Sleeving up Shards

Hello everyone, yesterday was quite the day for magic. Nick had purchased a Shards of Alara box as a graduation to hinself a week or so ago. I suggested that he host a free draft where he keeps all the cards afterwards, and that is what happened yesterday. However, before I get there, to keep everything in chronological order, I had a small slice of exciting stuff happen on Monday.

I got a Black Lotus!

Well... not really. I was poking around Target with some of my friends and I saw this interesting package of Magic cards where for $8 you get a Worldwake booster pack, a Dissension booster pack, and 8 bonus cards. I picked up 2 of these, and I also picked up some top quality deck sleeves to see if I like them or not. In the first Worldwake booster I opened, I wound up earning all my money back by getting an Abyssal Persecutor, a card that currently goes for $17. The Dissension packs were both fairly unexciting, but my worldwake pack got me a Stoneforge Mystic, who currently goes for $6, and is expected to go up when Scars of Mirroden is released.

But wait, what about the Black Lotus? The card sleeves I got had Black Lotus as its art.

I found these sleeves are superb! Aside from their awesome art, the sleeves themselves are very nice. Before I start talking about the sleeves, if you don't play with sleeves I highly recommend you do. They protect your cards from the environment, and prevent them from peeling. In addition to allowing to be played more by being more durable, it also maintains the monatary value of the cards so if you ever feel like scrapping the deck for cash, your rares wont be stripped of value simply due to them getting beat up. With that in mind, there have been 3 kinds of sleeves I have seen sold.

The first is the clear thin sleeves that go for 100 @ $1. They are cheap sleeves that are great for all purpose playing. I have found that over time, they can get gritty on the outside and sometimes make the cards stick together. Also, sometimes the endge bends, and can prevent ideal shuffling.

The second is the solid-color backed sleeves that go for 50 @ $3 or 100 @ $6. They are very durable sleeves. I have broken one sleeve of this variety in the past, but I had plenty of extras to make up for it. I generally don't have any complaints about these sleeves.

The third kind is the art-backed sleeves liuke the Black Lotus one above. They go for 80 @ $8. While these are the most expensive per sleeve (10 cents a sleeve as opposed to one penny or 6 cents), they are also the highest quality. In addition to being so high quality, they also have great art. Another advantage is that they come in packs of 80 as opposed to 100. This is the perfect amount so you have enough for a 60 card deck + a 15 card sideboard with a couple extras in case something breaks. With the sleeves, I found I wanted each deck to be a different color for quick recognition, but then I had several extra sleeves that were fairly useless. Also, packs of 50 are simply awkward.

Overall, I would suggest buying the first type of sleeves for general use, because they are so cheap. The second type is better for an FNM because there is a ton of playing at an FNM and these sleeves are more consistant with shuffling while still not breaking the bank. The third type of sleeves, I would reserve getting unless you're either loaded or going to a Grand Prix or PTQ.

Now back to our feature presentation, the draft at Nick's house:

So as I was saying, there was a draft at nick's house and the format was Shards/Shards/Shards. The 6 people there were Myself, Nick, Paul, Mark, Eric, and our new comer Dan.

Conveniently, each shard was drafted by one person, except for Naya, which was drafted by 2 people. Starting with me, and going around the table to the left we had:

Me - Grixis
Dan - Naya
Mark - Esper
Nick - Naya
Paul - Jund
Eric - Bant

Personally, I thought I had a really powerful deck. It was focused on Red and Black, with only 1 mono-blue card and the other blue cards mainly being xUBR. My deck had a ton of removal including 3 Executioner's Capsule, a Magma Spray, and Grixis Charm, with a Resounding Thunder in the sideboard. In addition to all that removal, my deck had a very low curve, where I had 60-70% of my cards at 3 mana. Only 3 or 4 were 4 mana, and everything else was 1 or 2.

Drafting

I was only able to play 2 rounds because i had to leave early for boy scouts, but I went 4-0, where my 2 opponents were Nick and Paul. I was hoping to play against Mark's Esper deck, because it seemed to be a very interesting matchup (and the archenemies would get to battle again). During the 3rd pack, all of a sudden Mark gave an excited yell over a bomb card he just opened, but wouldn't tell anyone. After a little bit of guesing, it turned out he opened Tezerret. Come to find out by the end of the draft that mark had the only 2 mythics opened in his deck (the other was Sphinx Sovereign). It seemed his games went longer, but he was able to dominate when they did. It would be a classic aggro vs control match.

Check out that shiney new planeswalker

Despite my leaving early, I still had a ton of fun, and Nick sold me a short stack of cards before I left, so I have some exciting new tools to work with (RG tokens deck in my next post). Until next time, keep cardslinging