Hi there card gamers, this week we delved back into the Sularia box and decided to try out drafting! The results were…unexpected.

For once team mostly not there were actually all present so we got together for some games. Colin hadn’t played B4S before so we decided to ‘Open’ draft the box. We made up 9 ‘packs’ of 15 cards at random from the boxed set. Then we dealt out the first pack in front of us and openly discussed our thoughts and potential strategies; we drafted it and then repeated the process until we each had 45 cards to make a deck with.

Colin and myself chose to draft sites first and combatants we thought we could play second. Stephen drafted all the burn cards and quite a few scary combatants but was left with fewer sites, and a lot of those were quite mid-high range in cost. By the end I was actively drafting sites as a weapon against Stephen to reduce his resource base to a ruin. I may have over done this though…

The first game was Stephen vs myself and his resource base did what I thought it might and let him down badly. I was quickly in front and destroying sites faster than he could play them. The game was over so quickly that we played a couple of other games, both of which he won once through clever use of Catacombs to play Fenris, making me realise that Catacombs is actually better than previously thought. Using it at the end of your opponents turn basically gives you a huge surprise attacker like boom. The other was lost to all four System Scrambles being suddenly dropped on a mediocre STAB turn when I thought he was a dead duck. Ho hum, lessons learnt.

Colin, playing his first game ever, experienced Stephen’s shady resource base and inflicted a catastrophic amount of damage before Stephen managed to rally behind Bergheim. Unfortunately it was too little too late and Colin’s flying assault picked off Stephen’s other sites before the burn could kick in.

That left me playing Colin. It was at this point that I thought I may have drafted too many sites and not enough clever stuff. The game was a battle of epic proportions as you can see above and came down to a final turn in which I was reduced to minus 12 life but then cracked back to drop him to minus 11! I think that So I lost by one point of life! Congratulations go to Colin as well deserved winner!

I think that there’s a fine line with drafting this game, I would still first pick a site with four or less cost but would also place Catacombs and System Scramble quite highly on my drafting list. Centropolis and Bergheim are also very strong and Oathki should be a high priority. I would attempt to get roughly 14 sites, 18 combatants (that you can play) and enough tricks to get it done. I would try to choose Jotune combatants first because the flying ability is really good and the tactics of Synthien back them up nicely. Cards to avoid drafting are Fire from the Sky (since you probably won’t get very much out of it) and Interference (because Art of War is less of a thing).

We all really enjoyed it and I think it fills the drafting void. We can’t wait to get our grubby mitts on further expansions either! For more information head over to www.sularia.com. Normal service will be somewhat suspended as we start coverage of Salute 2016 in ernest but stay tuned for updates! -Mark