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Everything You Want To Know About The Draft Gates Deck

Constructed isn’t the only spot to find a lot of Gates! Ryan has gone to work on this fun and strange archetype so that you don’t have to! Learn the signs, learn the cards, learn the methods! Instant 3-0!


The Gate deck existed in Guilds of Ravnica, but it wasn’t anything
special. Here’s what that set had to offer:

These cards were good, but just like the Gate deck, nothing special. You
needed a lot of Gates to play them, and they were rarely the best cards in
your deck. It could happen, but it wasn’t a common occurrence.

Ravnica Allegiance
is an entirely different story.

Each one of these cards are better than what Guilds of Ravnica had
to offer by a noticeable margin. With only a couple Gates in your deck,
Gatebreaker Ram, Gateway Sneak, and Archway Angel are playable. And if you
have a good chunk of Gates in your deck, each of these cards has the
potential to be a bomb.

You heard me right. A bomb.

What does this mean for the Gate deck in Ravnica Allegiance?

  • It’s much more powerful than in Guilds of Ravnica.
  • It doesn’t manifest as “the Gate deck” as often as you think.

That second point may sound confusing. How does “the Gate deck” not
“manifest as the Gate deck”? That doesn’t make sense.

It has to do with the following observations from above:

  • These cards are playable without an abundance of Gates.
  • They have the potential to be bombs.

This means that it’s often correct to take cards like Archway Angel and
Gate Colossus early. It’s not too hard to pick up around four Gates, and so
the downside of speculating is a reasonable playable and the upside of
speculating is a bomb. Let’s do some math approximations.

There are 80 uncommons in the set. 24 packs are opened, each with three
uncommons. Approximately one in six packs have a foil, which means there
will be approximately four foils in the draft. The probability of any given
uncommon being in the draft is 90%. With five Gates-matter cards, there
should be between four and five of them opened in any given draft.
Sometimes there’ll be less, sometimes more, but the important observation
is that they’ll almost always be there in multiples.

Because these cards are high picks, it’s very rare that all the
Gates-matters cards end up in the same person’s hands. Usually two or three
people in the pod will play some half off-color Gates to improve the power
level of their cards like Gatebreaker Ram. With this incentive to play more
Gates, the incentive to splash is increased. A pod will often have multiple
three-color decks that play extra Gates for a card or two but wouldn’t
identify as “the Gate deck.” A true Gate deck that snaps up all the
Gates-matter cards does happen and is very powerful but not in every pod
because of this.

One of the awesome parts of this Draft format is that when you draft the
Gates-matter cards just because they’re good, you open up the door to draft
“the Gate deck” if the opportunity presents itself without taking a large
risk.

Okay, I get that I can’t always just draft the
Gate deck, but when I can draft it, what do I do?

At the Grand Prix this past weekend, I heard a lot of players say they were
avoiding “the Gate deck” because it has so much going on that they weren’t
sure they’d make the right picks, especially without the ability to look at
the cards previously taken.

The Mana

Gateway Plaza Open the Gates Azorius Guildgate Orzhov Guildgate Simic Guildgate Gruul Guildgate Rakdos Guildgate Simic Locket Gruul Locket Rakdos Locket Azorius Locket Orzhov Locket

When drafting this deck, you need to know your base colors as soon as
possible. If one of these colors is green, you can take Open the Gates, but
otherwise you can’t. You can play double off-color Gates to facilitate
splashes, but you don’t want to play double off-color Lockets since you’ll
never be able to crack them. The power level of this deck is through the
roof, so you need to prioritize mana for consistency. This makes Gateway
Plaza one of the best commons for the deck.


After you have your base color, you’ll get an idea of what splashes are
easier. Each guild has one color it struggles to splash thanks to the Gates
it has available. Simic has access to Azorius Guildgate and Gruul
Guildgate. This means a base Simic Gate deck will struggle to splash black
cards. It doesn’t mean you can’t, but be careful. Here’s my first draft
deck from the GP:

Orzhov Guildgate

Orzhov Guildgate
Azorius Guildgate
Azorius Guildgate
Simic Guildgate
Simic Guildgate
Gruul Guildgate
Gateway Plaza
Rakdos Guildgate
Forest
Forest
Forest
Forest
Forest
Island
Island
Mountain
Pteramander
Incubation Druid
Aeromunculus

Aeromunculus
Gatebreaker Ram
Gatebreaker Ram
Gruul Spellbreaker
Gateway Sneak
Skatewing Spy
Azorius Knight-Arbiter

Humongulus
Archway Angel

Azorius Skyguard
Open the Gates
Applied Biomancy

Growth Spiral
Slimebind
Arrester's Admonition

Azorius Locket
Thought Collapse
Mortify
Sphinx's Insight

Domri, Chaos Bringer

This deck felt fantastic. I went 2-1, but the loss was a good and close
match. I played Mortify because I needed more removal, but it was difficult
to cast because two of my black sources were also tied to white sources. I
also had a Theater of Horrors I couldn’t play. Be aware of which color is
hard to splash from your base color and take cards accordingly.

The last aspect of the mana is the number of Gates. Once you have six
Gates, all the Gates-matter cards become quite good, but they only behave
at bomb-tier once you have more than eight. And you can go up to fourteen
Gates before you stop. That might sound crazy, but the cards are so
powerful that the taplands don’t matter as much as you would think. Once
you have that many Gates, your base-color doesn’t matter as much anymore.
Your basics should be a Mountain, Forest, and Island in order to play
Gateway Sneak, Gates Ablaze, and Gatebreaker Ram on time. But note that the
I-have-all-the-Gates-and-my-colors-don’t-matter version is very uncommon.

Not the Mana

Honestly, after you figure out your base color and properly prioritize your
mana, the rest is fairly simple. You take Gates over anything replacement
level, never pass any of the Gates-matter cards, and just make sure you
have enough removal. Keep taking Gates and the best cards in the pack.

You’ll likely have to play some mediocre creatures for playables at the
end, but that’s not going to matter. I believe David Williams said that
once you have all the Gates and Gates-matter cards, you can fill the rest
of your deck with ham sandwiches. That’s how powerful these cards are.

There are a bunch of versions of this deck, mostly because your base guild
will determine most cards you end up playing. Orzhov will gum up the ground
with afterlife creatures. Gruul and Simic will have more above-rate
creatures. Rakdos will have a ton of removal, although this is the least
common guild for the Gate deck. And Azorius will either be a fliers deck or
a Dovin’s Acuity and Clear the Mind deck – note that this deck works very
well within the Gates archetype because Clear the Mind shuffling back Gates
Ablaze is a big game.

Don’t be intimidated by the Gates deck. It’s not that different from other
archetypes out there. Just make sure you understand your manabase and snap
up those Gates-matter cards!