Ninth Edition draft will soon be the newest Limited format available on Magic Online. While those people only interested in tournament formats may ignore the existence of 9th Edition draft, hopefully you can learn something about how to approach new Limited formats from this article. The first step in evaluating any Limited format is to look at each color separately and figure out its strengths and weaknesses. Once that is done we can start pairing them up to figure out the best color combinations. I was fortunate enough to have access to the Magic Online Beta so I’ve had a head start playing drafts and sealed decks which I hope qualifies me to write this article.
The most important thing to look at within each color is the commons. These are the cards that you will have, and have to play around every game. They make up about eighty percent of most Limited decks, and are the only cards that you can rely on finding when trying to draft certain archetypes. Therefore I am going to rank each color on the basis of its commons alone, and list what I believe to be each color’s top five commons in order. With the common ranking you need to keep in mind that the orders as always can vary greatly depending on what you already have. Mostly it depends on your creature count, holes in your mana curve, and color requirement issues. The colors are presented below in the order of strongest to weakest.
Blue:
1) Aven Windreader
2) Time Ebb
3) Sift
4) Aven Fisher
5) Wind Drake
Blue does something in this format that no other color allows you to do easily; gain card advantage. In games that stall out as often as the base set drafts do there is no better recipe for winning games than card advantage and flyers, which is exactly what Blue delivers. People complain about the loss of Coastal Hornclaw and Unsummon, without realizing that they were replaced by superior cards with similar effects. Those people need to realize that its never going to go back to the days of Seventh Edition where you had Vigilant Drake, Giant Octopus, and Prodigal Sorcerer in addition to all the other standard commons. Your goal with Blue decks is to hold them off on the ground with dorks like Horned Turtle and Lumengrid Warden, until you can pull ahead with Sift and Counsel of the Soratami, and eventually win with your flyers. It is a consistent and powerful gameplan unmatched by any other color. Counsel of the Soratami is a card that has been surprisingly good. I absolutely hate it in Champions, but in a format with many fewer opportunities for card advantage, and simplified gameplay it fills a hole.
Black:
1) Dark Banishing
2) Enfeeblement
3) Hollow Dogs
4) Razortooth Rats
5) Gravedigger
Black as usual finds itself near the top with an excellent removal package and a good number of solid creatures which can provide card advantage, evasion, and massive bodies to push through with removal. Black only asks one thing of you: to commit your mana base heavily towards it. Two of its better commons have a casting cost of BB, so you really want to play at least 9 Swamps in most Black decks. The common I’ve found has had the most impact, while not being one of the best five, is Giant Cockroach. What you use him for is usually a good indicator of who’s winning. The games I win with Black decks usually involve a turn 4 Giant Cockroach hitting hard when backed up by some removal. The losses come when you get out tempo’d and your Giant Cockroach is forced to block their two-drop.
White:
1) Master Decoy
2) Pacifism
3) Pegasus Charger
4) Aven Flock
5) Cloudchaser Eagle
White has a very similar gameplan to Blue, but lacks the card draw aspect that puts Blue over the top. White however is much better at the other aspects of Blue’s gameplan. It has no trouble stalling the ground, and has an excellent array of flyers which allow it to lock up the game. The thing that has improved White the most from 7th and 8th Edition is the decision to remove three of the Circles of Protection from the set, and move the other two to uncommon. This gives white 5 opportunities for playable commons instead of five cards that were only sideboardable about 30% of the time. The most important thing to keep track of when drafting the White cards is to keep a careful eye on your mana curve, since it is very difficult for White to catch up after falling behind, but easy to stay ahead once there. This isn’t the most difficult task in the world because there are three good two-drops, and a solid curve the rest of the way up.
Green:
1) Giant Growth
2) Llanowar Elves
3) Trained Armodon
4) Giant Spider
5) Treetop Bracers
Green is, as always, at a disadvantage in the Core Set draft. That’s because its natural abilities as a color aren’t particularly powerful, especially in a Limited environment, and it doesn’t have a major block mechanic such as artifact removal or color fixing being important to correct that. That said, Green does have Treetop Bracers and Giant Spider to deal with these issues. Giant Growth is Green’s best common because it is the only source of tempo advantage after turn 1, and the only source of card advatnage other than their two dorks trading with one of your fatties. Llanowar Elves are also quite important because a turn 1 Llanowar Elves leads to most of Green’s wins. After that, you have the usual Green fatties. Giant Spider must be taken over most of them because it is the only way you can beat a Blue deck in a million years. I put Treetop Bracers in the top five even though it is likely worse than Spined Wurm because it too is so important to the deck. The first and possibly second Treetop Bracers should be taken over everything but Giant Growth and Llanowar Elves, as long as you know you will end up with enough creatures.
Red:
1) Volcanic Hammer
2) Anaba Shaman
3) Shock
4) Hill Giant
5) Lightning Elemental
Red gets the standard white-bordered draft shaft. This is because the cards that make you want to draft Red in most formats are tied to block specific mechanics such as Firebolt, Sparksmith or Magma Burst. The other issue is that it is quite difficult to find a good Red creature. Hill Giant is nice but other colors get it for three mana. At first I thought Sandstone Warrior would be Red’s savior, but he tends to destroy your deck’s mana base since there are no other Red cards that require a heavy commitment. You are always free to play less than eight Mountains until this guy makes his way into your deck. If you somehow do manage to get a bunch of the burn spells and are going to have nine or ten Mountains in your deck, then he becomes quite good, but otherwise I have had him on the bench for the most part. The way Red is set up, you have no choice but to make your deck very aggressive, otherwise the bad cards like Goblin Chariot and Goblin Brigand become unplayable, not that I’m happy when the Brigand makes my deck.
Now that we have looked at the colors, the next step is to determine which are the best color combinations and archetypes. With both play experience and looking at the card lists, one can see that the classics like Blue/White and Black/Red are still quite good. Beyond that one needs to start getting adventurous. White/Green is surprisingly good, the aggressive White/Red deck that was everyone’s favorite in Tempest block draft is also quite good again.
Blue/White
By the time every block since Invasion has completed, Blue/White has been the best archetype for Limited. The two colors are always decent, because it is very hard for them to deviate from their basic gameplan of slowly winning by taking control of the ground, gaining card advantage, and eventually attacking with evasion creatures. This plan only fails when there are board dominating creatures such as Sparksmith or Spikeshot Goblin plentifully available. The closest thing this format has at the common level is Anaba Shaman, and he doesn’t dominate the game as much as “Tims” have in other formats due to the lack of single toughness creatures in general. With this in mind you can draft Blue/White decks that look nearly identical every single draft following the basic gameplan I’ve outlined. One thing to keep in mind is the lack of tricks in this format. This fact makes cards like Mending Hands and Boomerang much better than they are otherwise.
Black/Red
Black/Red has historically been one of the best archetypes in nearly every format, but it is usually difficult to get into both colors because you will often be fighting a war on each side for one of your colors because people need a good reason to not play one of the removal colors. There is a noticeable deficiency in efficient creatures in this archetype, but that is more than made up for by the plentiful removal. The creatures are very aggressive for the most part, the extreme examples being Giant Cockroach and Lightning Elemental, who greatly reward you if you are able to remove all your opponent’s dorks that they don’t want to trade for quality creatures. Oddly enough this archetype also has a great deal of utility creatures such as Anaba Shaman, Gravedigger and Ravenous Rats. This gives you a better long game than a lot of decks, and the capability to play 18 lands (something I love doing) more than other decks.
White/Green
White/Green is playable for the same reason that Blue/White is the best archetype. There is no dominating common creature that makes you feel ill when they drop it turn 2 three games in a row. Blue/White is better however because their goal has more natural synergy than Green/White’s. Green/White needs to deploy its monsters quickly and use its tricks to force them through, while Blue/White can simply hold off the opponent in the early game, until its evasion can take over in the midgame. That said, White/Green is quite good at what it does. The creatures here are more efficient than you will find anywhere else, and the tricks are solid, but generally aren’t quite good enough to get the job done. My best and most successful White/Green decks have splashed either Red or Black for some removal, even though splashes are more difficult in this format than they have been in previous base set drafts.
Red/White
My favorite archetype in terms of playing it is Red/White jank. This is the most aggressive archetype possible, with a creature curve that tops out on four, and spells designed to push the final damage through. This archetype works because it wants cards that range from bad to unplayable in other archetypes. The two White Grizzly Bears are quite bad in most archetypes because it is so easy to stall the ground they don’t end up doing very much. Here since you are trying to overwhelm your opponent with smaller creatures, your dorks have a much larger impact on the game. Lightning Elemental and Lava Axe are two examples of cards that are terrible in the control decks that focus on the long game, but are exactly what the Red/White deck is looking for. The most important common is Master Decoy, followed closely by Volcanic Hammer. After the removal spells and high quality creatures are gone, you can fill your deck out with dorks like Goblin Brigand, and Goblin Chariot as well as the spells that force damage through like Angelic Blessing and Panic Attack.
Sealed Deck differs from draft in this format as it is much more difficult to build certain archetypes when you are playing only what you’ve been given, but it is still possible to determine whether your deck wants to be aggressive or controlling and make deckbuilding and playing decisions based on that. The thing I have noticed most about 9th Sealed as opposed to other formats is the commonality of playing three colors. In most formats it is something I hate to do, but in 9th you have more time to find your lands, which will let you cast more powerful spells to take over the game. The other thing is that most sealed decks only ever have about twenty playable cards between any two colors at most. This means you are forced to play three colors instead of playing some terrible cards like Honor Guard or Elvish Berserker. Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how I look at formats for Limited play, and also helps you win some 9th Edition drafts. Let me know in the forums what else you would like from this style of article, and if you’d like me to do it again for Ravnica.
Rich