In case you missed the memo, Gabe Walls and Jason Hager are now teammates. The boys from Indiana recently hooked up with Hager and his West Virginia teammates to form an unholy alliance that is attempting to fix the weaknesses in both of their teams. Hager’s crew is known to need a bit of help with their Sealed Pack play at the Pro Circuit level, while Gabe Walls, Nick Little, and company are far too lazy to do anything so workmanlike as playtesting Constructed. Therefore, why not team up? This gives Anthony Justice a chance to stop freefalling in the standings every time the PC switches to Draft format, while Gabe and friends get a chance to see tech decks like New School before they’re being wrecked by it.

They are sitting next to one another this morning, seated at table 1 for the first draft of the weekend before the inevitable cut to the Top 8. It would be impossible to cover the picks for both players at the same time, but what follows are Walls’s choices with some notes on Hager’s deck interspersed.

Pack 1

Pick 1 Walls: Uppercut, Mouse Trap, Remoni-Notra ◊ Star Sapphire, with the rare of Anti-Monitor
Chose Uppercut

Pick 1 Hager: Mosaic World, Myrwhydden, Tomar Re
Chose Myrwhydden

Pick 2 Walls: Mosaic World

Pick 2 Hager: Empire of Tears, G’nort
Chose Empire

Pick 3 Walls: Sinestro, Lantern in Exile, G’nort, Book of Oa
Chose Book

Pick 4: Walls: Rain of Acorns, St’nlli, Kreon
Chose St’nlli

Pick 5: Walls Boodikka

Pick 5 Hager: Qwardian Pincer

Pick 6: Walls: picked Ganthet over Force Sphere

Pick 7: Walls: In Evil Star’s Evil Clutches

Pick 8: Walls: Guy Gardner, Warrior

Pick 8 Hager: Elastiman

Pick 9:Walls: Mouse Trap

After pack 1, Walls was looking to go Green Lantern, while Hager had hopped into Emerald Enemies from the start and was ensconced there when Empire of Tears showed up. He also had a Goldface at that point and was looking to draw the hyper-aggressive EE aggro deck that Adam Prosak talked about yesterday.

Pack 2

Pick 1: Both Walls and Hager opened Hal Jordan, Parallax as their rares. Walls picked Malvolio.

Pick 2 Walls: Prison Planet, No Man Escapes the Manhunters, Malvolio number two
Chose No Man Escapes the Manhunters

Pick 3 Walls: This pack was huge on plot twists, with Breaking Ground, In Remembrance, Lanterns in Love, Qwardian Pincer, and Emerald Twilight available. Walls chose Lanterns in Love.

Pick 4: Walls grabbed Lanterns in Love number two. Hager took In Remembrance.

Pick 5 Walls: Guy Gardner, Strong Arm of the Corps vs. Hector Hammond. Hector Hammond won for Gabe’s deck.

Pick 6 Walls: Gabe received another Uppercut to many shakes of the head.

Pick 7: Tattooed Man

Pick 8: Guardians Reborn

Pick 9: Dimming of the Starheart

Pack 3

P1: The rare in this pack for Walls was Korugar, with Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern, Guardians Reborn, and yet another Sinestro, Lantern in Exile available. Walls snagged the Kyle Rayner, while Hager gleefully picked a Sweeping Up.

Pick 2 Walls: Krona over Millennium, Legion, Emerald Twilight

Pick 3: John Stewart over Olapet

Pick 4: A second Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern over Grayven

Pick 5: Power Ring over Book of Oa, Hal Jordan, Green Lantern of Sector 2814, and Olapet

Pick 6: Yellow Impurity

Pick 7: Alan Scott


Talking to Gabe after the draft, he thought he should have been Anti-Matter early, but those dried up quickly. Draft is interesting because while players may come into a draft table with a set pick order in mind, your actual pick order at the draft table is directly affected by who you are drafting with. One of the major problems Gabe was having was that he kept getting passed insane plot twists, but they came at the expense of the best men in the game. As Gabe put it, “When you are drafting with players that know how to draft the set, they know that the best plot twists and locations are usually the first cards you draft, but in this one I kept getting passed great twists and had to scramble to fill in my curve and make sure I could hit my drops.” His deck ended up solid with some very good twists, but the men were largely underpowered in the middle section of the curve. His curve ended up with four 1-drops, three each of drops 2 through 5, two 6-drops, and two 7-drops.

Random quote from Russell Pippin: “Someone in pod 1 actually passed Oa. I thought about DQ’ing them right there.”