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Friday keeps kicking my ass. I was doing a lot of puzzles on Thursday, old Cryptics and such. Perhaps I was worn out by the time I went to work on it.

I did OK at Friday Night Magic tonight (2-1), although I didn't think my deck was all that good. I may lend too much weight to tribal synergies and tribal payoffs. The draft as very wobbly and I ended up with just a bunch of assorted R/W creatures and spells. A couple of pirates, four vampires, a random Human, and the rest dinosaurs, but nothing amazing. Decent removal, though it was all damage-based, and 2 Pirates Cutlasses that never attached to a Pirate, but went great with Exultant Skymarcher, of which I had two (MVP). I also had Form of the Dinosaur.

So, Round 1, I faced off against a regular, who is not known for being all that great. In fact, his deck was so not great, that he was playing multiple Negates main deck. Negate WRECKED me. I lost the first game by just confidently tapping out for Unfriendly Fire to his face (he was at 4) as soon as untapping, and then dying, but honestly, who plays around the second Negate in Game 1? Game 2 I won, though he had two Negates again. In between games, I as kidding him about how Negate might have worked out ok against me, but really not something you want multiples of. He told me he was only playing two. Game 3, he hit me early with fliers (the non-Negate portion of his deck was very good, with 4 Kitesail Corsair, Air Elemental, Curious Obsession) I fell to one, but I had an ace. I played Form of the Dinosaur, planning to get up to 15 and then take control. He had a third fucking Negate! Three Negates!

Round 2 and 3 went fine. I drew things, killed enemies, easy peasy. I drew Form twice in the third round, but both times, I was well above 15 (once at 27) against a mostly empty board when I drew it. Negate kid made the finals.

Postscript: Late in the first pack, I picked up a foil Brass's Bounty because mise. I got a second one really late in pack 2. I joked as I took the second one, my draft was going so poorly that I could only win by getting Revel in Riches in the third pack. And then the guy to my right opened it and passed it to me! But I have standards. There is no way that card shouldn't wheel, and with all the table talk, I figured it would be shipped to me, just to see if I would do it, so I took an Unfriendly Fire. But the guy who opened it took it on the wheel. What a jerk. Now, there is no way I would have actually tried that, and things turned out ok, Unfriendly Fire was naturally good, I'm not actually mad. But come on, man!