Vintage Rochester Draft

Hello everyone!

So I recently took part in a very bizarre, yet incredibly awesome draft format - Vintage Rochester! This draft was nothing like you would ever expect in a draft! First, I have to explain what a Rochester draft is. Rochester is considered to be the hardest form of playing limited because of how skill intensive it is. In an 8-man Rochester, all 8 players would stand around a table and the packs would be open for everyone to see instead of passing hidden information to each other. This made drafting far more difficult because you could see when other players are cutting you from your colors, and you could see where other players were going with their decks.

So we take this simple format, and now we open it up to every card that is legal in Vintage! 1 copy of every vintage legal card is in the pool, and you get 40 rounds of picks to build your deck! Everyone who was drafting was encouraged to bring their laptops with them to research cards, and eventually to build and play the decks on Cockatrice.

Unfortunately 1 guy wasn't able to make it because he was cut off by Hurricane Sandy, but we did a 7 person draft anyways. I would up getting the first seed after rolling dice, so I naturally first picked Ancestral Recall. As the draft progressed I forced as many good blue spells into my deck as possible - Snapcaster Mage, Mana Leak, Delver of Secrets, Vendilion Clique - before ultimately deciding I wanted to splash red an started taking cards of the Lightning Bolt variety.

The other 6 guys played these archaetypes:
Mono-White Control
BUG Control
UG Ramp Soratami Control
Goblins
UB Tezzeret MUD
Survival of the Fittest

We're casually timing out the playing of the games. It took us two hours to do the drafting (280 individual picks takes a LONG time), so some guys couldn't stick around to play their matches. As of right now, I have beaten Mono-White Control, UB MUD, and I have lost to Goblins.

Even though we have hardly gotten halfway through playing out the games, this was absolutely a successful draft! Everyone enjoyed the uniqueness of it, and there is absolutely unexplored territory. Jake's Goblin deck is probably the best deck because it is so streamlined that it very consistently punches you in the mouth with an onslaught of dudes.

After the draft was over, before we were even getting into deck building, I was talking with some of the guys about cards and archaetypes we didn't even think of until it was too late. Zoo and tribal aggro is a huge one that we think would do well! Another powerful archaetype is Show and Tell. With Show, Natural Order, Oath of Druids, Sneak Attack and Eureka you can pretty consistently drop in quick fatties. You could even go deeper and play cards like Quicksilver Amulet and Elvish Piper to drop in the boom booms and crush face.

The one thing that I quickly discovered to be important is you need your deck to be consistent. My UR delver deck only has 7 creatures in the maindeck (Delver, Snapcaster, Vendilion Clique, Goblin Guide, Guttersnipe, Sower of Temptation, Phyrexian Revoker) and often I just don't have one in my opening hand, which completely neuters my deck. This prevents things like Dredge or Storm from being very playable because there's not enough redundancy. Then again, I may try to force storm playing Necropotence, Drain Life, etc.

Overall, we had a ton of fun doing the draft, and I'm sure the games will be good too! We're definitely planning on doing it again, and maybe every couple of weeks. Every time you draft a new format, there's a lot to be learned and discovered. Thankfully with Rochester though, you can't "break" the format because by round 30 everyone has their deck picked out, and now they're just picking cards to hose everyone else's decks!

I strongly encourage you to get a group of guys together and give Vintage Rochester a whirl, you won't be disappointed! That's all I have for today! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack