It’s always kind of funny to me how I always try to get my first crack in at figuring out a Limited format the day before anyone, myself included, actually gets to play with the cards. After all, it’s obvious that I don’t work for Wizards of the Coast (though sometimes I do get accused of ‘going to bat for them,’ such as when I am inexplicably positive about the SKY IS FALLIN! M10 rules changes) so it’s pretty clear that I haven’t managed to sneak in any M10 drafts before the Prerelease, and I am just leaning on my analytical skills to take a first look at the set’s overall balance. What I try to do is to figure out what matters and relay that information, to figure out what makes this specific set tick, what it is that is important and should be focused on.
In hindsight, this always seems obvious. After all, for my last attempt I was telling people to play first for the Alara Reborn prerelease, after Shards of Alara and Conflux both being very clear draw-first formats. With a few months of actually playing with the cards now, the very idea of drawing first in Shards-Conflux-Reborn Limited just sounds like suicide. But that’s after months of playing, when I had a spoiler list, years of systems analysis for this game, and some time on my hands as my only tools to work with. Looking good in hindsight is actually a pretty awesome track record, even if it is the sort of thing that just gets remembered as being pretty obvious and very basic. Nothing’s wrong with obvious and basic, after all, if it’s right, and it accomplishes the presumed goal of helping push my readership at least some little bit higher up the learning curve in time for their Prereleases.
Magic 2010 is a downright interesting set, dripping with flavor and lighting up the eyes with untapped potential. As a veteran spellcaster of a decade plus, whose first Core Set was the last Core Set to feature Ball Lightning and Lightning Bolt, this feels somehow like a homecoming to me: maybe you young whippersnappers don’t realize how good these things are, but I learned how to PTQ back around that time and am just astounded by how people aren’t expecting Lightning Bolt to just change everything. Core Sets are traditionally kind of mediocre for Limited, due to their too-basic nature there is only a certain level of complexity to the strategy because it’s at most French Vanilla not Ben and Jerry’s Fossil Fuel, sweet cream ice cream with cookie chunks, a swirl of fudge and chocolate dinosaurs to excavate from the bottom of your bowl. M10 is not your traditional Core Set in that regards, because there’s just a higher level of complexity going on here, and you can get more out of M10 Limited than you could out of its predecessor, Tenth Edition Limited.
To state the obvious: this article will be chock full of spoilery goodness, and it will be critical to actually know what the cards are, so you may want to start by opening the complete M10 Spoiler over at MTGSalvation.com.
White:
White is easy to overlook but manages to go misunderstood at first pass, because it is not being looked at from a Lorwyn tribal perspective. White has some solid commons and uncommons, with some of the same tricks we always expect out of it: a tapper, Pacifism, maybe something else tricky alongside this. These things are of course present, but what is being missed within the color is its tribal theme for the Soldiers tribe. Sure, it’s being looked at for Constructed purposes where we’re mostly comparing the Soldiers to the Kithkin tribe and declaring them to be not good enough, but it’s easy to miss that at Common the Soldiers stick together and buff each others’ stats quite nicely. While they may be a little small for Sealed Deck, it’s still quite possible that you’ll get two or three Lord-like soldiers and a few other Soldiers to go with them, even if the tribal Soldier theme is mostly for Draft purposes.
Veteran Armorsmith — WW
Creature – Human Soldier (Common)
Other Soldier creatures you control get +0/+1.
2/3
Veteran Swordsmith – 2W
Creature – Human Soldier (Common)
Other Soldier creatures you control get +1/+0.
3/2
This is Balduvian Barbarian and Elvish Warrior territory, by themselves just a 2/3 for two or a 3/2 for 3, neither impressive nor specifically unimpressive. However, add the two together as your first two plays and you have two 3/3’s… add a few more friends and you’ll see how this is very easy to start accumulating into a meaningful boost. White has some solid fliers and a pretty good creature base, up to and including Serra Angel at Uncommon once again, kind of topping the power charts for what kind of bomby Uncommons you’ll get to play with since Serra’s been back in Core Set limited for some time, but always as a Rare in prior sets. The more Smiths you get the better the Soldier tribe gets, to the point where a focus on Soldiers over everything else will lead to some pretty nutty draws if you get that tribe. I’d say “That’s just for Draft,” except M10 Sealed Deck is opening six packs of a now much smaller card-set, so it’s not necessarily strange to see two or even three copies of a common appear, and if those triples are the right Common then White’s tribal theme can amp its power considerably.
At common, White also gets Blinding Mage, its customary tapper (though unfortunately not a Soldier, nice as that would be), Pacifism, Neck Snap Divine Verdict, Excommunicate, and a reasonable flier at the 2, 3 and 4 drops, though unfortunately these are a Pegasus and two Griffins, no Soldier theme crossing over there. The Soldier theme is actually quite light, just those two Commons, our Savannah Lions reprint at Uncommon and the impressive first-striking Rhox Pikemaster… but again, if it appears in your pool, or you aim for it in Draft and get it, it’s quite a potent combination of aggressive cards. White has some clear junk, with walls and lifegain among the unplayables or hope-you-don’t-play-ables, but its premier cards work very well together, it has plentiful removal and even some potent uncommons: a Sealed pool with two Serra Angels is not a Sealed pool I’d want to have to face, and duplicates of an uncommon out of six packs shouldn’t be too rare.
White’s Rares are also quite solid, with some sizable creatures and excellent abilities on them, with only Mesa Enchantress, Silence, Indestructibility and Open the Vaults not being excellent Limited cards, as you’ll see even better flying Angels than good old Serra, a solid Wrath of God variant in Planar Cleansing, and Ajani Goldmane as the nutty game-winning Planeswalker we remember him being in Lorwyn limited, but this time at least as a Mythic Rare so he doesn’t impact as many games. The Uncommons and Commons are good enough to make White a solid color for Limited, but a good Rare or two will be swingy indeed, which is worth noting as a trend as I’d found Shards of Alara Sealed to be very Rare-dependent and thus a very swingy game if you were the one who opened a Planeswalker and a Dragon.
Blue:
Blue is the worst color in the set, at least as far as leading opinions seem to be placing it. I don’t see where the problem is, even if Blue isn’t great… it’s the color of actual card advantage and has some fliers to its name, not the first color that draws your eye based on card strength but definitely not a slouch. Blue has definitely got some crud at common and Uncommon, like super-expensive ‘combat tricks’ and some unimpressive Merfolk. Blue’s theme in this set is more about risk than we’re usually comfortable with, as its main removal spell (Ice Cage) and its most powerful creature (Illusionary Servant) both will disappear into a puff of smoke when anything that can target a creature is pointed their way.
We’re used to Blue being awesome and obvious, but here instead it is less obviously good… but that doesn’t mean not good. Blue gets many of the traditional elements that carry it, from Horned Turtle on blocking duty to Essence Scatter and Cancel blocking critical spells, and at common it has a flier at one through four mana, doubling up at the three-drop with your choice of stable (Wind Drake, at 2/2) or risky (Illusionary Servant, a 3/4 that has the chance of exploding). Blue also is the only real color of card drawing, with Merfolk Looter always proving awesome in Limited and Divination to get yourself up in the card count. Its commons are overall worse than the other colors, because it gets more filler junk like Jump and Tome Scour.
When we get to Uncommons, Blue gets Sleep and Air Elemental, and let me tell you, it doesn’t really matter whether your Serra Angel taps to attack, 4/4 fliers for 5 are really, really good in Limited… and Sleep is just one of the fairest unfair cards for Limited we’ve seen in a while, a fact which is being overlooked I suspect due to the fact that Blue is not the color of ground-pounders. Naya Charm is well-respected in Shards Block Limited for its ability to end a game by tapping an opponent’s creatures for a turn, and here Sleep holds them down for not one but two, making it difficult indeed for an opponent to race or even defend themselves when you get two attacks in thanks to Sleep. Blue is very powerful, even as common opinion seems to be decrying it as junk. It just happens to be that your playable Blue card-pool will on average be smaller than your playables for the other four colors, since Blue has more chaff in the mix. And when you get to the Rares, Blue ends up carrying the short end of the stick, with more than half of its Rares being junk you just don’t care about, so you’re left leaning mostly on your commons and uncommons. Thank goodness these are all evasive creatures, counterspells, and some card drawing or card-selection spells to smooth your draw.
Unlike most of the other colors in the set, Blue doesn’t seem to be asking you to play as much Blue as possible. White asks you to cram in more White for its double-colored two-drops and Armored Ascension, while Black is clearly a ‘swamps matter’ color and with plentiful double- and even triple-colored spells. Red asks you to have more Mountains if possible and an awful lot of cards with Firebreathing to make you want to maximize your Mountains. Blue and Green, however, don’t really ask you to maximize how much of them you have, though Green has a few Green-intensive cards like Overrun and Howl of the Night Pack that do reward you for having a bias towards more Forests than not. Blue has a Sea Monster variant that has power and toughness equal to the number of Islands you control, which for a five mana creature with Islandhome is just no good and shouldn’t make the list of playables, and this is about the only card that cares how much Blue mana you can make or how many Islands you have.
M10 has a ‘color saturation matters’ theme for three out of the five colors, and Blue is not one of those three, so it slots in very neatly alongside any color and does its thing. To my thinking, this means Blue will be a very plentiful second color but rarely the color anyone thinks of as their first color, since they will be attracted to the sparkle of Red or White or Black first and foremost, or the plentiful and powerful Green creatures, then want something to finish the rest of their deck and turn to good old reliable Blue. Even ‘neutered’ as it seems to be in most peoples’ thoughts so far, I’d expect a lot of people to be playing Blue regardless, because it does have solid evasion, the ability to defend itself, and some card manipulation, plus some solid Uncommons that will turn up and ask to be played.
Black:
Black has a little bit of everything, with some solid removal, a bit of card advantage, and moderate to excellent creatures at common and uncommon. Black has a bit of a theme for wanting more Black mana in your deck, with Tendrils of Corruption and Looming Shade at common and Consume Spirit as a power Uncommon, and a fair number of double-black creatures at the two- and three-mana mark leading you towards playing a lot of Black if you’re playing Black. For the color Black, Black matters, and when you get to higher rarities you’ll even see this with triple-Black costs on the mythic monsters and a powerful incentive for having as many black cards as possible so that Vampire Nocturnus can rule the night.
Black has some filler cards, it’s true, but not nearly so many as Blue does. Duress isn’t really playable in most instances, since you’ll find nowhere near as many noncreature spells as good old fashioned monsters in opposing decks, and Black has a good Enchant Creature spell (Weakness) and two crummy ones (Unholy Strength and Soul Bleed) in the common slot. For that matter, I’d dare anyone to publicly call Acolyte of Xathrid ‘playable’, so there’s definitely some crud in among the quality Black cards. But what quality there is, comes plentifully, with solid defensive creatures and the good old fashioned Gravedigger winning attrition wars as the game goes long, plentiful removal at common and while the creatures aren’t really solid they’ll do in a pinch. Perhaps more importantly, Black’s most powerful mid- to late-game removal spells gain you life while you’re at it, helping to stabilize or maybe just negate the life you have to pay to Sign in Blood for card advantage.
Black is a greedy color, and it’s hard to make it play well with your other colors since Black wants you to commit as much as possible to its evil influence. This means that unfortunately Black doesn’t play well with the other greedy colors, White and Red, even though Red is supposed to be a neighbor… the double-colored costs stack up, and both Black and Red want you to have more and more of their basic lands to get the most out of their cards. This all but guarantees that a Black deck will also be a Green deck or a Blue deck, and in fact I’d assume that Black/Green is the default combination for M10 Sealed Deck as the Green creatures will better compliment the Black removal just in general.
When you get to the Rares, Black sadly disappoints. You get some solid fliers in the Rare slot once in a while, and there’s nothing wrong with Royal Assassin, but there’s a lot of cards that are there for Constructed playability and which just aren’t any good in Limited. The Black you want to have is all at common and uncommon, and it all wants you to have a lot of Black in your deck… which unfortunately makes Black harder to commit to, because to play it you have to play a lot of it, you can’t splash most of the cards you’d want to be including, with only really Doom Blade among the splashable cards.
Red:
At common, Red is barely playable. It has a few sizable creatures to keep you interested, Lightning Bolt to really convince you this might work, and then Sparkmage Apprentice and Seismic Strike as removal that can help make the Red deck work out. It also has Burning Inquiry, Burst of Speed, Firebreathing, Jackal Familiar, Panic Attack, Raging Goblin, Trumpet Blast and Yawning Fissure among the unplayables, and this is assuming that Shatter, Lava Axe and Kindled Fury are somehow going to make you feel good about including them in your deck from time to time.
For commons alone, Red is the incredibly shallow color, and worse yet it’s shallow but wants you to commit a lot to Mountains with Seismic Strike and Fiery Hellhound really wanting a lot of Red mana lying around to do their thing with. But when you get to Uncommons, Red starts to impress again. First of all you’ll see Fireball return, as the mother of all splash cards in this format, so I’d assume right off the bat based on how weak the Red commons overall are that if your opponent plays a Mountain, he has a Fireball. At Uncommon you also get another Red-intensive critter, Dragon Whelp, and the rebooted Orcish Artillery, but it’s still not really a color that is easy to love. Far too many of its cards are just utter chaff, and of the rest it has a too-aggressive stance, bending on the aggressive side of things without actually being good at it.
Blue is the color that can’t get no love in most people’s minds for this set, but Red is the giant trap where Lightning Bolt lures you in and ultimately you get disappointed. Which is not to say that you can’t open a good Red deck, but instead that it is going to be the statistical anomaly rather than one of those things that happens regularly when you look at a Sealed Deck and it has Red cards in it. Red may be a worthwhile gamble for Draft, where you can actually pick and choose from almost all of the Red cards opened, but if you have to rely on what you’re very likely to see out of just a few packs to build your Sealed Deck with, it’s going to take something unusual to make you commit to playing Red instead of just commit to playing Fireball. Red was a crapshoot at Common and Uncommon, not really something you’d commit to instead of splash, but when you get to Rare, everything changes.
Both of your Mythics are basically bonkers in Limited play, with Chandra Nalaar being a powerful removal spell with tons of upside, and Bogardan Hellkite owning the sky and your opponent’s board the turn it comes into play, which may very well be mid-combat for that matter. Capricious Efreet is a sizable monster who offers the opponent a bad deal every turn, Earthquake is at least as much a Wrath as this set’s actual Wrath. Magma Phoenix is part recursive flier and part removal with buyback, both good things to have around… and then to cap things off we ‘only’ see Shivan Dragon and Siege-Gang Commander, whose strength was not in fact based solely on the words ‘damage on the stack’. Where I had to stretch pretty hard to find rares worth playing in Black, I could point to seven of them, meaning that Red is unusually swingy based on what rares you open. Add that to the fact that Red wasn’t exactly compelling at common and uncommon as a main color and I’ve got to say that playing against an actual Red deck probably means that their deck is quite exceptional, possibly with multiple great Rares and multiple Fireballs.
Green:
Finally we come to the power color, the one everyone can always rely on to fill out a good Sealed deck. Green in M10 is no different, as its Commons alone give you an excellent assortment of color-fixers, mana accelerants, and downright efficient creatures, hitting 3/3’s for three and 4/4 Tramplers for 5, while also having some flying defense and even a Deathtouch creature in the mix, and Giant Growth for good measure. You even get a removal spell, even if it is an awkward removal spell, basically just Assassinate for one more mana. Most importantly, among the commons you’ll find only one of them costs more than one colored mana, and almost all of them are playable, even the janky Enchant Creature spell is at least a tempting enough boost to make you actually think about playing it as Card #23. Green is easy on the rest of your deck, and always there to provide you with its services, even if not all Green monsters are created equal. (The 0/3 for 5 is still actually playable, but it’s kind of ugly to think about it.)
Moving up to uncommon, you get some solid creatures, with Cudgel Troll especially piquing my interest for things I want to play with in Limited. At Uncommon, Green starts to care about how much Green you’re playing, with a fair number of double-colored cards and even the triple-colored Overrun, which in most Limited formats reads simply ‘Win the game’. At the top of the curve you get Howl of the Night Pack, which was bonkers when you had all Forests but is still worth casting with only three or four of them, meaning you can play it in your regular Green deck without having to overcommit to Green like how Red and Black want you to play more of each of them across several cards.
What impresses me the most about Green is not merely that it is chock-full of good cards at common and uncommon, but that it really pushes the envelope for how good the creatures get to be. At three mana you get a 3/3, or can have an Awakener Druid that gives you a 4/5 Treefolk so long as your 1/1 creature doesn’t die, which really ups the power curve significantly. At four mana you get a 4/3 with the ability to regenerate, and five mana lets you attack with five power. There are multiple good creatures at all the right costs, just enough removal-like effects between actual removal, Reach and Deathtouch as Green’s iconic ‘anti-creature’ defenses, and for good measure you get Giant Growth and Overrun to change combat math. Green is so deep and so good, I have to assume that Green on Green battles will be the norm, and it is then key to find ways to beat the Green-on-Green stalemate effect… which is part of why I favor the idea of Green and Blue paired together, card advantage and fatties and acceleration and a hint of control, plus fliers to finish the game when the board over-complicates and both Sleep and Overrun to turn a stalemated board on its ear.
When you get to Rare, things are still really, really good for Green. While some of the Rares are just not worth thinking about, like Lurking Predators, some of the others are the incredibly powerful Ant Queen or Master of the Wild Hunt, one of them is Garruk Wildspeaker, and you even get some more mana acceleration going on with Birds of Paradise and Elvish Archdruid helping you get more fat into play earlier in the game than you probably should. Green is aggressively costed in this set, and has some mana acceleration to get these creatures that are already on the bleeding edge of fairness for their mana costs down even faster. Green is far and away the best color, and is also the best at sharing with others.
The Rest:
There might as well not really be colorless cards in this set. There are no common artifacts, and many of the Uncommon artifacts are straight-up unplayable, like Dragon’s Claw or Ornithopter. I’d say the only playable Uncommon artifact is Gorgon Flail, though 10th Edition Limited does want to remind me that Rod of Ruin was not merely playable but pretty good. Unfortunately, there are fewer things a Rod will kill, and more aggressively-costed creatures in this set overall, which to my mind makes the Rod too slow to be good. Gorgon Flail is good because it’s reasonably cheap equipment that lets you send damage across the table each attack phase while also keeping back a blocker with Deathtouch, good at letting you get damage across the table and good at helping defend yourself.
But ‘the rest’ also includes the single most important card in M10 Limited, the one colorless Common: Terramorphic Expanse.
This is a crux point to me, because it is the perfect land to want to get in your two-color deck to fix around the fact that at least one of your colors is probably going to want access to a lot of that color all at once, because M10’s colors don’t all play nicely with each other. How many Terramorphic Expanses you have also dictates how much you have to commit to a single splash card, if say for example you open a Fireball but your deck wants to be Black / Green. We’ve been spoiled lately by Shards limited, where there are multiple common mana-fixers and all sorts of ways to play two colors or five colors with almost equal aplomb. Here in M10, we get one fixer and one fixer only, making Terramorphic Expanse a very credible first-pick in Draft (how are you going to get one, otherwise?) and the single most important card to be aware of when you look at your cardpool.
I went out on a limb, or so it seemed at the time, when I described Shards of Alara and Shards/Conflux Sealed before their prereleases as defined by your lands. It sure seems obvious now, but pointing it out beforehand that you had a swingy format that wanted you to build your deck as greedily as possible was not inherently obvious to everyone before we even got to put a single real card in our hands. Here we have a format that wants you to have a lot of your color’s lands to power up some of your best cards, and more than your fair share of double-colored cards in every color in a format that feels to me like it will be at least somewhat tempo-conscious. One Terramorphic Expanse goes a long way to fixing your two-color deck and enabling a splash, with the next most relevant cards at Common being Borderland Ranger and Rampant Growth to help smooth your draw, since by all likelihoods you’re probably playing Green as one of your two main colors. Two or three Terramorphic Expanses let you splash a card for free off of one basic land and perfectly smoothes your otherwise two-color deck, and will let you actually consider playing ‘greedy’ color combinations together if your best cards happen to be Black/Red, Black/White, or White/Red together.
Setting things down some more, we can see that Green is almost certainly going to be your main color, and very frequently you’ll see a splash of Red alongside for however many Fireballs or Earthquakes as you opened, or maybe ‘just’ Lightning Bolts. Green paired with White is going to be focusing on curving you out and winning with pump spells and the odd bit of creature removal. This is likely the most aggressive color combination, as both Green and White are remarkably efficient, and unlike what we’d normally expect to see, White is actually a removal color so G/W isn’t just a creature deck with no removal. Green paired with Red should be an oddity, since it requires strong Red to be opened, instead of just splashed for, and thus when it exists it is probably a monster with multiple X-spells to ramp up to with Green’s acceleration and at least one nuts Red rare besides. I’d expect it to be the least common Green archetype, but the most powerful by far.
Green and Black lets you pair efficient Green creatures with Black’s removal and ability to push through in the mid-to-late game, grinding things out Rock-style with card advantage from Gravediggers that may be quite plentiful with six packs of M10 to open, maybe even doing the infinite Gravedigger dance as things go long. This has a very defensive stance to it, at least compared to the other decks we’ve discussed, because Black takes its time to get going and should focus on slowing the game down so its powerful cards can deploy and catch up. And my favorite to think about is Green/Blue, a tempo-based archetype that mixes Green’s strengths with Blue’s evasion and light control elements, but that’s probably just because I love an aggro-control stance.
Since only one of these four color pairings really takes an aggressive stance on the game, and it isn’t even the color combination I’d expect to be most favored based on how the cards play out, I’m confident in calling M10 Sealed Deck as a draw-first format. There are of course six other color combinations you can play, the non-Green archetypes, but they should be rarer than the four Green archetypes (probably 80% of the room will be gaming with Forest) and can’t really match the sheer efficiency of Green’s creatures anyway in trying to put an aggressive stance on the game with 3/3s for 3.
I also see this as a format that is very hard on missing land drops, and thanks to the lack of fixers overall and the very color-intensive nature of three of the five colors, I also see this as an eighteen land format. You will have the occasional deck that has a low curve and only two colors to commit to, and those can stay with ‘just’ seventeen lands, but there’s a lot of color greediness going on plus the fact that no one wants to miss their fourth land on turn four, and most everyone will still want their fifth land on turn five. Flooding out will be a problem, but that is why I see Blue as better than most do, combining everything as a whole… it is the one color that can try and control whether it floods out, and in the meantime also ensure it draws lands in the early turns to make its land drops without fail. Red has Firebreathing effects and actual Fireballs to make use of extra mana, while Black wants to funnel extra mana into Shades and get to the point where it can play Gravediggers and another spell in the later turns, so it doesn’t mind drawing the lands so much. This latter fact is especially helped by the fact that Black’s extra lands convert into extra life, giving you a resource back even as you flood out and helping you to scrabble back into the game, not just scaling how big your Tendrils of Corruption are when you want to kill a Green fattie.
This is unfortunately not a very tricksy format. The M10 rules changes have made combat tricks even riskier to employ than ever before, and the tricks were not plentiful to begin with. There will be plenty of interactivity, and lots of depth to the format, as I see a lot of strategic depth and interactions going on, just not as much Instant-speed Magic as we normally like to see keeping our combat phases from being too very simple. Underestimating its complexity will do you no good, because tempo is important to some decks and just something to be spent by others as they try and take over the late game instead, but underestimating by what degree we are playing Sorcery-speed Magic will do you no good either. At some level, we have everyone jockeying for efficient Green creatures attacking and finishing the turn with a Fireball, so care should be taken to try and force interactivity whenever possible, maybe choosing one color over another when everything else is otherwise equal simply based on the fact that one color’s removal is an Instant (Doom Blade) rather than sorcery speed (Pacifism). Or just open two Fireballs when the other guy only has one, that’s probably as valid a strategy as anything else you can’t control, because you’ll play your best cards regardless of whether they are Instants or mere Sorceries, and ‘all other things’ will rarely ever be ‘equal.’
I like that each color has its own themes, and even sub-themes, like Black pretending we’re in Shadowmoor block and asking for all your lands to be Swamps, while White is saying it’s Lorwyn block and maybe you should try and gobble up all the Soldiers. I’m a bit disappointed that Red is almost a non-color, and worry that with six Rares in your Sealed pool and eighteen Uncommons that this format may be too swingy based on what bomb Rares you open and how many of them you can play in the same deck, not to mention how Fireball-intensive the best decks may end up being, because Fireballs in Limited are always A+ #1 awesome cards. And I figure that missing land drops will be the chief cause of death for many players, as will be thinking we live in a world where you can splash freely and it’ll be okay. Most decks will want to be two colors, and most decks will want to play eighteen lands. Most decks will even want to draw first, though if I were Green/White I would very happily play first, and I would have to at least think about it if I was Green/Blue. Keep your curve low, around the three-to-five range, and your color commitments minimal: I’d splash for Fireball, but not for Pacifism, and while I don’t expect I’ll ever meet a Doom Blade I didn’t like, I’d have to accept that if I can’t justify playing it because Black is my main color, I might not be able to justify playing it at all. Terramorphic Expanses in multiples of course let you go splash-happy, but without that I doubt I would splash for anything less awesome than a Fireball and settle for a two-color deck.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com