M14 Draft thoughts and a Sealed Pool

Been grinding a bunch of M14 drafts since my last post with average to poor results. Have tried to stray from base blue decks to try out other archetypes, with bad results generally. I have had a few good green decks running Howl of the Nightpack along with spiders and baloths to stall. 

Blue is pretty clearly the best color, but I have been beaten by non-Blue decks that just have excellent cards in other colors. If you can assemble a bunch of top 2-3 pick quality cards, any color combo will work given enough of them. For example White is widely regarded as the worst color, and it is certainly has the weakest commons, but if you can put together a number of Serra Angels and Seraph of the Swords along with Pacifisms, you can get there.

You certainly want to jump on blue if it looks remotely available, but if not, you can try to rely on seeing what is open and trying to get the best cards in those colors. Pretty basic strategy, but it seems to be the way to go. Trying to jam slivers or RB sacrifice for example has led to some pretty disastrous results. You probably want to just draft the top pick cards and if after those you can pick up cards for one of the niche archetypes then go for it at that point. Trying to slam bubbling cauldron/act of treason over top pick quality red/black cards just hasn't been a good move early on. 



I'll leave you with an interesting sealed pool. At first I was super excited by the deck I had made, but it has some key flaws that led to a 2-2 drop in a premier event. The pool appears to be a little threat light, which turns it is a problem in the format. You need a legit plan to win, and the deck I built was pretty soft to a handful of spot removal. It is VERY hard to just not play red or black though given the bombs in black and the removal in red. Would love to hear how others would build this. Part of me wanted to go deep with the Angelic Accords + Cauldron, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Thanks for reading.

-Ben
@bchap55