For the second draft of Day 2 in San Francisco, there was quite a tough table in pod 3. Gabe Walls, Jason Hager, Shane Wiggans, David Leader, and Ryan Jones all sat next to each other—not exactly the most straightforward place to get your 3-0. And who was the person being fed by those five? Donkey Club’s own Adam Prosak. Along with his teammates, Adam prepared vigorously for both the Constructed and the Sealed Pack portions of this Pro Circuit, and the result is a collection of Donkey Power all over the top tables. Their current motto? “We might have the best deck . . . we might not. Either way, we’re going to outplay you.”
Adam’s first pick of the draft was pretty unspectacular. He stared down a lot of Brotherhood reservist characters and a Planet X. Beyond that, there was only a Marrow and a Special Delivery. Not wanting to commit too early with so many great drafters feeding him signals, Adam took the Team-Up, which, while at its best with Brotherhood, is always a convenient inclusion.
Beast, Feline Geneticist came second pick in a pack that also flaunted an Archangel, Angel; Harry’s Hideaway; and Xorn. Each pack was telling its own team story, and the X-Men storyline looked pretty compelling to Prosak. X-Men United quickly followed it up, and then there was something of a twist. Adam let me know after the draft that he would happily scoop up Massachusetts Academy first pick, so he saw getting it fourth as a clear signal that there were things afoot in Hellfire territory. Cardinal Law and Viper in the next couple of picks worked in that direction, followed by Xorn and another Viper.
On the second lap, most of the packs were looking a little lackluster; much of the real sauce had already been taken by the various savvy drafters at the table. Nightcrawler, Swashbuckler and Black Panther, King of Wakanda came twelfth and thirteenth, which was pretty handy as things turned out, but the bulk of Prosak’s work had been done in his first eight picks.
For pack 2, Harry’s Hideaway was Prosak’s first pick, which would go well with his Xorn and potentially a late Rebirth he had drafted in pack 1 with which to keep around most of his force. Another Viper came, followed by a Turnabout (Prosak’s first top draw trick of the draft), and then Adam was more or less forced to take a Cannonball over Wolverine, The Best at What He Does because he was still very much lacking in low drops. In his early picks, Adam was forced by a dearth of low drops to ship two Image Inducers to Ryan Jones to his right, which was a little bit of a hurting. As it happened, stocking up on low drops was ultimately not a problem for Prosak as the pack went on, and it seemed that he was gearing up to a nifty little Blackbird Blue deck . . . albeit without a Blackbird Blue thus far.
As Adam cracked his final pack of the draft, I could mentally hear him chanting, “Did we do it? Did we do it?” When he looked at his final pack, there was a slump of “No, we did not.”
First and second picks of Destiny, Freedom Force and Lockheed respectively were solid if unexciting for Prosak. He was low on tricks, and while he had the curve for it, he was lacking a bit of the continuous pump he really required to do the off-curve strategy justice. When in pack 3 there was a unique X-Men equipment, Adam merrily slammed it into his draft pile. Nearby, somebody’s chair broke. Gabe Walls had a little chuckle, happy that it wasn’t him who had beaten up on his chair. Everyone else at the table laughed with Gabe, as tends to be the case. Adam was happy to laugh as much at his own good fortune as at the bad fortune of the nameless chair breaker.
In the next pack, possibly a little giddy from the one before, Adam took Professor X, Headmaster over a second Massachusetts Academy—something he later decided was a mistake. There was soon another “We did it!” moment, though, as he got passed a fifth pick Sage, Tessa. From there, Prosak’s draft was a shiny happy ball of “draft on track.” Another Destiny came, along with a Mindtap Mechanism, a Trevor Fitzroy, and a late Tarot.
When it came to building, Adam was pretty quick to assemble his off-curve beatdown deck. It was, he claimed, a little worse than his deck from the pod before, where he had somehow gone 1-2. As such he was hesitant to predict anything too spectacular for it, but it appeared to have most of the tools necessary to put in a good performance. Perhaps a bit short on tricks, it looks like Adam might need to do a little bit of outplaying to get to where he wants to be, but even at a table like his, he feels confident that he can do it.