Luckily for me, there is one. Unluckily for me, it's in the next town. F my life.

No car, I take it?

G/R land-based deck. Budoka Gardener, Scute mob, and Fireball (my only red spell) ftw!

That's my stand-bye casual deck. I've been doing a bunch of booster draft with some school chums recently, and I have some other decks, like a U/B unblockable standard-legal deck.

So lost as to where the game is now. I played from Beta til somewhere around Urza (did a few drafts in the sets following, but no real collecting). Game's changed a good bit since then.

Still have way the @#(% too many cards sitting around in boxes. Every once in a blue moon, my tabletop gaming group drags out our old decks and plays a few games. Never really played competitively..... once my collection got too big, it got hard for me to remember all the cards, so I just made "theme" decks.

Like I've got a Dragons deck (all dragons, plus some dragon-like spells & artifacts that help getting those expensive things out). Ditto for Angels, Cats, Spiders, "Big Green", Merfolk, Tims, Thrulls, Slivers, Falcons, Wurms, "Annoying Blue" (weird rule-twister cards, plus stuff like Stasis), etc.

(Oh, and then there was the "Unreal Tournament" deck - a whole bunch of multicolor Legends, plus artifacts - Armor, Rocket Launcher, a Flag to capture, Tawnos's Weaponry. And, of course, the Arena unique land. And about 20 dual lands, so I'd have even some hope of getting something out in a five color deck. )

Needless to say, a bunch of those decks are either really slow, or not terribly effective. Against a competitive deck, they lose really fast.

Basically we're at Scars of Mirrodin Block, Core 2012, and soon to be the second set of Innistrad block. After Innistrad Scars of Mirrodin Block will be moving out. Major theme of Mirrodin block was derp artifacts, infect, living weapons, phyrexian mana, and metacraft. The "Titans" still reign supreme in standard and mop the floor with many cards. Innistrad is all about horror, dual sided cards, werewolves, flashback cards that can be played form the graveyard, and morbid mechanics where if something dies a spells effect becomes stronger. ect.Innistrad is unusual in it seems to be blurring which colours play what things. Red seems to have a few cards that would set up a good milling deck with blue. Green is getting some good quick creatures out that seem like mofre of a red style thing. Basically things got switched up during this set pretty neatly. Rumors abound the next set after Core 2013 will be a return to Ravnica.

That's not a real draft in that case. That's just pick-the-best mentality. That's not going to get you to the world championships in tournaments.

It's probably a good idea to have that be your goal if you play(it'd certainly bolster your motivation to build the best deck you can), but I dunno, I'm too pessimistic to ever really believe that's a possibility for myself.

The way we play drafts wtih friends is this: Everyone writes on a paper the rare cards that were in their boosters and no matter if they pick it or not, at the end of the draft it's returned to their owner. This way we can focus on the game instead of "rare-picking".

That's really clever. Do you play in tournaments?

Good idea, but rare-picking doesn't always pay off in the end, so even if you get a lot of rares you might still lose.

Regularly. However there's been some strange rule-changing as to who gets an invite to the championships, or something. I'm not entirely sure what the new things are about.

As for rare-picking not winning you the draft, that is exactly the thing. They don't. Come rares are obviously very good, but some are outright crap in the draft-format. Medling Mage for example. I dare you to try and use it in a draft. What the F* would you name? However, you'd most likely choose in because it was at the time it was in T2-standard worth at least as much as the draft cost you. With our special rule, you'd still get that card and could focus on actually playing the draft.

Hmm. Back when I played drafts (many, many moons ago) at my local shop, the way they did it was: Draft what you want to make a good deck with. At the end, all the rares & foils (and maybe super-good uncommons?) got thrown into the center of the table and people drafted again - based on their standings for the tournament (i.e, first place winner got first pick, second place got second pick, etc)

Let you pick the right cards for your deck to win, gave you a reason to want to get a good placing, but still gave everyone ~3 rares at the end.

We have an additional booster (per player). Should be enough to want you win. And you will get 3 rares (that came in your booster, no mater if you picked them or not) in addition to every common and uncommon you picked during the draft. So the worst that could happen is you paying 12€ for 3 boosters worth of cards that might or might not have a lot of uncommons in them. At best, you'd win 4-5 boosters + what I said you'd get at least. Everyone wins, some win more.

Went to my first draft yesterday and I think I did okay considering it was the first time I've had to play with such random cards and with so few of them. Ended up against two guys who are very experienced who beat me easily and against one dude that I had never dueled before who I beat. So one win and two lost matches. Didn't get any further after that really.

As for the cards I drafted I decided to go for white and green like my main deck but no good rare token cards came my way but I did end up drafting two creepy dolls simply because by the time I got the boosters they were in there were only red, blue and black cards aside from them and other artifacts which led me to pick them. I did also get Mentor of the Meek who I may just put in my main token deck despite him not being related to tokens in any direct way except in that most tokens have 2 or less power. Gutter Grime may also be fun to have but it only works for normal creatures dying and normally it's tokens that die for me so I'm not too sure if I will ever use it and the last rare I got was Dearly Departed. I think I picked fairly considering all my cards could be used in my spirit creature white and green deck I made and out of 5 rares two only came to me because I could not pick anything better since I wasn't intending to use any mountains, islands or swamps.

Playing Spirits is rough, friend of mine tried to run Spirit tribal when Innistrad first hit and he kept getting decimated. Only Saint Traft and the Spectral Riders availed him. I hope the few Spirits previewed from Dark Ascension are a sign of an active attempt on WotC's part to create better synergy for the tribal. The UW "Half-Lords" just don't work as well as they were intended to. Although I had heard there was a set-up which used that Green Avatar (Essence of the Wild?) that works pretty well, is that what you're talking about with WG Spirits?

No, I just decided to try a spirit deck in the draft and I decided to throw green in for extras as there were not always spirits or cards to support that in the boosters I got handed to me. My main deck is not a white green spirit deck but simply a white green token deck. I try my best to throw out as many tokens as possible and then I have cards to support tokens like Intangible Virtue and Parallel lives. I own a copy of Essence of the Wild and I used to keep it in my deck but I've taken it out for now. I probably should keep it but every time I draw it I hesitate to throw it out because of how easily I can mess up my game with it. But I probably worry too much, I've had a few matches where I lost because I could no longer produce flying blockers and my opponent was able to handle the assaults from my 6/6 units. But that is a lot rarer than me storming my opponent with something like a jade mage happily spawning 6/6 creatures for 3 mana when I get that card out.

That seems like it would be a lot more fun than doing a real draft at the CCG House. Everytime some fop screeches "judge" over a minor and irrelevant etiquette infraction I want to light my beard on fire.

Side note: Mikaeus brought the word "fop" back.

I play Magic alot. I currently run in standard a B/R Vampire Deck that generally fares pretty well. In casual games I have a Goblin Burn deck Ive been working on that is really awesome and a Green deck which I dont know how to describe aside from play lots of creatures, play doubling chant, play overrun and [censored] things up. Only thing missing from it is a Garruk Primal Hunter. But last night with the accquistion of a Jace Memory Adept Im gonna work on a nonstardard mill deck using him and Szdeck Lord Of Secerts.

Going to pre release.
I usually only play single black but thats hard so I've spiced it up with a little bit of white; mostly enchantment removal and fealing of dread.
I dont think black has too many good cards except the 2/1 zombie that keeps coming back. So far.

The new version of Mikaeus is pretty solid, I'm going to run it alongside Death Baron:
http://www.magicspoiler.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Mikaeus-the-Unhallowed-Dark-Ascension-Spoiler.jpg

Have you checked out how much your old cards are worth yet? If not, you should do that. Especially since you left at the brokenest block, some of your old cards might be worth a whole lot.

For those not in the know, http://magicseteditor.sourceforge.net/ is a fun program to toy with to make your own cards. (the program is free and I'm not affiliated with the makers so this is not advertising against the rules)

I made a card as an example:
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/23/asmodeushackworthy.jpg

Shroud ? tsk, tsk, tsk, so oldschool. These days we kids call it hexproof

I know, I know... I just thought nobody being able to easily remove him (even his controller) was fitting. I have a thing for terrible cards that are more trouble than they're worth.

Tap Swamp and cast Reanimate on this thread.

How did people's prerelease go? I placed 20th out of about 100 people which surprised me given my lack of confidence in the RG Beatdown deck I slapped together. Mayor of Avabruck really brought most of the games home, I'd certainly vote for him.

Anyone attending any release tournaments tommorow? I have prior engagements and can't do so myself.