#nemata primeval warden is busted

[i-am-nickelbolt]

Bronze to Mythic, Dominaria United premiere draft #4, new dad style! It’s been two weeks since I have been able to fire up arena. Many sleep-interrupted nights, lots of exhaustion, and a bucket of tears (more than a few of them were my own.) But we finally got a decent night’s sleep and my son is napping well again, so it’s time to jump back into the queues!

The draft was interesting.

Pack 1 a worthy first pick Phyrexian Missionary. Great 2 drop for every white deck, excellent to kick. Pick 2 Benalish Sleeper over Extinguish the Light and Blight Pile. I find Extinguish the Light to be okay but Shore Up is kind of a blowout. Blight Pile is okay but it’s more of the fail-case if you don’t have Chaplain in the wall deck than it is an early pick. I kind of wanted to try base white, so I went with Sleeper. Pick 3 Heroic Charge out of a mediocre pack. Gaea’s Might, Shore Up, Shadow Prophecy, and red-white land are good but don’t really fit what I’m doing. If you’re base white, the first Charge is a lot better than dorky filler. Pick 4 Phyrexian Missionary over Love Song of Night and Day. I feel like I’m kind of doing it. Pick 5 Bone Splinters is kind of perfect for black-white, especially if I get a couple token makers. Pick 6 was a curveball Essence Scatter, and I thought it might be a signal, as this is one of the best blue cards. Pick 7 Gibbering Barricade over Pixie Illusionist and Shadow Prophecy, which I think is a mistake. I am pretty sure I overvalue the barricade, it just wasn’t impressive at all in these games, even though I was thinking I maybe wanted defensive plays to go with Essence Scatter. Pick 8 Battlefly Swarm is a flier if I want to Charge, and a grindy blocker for Missionary to rebuy if I abandon Charge. Pick 9 Phyrexian Espionage kind of confirmed the grindy Esper plan for me. Crystal Grotto, Shadow Prophecy, a speculative Shield-wall Sentry and a Salvaged Manaworker rounded out the pack.

Pack 2 pick 1 I immediately saw second Phyrexian Missionary buuut... Nemata Primeval Warden was right next to it. Nemata is pretty busted, so here we go 4 color, lets pick some lands! Pick 2 I immediately saw blue-white land, buuut... there was Boretusk Bonerattle. I’m basically on lands over everything at this point. Pick 3 Vohar, Vodalian Desecrator over second Crystal Grotto. Pick 4 Talas lookout over Scout the Wilderness, but I think I should have taken Destroy Evil. Pick 5 Deathbloom Gardener over Citizen’s Arrest... hmm...

I think basically everyone else in the pod was taking lands, because I only saw a couple of them for the rest of the draft. I had to resort to Salvaged Manaworker and Scout the Wilderness. Fortunately, I was mostly looking for colors to cast my spells, not necessarily needing to get land types quickly. The domain cards I had were still pretty good at 3 types. I did think I had a trainwreck. Fortunately, I rattled off 6-1 despite making a ton of mistakes. I misclicked an Urborg Repossession, I made a ton of weird blocks, my sequencing was bad, I almost needlessly decked myself once, but the late game grind got me there. I’m not even sure if I built my deck right, or even drafted my lane correctly. The game I lost could basically be traced down to missing a double-block because I thought my opponent’s Karplusan Forest contributed to Domain and the Rootwalla was smaller than I thought it was. I think I made a couple other mistakes that match, but I made it harder for myself by missing that block.

The last two games I lost were card quality issues. The problem with playing a lot of mediocre cards to make your mana work is when you draw a lot of those mediocre cards, your deck looks horrible.

A couple of observations:

Nemata, Primeval Warden is busted.

Gibbering Barricade was very disappointing. it never really blocked the way I hoped and I thought it would be better with Scout the Wilderness.

Scout the Wilderness was okay. It’s nice that you can get tokens off of it and shuffle back Scrys in the late game from Automatic Librarian digging for land. And the tokens can be relevant.

Automatic Librarian overperformed in this deck. 3/2 brawls reasonably well, and it was pretty nice with all the graveyard recursion. It seemed like I could always dig to land or powerful spells for as long as I wanted. Also, just being able to always cast a 3 drop with whatever lands I had was really nice.

Salvaged Manaworker was only okay. Where it shined was more as a 2 mana blocker, not so much at fixing mana.

Here’s a shocker of a headline: “Merfolk Looter is great!” But Vohar, Vodalian Desecrator was really nice with all the graveyard recursion.

You can deck yourself pretty easily with a couple Shadow Prophecy.

Also, my son was a lucky charm! He cried during two matches, so I had to run and get him. But then I won both of those match-ups. And the third game he cried and I left him in his crib, I lost. So the lesson is if I can play Arena while holding him, I will always win.