soul parry for sure

Seize the Initiative gets my vote. Nice sideboard trick against poison

Agienst poision soul parry are better, most poision have 1 or 2 toughness, so preventing them doing dmg will in most cases let u kill 2, and your own critters would still live.

soul parry also lets your prevent dmg from big hitters, which u then chump block.

So my vote is soul parry

but Corrupted Harvester ...

I vote Soul Parry >:(

I'm just scared our largest creature will be a 3/3.

Soul Parry

We've got a whole other pack to get large creatures. The Harvester is double-black, and we're going to be splashing black at best. It's certainly not impossible to play it, but I personally don't see a reason to try and play a double-black, underwhelming creature.

Soul Parry , though honestly I won't be upset with the Initiative either. They're both useful combat tricks.

Soul Parry

next pack

Guys we should not ignore the Corrupted Harvester We need a beat stick, and this is a good one cuz we can regen him! And late game we are bound to have plenty of chumps on the board to use the sac ability. I know he isn't great if he is getting blocked by infect, but he is a beat stick, and we have none.... Yes some of the white cantrips could be useful... but i want the beef so i vote harvester.

He's a beat stick in a different deck. We're looking at W, maybe splashing R or B, maybe W/R. None of those strategies work well with saccing creatures, even to feed beat sticks. Harvester is a different strategy entirely, and we're already unfocused enough.

I want some muscle too, but grasping at straws by picking poor cards that don't work with our deck to get it is only going to make things worse. Stay on target, we'll get more chances at beef later.

Pretty much spot on magnor, a bit of beef wouldn't hurt us but not one with such low toughness, no evasion, no abilities worth mentioning in our deck, and a double black casting cost when we still have literally zero maindeck playables in black.

Either combat trick for the board would be better than a card I would never consider running in this type of deck (it's at least playable in the Furnace Celebration , B/R, and B/W archetypes)

@draft in general,

This draft format has some "issues". Having to fight over colors with yourself as well as the 7 other drafters kind of kills some of the value in terms of what can be learned from it. Being this indecisive in a real draft is a good way to get 0-2'd and it's not that any individual is doing anything wrong by arguing for what they believe is the correct pick. It's just that a person usually will pick a direction and go with it and even a bad direction will often work out better than what we've done thus far with our frantic undisciplined picks.

It might be worth looking at alternative ways to vote on this in the future to allow the community a vote to pick a direction as we go through the first pack so that we can have it more clearly defined as a group. With a group direction defined it would be easier, I think, to cohesively make picks.

Perhaps in pack 1 have everyone vote for both the card they want to pick in the pack plus an archetype they would like to work towards. Then somewhere around pick 8, look back at archetype votes associated with the taken picks and use that to get a community selected archetype. We would end up a little rigid and probably unable to change but that would be better than the alternative of being all over the place.

Something worth considering at least.

PS - Don't take this as a gripe about the picks I've disagreed with. I understand the nature of a communal draft pick format is that you're not always going to get your pick, that's life. The point I'm making here is that I think the value of participating is lowered significantly when we have competing groups of people moving in different directions. It's still entirely possible that had we picked a direction as a group we might well have gone a direction I didn't like, but I know if we had picked a group direction I wouldn't have fought it, I would have tried to draft the best deck I could in that direction.

In short the fact that we have competing directions and no official direction means nobody is in the right or wrong really. Everyone is equally part of the problem and I don't exclude myself from that at all.

Eyehate. I don't think you understand what we are doing here. Of course we are indecisive. Thats why its a debate! The difference between the hivemind and an individual is that we constantly second guess each other. The best way to draft is to built toward something but inevitably adapt to make the best deck with the cards that your dealt. Picking and stubbornly sticking with an archetype even when it isn't working won't win a draft. In previous drafts the hivemind has done very well. Our current deck is shaping up just fine.

He's just trying to brainstorm ideas for a way we as a hive mind can be a bit less...well, scatterbrained.

Eyehate may or may not understand the "stay flexible" thing - I'd guess he probably does, really. But his point is that we're TOO flexible, so to speak. =p Stubbornly sticking with one strategy is indeed bad drafting, but so is not at least trying to aim yourself a little bit - then you end up drafting clumps of cards that work for a number of different decks, but none of which will work on their own to power to victory.

W/R, W Weenie artifiacts, W Equip, W/B, they're all pretty specific decks (obviously with some cards shared, but not all), and we've drafted good cards for all of them and passed up good cards for all of them. Drafting the Harvester would be yet ANOTHER deck we've picked a card for.

Don't get me wrong, I actually love how these things turn out specifically BECAUSE of the discourse and discussion - it's interesting and produces a very unique deck.

I certainly don't advocate a "choose a direction and stick with it" plan - that squelches creativity, and the entire point of this exercise, I think.

But I do agree that if there's a way to try and collectively concentrate a little more, so to speak, we might want to look in to it.

@zerotime,

I get where you coming from in terms of the flexibility, and I don't disagree with that at all really.

The idea I put forward though was not necessarily that we would enforce the archetype on all voters or even to squelch debate. But that by selecting an archetype as a group we could have a good guideline. Adding an option as simple as allowing people to cast their vote as "[card name] - change Arch" to signal they would like to change the arch could bring some of that flexibility back. In fact this would add a formal way to approach the discussion of changing the archetype and allow for that debate to be had in its own right in the comments. I think a lot of people could benefit from seeing how and when thinking about switching, and the key issues that go into making that choice, is processed.

Really though I would say the value of learning from a frantic drafting style is lower than that of a rigid style. When a strategy is too rigid the discussion will be focused on a single archetype and the rigidity offers a stark comparison so people can easily see what is missing and why the attempt failed. With frantic drafting it can be difficult to pin down where things went wrong, and the answer can often depend on which side of the debate you look at it from.

In closing, I won't disagree that we have a playable deck shaping up, but I think the idea is to create a communal format from which people can take what they learn and apply it to their drafting. I don't think this format is awful, but I do think it could be improved. And for me at least, that is good enough to consider some options of how to do that, even if they ultimately never become more than ideas.