Players: Ross Cowman, Sean Nittner, Jonathan Tweet, Tony Dowler, Harry Lee, Brendan Adkins, Christian Griffen, and Miles Gaborit.
System: Magic ’95 Cube Draft (1 of each card printed up through 1995).
(Note: this wasn’t an RPG, but since I’m documenting all my GPNW games, I putting this one in for posterity).
Ross and I had been talking at Origins about Magic and how I enjoyed the game but years ago had to quit because it was a complete money pit for me. Despite not playing it ages though, I still felt a hankering for my old decks. The sweet combos, the crazy acceleration, the wicked comebacks. Augh… so good.
I’m not sure if it was because the discussion left him with a hankering for it, or if he just wanted to deliver my birthday present early, but Ross put up a 95 Cube draft on the Go Play schedule. For those not familiar (I wasn’t until I looked it up):
Cube Draft is a casual Magic: The Gathering format where players create a cube, a large pool of cards selected for the purposes of playing a limited game.
In this case, the cube was every cart that had been printed up till 1995. Lots of proxies in here (Ross isn’t swimming in Moxen) but he had nearly all those early cards from back when some things were very, very broken.
If you’re curious about what drafting from this deck is like, check out his Cube Tutor.
The Draft
I was pretty overwhelmed, I gotta admit. In my first three pulls I got a Royal Assassin, Hypnotic Specter, and Mox Jet. Shortly after that I grabbed an Underground River and some sweet blue control. But then I just floundered. Black and blue is a particular favorite of mine, but I wasn’t seeing any counters (Tony had grabbed them all) and soon I was dipping all over the place. By the time I got to making my deck I was into four colors and realized I had made a terrible mistake.
But, just the same, I had some mana acceleration (thank you green), and a couple tricks that might serve me well.
The Games
My first two games were against Ross. Not my best bet. He whooped my butt and too both my Psionic Blast and my Royal Assassin. May black and blue tears over here. He rolled out a Lord of the Pit with Circle of Protection Black, a Spirit Link and Lich. LICH! Yikes.
My final game (our time ran out so fast) was against Tony and I narrowly one only because Juggernaut can’t be blocked by walls. Tony was rocking the blue (that’s where all my counters went) and had me locked down for a while. Eventually though the Demonic Hordes + Instill Energy gave me land advantage. Tony was drawing plenty of it up (because of Land Tax) but I was destroying two per turn. I think I was down to 2 life and maybe as many minutes before lunch where Juggernaut finally did it’s job.
What Rocked
Despite being really unfamiliar with the card set, the whole drafting process was a blast. There was a lot of laughs about amazingly good and amazingly bad cards and just a whole ton of nostalgia. Thanks so much for making this happen Ross!
What could have improved
Playing a little totally wired my brain of for doing it more. I could have totally played another four hours or more but there was lunch and the #Feminism games to play!
