Hosted my second box of Mystery Booster 2 tonight at a local weekly cube/draft night; we did entry fees and I gave out the lair and collector boosters and some other stuff as prizes. Overall a great time, everyone sounded like they had a lot of fun with the draft - myself included.

Mystery Booster 2 draft deck - green white control with sliver and elf subthemes

I ended up in a GW control deck (the Angelic Exaltation here was swapped for a Diversionary Tactics, which is the “Opposition” in my deck). Started pack 1 off with Steve and for awhile thought I might just be in some sort of Gx ramp deck, but didn’t end up seeing anything huge and I did grab The Heron Moon, which I really wanted to make work. Some proliferate cards pushed me into white, and I specced on Fury/Spectral Sliver at the end of pack 1 and found the Muscle Sliver pack 3. Minor elf subtheme with the Wirewood Channeler since I had the dorks anyways.

Overall record 1-2, unfortunately Heron Moon is a glacially slow wincon and I didn’t have nearly enough removal to back it up (best I got was 8/13 counters, which honestly I’m pretty happy with). A few synergies were quite potent - Quirion Ranger + Sporemound to make a creature every turn with Diversionary Tactics in particular was fantastic, and Night Soil could help to accelerate The Heron Moon a bit.

The draft itself was surprisingly high power, I had a sense for it on Sunday but it really crystallized tonight. There’s plenty of bad cards, sure, but a lot of them have wrinkly synergies to tease out, and it’s a very high complexity draft environment. I was joking a bit about Sliver and Elf typal but there’s actually quite a few, and changelings to fill things out to boot. The fixing isn’t great but it exists in several of the slots (tapped tris in the normal slots, Ash Barrens in white border, several fixing lands in the playtest slot). And of course, all the playtest cards give you some ridiculous things to build around.

This is definitely a set catering to players enfranchised enough to attend a convention, given the amount of in-jokes and pre-errata rules text on some of the older ones. All that leads to a really great experience, something that feels as if it has a lot more longevity than the original Mystery Booster - which makes sense, given it’s a tool for the events team. I’d happily draft this for several weeks in a row, but unfortunately this was my last box for now. Definitely plan on picking up another with the next FIAB