It’s been a while since I’ve written for this site, or written anything for that matter. A lot has happened since my last article. Back then we were still drafting with the beautiful RGD and the atrocious Coldsnap formats, which have now been replaced with the average formats of triple Time Spiral and TTP. I scrubbed out in two more Pro Tours, and a few more Grand Prixes, but it was all worth it as we won this year’s Team Rochester Draft championship at Worlds. This might be the last time in a while we’ll be able to play this terrific skill-testing format, as Wizards has announced that the Team Limited format will be Two-Headed Giant for the foreseeable future. This is much to my regret, and I’ve spoken with a few of the people involved in making the decision for this change of formats. A lot of them agree that while Two-Headed Giant is an interesting format, it is by no means as interesting and skill-testing as Team Rochester, but the main argument against that format was that apart from Pro Tour players, nobody seemed interested in it. You just don’t sit down for a casual draft and start “Team Roch-ing,” but you don’t start “2HG-ing” either. The format most of us play – pros and non-pros – when there are not enough people for a regular eight-man draft, is the three-on-three booster draft format.
I think most of you are familiar with this format, but for those of you who aren’t I’ll explain it briefly. Like Team Rochester, it’s a three-on-three draft with individual draft games, but the draft is much like a regular booster draft. Each player sits between two of his opponents, which allows for intriguing draft strategies like pass-and-cutting (giving confusing signals to your neighbor to ensure his deck won’t be as good). After the draft, each player plays a match against each of his opponents, and the first team to five match wins is the winner of the draft.
For a Pro Tour, you could just play cross-pairing and let the match be decided on whichever team gets two matches. There is a major problem for the draft process though. In the other two Team Limited formats (Rochester and 2HG), it is allowed for the team members to communicate with each other, but in this format it’s strictly forbidden. It’s hard to enforce this rule. A solution that I offered while I suggested the idea of this format for Pro Tours was to use draft screens similar to the ones used during deck construction in VS System Pro Circuit events. It’s not ideal, but it does offer a solution to use the world’s most beloved draft format to be used in professional events, and I think it’s worth looking into.
Honestly, I’m not sure yet how good the Two-Headed Giant format is for professional events. A lot of players seem to enjoy the format, and I haven’t played it that much yet, but every time I play it or watch someone playing it, it seems like the pace of the games is far too slow. The Pro Tour will only be one-game matches, which increases the effect of the luck of the draw (which is only moderately compensated for by the free mulligan), and also disallows sideboarding. I also think that because of the complexity of a lot of combat situations in 2HG, slow play and stalling will occur much more often, and for the judges a 2HG event will be one of the hardest to manage.
Enough about teams, let’s talk about the draft format of Pro Tour: Geneva… TTP! I like that the last couple of sets seem to have a higher number of cards that are playable in Limited, which allows for more switching between colors in the draft and more decisions during deck construction. What I don’t like, however, is that there are more game-breaking rares than usual, not just because of the addition of the Timeshifted cards, but also because the power of the rares is higher than usual for Limited.
And they reprinted Pestilence.
It’s really a pity that a lot of games are decided for a big part on rares, because apart from those, I think the format is very interesting and balanced, although Black is clearly the worst color of all. This does, in its way, add another aspect to the format, as it’s often underdrafted as a result, and some players might pick up on this and be one of only two Black drafters at the table.
My main strategy for the Pro Tour was to avoid Black, and if I did somehow end up in that color, Red/Black was hopefully the way to go. My first draft at the Pro Tour immediately disappointed me in that aspect; I opened Sengir Nosferatu twice and ended up with a mediocre three-card U/B deck; I was lucky enough to get a third-pick Enslave in the last booster. Yes, that’s how much I wanted to avoid Black. My very first pick of the Pro Tour was Nosferatu over Rift Bolt, and I immediately regretted the fact that I had probably made the correct pick. In triple Time Spiral draft, whenever I was Black I would try to be Red/Black, as that was the only Black deck I liked and it was only because of the Strangling Soots. Now they have just taken away one booster of Black cards. Really, I’ve never seen a color that was this bad in a set. The only good common is Rathi Trapper and the only other decent common is Blightspeaker, and neither of these is anything spectacular. Black is probably underdrafted in any given draft, but this does not necessarily make it a reason for you to jump into it; it’s underdrafted for a very good reason.
Enough about Black decks! I’m here today to talk about some archetypes that I do like. Let’s start off with my favorite, Blue/White. Although it’s not the strongest color combination out there – Red/Green probably is — Blue/White is a very safe choice, because a lot of its very late picks can be put to use as great cards if you draft your deck a certain way. If your deck doesn’t wind up using those cards, you’ll always have a lot of sideboard options available to you, which is a bigger deal than most people think in Limited. I’ll now list a few common combinations that interact well with each other. I’m sure you’ve seen all of these combos before, but I’ve tried them all and I’ll tell you what I think is the best way to go with your Blue/White deck:
Dream Stalker / Tolarian Sentinel and Reality Acid
This is a combo that’s very powerful when it gets going, and both Dream Stalker and Tolarian Sentinel are good cards in themselves… but Reality Acid is only very marginally playable on its own. You can’t really take out the big creatures with it, as they’ll have free passage to your life total for three turns since you don’t really want to trade for that guy in combat anymore. All in all a powerful combo, but it’s a little slow sometimes and Reality Acid is a big dud on its own.
Crookclaw Transmuter / Merfolk Thaumaturgist with Bewilder and Saltfield Recluse
This combo has a lot more going for it, as both Crookclaw Transmuter and Saltfield Recluse will always make your main deck. Bewilder is just barely playable, but the Merfolk Thaumaturgist has functioned as a healer-kind of utility creature in many situations for me. I mostly just put it in the sideboard because of the large number of three-drops a Blue/White deck usually has, but I don’t at all mind playing it main deck or to side it in if my opponent has some creatures with different power and toughness.
Slivers
You should never get too carried away when you’re drafting Slivers, and be careful that your Slivers can function on their own if they have to. In TTT, there just weren’t enough good Slivers to pick a card like Watcher Sliver very highly, but Planar Chaos brought back Muscle Sliver along with Poultice and Synchronous Slivers, and I’ve now correctly picked Watcher Sliver over a good card like Amrou Seekers numerous times. All of these cards are fine on their own, and become a hard-to-break-through defense for ground creatures when combined, which allows your flying creatures to play the role they’re best at.
Momentary Blink combos
Every time I play Blink in Blue/White I love it more and more, as it’s a very good trick on its own without all the combos it creates. It also increases the power of Aven Riftwatcher from playable to a force, and helps you reset the two new Shapeshifters if needed. Everyone already knew Blink was a very good card, and nowadays the only commons I pick over it (if I’m sure I’m Blue and White) are Temporal Isolation and Errant Ephemeron.
Another deck that I really like with Planar Chaos added to the drafting format is Red/Green. It used to be either a deck with mana acceleration and fatties, or a deck with cards that work with Empty the Warrens, but the Red and Green commons in Planar Chaos are amazing for an aggressive deck. Giant Dustwasp, Mire Boa, Utopia Vow, Dead / Gone, Prodigal Pyromancer, and Brute Force are all excellent first picks, and then there are a lot of very decent commons like Stingscourger, Citanul Woodreaders, (although this one is a little less aggressive), Evolution Charm, and the still underrated Skirk Shaman and Uktabi Drake. Especially the Drake; on its own it’s already a pretty good creature, but it works very well with Herd Gnarr, Primal Forcemage, Bogardan Rager, and (of course) storm cards. As a general rule, creatures with evasion don’t work particularly well with the Red and Green combat tricks because with evasion you’re trying to dodge creature combat, but there are rarely enough creatures with evasion in a Red/Green deck to make the pump spells significantly worse. They do add variation to the deck, as they give you a different kind of threat, and it’s often hard for your opponent to busy themselves with solving both. With this I mean that you’ll play out a few ground attackers at the beginning of the game, and while your opponent is concerning himself with dealing with these, you’ll continue attacking for a few points through the sky.
Red/Green has a few built-in themes that you could draft, like Thallids or Storm, but I strongly recommend not to focus on any of that. Unlike Blue/White decks, Red/Green can now win very consistently on pure aggression since the cards in Planar Chaos are so good for that, so there’s no need to hinder your game plan to get a more synergetic element in your deck. Just draft the best possible aggressive card every pack, the rest is just not worth it. Especially Slivers; I’ve tried it a bunch of times, usually splashing White, but even if you do have all the good Slivers, you can easily lose to a deck with a few removal spells to take out your interesting Slivers, which is clearly the weakness of this archetype.
To wrap up on the addition of Planar Chaos, I’ll highlight a few cards from the new set that I feel are underrated or overrated, and haven’t been talked about enough:
Magus of the Tabernacle
I’ve played it, and have had it be played against me, and I can honestly say that this card is ridiculous if it comes down early. As a 2/6 body, it’s hard for your opponent to attack with creatures without evasion, and such creatures are usually smaller increasing the power of giving it an upkeep. It seems like it should be about as bad for you as it should be for your opponent, but the 2/6 stats of it by itself nullify a lot of your opponent’s plans.
Mana Tithe
Unlike other counterspell effects, Mana Tithe is only good in the early-mid game but it makes up for that by costing only one mana, fitting right into that prospect. It’s not that hard to keep one White up early on, and this causes a major tempo setback for your opponent. It might not seem that great, but every time I’ve had it in my deck, it’s been quite good for me.
Veiling Oddity
This is obviously a powerhouse in Two-Headed Giant Limited, but it does much less in regular Limited and I don’t think it’s playable under normal circumstances. In 2HG, the games take longer, making it more useful to suspend it after turn 2; you’re more likely to get involved in creature stalls, and with the new 30-life rule, dealing damage has become 33% better. None of this applies in a normal one-on-one game, but I still see people playing this card all the time and I don’t think it should be played.
I’m about done with the TTP individual draft format when it comes to professional events, and I’ll only be drafting that format for fun, as the Two-Headed Giant season is coming up. I really think it’ll be a disappointing season for the Magic community because I think it’s just a bad format for competitive play, and I don’t think that it’s been tested enough. The fact that they recently changed how many life a team starts with really shows this, and I think that the format will need more changes should they ever decide to do it again. The individual booster draft is fine, but perhaps not interesting enough; drafting strategies are in no way as sophisticated as they were in Ravnica block, where it was much more of picking two colors to draft and just draft a deck from there on. Don’t get me wrong, I like drafting TTP, but I hope they’ll come up with something new for the next block, so I’ll have something more interesting to write about next time.
Thanks for reading, and bye for now,
Julien