This is not bad. If it were me, I would slightly lean toward the following changes:

-2 Possession..............+2 Cluestones

-1 land..........................+1 Mastiff

If we say the cluestones count as a half a land each, then that would be 17. It makes room to squeeze in the mastiff, whose presence helps 3 of our non-creature cards work better.

I think we will be up against a lot of slow-starting decks in this format, meaning SP is less effective(I would think), and that we can usually be the faster starter and swing for damage if we get the bear out early. Even if he comes late, again, there are 3 cards that he serves.

I like taking out the one Ubul Sar. The two Torturers will give a late game option. Come to think of it, what do we think about replacing another Ubul Sar for the Mastiff to speed us up? That actually might work well if we're not triggering keepers a lot anyway.

If playtesting reveals that SP's are still effective against a slow starting deck, then I'm okay with this build. But I'm doubtful that they would be very often.

I'll get to Caley's questions later. Those will take a while.

1 - What colors do you predict were most open, and least open?

Blue seemed pretty open, but Boros seemed open also. Got passed a bit more than I expected there.

2 - How many match wins (7 total possible) do you think you'll accumulate in this round-robin event?

Always tough. I'd say we're capable of 7. We have multiple finishers, but if someone pulled Aetherling... Accounting for nuts pulls I'll say 5.

3 - What do you suspect to be the colors of the player to your right (that you were getting your cards from in the first and third packs), and the player to your left (that you were getting your cards from in the second pack)

Gruul for some reason is my guess on the right. On the left I think gruul/boros.

4 - Pick apart your own draft a bit for me. How did it start, what strategies were you thinking of, how did they evolve? How did your discussion process go/how did your group work together and come to decisions? How did you like the Cluestoney madness of DGM-DGM-DGM? etc. etc

Well we picked up debt I think first pick. I was hoping we would see one more, but no such luck. When we passed gleam of battle I was a little disappointed, don't like the idea of facing it, but helix is damn fine pick also. Was amazed when gleam came back. We started picking up keepers quickly, and perhaps under drafted gates. As for cluestones, if we had two more debts, I'd advocate getting stoned. Otherwise, I still think they are terrible cards you should avoid unless you are desperate for fixing.

Our discussion and teamwork went well overall. Give and take, and open discussion, and I hope I was less acerbic this time around. Look forward to the next one!

Okay on to the deck. Seems fine. I think both hired torturers is a good shout. You can always side for mastiff or keeper depending on what we face. Also the SP main oard is good. If they play slow we can always double enchant something bigger, but if they play fast we'll be glad we have them I think. Hard to know in this format, only having drafted it a couple of times.

One note on the deck. We have only two ways to trigger blaze commandos. Swap one for steeple roc?

I'm still feeling that we should mainboard that mastiff. Even testing for myself if I draw it in the beginning there's usually not much I can do in the first 3 turns and if they'r only a bit mana screwed or only play Rakdos Drake s, he will do at about 6-8 damage, only stopping when a torturer or gatekeeper comes down. I actually guess that's why people picked the Murmuring Phantasm over some other nice things.

You're playtesting against our own deck? That seems like it's not going to give you a good idea of what we'll be facing.

Not that I have any idea what we're likely to run up against in a freakin' DGM draft.

Exactly! The thing is that there are only so many 2 drop creatures in this format (no 1 drop creatures), of which I'd be happy to trade most of them with the mastiff. And there are not many 3-drops it couldnt trade with, namely Cyclops, Torturer and Snare Squad, in addition to the simic and golgari guild champions.

Most of those creatures either have relevant abilities or evasion in some manor. If you really really wanna run the mastiff, then take out one of the blaze commandos?

But I don't really think we'll need to worry overly. Anything the mastiff could trade with is neutered by an SP. I'd rather they swing in and reduce both our life in the early game, than trade off a creature, because it gets us closer to our victory conditions, and we have pretty good lifegain in the helix to help us claw some back if we need to.

The thing about SP is that we can only play it when they have creatures (in which case it becomes good) but before that we can only play our own... and a two-drop mastiff on the play is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Not sure what to take out though, I really want to keep both the commandos, I think they're one of our best creatures, especially combined with our three boost cards (gleam, surge, initiative).

I think I'd rather take out one more of the ubul sars.

I think we should maindeck the mastiff, too(surprise, surprise).

Having 2-drops just plain makes a deck run more efficiently with regard to using all your mana before your next turn. Also makes us faster.

In this slow format, those 2-drops can hit for a good chunk of damage when you get them early. And in this case, he's also relevant if we get him late.

I wouldn't take out a commando for him. I'd take out either a land or an Uber Sore Gatelicker. I'm starting to think that getting only the 4 gates could be a blessing in disguise, because we are rethinking this deck outside of just the gatekeeper strategy.

Rather than relying on that engine, we should go for overall deck efficiency. And if we can trigger those keepers later in the game, then all the better. But our build is becoming less dependent on the idea of their triggers, and I think that's good.

Having a single 2 drop does nothing for the deck except give it a turn 2 play sometimes. Like, 1 in 5 games or so. It does not help the consistency of the deck. If they don't play creatures in the first few turns, then so what, we don't care. We will put up fat asses to stop them from getting to us and do damage in the sky or via torturer.

I don't know why you're so fixated on a card that, if we put in our deck, we will draw at the right time rarely and then only actually get value if they don't play any creatures until turn 3/4. Seems situational as hell to me.

You're talking about overall deck efficiency, again, as if we were running some kind of aggro, or 2 drop.dec.

Remember, having more gatekeepers means that even if we draw some before our gates, we will draw some after as well. If we run fewer and fewer gatekeepers, we increase the odds of having all of them before we enable the gates, then we're relying on legion's initiative to get value.

Lastly a 5/3 for 5 mana is pretty brittle. There are a LOT of creatures that will trade up with that and we have to rely on combat tricks to make them not die immediately. Frankly, the steeple roc is just way better because A, it evades, B it first strikes and C it's easier to cast.

What do you guys think of the current deck list, you think I should submit it like this? Remember that we can't do any changes to the main board afterwards!

Well, if we have 5 or 6 lands, playing 2 creatures in one turn can actually make a difference, so even as a later 2-drop it has some worth.

My answers to Caleys questions:

1 - What colors do you predict were most open, and least open?
White. We got passed a lot of good boros, selesnya, azorius and orzhov cards.

2 - How many match wins (7 total possible) do you think you'll accumulate in this round-robin event?
I'd say about four, plus/minus one.

3 - What do you suspect to be the colors of the player to your right (that you were getting your cards from in the first and third packs), and the player to your left (that you were getting your cards from in the second pack)
definitely red in both decks, probably also blue on the left and green on the right.

4 - Pick apart your own draft a bit for me. How did it start, what strategies were you thinking of, how did they evolve? How did your discussion process go/how did your group work together and come to decisions? How did you like the Cluestoney madness of DGM-DGM-DGM?
We tried doing a heavy gatekeeper + gate strategy but in the end we didn't get enough gates to make it work. We skipped some potentially good picks in favor of gatekeepers (or didn't pick the half-off-color gates) and that might bite us in the ass in the end since we couldn't follow through. [add stuff about a few special picks here]

Ok, I playtested the current build on Magic Workstation and the results weren't so good. out of seven matches I won just 2 of them and both times with a combination of DttD and Sinister Possession I also found our build particularly weak against gruul/golgari (mostly due to the green component)

Against who or what did you test?

I think dropping yet another gatekeeper for the mastiff is a huge mistake. Even playing the mastiff late game is not good, we're trading a card and two mana for a chump blocker, which at that part of the game is all he'll be. If that card is a better creature, even if we can't play it in the same turn as another creature, it's an opportunity for a later turn that we're throwing away by just throwing a mastiff down, in my view.

-1 boros mastiff

-1 blaze commando

+1 gatekeeper

+1 steeple roc

That's my last criticism on the deck. Either it's changed or it's not, and either way we're submitting the deck very soon. Best of luck piloting this. I'm going to assume we can't be on comms with you listening/advising, but that's probably best. Too many cooks spoil the broth, so the saying goes.

You can check in on the stream when I'm playing, although I might not be watching the chat since I have only a small monitor.

VRonin was SP good against certain builds, or against all? I'd be curious on that one.

I suppose the current build is a good compromise on what various people want.

If we really want to put another keeper back in, I suppose we could trade out an SP. But in my play-drawing, I'm finding that the keepers don't trigger a lot. I still think we'd be better off with the stones over SP's in most cases. It would allow us to take out one land and put back an Ubul Sar. I'd be fine with either of those changes.

I playtested against random opponents found online that live drafted their deck with something similar to the solo draft of this site. SP was basically a Sulfuric Vortex in one match I attached 2 of it to a Riot Piker and let all the attacks pass so that it won't die. On another match I had it attached to a Thrashing Mossdog that was stalling my flyers and won stealing a Zhur-Taa Ancient with the gatekeeper and then using the extra mana for DttD and attcked for lethal. I then played against BUG, Golgari, BGR, RUG, and RWB (yes, I don't know the names of the shards) and lost either because I was color screwed or because the dropped bombs on the field that I simply couldn't handle

1 - What colors do you predict were most open, and least open?

Most: White

Least: Blue

2 - How many match wins (7 total possible) do you think you'll accumulate in this round-robin event?

5-7, only because the format is kinda weak. After round 1, I thought we were probably #1, but I think we slipped a bit. Didn't see a bomb or the other gates, which hurts us. I'll say 6 wins, due to other weak decks.

3 - What do you suspect to be the colors of the player to your right (that you were getting your cards from in the first and third packs), and the player to your left (that you were getting your cards from in the second pack)

Right: Blue for sure. Otherwise hard to say. I'll go with WU, splash B.

Left: GR, splash U.

4 - Pick apart your own draft a bit for me. How did it start, what strategies were you thinking of, how did they evolve? How did your discussion process go/how did your group work together and come to decisions? How did you like the Cluestoney madness of DGM-DGM-DGM? etc. etc

Early on there was very little disagreement. Choices were clear, and the deck's direction seemed to be presenting itself. It looked to be be a control/direct damage deck. But later, some boros ground damage came along, and it turned our pool into a mix of aggro/late game, with gatekeepers to give advantage at midgame.

In pack 3 and final decklist, we started to see some disagreement, mainly between one other drafter and myself(the two who had the most to say all draft). We had a clash of switching directions to a more aggro focus vs. favoring the late game strengths. I don't know what everyone else in the group thought about reading all that. I think it was handled well considering that there were a few places where we had some strong doubts about the other's choice. But a lot of info got fleshed out and no insults were made. May have been a decent learning process.

It was interesting to see the different thinking. Round 3 revealed different mindsets: a couple of us are more early-game oriented players, and a couple are more late-game oriented, with our leader being somewhere in the middle. That's my take, anyway. It led to a clash in decisions, but I enjoyed seeing the different perspectives.

We drafted 6 gatekeepers, and since we had 3 gates in the 1st round, it looked like a really good direction to go. But now, I'm not so sure. You can't rely on getting enough gates to be sure of that strategy, and even still those gatekeepers are good, but not amazing. I think it's good not to get caught up in any one gimmick or engine, and always be looking for overall good fundamentals of deck-building.

In my opinion we ended up with a solid enough mix of early & late game weapons considering the format, but our midgame will be a bit weak. No real bombs except Debt to the Deathless. And not super fast, but probably faster than most.

I'm very curious to see how it works. It could be a top finisher or a total disaster. This one is the hardest to predict out of any draft I can remember.

One more thought on Caley's question:

One thing that our group did right was to pick our colors(BWR) early and stick to them. I'm a believer in that anyway, but after seeing this, I think that in a weaker format it's all the more important.

We never drafted anything G or U with the intention of playing it, and still we only had room to cut out about 6 playable spells.

I think that any group that couldn't settle on their colors early(like the Hive in the last DDD) will probably be in rough shape.

Games are starting on monday?