Haku

some friends only play decks with kill-on-sight Commanders or ones that necessitate knocking them out first.
My bracket 2 decks are pretty okay at managing this power disparity since they are both chill and efficient, but it would be nice to have more balanced pods more often, haha.

Haven't been posting about it much, but I have been playing Commander pretty regularly, mostly with my mahjong friends and occasionally with local furry friends. It has been a bit tough to balance the pods though since some friends just want to play thematic or otherwise chill decks and

from the draft packs, so I can't really complain, haha.
In any case, this card shop isn't too far from me, so I'd definitely be willing to draft here again assuming we can get enough players. Hopefully it'll become a regular thing, but we'll have to see.

So I ended up going 3-0 and getting 1st place, which is nice. In addition to the three extra packs, I also got a foil promo pack for getting 1st and a regular promo pack for participating. I didn't really pull anything of note, but I already got a Bitterbloom Bearer and a Steam Vents

most of my threats, but I managed to get him to a low enough life total that a full swing with instant-speed removal to force through damage with my trampler was enough to win no matter how he blocked. I would've lost that game if I had waited even one more turn, but I was able to take the match 2-0

Round 3 was against BGU Maralen; his pack one pick one was Maralen, so he was also fighting for the elf cards and got most of the faeries. I was able to win game 1 after removing his Maralen by just having higher-quality creatures then him. Game 2 was a lot closer since he managed to deal with

Round 2 was against WU Merfolk; I was worried since he got all of the white cards, but I guess they weren't particularly good, haha. I won the game 1 with my giants, lost game 2 to his abundance of flyers, then won game 3 with an aggressive curve that put him on a strict clock to take the match 2-1.

Round 1 was against BG Elves; it turns out that two other players were also in black and green, so we were all fighting for similar cards. My opponent this round had a lot of the early-game cards, but I managed to stabilize both games and overtake him with my giants backed by Boldwyr Aggressor. 2-0.

BRG deck for tonight's Lorwyn Eclipsed booster draft. Not pictured are 6 Swamps, 4 Mountains, 5 Forests, and 1 Steam Vents I decided to throw in after taking the picture, haha.

It looked like white dried up pretty quickly, but Goblins didn't have enough for me to fully commit to just black and red, so I also took some of the stronger green cards and a couple of Midnight Tillings to help smooth out the deck. I ended up on a decent BRG deck with a lot of threats, haha.

We were drafting Lorwyn Eclipsed, and there ended up being exactly 4 players, so we did a Pick Two draft. My pack one pick one was Bitterbloom Bearer, so I of course had to be in black, haha. I did my usual strategy for this set of just picking up some removal early on, this time in red.

Went to a booster draft tonight at a relatively new card shop. One of the regulars at my usual LGS apparently lives closer to this shop and spoke with their staff about trying out draft events, so participating to help get these rolling was the least I could do, haha.

getting both a Three Tree City and an Innkeeper's Talent. I really don't need anything from Bloomburrow at this point with how much of that set I've gotten, but that Three Tree City more than paid for my draft, and the two rare Talents were a nice bonus, so I'm not complaining, haha.

So I ended up going 2-1 and getting two extra packs, which I'll happily take since I was expecting to go 1-2 with the deck I drafted, haha. I think being able to adapt to the funky draft pool helped especially in that last round. Anyways, I actually pulled pretty well from my prize packs,

and had enough large creatures with flying or reach to prevent his attacks. I was able to build up enough of a board to race him and then counter his Glidedive Duo with a Dazzling Denial so that I could go in for the kill on the following turn.

and I curved out well, so I was able to win 2-0 without any trouble.
Round 3 was against WB Bats; game 1 I got mana screwed and couldn't catch up against all of his life gain. Game 2 he got mana screwed so I just beat him down with a couple of creatures. I curved out pretty well in game 3

Round 1 was against UB Rats; he had a pretty solid mid- to late-game, and I couldn't apply enough consistent pressure or gain enough advantage to beat him once he got Threshold, so I ended up losing 1-2.
Round 2 was against WR Mice; I noticed that he wasn't playing enough creatures in his deck,

My curve was kind of funky and I didn't have much in the way of an end-game. I ended up swapping cards in and out between every game since I needed to fine-tune my deck in order to have a chance against my opponents. I also opted to play two counterspells since I was light on removal and 2-drops.

Unfortunately, one of the other players also had a similar idea, so we found ourselves fighting over all of the Frog cards by the time it was too late to pivot. He ended up with the better deck since he got more of the uncommons, but I at least got some okay rares.

I figured the Caretaker's Talent would make more sense because it's actually worth money, but neither white nor red ended up being open, so it didn't really matter for my deck. Blue and green were pretty open, and I was passed a Clement, so I decided to go for Frogs.

Went to another Friday night MTG booster draft. This LGS had sold out of TMNT last week after the prerelease, but they had restocked on Bloomburrow, so we drafted that tonight. There were a total of 7 players, which was cool.
My pack one pick one was Caretaker's Talent, passing a Manifold Mouse.

Original printing of Sunken Citadel from Lost Caverns of Ixalan

Stellar Sights printing of Sunken Citadel from Edge of Eternities

I mentioned this a bit on stream this week, but I'm pretty excited to try out Sunken Citadel in a bunch of my Commander decks. Not only did TMNT introduce 3 new lands with strong activated abilities, but I was already using a bunch of utility lands. It even works for channel lands and filter lands!

the league standings now. He managed to sell his Newtype Challenge Top 4 Haman Karn and get play sets of The-O and NT-1, so he might change his deck sometime soon. My deck worked about as well as expected, so I'll continue with it for now, though now I need to figure out a good name for it, haha.

So I ended up going 4-0 and getting 1st, which is good. I pulled a Zaku II FZ R+ from my prize packs and a Full Armor Unicorn from my Winner Packs, so the latter replaced the base rarity version that was in my deck, haha. Hatsu unfortunately ended up going 2-2, but that means we're tied for 1st in

for his The-O, so I was able to clean up his board without any issue. Won round 4 against red/white ZAFT; he didn't really apply any early-game pressure since red decks just lean really hard into the direct damage commands now, so I was able to take my time and take control of the game.

in favor of more Full Armor Unicorns and Banagher. Apparently his method of dealing with aggro was Awakened Potential, which makes sense but still isn't that great. Anyways, I was expecting to lose since his deck just had a higher ceiling than mine, but I drew pretty well and he didn't have a pilot

I drew a slow hand, but was still able to dominate in the late game with a The-O paired with Kira to keep killing his units effectively for free, haha. Won round 3 against blue/white Jupitris; I saw that this guy was leaning heavily into his top-end, going so far as to drop Kira and all of his units

red for the direct damage commands, but AEUG still doesn't really have a critical mass of good units, so I won without too much trouble. Won round 2 against red/white control; it looked like he was on Sinanju and Justice with their respective pilots, which made his range of plays kind of narrow.

I pretty much just used the previous Freedom Rebuild deck as a base and replaced Freedom, Rebuild, and Suletta for The-O and Scirocco. There were a few other changes here and there, but that was the main idea anyway.
Won round 1 against red/white AEUG; he was pretty much running an AEUG deck with

Went to the usual Wednesday night Gundam locals. Tonight was the second week of their GD03 league, and there were a total of 16 players. Hatsu was on the unmodified blue/white Freedom Rebuild deck from before, but I changed up my deck to drop the extra Jupitris stuff.

Haku5z - Twitch I'm a dragon who enjoys older video games, speedruns Battle Assault 3 Featuring Gundam Seed, and is really into riichi mahjong. I post about upcoming streams on Bluesky.

Streaming more Shenmue II! We learned about the Wude, so does that mean we'll get to see the master today?
www.twitch.tv/haku5z