.17lands.com/deck/16498231a8874a768573eea374a288d9/0

>!I really wanted to play all three colors, but in the end I couldn't figure out a good balance and just cut the blue entirely and played G/R Ramp. I caught a lot of players off guard with Desolation of Smaug and all the big creatures helped me stabilize after spending the early turns ramping instead of fighting for board position.!<

The game replays: https://www.17lands.com/details/16498231a8874a768573eea374a288d9

I haven't gone over the draft picks yet because I know darn well I screwed up badly and I'm too embarrassed to try to figure out what I should have been doing. But go ahead and deliver the lecture anyway. 😥

The draft:

https://www.17lands.com/draft/16d0fc526ce645d391226f62a1290e91

The deck I ended up with:

https://www.17lands.com/deck/16d0fc526ce645d391226f62a1290e91/0?view=deck

The matches:

https://www.17lands.com/details/16d0fc526ce645d391226f62a1290e91

I'm not actually sure I built this right from the card pool I ended up getting, but after my first three picks were Leader, Taskmaster, and Dark Deed I was pretty optimistic about going U/B, and the deck felt strong when I played it, but I think I struggled a bit with not getting run over and in one of my lost games my opponent resolved an Avengers Assemble and, well, there's really no coming back from that even though I did make a game of it with Super Skrull.

My pool ended up very heavy on 4-drops, which may have contributed to my trouble; my only 2 mana plays were instants or landcycling, although Aerial Doombot x3 did give me potential turn 1 plays even though it probably wasn't doing much early blocking.

I did have to mulligan a number of hands for not having both colors of mana, but I didn't see a single U/B dual land all draft and I had three landcyclers, so I don't know what else I could have done about it. ::shrug::

P2P1: Frozen in Ice or Hour of Defeat? I went with the instant. Mistake? Probably didn't matter, though, because the Frozen in Ice tabled.

P2P2: Atlantis Attacks, Falcon's Wing Harness, or something else?

P2P8: Is Atlantean Cavalry the better pick here? At this point I have a lot of ways to trigger it. I didn't end up playing the Rewrite History and the win rate of the various Plan cards on 17lands tends to be pretty bad, so maybe I should have just grabbed the filler-grade 3-drop?

P3P1: Is Avengers Under Siege good enough to splash?

Should I have run the second 3/4 Kang instead of leaving it in the sideboard? What's the cut for it?

Super Skrull + Surveillance Room was just as nuts as I anticipated, but I'm not entirely sure if running an off-color Forest as an 18th Land (so I could potentially fetch it with one of my three landcyclers to turn on Super Skrull's green ability) was worth it.

I'm afraid to actually run Atlantis Attacks, even though I drafted two copies. It's a powerful effect, but at 7 mana I'm worried it's just going to sit in my hand all game. Should I have played it, and what should I have cut for it?

One thing I perhaps should have done differently in the actual games themselves is deploy my removal more aggressively instead of letting my opponent hit me with a 2/3 or some other weak creature because I thought I'd see a better target for Frozen in Ice...

Anyway, what's your verdict on my draft, my deckbuilding, and my results? You gave some great commentary on my draft gone wrong - can you give me equally good advice on a draft that felt like it went right?

The draft:

https://www.17lands.com/draft/4c1ea29f40bd4448ad3747508b77c79f

The deck I ended up with (that went 3-3):

https://www.17lands.com/deck/4c1ea29f40bd4448ad3747508b77c79f/0?view=deck

I ended up with a lot of artifacts and not many payoffs for having artifacts. I think maybe I could have grabbed Spider-man P1P2, I'm not sure if I should have picked Shuri P1P4, and P3P5 could have been Machinesmith Automaton as an extra artifact payoff although Herbie is better in a vacuum. I also passed up Atlantis Attacks which is powerful but 7 mana scares me. Maybe green or black was more open than U/R/w; The Ruinous Wrecking Crew tabled in pack 3, so there was at least no BR player. I honestly don't see a better overall approach than what I tried, but it still ended up a complete mess. Help?

I opened Loki Laufeyson in a number of Sealed pools, and he turned out to be very strong if he managed to stay on the board for a little while - and as a two-drop, if it died to removal it probably wouldn't set the person playing him behind on tempo. So I was surprised to see how awkward he was in the 17lands data. Is it being fragile really that big a deal, or is it just that, as some people are saying here, red as a whole is weak?

I think part of the issue is that the best home for Loki Laufeyson might be in red/green of all things. When I searched Scryfall for instants and sorcery spells for two or less mana, green was actually the secondary color with the best suite of cheap spells to copy: Go Nuts, Rapid Rescue, and Giant Growth. And maybe it's just that creatures die more in Draft than in Sealed? I really was getting major Snapcaster Mage vibes when I was running the red Loki in the Traditional Sealed events I used my event tokens to enter; when a spell costs one mana, it's usually a good deal mana-wise because the card itself is a bigger cost than the mana you're spending on it, so getting double the effect for an extra one mana is a pretty big deal, since it lets you do things like kill two creatures for 1G and a card, get two cards and four life for 1G and a card, or surprise your opponent with six extra damage from an unblocked creature for 1G and a card. So there's an awful lot of raw power here, but is the bullseye on Loki Laufeyson's head just too big to make it a game winner?

I remember hearing back in the day that people have embedded CSAM into the Bitcoin blockchain ledger, theoretically making it illegal to possess. But could someone actually extract the CSAM from the ledger and look at it without having to go to another site or use an encryption key from another source? It could make a big difference if it ever ended up in an actual courtroom.

The US actually gives people that have been depicted in CSAM a private right of action to sue people who possess CSAM of themselves, so an individual could actually force the issue by suing a large Bitcoin miner over embedded CSAM even if the rest of the US government wants to ignore the problem. But in order to do this, the person depicted has to know that they're the one being depicted, and if nobody can actually extract and view the images, then nobody can prove in a court that possessing the Bitcoin ledger means possessing CSAM.

In this episode, Gumball's parents buy him a knockoff game console from THE AWESOME STORE and starting the game turns his neighborhood into a JRPG. It's hilarious and was clearly made by fans of the genre, with references to OG FF7 in particular. Has anyone else here seen it, and did you like it as much as I did?