After a few weeks of intense drafting I feel I’ve gained some sort of insight into this new world of Mirrodin, and I figured I’d try to give a sort of overview of the format as I see it. I’ll go through some of the archetypes, both the common and the not so common and give my thoughts on how to approach drafting the format.
I think it was Rob Dougherty who once mentioned that he likes to build all-common Constructed decks to get a feel for the sort of deck you should aim for when drafting. This is actually a pretty cool idea. If we try this on what I guess is the most obvious archetype in Scars Limited, we get something like this:
Infect
4 Blight Mamba
4 Ichorclaw Myr
4 Plague Stinger
4 Cystbearer
4 Corpse Cur
4 Tel-Jilad Fallen
4 Untamed Might
4 Grasp of Darkness
Salt with some equipment like Sylvok Lifestaff or Bladed Pinions or Accorder’s Shield and add the appropriate lands to taste. The exact decklist isn’t really important, since you probably don’t need to play games with a deck like that to figure out that it’s really strong (compared to a Draft deck). So if we can aim for a deck like that one, even though we’ll fall short every time, we can be pretty certain that we aren’t making any big mistakes. Maybe you’ll pick a Corpse Cur where you should’ve picked a Plague Stinger or some other small mistake, but if we can just get those big mistakes out of the way, we’re in pretty good shape.
Since I bring up infect as the example archetype here, I guess I should discuss my opinion on it. Infect is pretty much the black sheep in the Scars of Mirrodin family. It just isn’t part of the other stuff that’s going on (except proliferate and to some extent equipment). All the other cards in Scars kind of blend into each other, but infect usually just stands alone.
For Draft this often makes it a “dumb” strategy, reminiscent of drafting Lorwyn. If you just pick every card that has the keyword “infect” written on it, you’d actually have a deck (assuming of course you aren’t getting cut). Obviously not the best possible deck you could have, but still a deck that could win drafts. If you tried this with metalcraft instead, you wouldn’t be doing great at all.
I personally dislike formats filled with archetypes like infect for the reason mentioned above. I like drafts to be challenging and give you tough decisions all through the draft, where strategies like infect reward more of a “dive in and hope” strategy. You see, infect is a really strong strategy in Scars, and assuming the cards are there and not many are drafting it, the rewards can be great. The problem however is that often you can’t afford to wait before you commit to drafting it, and if too many are, you probably end up with a really bad deck. For these reasons I personally would love to never have to draft infect, but of course I can’t do that, since in many cases I’d then give up my best shot at winning.
My philosophy when it comes to drafting is to learn to use as many cards in the format as possible. I think that if you limit yourself by discounting certain archetypes or just individual cards, then you’re greatly reducing your chance at success.
In M11 for example, I really disliked green cards, but that just means that I’m biased against picking them, not that I’d never draft green. Bias comes from experience playing the format and (assuming the bias is correct) is a great tool when drafting, but simply discounting viable options is never good strategy.
Most of us would never do something as stupid as just ignoring a whole strategy though. Like if you never under any circumstance would draft a G/B infect deck in Scars for example, then that’s just monumentally stupid. More commonly, people ignore certain fringe cards and less common strategies that don’t come up as often. These are strategies that we probably shouldn’t actively pursue drafting, but might be good ways to save a draft gone bad.
As an example, I’m not likely to pursue drafting a deck based on Furnace Celebration. It often leads to a deck where you need to draw it or find yourself with a bunch of cards that don’t really do anything. On the other hand, if my draft is already going badly, and I have a few cards that go well with the Celebration then I might jump on it. You do have to get lucky to win, and maybe my best chance is to keep drawing that one card or somehow patching together a win even when I don’t. Of course there are also situations where a card like that will just fit perfectly in a deck, but that is completely different.
Okay, going back to the original exercise, building these “Constructed” decks. Once I was done building infect and moved on to other decks, I quickly found that nothing was quite as obvious anymore. Like I mentioned above, decks in the format really tend to “blend” into each other. You could build a white deck based on metalcraft and another white deck based on equipments, and if you just shuffled up both in one big pile, it’d still be a deck. And since Scars is dominated by artifacts, different colored decks also blend.
A very artifact-heavy blue deck maximizing the effect of stuff like Vedalken Certarch and Lumengrid Drake could easily blend with white’s metalcraft or just Glint Hawk Idols for a bigger artifact count. And with metalcraft demanding most of your cards be artifacts, your exact colors matter less. Often you’ll just have an artifact deck splashing a couple of colored cards.
Anyway, here are a few other decks I created:
Equipment
4 Accorder’s Shield
4 Sylvok Lifestaff
4 Origin Spellbomb
4 Glint Hawk
4 Sunspear Shikari
4 Glint Hawk Idol
4 Kemba’s Skyguard
4 Arrest
4 Tumble Magnet
An equipment-based deck with only white cards. Not the most likely deck to aim for, since not much is gained by being mono-white. A more likely approach with red added in:
4 Accorder’s Shield
4 Sylvok Lifestaff
4 Goblin Gaveleer
4 Panic Spellbomb
4 Origin Spellbomb
4 Glint Hawk
4 Sunspear Shikari
4 Glint Hawk Idol
2 Tumble Magnet
2 Galvanic Blast
Red gives us Gaveleer which is an interesting card because it will go very late unless someone else is trying for this kind of deck. Overall the equipment-strategy has many cards that don’t really go that well in other decks, which is always a good thing. I’ve seen Sunspear Shikaris go as late as twelfth pick, and while that might be later than it should, you could still wheel great cards for a deck like this one. Given enough Gaveleers in a draft, I can even see drafting equipment-based decks that don’t include white, since you can often end up with all the Gaveleers in the draft.
Actually, whenever a card is fringe enough that you can expect to get all the copies of it in the draft, things can get very interesting. This fact has spawned strategies like the Dampen Thought-deck of Kamigawa Limited or (the much less successful) Tome Scour/Jace’s Erasure of M11. The first one was a really good deck since the key cards were just all these arcane spells that didn’t do much in normal decks, and even though the actual Dampen Thought was uncommon, you only needed one, and sometimes you could even win without it. The second case is much less successful, since you just need so many copies of the cards before the deck is any good. 240 commons in one draft gives an average of less than 2.4 Tome Scours, and you need way more than that to actually mill someone out before you die.
A metalcraft decklist is obviously the trickiest, since it’s not one or two lists but many. The generic template would look something like this:
Metalcraft
Chrome Steed
Perilous Myr
Tumble Magnet
Some Spellbombs
Some Mana Myrs
Some Replicas
And then add in whatever metalcraft cards that fit the color we play. The most likely seem to be blue and white — blue since it has two cards that are just very good with metalcraft (Vedalken Certarch and Lumengrid Drake) while white often just gets the nod for stuff like Glint Hawk and Glint Hawk Idol. Of course white also has a couple of metalcraft cards, but they aren’t very strong. Red offers Blade-Tribe Berserkers, which can be good, and Galvanic Blast that often will get cast before you reach metalcraft, but the big draw of red is the removal, Blast and Shatter and Turn to Slag.
Green and Black aren’t often part of metalcraft decks, since most of the commons in those colors are infect-based. Sometimes you’ll see very late Carapace Forgers though, which could make green an option. And even less frequently, you’ll have a metalcraft deck with black only for cards like Grasp of Darkness or Skinrender, and in those rare cases, Bleak Coven Vampires could be a nice free pick.
I can see building more decks like the ones above, and for future formats maybe even create exact lists to play on Magic Online. For now I’ll leave them behind though there are obviously many more fine decks you could build this way. Instead I’ll move on to decklists of actual decks I’ve drafted, to help illustrate some of the less common archetypes I’ve found.
R/B Aggro
1 Chrome Steed
1 Copper Myr
2 Dross Hopper
2 Fume Spitter
2 Goblin Gaveleer
2 Leaden Myr
1 Painsmith
1 Perilous Myr
1 Vulshok Heartstoker
1 Vulshok Replica
1 Accorder’s Shield
1 Darksteel Axe
1 Grasp of Darkness
1 Koth of the Hammer
1 Necrogen Censer
2 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Panic Spellbomb
1 Sylvok Lifestaff
1 Turn to Slag
This one I started out with Koth, and the second pack only really had Painsmith. I took it and then sort of drifted into the R/B aggressive archetype. Partly because both those cards fit that strategy well, partly because nothing else that was great came my way, and partly because I wanted to try it out. I didn’t really get much good removal, meaning my early picks were often “wasted” on cards that I could just as easily have gotten eighth pick. I ended up losing a close 1-2 game in the quarters against a good player with a nice white equipment-based deck. My deck wasn’t well suited to deal with Accorder’s Shield on anything, and especially not on Sunspear Shikari. Still the games were close, and I could definitely see the potential of just really quick creatures and removal (shocking I know). Fume Spitter is one of those cards that just seems to overperform but doesn’t really fit great in the more common infect-based black decks, and even the lowly Dross Hopper isn’t that bad in a deck like this one.
W/U Golem Foundry
2 Copper Myr
1 Glint Hawk Idol
1 Necropede
1 Palladium Myr
1 Razor Hippogriff
1 Rust Tick
2 Silver Myr
1 Thrummingbird
1 Vedalken Certarch
1 Culling Dais
1 Flight Spellbomb
2 Golem Foundry
1 Inexorable Tide
1 Myr Reservoir
1 Revoke Existence
1 Sylvok Lifestaff
1 Throne of Geth
1 Trigon of Infestation
1 Trigon of Thought
2 Tumble Magnet
1 Venser’s Journal
This one is very different. I’ve been wanting to try out drafting Golem Foundries and see how far you can push that archetype. The Foundry seems like a bit of a sleeper card; although I guess you need a pretty specific deck for it. Anyway, I started out with a Revoke Existence and a Razor Hippogriff and then just slammed a Foundry third pick. There were a couple of better cards in the pack, and if it were a tournament, I wouldn’t have made this pick, but part of the reason I draft on Magic Online is to learn, so I went for it.
I basically ended up playing every artifact I could find and some of them are a bit embarrassing. This little beauty still made it to the finals though, mostly on the back of Thrummingbird charging everything up. The Foundries were good but not amazing; the price is still kind of steep for a 3/3, but with the right combination of cards, they’ll shut down any offense and deliver a pretty swift kill.
Funnily, I mostly won with poison counters, just getting a hit in with a Necropede and proliferating or overloading the board with infestation-tokens, using Thrummingbird to give more poison and recharge the Trigon. Myr Reservoir never really had time to do anything, and I think you need many Myrs before that card actually becomes good. Venser’s Journal I have seen be good, but for me it was just an artifact for five with no rules text on it. Still, I had no alternatives as far as artifacts went, and it sacrificed itself to the Throne just fine.
The proliferate theme in this deck was pretty good for a deck missing the proliferate cards that are actually good (Contagion Clasp and Contagion Engine). I’m not sure what R&D’s goal with proliferate in Limited was, but I think it’s a little sad that the two good cards will just get picked by everyone, while cards like Steady Progress don’t do nearly enough for the cost.
Inexorable Tide is basically one of those win-more cards; if you have time to play that and play more spells, you’re probably winning anyway.
Thrummingbird is excellent though, and you can usually get it pretty late. Playing a turn 3 Tumble Magnet and immediately charging it up is just incredibly strong — not much beats a free Icy Manipulator.
Throne of Geth is also pretty nice, since it’s a cheap artifact, which you want as many of as you can possibly get anyway, and you can often get free proliferates out of artifacts that are already heading to the graveyard. Also just the threat of proliferate can sometimes be good enough to change your opponents game plan.
U/R Good Stuff
1 Copper Myr
1 Darksteel Sentinel
1 Darksteel Myr
1 Embersmith
1 Iron Myr
1 Neurok Replica
1 Oxidda Scrapmelter
1 Perilous Myr
1 Riddlesmith
3 Sky-Eel School
1 Sylvok Replica
1 Vulshok Replica
2 Wall of Tanglecord
2 Galvanic Blast
1 Panic Spellbomb
2 Shatter
1 Turn to Slag
2 Volition Reins
This deck is just a really good deck. Maybe that’s not the most exciting thing to talk about, but I think we can find some hidden truths about the format in it.
This draft started out with Volition Reins and a Scrapmelter, and I quickly drifted towards a controlling R/U deck. I never really cared to pick up artifacts over better non-artifact cards, since I never had any big need for metalcraft, and I was already set in my colors. The other drafters though were most likely going out of their way to pick up artifacts and enablers for their more focused strategies, which meant that good removal and quality cards were coming around late.
One thing that’s true for any draft format is that if you can use the cards that no one else wants, you’re in great shape. It might be the Golem Foundry that no one else thinks is any good, or it might be the Gaveleer that you’ll attack for four with on turn 2, or strangely, in this format, it might be cards like Arrest or Shatter or at the very least Sky-Eel School. The three played in this deck I picked seventh, eighth, and eighth. And I don’t think that anyone necessarily screwed up, you’ll regularly see that card even later, but it’s funny how card evaluation changes with the format. If you’re old-school like me, try to imagine getting Faerie Squadron eighth pick in an Invasion draft.
Another positive side effect of this approach is it makes opposing artifact destruction worse. Most of the time your opponent won’t Shatter a turn 2 Myr, and most of those other artifacts won’t be killed on sight either. Often you’ll get good use out of your artifacts because they’ll hold removal for better stuff, only to see that better stuff never comes. And sometimes the opposite will happen too, where they think a card is in fact much stronger than it is. Often opponents will kill Embersmith or Riddlesmith on sight, when in this deck those cards are almost just filler.
The downside to this good-stuff strategy is obviously that once you go outside of the given synergies of the format (infect, metalcraft, proliferate), you’ll get less mileage out of each card. It’s pretty tough for a deck like the one above to survive without bombs and overpowered cards, but it’s still important to remember that you can just draft good cards if that’s what’s coming your way. Good cards have been winning drafts for a long time.
More on the Format
Another central point in Scars of Mirrodin draft — that I’ve already kind of touched on — is the importance of “slots” in your deck. When I say slots I mean how many of each kind of card your deck wants in order to function.
In a very basic format, for example M11, your deck is usually mostly made up of creatures and removal and a few tricks/equipments/card draw. As long as you don’t play seven Giant Growths, three Unsummons, and two equipment, or something stupid like that, your deck should most often be fine. In Scars things are a bit more complicated though.
If you’re trying to get metalcraft, you’ll want a bunch of artifacts. Hopefully fifteen artifacts or more, depending on how many metalcraft cards you have. Obviously Chrome Steed is easier to turn on than the colored variants, but you still want to reliably get there early on.
Another big constraint is equipment. Once you start adding a few equipment to your deck, you drastically increase the need for creatures in your deck.
All these factors put some really tough restraints on what cards you can pick, especially later in drafts where you need to fill those slots. This is why a card like Disperse has a hard time making the maindeck and why cards like the aforementioned Sky-Eel School are such late picks. Many decks just can’t afford to play them, even if they’re in fact “better” than the artifacts you do play. If you have played Auriok Replica over Kemba’s Skyguard in your white deck, then you know what I’m talking about.
Final Remarks
So, to wrap this up, Scars has basically one real actual archetype that’s all alone by itself, and that is infect. Then you have metalcraft which spawns artifact-heavy decks and heavily tilts pick orders towards picking artifacts over colored cards. And then you have equipments and creatures that like to be equipped, which is almost like an archetype in itself, except it can easily be combined with metalcraft. Infect decks are usually G/B, and the other two are usually some combination of red, blue, and white; although you can easily use either green or black in these, assuming you have some special cards that make sense in your deck (like multiple Carapace Forgers for example).
Apart from these more common archetypes, you have a bunch of less common decks you can draft, like the R/B aggressive deck or proliferate-driven infect decks and basically anything you can think of. Scars is just very open-ended, and you can draft any color combination — heck you could even draft four or even five colors if you somehow find enough good cards to splash. It’d be pretty cool to have a five-color deck with one card of each color, or you could even have five colors, but where all your cards were artifacts, and you were just playing different mana to activate the different Replicas!
Maybe that will be my goal, the 24-artifact deck. Pretty sure I’d run into Tel-Jilad Fallen though.
That’s all the wisdom I have to impart this time; I hope that I managed to be clear, and that you could learn something new from my experiences. I’m still not nearly done exploring Scars of Mirrodin, and this is obviously not meant to cover much more than the surface. There are still probably some fringe decks out there to find and some cool combos to draft. There’s just a ridiculous amount of options in artifact-based sets, and I look forward to finding new stuff every day.
Bonus Section
I just read Geordie Tait article
“18 Ways To Improve Magic Online”
and found it a bit amusing that while I agree with most of the improvements he wants to see made, I think that if I wrote that same article, my 18 reasons most likely wouldn’t include any of his. Kind of tells you how bad that software really is. I’m not going to list 18 reasons, but I’ll mention the ones that annoy me the most:
1. Why do I have to wait for everyone to finish their match before I can play the next one? If I’m playing an 8-man, why do I need to wait for any match to finish except the one my opponent is playing?
In real Magic it makes sense for rounds to start at the same time, but with computers you don’t have to do it that way. Sure this could lead to a bigger wait between semis and finals, but at least then I made the finals! I obviously can’t run the numbers on this, but I’m sure they lose a lot of money on people waiting for the next round instead of having already lost and joined another draft. Waiting between rounds also leads to players playing several drafts at once, which in turn leads to even slower rounds. With good programming you could even make this work for bigger Swiss events, since on Magic Online you have no draws, meaning you could actually compute the pairings of the whole tournament before round 1.
Imagine not having to wait for those two dudes at 0-3 battling it out for nothing more than honor? Wouldn’t that be great?
2. Why do we need two minutes between rounds?
If those two guys that played the longest really need a break to go to the bathroom or something, they could just use two minutes of their clock for the next match. Or just give everyone two minutes more on the clock, which still means less time spent waiting.
3. Fix it so that every game I play ends up on the list of games played, so I can replay. Also make replays saveable and shareable. Imagine how easy it would be to show your friends the game you played or for authors to post replays along with articles.
4. Remove the ability to watch replays of the other matches in your draft.
I guess in bigger tournaments, they added replays so that you wouldn’t get an unfair advantage if you have a lot of friends playing in the same event. In 8-mans however, this just won’t happen enough that it matters, and knowing the contents of your opponents deck (or them knowing the content of yours) just isn’t fun. In real Magic, you get penalized for looking through your opponent’s deck pregame, but on Magic Online it’s endorsed?
Those are the ones that affect me every day I play, and especially the waiting just sucks. On top of these there are obviously many faults with the user interface and the menu system requires way too many clicks, and trading is also just dreadful.
It says a lot about how good a product Magic really is when Magic Online is successful in spite of all these faults. But it also says a lot about the potential that Magic Online has, if the client were better. I truly believe that Magic Online could rival the Pro Tour if they just got everything right.
Okay, that’s it for today. Please post opinions, comments, and questions, and I’ll try my best to respond.