Failing, miserably.

Yes yes yes, slim readers. I drafted the other day for one last minute test before this sunday day, and the PTQ itself. You might call practising the DRAFT portion optimistic but I like that word. It was also a very good lesson for me, as I utterly stank at it.

Hoping red/white, I open Ezuri's 4/4 metalcraft 8/8 trample and pass it, taking the much less powerful, but certainly red/white something-or-other. I can't even remember. The rest of the draft continues until I can see white is coming, sparingly, and red is all but divorced of me. I don't know what to do. There seems to be some nice blue coming, so I move in to that.

Try not to do this at home, kids. We're not trained professionals and it didn't work for us. It won't work for anyone. The draft went with my deck being way to fat around the 3/4 cost mark, and I hardly got anything worthwhile in my 2 rounds.

Yes two rounds. I lost 0-2 0-2 both matches so I figured it was nicer on my rating to drop for the last round, giving Mr 7th a smug feeling of "mised it."

Of note was that the winning deck was indeed red/white.

Of extra was a friend of mine who drafted earlier then me had tried for mono-green poison, and went 0-3. This is a surprise to NO ONE.

Also an extra note to the Scars sealed practice that I ran the other day - the top two decks, mine and Tony's, were red/white. The other red/white deck came third, while a red/green was fourth and fifth was taken up by red/white yet again. Rony's immaculate self-destruction deck was 7th, at red/black/green.

This really enforces the idea that I'm going to force red/white on the day. I'll have a savagely good 65% chance to win against the non-red/whites, and if I don't get bombs my skills should help pull through against the better players, or I'll invoke some Irish luck so they don't draw their bombs while I do draw mine.

I foresee an X-2 finish, needed to top 8 with a group of maybe 40-60 players (PTQ Prague got 80 back in 200X) and I'm sure that'll quickly disolve into the competant players, and those who showed up for the flighty lottery pick of cards to "win a trip to France."

On the above work, "luck": I'm a great believed in luck when it comes to finding coins on the ground. I have no such belief with Magic. Your draft choices, deck building choices, mulligan choices and awareness-in-game really help to form a consistant approach to playing, and if other players don't have it then they're believing in luck, and throwing themself at it's mercy.

It's what you do with what you've got -- lemonade from lemons is still a nice drink.