Fallen Empires draft @Mythic 11-17-12

Fallen Empires Draft
Mythic Games, Santa Cruz
Nov. 17th, 2012

My Saturday was crazy. An old friend talked me into running in the SC Turkey Trot 5K at 8am on West Cliff. In the rain. Then, after much coffee and pumpkin bread, I raced up to UCSC and the KZSC Music sale at 10. Six dollars and 24 CDs later, I stumbled home for a much needed shower. Because at 1pm, Mythic was hosting a FREE Fallen Empires draft!

So if you don't know, Mythic Games is THE gaming destination in Santa Cruz. They recently expanded and now have lots of well-lit, clean gaming room for all players. If you play Magic, or any table-top game like Mech-Warrior, this is the place to play.

One of their regulars, Joe, bought a box of FE and wanted to draft it. So Mythic advertised on FaceBook and I got the 6th spot. Joe would keep the cards, but he would give out prizes to the top 4. Deal!

My buddy Larry Bee was there, but wasn't drafting, so he quietly watched my picks. I had done some FE drafting research on the web, but it mostly said "don't do it". You see drafting wasn't a thing yet in 1994, when FE came out, so it wasn't built with drafting in mind. After looking at the cards, I could see it did at least have a tribal theme: Thrulls, Thallids, Orcs, Drawves, Soldiers, Hominids and some Goblins. Also, the most expensive card in the set is Elvish Farmer ($2.50), which makes Saprolings that can be sac'd to gain 2 life. Really? Oh, and the packs have 8 cards each. So we drafted 5!

My first pick in the draft was Order of Leitbur:

White it was! My second pick was Icatian Town, which let's you play four 1/1 soldiers. Almost as good as Lingering Souls! I then proceeded to pick up 4 Icatian Javelineers, which are some of the only removal in the set.

I ended up in mostly W with some G for 2x Night Soils and a Feral Thallid (6/3, who can regenerate).

Some interesting things about FE - they had some cards with multiple artwork like the Javelineers above. It was a small set (102 cards), but with the extra art, it seemed like more. There's barely any removal and the average size of the creatures is probably power 1.3 and toughness 1.6. This causes for a lot of stalled boards. There's a reason you don't draft this set, but hey, it was a crazy Saturday and the price was right!

My first round opponent was Casey running mono-blue with 2x Deep Spawns and 2x High Tides. Combo anyone? High Tide makes all Islands double their output for a turn. And a bunch of Hominids.

Game one my Javelineers took out some of his dudes and I was able to overrun him with 1/1s before he could stabilize. Game two was a turn 4 Deep Spawn by way of High Tide. Ouch. I had an Elvish Hunter to keep the Spawn tapped, but he played a Merseine on it and I was done. Game three was a board stall, but my Thallids kept making Saprolings and I eventually got in FTW.

Second round was versus Jacob running Brassclaw Orcs (3/2 that can't block creatures with power 2 or more) and Hymn To Tourachs.

This is regarded as one of the best cards in the set. This and High Tide. Two discards at random is harsh! But my army of 1/1 dudes all spilled out onto the battlefield in a few turns and beat Jacob in two games without much resistance. He showed me his deck with Orcs and Thrulls and he just got mana screwed.

Onto the finals vs. Tully, who had called for us to meet there when we started. Tully and I have had many fun Magic battles over the years and this would be no different. We agree to draw and play for the extra pack. (1st was 4, 2nd was 3). He was running GB with Thallids and Thrulls. Lots of counters were needed for our games.

So with Night Soil, you like having guys in the graveyard to make more dudes to fight with. Unfortunately, he had some too, so we were fighting over who could trigger their Soil first. He also had a Druid that could make his forests into 2/3 fighters. Ugh.

I was able to take a game with my army of 1/1s and he stomped me back in game two with forests. Since I had some movie plans with the family, I needed to head out, so I offered the extra pack to him. He was stoked and asked me to sign it. He said he was going to start a collection of all the Magic packs. Good luck on that, Tully! It should make for a fun Chaos draft one day!

Props:
Joe, for a fun blast from the past draft. I'm inspired to buy a box myself!
Mythic, for a cool place to hang out!
Icatian Javelineers, you know to clear a board.
Slops:
Deep Spawn, no fair being a 6/6 trampler in a world of 1/1s!
The rain. Nice to look at, but a drag to run in.

Let me know your Fallen Empire experiences in the comments below!