Alara Reborn Draft

I attended my local Alara Reborn release party yesterday, the format being Shards/Reborn/Reborn draft. My Shards pack revealed the ultra-rare planeswalker Elspeth, Knight Errant, which is an amazing card for limited play, so that became my first pick. Still not being that familiar with the Shards block environment I wasn't really sure where to go next. The next several packs I saw didn't really seem to be offering me much to go with the Elspeth, and several random picks ensued before I settled on the Esper Shard with a number of strong White, Blue, and Black cards.

My final deck had a number of strong artifact creatures, a couple of spells with the new cascade ability, some counterspells, and a couple of the mana producing borderposts introduced with Alara Reborn. My deck's primary weakness was probably the complete lack of creature removal, as the one match I lost was due to a couple of particularly nasty first strikers that I just couldn't kill. Ultimately I finished third out of eight players, and had a great time.