All right so I am drafting Sam Pratt's Arena Cube, rotisserie style. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the experience, draft and keep you up to date during the process.
For those of you who are not familiar with Sam, he is the host of Rough Drafts. Sam is a long time limited magic player and is very knowledgeable about retail draft. Rough drafts is usually a deep dive on a topic or single card specific to the current retail magic set. So, if you like to wax poetic about your favorite common, find hidden gems and uses for innocuous 2 drop creatures in the current format, Sam is your guy.
Now that you know who Sam is, let's talk about Roto draft and this cube before we discuss my first picks.
A rotisserie draft basically means that you are going in a sequential pick order out of the entire pool of cards in the cube. You're then going to snake back around at the end of the rounds. The last player to pick gets the first pick in the next round. You'll just go round by round. pick by pick and you're drafting face up.
Sam's cube is a pretty fun format, and features only cards that are on MTG Arena. There are a lot of powerful and familiar cards available on the client now. Arena went from being Ixalan and Dominaria, to featuring 5 years of sets and also numerous older cards with help from the "bonus sheet" and Historic Anthologies. Strip Mine, Ulamog(the OG), Demonic Tutor and Ragavan are just a few of the cards now available on Arena. Sam has done a good job of balancing powerful cards with efficient interaction. There are must answer one drop creatures like Ocelot Pride and Ragavan, and powerful interaction like Counterspell and Dismember. If you want to take a look at the list, I have it linked it up top.
Now, let's get into the draft:
I got slot number four and I was looking through the list of cards and I was trying to think of anything that I felt like was extremely scarce. Is there anything very powerful and flexible? I think it's pretty strong to have access to one of the only tutors in the cube. I like to play combo, control and I like to be able to have answers when I need the answers. So pick number four, I decided to take demonic tutor.
I immediately got some shade for the pick by the people that I'm drafting with, which makes Roto draft pretty fun. It kind of reminds me of drafting a fantasy football team with buddies, where we can joke around and share when we get sniped the pick before or laugh at the one guy who always picks a kicker way too early.
Apparently people don't value something like demonic tutor. The reason people were saying it's not that good, is because they don't feel like combo is a thing that you can do in Sam's Cube. However I tend to disagree. I pointed this out to Sam just a couple of days ago, that you have the ability to go infinite for turns with some Time Walk effects at 5 mana. There are also several very good board sweeping effects, good counter spells and there is a ton of graveyard recursion.
So my plan with this demonic tutor pick is to open myself up to play some key pieces or build arounds, whether that is a combo or another deck where you want access to a card or two for it to come together. I was afraid to commit to something too narrow from the get-go. If I want to try to go infinite on turns, demonic tutor can help me get my busted card or the ways I need to combo off. I've already done this in this Cube once and I went 2-1, but I didn't have a demonic tutor. There is Time Warp there's Temporal Manipulation, there's the simic Tamio Planeswalker that gets something back out of the graveyard, there is Eternal Witness, Timeless Witness and there is also Commit to Memory.
So my plan with my tutor is, I'm going to play this in really any deck. I'm going attempt to cheekily sneak in a couple extra turn effects and all of the graveyard interaction that I need to recur those. Now, this sounds maybe sounds like an all-in strategy, But, I don't think that both of those Time Walk effects are going to be taken very highly based on the group of people were drafting with. Regardless of whether or not my intial plan comes together, I will always be able to play Demonic Tutor and be very happy about it. As I mentioned before, I am looking for powerful build around cards. I'm less interested in building a "good stuff" deck. Even so, being able to have a 2nd copy of everything in my deck is going to allow me to do that more consistently. Heck, I'll even grab a land if I end up getting mana screwed.
Let's go through a couple of the other first picks. Also some of the cards the notable cars that have not been taking this round.
Then we have reanimate, which is extremely powerful and flexible which is very good. However, Reanimate is the best of several very good reanimation effects. In this Cube you also have: Emperor of Bones, Necromancy and I think there may be one or two more reanimation effects. Clearly reanimate is the best version of that but it's not something that you can't get into later on.
Then there was strip mine, and swords to plowshares. These are all good cards, but I want to name some of the cars that have not been picked yet. Mox opal Chrome Mox, Ancient Tomb.... These cards are so flexible and so powerful that they basically allow you to cheat mana for free. There's so there's no downside to these at 0 mana. Any deck would want this.
I thought long and hard about drafting Mox Opal and committing early to an artifact plan, because there is a ton of artifact support. However, I decided on demonic tutor because of the fact that there is nothing else like it in the cube.
We're going to see if this proves to be the correct pick or not. This is my first Roto draft. And I'm excited to have it in the deck already and look for a game-winning combo or control finisher.
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