Hola people!
Now that I have started to write for StarCityGames.com again, I feel the need to get my old game back. Since I want to bring you the best of my experience with the game, I devoted myself to drafting the new set last weekend. I have yet to understand how it works, but I have learned a lot.
I tried to be as objective as possible when I talked about the previous sets. However, the ratings I gave them also correspond to how successful I was with them in Limited. I played a lot with every set, even the ones I disliked. I never managed to have a considerable edge on my opponents in either Shards of Alara or Zendikar blocks. It is up to you, with the help of my arguments, to deduce whether the formats sucked, or if I simply sucked at the formats!
In order to make my analyses more personal, you have to know that I am not reading anyone else’s review (for now). It is very likely that you’ll find things that you’ve read somewhere else. If that happens, it just means that two people are thinking alike…
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I remember when I first drafted Zendikar, I quickly understood that drafting aggressive strategies was the way to go. I wasn’t wrong, and I won the first drafts I played. Players caught up pretty fast and from then on, having an edge became a lot harder. What I like about Rise of the Eldrazi is that the format is very far from being intuitive, and that a lot of work is necessary in order to understand what is going on. More work means that once you do understand it, and the quicker you do, the longer an edge on your opponents you will have until everyone catches up.
Even though there are still 14 cards in every pack, there is one huge difference in ROE: the commons are almost all playable. After 6 picks, you were left with 8 unplayable cards in Conflux. Now you are left with choices that are relevant most of the time. Reading signals in a draft in Zendikar was just way too simple and uninteresting: count the cards in each color and draw conclusions on what your neighbor(s) was likely to be playing. Of course, there are cards in each color that you are going to pick whatever your strategy is.
Do you remember the last time you had to cut more than 2 or 3 cards to build your draft deck? In most drafts in the last 2 years, you had to add a couple of fillers to make it 22 or 23. While most cards in ROE are not overpowered, they all serve a purpose in your Limited deck, and finally you have options when it comes to deckbuilding.
There is a lot of synergy between the commons, both within each color and each combination of colors, and they don’t necessarily have the same focus. For example, you are playing Red, and your neighbor is playing Red as well. You are drafting a defender deck, and he is drafting an aggro deck. He will have no interest in a Vent Sentinel that is very suboptimal for his strategy, while you want as many as possible in your deck. It’s the same with Raid Bombardment, which looks like a very weak card in the first place, but is very efficient in some decks and can’t be drafted in other strategies. With so many playable commons, it is not surprising to see 2 or 3 different archetypes emerging for just one combination of colors. I can think of at least 2 obvious decks with Mountains and Islands: The defender deck, running lots of removal spells, Mnemonic Walls and Vent Sentinels; and a Kiln Fiends/Distortion Strikes deck with the help of Goblin Tunneler. There are probably some I am missing. The more focused your deck, the more efficient it is going to end up. Once you know all your possible options, reading the signals correctly will be extremely relevant and useful so you can have an idea of what the best strategy to adopt is at your draft seat.
As I said above, I haven’t figured out the whole format quite yet. I have played in less than 10 drafts so far, and I’ve only won one of them, doing fine in some and terribly in others. I feel I made a lot of suboptimal picks that I won’t make again once I know which combination is better, which card is better, and so on.
First, I’d like to share the deck I played at the Prerelease:
8 Island
5 Forest
4 Plains
Evolving Wilds
Ulamog‘s Crusher
Dreamstone Hedron
Dawnglare Invoker
Deathless Angel
Guard Duty
Totem-Guide Hartebeest
2 Regress
Deprive
Narcolepsy
Enclave Cryptologist
Guard Gomozoa
Halimar Wavewatch
Lay Bare
Mnemonic Wall
See Beyond
Beastbreaker of Bala Ged
Growth Spasm
2 Overgrown Battlement
Pelakka Wurm
I played a very defensive, control deck: 5 walls, 2 counterspells, a few removal/tempo cards to give you some time to set up your kill, card drawing, mana acceleration and a strong finisher. A perfectly balanced control deck, that doesn’t really have a bad matchup… in sealed deck. I thought for a while that it was the kind of deck I would always want to draft. I tried at my first attempt, and failed miserably. The reason why it didn’t work taught me a lot about the format.
The draft format is not as easy to control as the sealed deck format. The threats are versatile and might be tough to deal with. However, they take some time to give you a definite advantage.
When I first saw the spoiler list of ROE, I thought that activating Annihilator first would be the key to the format. I couldn’t be further from the truth. The Eldrazis aren’t that a big deal after all. Some decks might run a couple of them, you can also draft around them as well, pick mana acceleration, including all of the spawn generators, but I haven’t seen that strategy doing too well so far. What I have seen is a lot of focused decks, with hard-to-disrupt threats that a deck like the one above is not able to handle.
And this time around, the threats are not always the biggest beaters. I like the fact that an Enclave Cryptologist wins you the game in the long run. It may not take very long to level it up, but usually enough turns pass for your opponent to find an answer or decide to change his game plan. By that I mean that he may want to go very aggressive, leveling up his guys already on the board, instead of planning to play a long game. Same goes for Vent Sentinel. It’s not the biggest beater (hell, it’s not a beater at all), but it becomes the real deal if you can’t deal with it in time. And that means a few turns, not right away, and with an actual set up for the advantage gained (spending mana in leveling the Cryptologist, and playing walls for the Sentinel).
The games are definitely slower than your average draft of the last two years. It is very likely that you actually reach turn 8, and playing a big guy does not ensure your victory. You need to set up your threats, level up your guys wisely, or reach the crucial turn you play your threats in a healthy enough situation to turn the game around. Like always, you have the so-called bombs that WILL turn the game around once they hit the board. I am not talking about Ulamog or Kozilek, since being able to cast them is a quite an accomplishment already, and you should be rewarded for that. I am mostly talking about Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief and Gideon Jura ,which are THE bombs in this format. All formats had their own – Power Matrix in Mercadian Masques, Cabal Patriarch in Odyssey, Visara the Dreadful in Onslaught, Meloku the Clouded Mirror in Champions of Kamigawa. So yes, I do believe Drana and Gideon are unbalanced for Limited games, but they are rare enough so that the whole thing isn’t too shaken by them.
Dawnglare Invoker seems to receive a lot of hate. While being a very good common, I don’t see it like a very unbalanced card. Don’t get me wrong, I will probably pick it over any common. A 2/1 flyer is already a good deal for 3 mana, and when you activate it, it does mean trouble. It is a creature you have to deal with, but just like Cryptologist, you do have some time to do so. I have seen it being decisive, but it is also very vulnerable. Red deals with it with “half a card” (Can hit another one-toughness creature with Forked Bolt, another two-toughness creature with Staggershock, and many more…). A lot of commons can take care of it… maybe not in all colors, and that is also what makes the format interesting. WU doesn’t have any real way to deal with it, unless you have a window to play Puncturing Light. That forces you to think about how you can deal with it, while you are drafting. You can either plan to go all aggro and hope your opponent never reaches 8 mana, pick enough removal to deal with it (something you would probably do anyway), or make sure you are picking some usually lower quality removal that you can splash and that deal with it in another color (same goes for battling the Cryptologist), like Wrap in Flames or Spawning Breath. Note that I haven’t drafted enough to classify these two cards as “low quality” yet. They seem at least decent, but I have not seen them being very decisive so far, at least compared to the other Red removal.
As a reminder, there used to be very unbalanced commons in other sets. Just to name a few: Pestilence, Troubled Healer (who remembers that guy, hmm?), Sparksmith, Spikeshot Goblin…
I would like to add Regress and Deprive to the mix of the format-defining cards.
One of the things you have to do to be competitive in a Limited format is to learn what the tricks are… and that means ALL the tricks. This has been forgotten a little recently, since you mostly had to tap out during your turn in order not to fall behind. Back in Onslaught and Time Spiral, that also meant you had to know all the morphs. It is particularly important in this format, since it is rather obvious when your opponent has something. Not all the decks have level up creatures, but leaving mana up with one on the board raises the red flag. The reason why I mention Regress and Deprive as format defining cards, over Vendetta and other instant speed removal, is because they are most likely to be the most efficient tricks in the format that you can expect at instant speed. Vendetta and Heat Ray will either be played at the end of turn, or during the player’s turn to clean the field, while Regress and Deprive will be played in a much wider range of situations. They are the instants you have to know about, more than any other. You have all already figured out that bouncing a leveled up creature gives you a huge tempo advantage.
Deprive brings a lot to Limited games. We haven’t had a cheap universal counterspell in a long time, and here is the one we have been waiting for. I like the fact that you can’t really play it in the first turns, and that makes it actually balanced. Casting an Eldrazi, sacrificing all your spawns and running into a two-mana counterspell sure is frustrating, but that is what “playing around a counterspell” means. Not to mention that they also work together as a universal removal for the Blue mage when paired together (bounce + counter); that’s very old school, and I’m not going to say much about that.
Knowing that the Blue mage might be holding either one is a reason to play differently. And that’s exactly what “format-defining” means. They are not pump spells that a Green mage may be holding; these are not format defining since the player needs a target and a good reason to play them (save a creature, kill a blocked creature, kill a blocker). Bounce and Counterspells have been around forever, but never have they been so efficient. They both serve a lot of purposes, and can be run in any deck running Islands.
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With all that said, we can move on and go into a more detailed analysis of the draft combinations and card evaluations. I haven’t had time to try them all, but it is only a matter of time. Here is a deck I used to win one of my drafts:
Dawnglare Invoker
2 Ikaral Outrider
2 Knights of Cliffhaven
Kor Line Slinger
2 Caravan Escort
Champion’s Drake
Enclave Cryptologist
Frostwind Invoker
Skywatcher Adept
Venerated Teacher
Affa Guard Hound
Makindi Griffin
Emerge Unscathed
Regress
See Beyond
2 Mammoth Umbra
2 Time of Heroes
Deprive
Relevant Sideboard Cards:
Out of everything that I have seen so far, this is by miles the best draft deck I played and have seen played. I had decided to try that UW Level Up archetype, and forced it. I opened a Knight of Cliffhaven and got passed another one. From there, everything went smoothly, picking as many Level Up guys as possible in White and Blue. Time of Heroes came pretty late in pack 1, allowing me to think that the archetype was open, and got passed a second one late in pack 2. Time of Heroes doesn’t go in all White decks, and there’s a minimum number of Level Up creatures required in your deck to make it worth playing… which probably is at least 6.
I have heard a lot of bad things about Ikaral Outrider. It might be slow, not very aggressive, and that is why it is picked so late, but I like it for what it does. It holds the fort for a while, and becomes a house when your Time of Heroes is out. It usually is the 6th, 7th or 8th Level Up creature, since the other ones are picked much earlier by other players. And that brings us back to Time of Heroes: How high should you pick this card? I haven’t tried it in any other archetype, like WB for example, with Black being the other color with cheap Level Up creatures, but it just felt intuitive to draft Venerated Teachers and Champion’s Drake along the way. When you pick any focused card early in the draft, you can be rewarded if your gamble pays off or just have it sit in your board. While Time of Heroes is an absolute beating when played in the right set up, the deck works without it. It is fast enough and has really powerful commons that carry your deck on their own: Caravan Escort, Knight of Cliffhaven, and Champion’s Drake.
What bothers me about this deck is that it is just too easy to build. Its strategy is very straightforward and efficient, and I am worried I have to counter-draft some of its key cards not to face a broken version of it when I am running something else. I have often seen Time of Heroes in packs after pick 6 or 7 and had to pass it along, which makes me think that the UW Level Up archetype is not yet a priority in every player’s mind… and it makes me regret most of my previous picks, since I’d rather have that deck again than some of the piles I have drafted so far.
Guard Duty is a card I am still very unsure about. In sealed deck I would have wanted to have more, and it was an obvious combo with the Hartebeest, but in draft I always see it picked so late. In the deck above, there is absolutely no reason to run it. Your game plan is to use your mana to make your guys bigger than your opponent’s. Your Ikaral Outriders will block the ground, and you don’t want to play it on a flyer either since that wouldn’t serve much purpose. For now I can only see it played efficiently in an Aura Gnarlid deck, or as a great sideboard card against Eldrazis. I don’t know how many and how badly you want them, though.
I also asked myself how good Recurring Insight actually is, and when you should play it. It’s a question that you will probably have to answer at some point, as the card arrives quite late in draft and you might strongly consider it. In a deck like the one above, I thought it would be too slow and that I would have to add a land and cut a card (which would probably have been the Makindi Griffin). Now that I think about it, the right strategy would be to board it in on the play and leave it out on the draw. In most cases, I don’t think running it main deck is worth it. Half of the time, when you lose the die roll, it will sit in your hand while you are waiting for the right time to play it… Thoughts?
That wraps it for today. I will be drafting some more soon and will bring you the lessons I learn next time. Grand Prix: Lyon is only 10 days away, and there is still a lot of work to be done!
Until next time!
Raph