I’ve played three Prerelease Sealed events and five drafts, so the format is still very new to me, but I think I’ve played enough to be able to evaluate
cards and strategies based on gameplay rather than speculation. I generally find analysis of Limited formats based purely on reading a spoiler to be
speculative enough that they’ll generally be pretty inaccurate, so I generally try to wait until I know what I’m saying to write about Limited.
My biggest overall impression has been that this format feels more like Constructed than most Limited formats in that most cards and archetypes are good in
or against certain other archetypes. Very few cards, especially commons, are just always great. Even the best removal spells, cards that are always safe
high picks in Limited, are horrendous in some matchups. If you’re looking to make lists of the best commons in each color, I strongly recommend saving
yourself the trouble and going straight to best commons in each two color pair because the value changes wildly based primarily on which color you’re
paired with. The best commons in some archetypes are filler in others.
What this matchup-based format means, aside from that you have to draft a deck and recognize how wildly card values change depending on your synergies, is
some cards are great in some matchups and horrible in others, but they’re so great when they’re good that you should take them fairly highly, but never be
afraid to sideboard a card out or not start it in your maindeck just because you took it highly. Skywise Teachings is a good example of this. If you draft
a great deck for it with a lot of noncreature spells, it will be the best thing you can have against value decks and removal decks, but almost always
pointless against aggressive decks–in general, once you’ve gotten to the point where you can use it against those decks, you’ve already won.
Also, there seems to be something of a culture shock going from Khans to Dragons. People want to try to draft three colors or splash a little more than
they should. This set is serious about being a two-color set. My best decks happen to have splashed a third color into controlling two-color decks, but in
general, it’s hard to do and often not worth it.
Because DTK is based on the two-color allied pair dragon clans, it’s easy to think of this as an allied color Draft format, but the common enemy color gold
cards in Fate Reforged offer pretty strong rewards to people who stray from this, and they should have easy access to them because few others will be able
to use them. Sadly, this is a much weaker incentive for G/U and R/U where the gold cards aren’t as good.
Removal is in a really weird place in this format. Different spells have different limitations, and a lot of them are really problematic. There are
massively powerful creatures that you need to be able to answer in a lot of decks you’ll play against, and it’s hard to get enough removal for your control
decks a lot of the time. Some cards like Twin Bolt are great in some matchups, but they’re almost worthless in others. I’m still not sure how to evaluate
Twin Bolt. Defeat reads like a replacement for Debilitating Injury, but I haven’t even wanted to put it in my maindeck most of the time.
Pacifism is back, and it’s likely the best white common. It answers basically any creature, even a dragon, for only two mana, but it has some real
problems. Sometimes, sorcery speed removal just doesn’t do what you want against red and black. Often, they’ll play out their creatures and Pacifism will
be good, but some portion of their games they end up playing as kind a burn deck and just dashing every turn, blanking all sorcery speed removal. Against
blue and black, especially both together, leaving their creature in play to exploit is a pretty big weakness, and often, none of their creatures are
particularly worth killing anyway. Against green and white, you have to be a little concerned that they’ll have Abzan Advantage, which is a little better
now that there are more good enchantments to kill (like Pacifism) and +1/+1 counters are a bigger part of their gameplan. Return to the Earth is another
card that’s a lot more likely to be played in maindecks now, as almost everyone has a dragon of some kind, and that’s among the best ways to deal with
them.
Now let’s get into the actual pairs specifically:
Blue/White
This combination is clearly pushing the noncreature spell synergies, and the prowess creatures from Fate Reforged are even better now, as this pair
supports playing a lot of noncreature spells, and rebound is great with them. This pair can be drafted as an aggressive tempo deck or a control deck based
on card advantage and removal.
The aggressive deck wants to prioritize creatures like like Elusive Spellfist, Dragon Bell Monk, Ojutai Interceptor, and Champion of Arashin with spells
like Artful Maneuver, Taigam’s Strike, and Ojutai’s Breath. Your goal is to have enough tricks that you can attack with your creatures every turn to get
your opponent low, and then Taigam’s Strike and Ojutai’s Breath close the game before your opponent can turn it around with bigger creatures while Champion
of Arashin and Student of Ojutai make it hard for the opponent to race you.
The control decks seek to take advantage of white’s good removal (Pacifism and Sandblast), filling in with mediocre removal (Enduring Victory and Reduce in
Stature). Because you’re a control deck with a good amount of card draw and card selection and the best home for Anticipate, you can likely afford to
splash a third color for additional removal, picking up late Harsh Sustenance or Cunning Strike to maybe support good early red or black removal you’ve
drafted.
I think it’s easy for this deck to fall into a trap of having too many Territorial Rocs and Updraft Elementals. You may want a few early blockers in some
matchups, but look at what these cards are up against. Most obviously, they just wait around to get eaten by dragons, but that’s only the beginning of
their problems. U/B ignores them while drawing cards to a better lategame, R/G ignores them because they don’t profitably block any creatures, G/W makes
their guys bigger and breaks through. They’re okay against some red/black decks, but those don’t have that many Goblin Piker style cards, and even if they
do, they can still just kill your guy and keep attacking, which is fine, but when that’s the absolute ceiling for your card, you probably want to look
elsewhere.
Drafting a control deck in this format is dangerous. We already know that the rares in Fate Reforged are absurdly game-breaking, and Dragons of Tarkir
makes it relatively easy for any deck to happen to end up with a lot of lategame power if they happened to open a few good dragons. If you’re going to play
a control deck, you need to be sure that you can hang in the lategame, and that means, at the very least, you’ll want a lot of card draw and counterspells
to compete in the lategame arms race blue decks in this format can often get into.
Blue/Black
As everyone predicted, I love this archetype. Shambling Goblin, Sultai Emissary, Palace Familiar, and Jeskai Sage stop aggressive decks from running over
you and make X/1s terrible (which is part of why Updraft Elemental and Territorial Roc end up playing so badly–people already know to avoid X/1s because
of this deck). Where the real strength comes in is that against other control decks you get to cash these two-drops in for more cards rather than having
pointless early blockers sitting around as dead cards. Removal is bad against you because almost all of your creatures do something when they enter the
battlefield or when they die, but then Dutiful Attendant and Gravepurge make it even worse since they can’t even reliably keep your good creatures dead.
Yesterday, I had a good U/B deck, and I played against a B/W deck that had won its first two matches on the strength of its great removal spells. It looked
exactly the way you’d want a Limited deck to look–it had a good curve of creatures and removal, but I could never lose to it. The creatures didn’t match
up well against mine, and the removal spells were completely pointless. He had no functional angle of attack.
Given that good answers are bad against this deck, obviously, the way to beat them is to have good threats. Blue/Black isn’t as good at answering Dragons
as it would like to be given that every game is going to go long enough that your opponent will get to cast them, and this is a matchup where Skywise
Teachings is totally backbreaking. You’re not going to have more cards than Blue/Black, so you just want the cards that you have to be as high impact as
possible and hope they just don’t have enough answers. Alternatively, sometimes you can just run over them. If they have to chump block too much, they
won’t have creatures to exploit, and all their spells will become pretty weak.
If you want to beat U/B, you have to be proactive.
Also, if you want to draft U/B, you have to be sure that you have some very high-impact cards. The commons let you buy time and draw more cards so that you
can easily find cards in your deck, but all of them are relatively small for the format, and a deck full of all the best exploit synergies will just buy
time before eventually dying to a dragon or big green formidable creatures. You’re not going to be able to spend a removal spell on all of their Atarka
Beastbreakers and Dragon-Scarred Beats and random five- and six-drops, and few of your creatures can compete with these in combat. If you have some very
high-impact rares, you’ll always find them and easily win games with them, but if you don’t get them, your deck will have a really hard time beating anyone
who isn’t overloaded with removal.
Red/Black
I’m sure you could draft some kind of Red/Black control deck with a lot of removal and some big guys, but, much like in Constructed, you’re just asking to
lose to every blue deck you sit across from if you do that. Focus on what this deck is good at: attacking.
As mentioned, I think one-toughness creatures are pretty bad in this format, so you’ll want to keep those to a minimum. Fortunately, there are fewer of
them than usual here. Mardu Scout is likely still good enough that you’re happy playing it, but I wouldn’t be too excited about having a lot of them or go
out of my way to make my mana support double red for them. It’s just very easy for things to go wrong when you build your deck around these guys. What you
want is cheap creatures, good removal to get your cheap creatures through, and ideally some dragons in case your opponent manages to lock up the ground,
but Magmatic Chasm, Lose Calm, and Sarkhan’s Rage might be sufficient alternatives.
You want to be aggressive, but that part’s pretty easy. This deck wants access to as many removal spells as it can get its hands on, and this is the only
archetype where I’m really happy playing Defeat in my maindeck. Coat with Venom is outstanding here, as is Butcher’s Glee. Just be sure you have 13-16
creatures.
Red/Green
You have a lot of very big monsters. Those big monsters are good at fighting, which gives you access to some of the best and most versatile removal spells
(Epic Confrontation, Hunt the Weak, Tail Slash). Temur Battle Rage is often outstanding here. If formidable is important to you, which it often is, you
need to be careful about trading early. You often won’t want to so that you can keep a couple creatures in play, but if you don’t trade early against
something like black and red, you’re taking damage to get in range of their finishers, things like Magmatic Chasm and Lose Calm. I haven’t drafted
Red/Green enough to know what the best way to deal with this is. It might be that you want to prioritize cards like Colossodon Yearling that can block and
live to try to generate a board stall where you can grind them out with Atartka Beastbreaker and Dragon-Scarred Bear, or it might be that you just want to
plan to trade early and then assume you’ll have the last man standing. Maybe your Stampeding Elk Herd won’t need trample to win the game.
I think this archetype is a natural predator of U/B and potentially prey for the aggressive blue decks based around evasion and tempo spells that get to
lock your expensive creatures out of the game.
Green/White
This is the allied pair I have the least experience with. Bolster synergies seem very real, and cards that care about +1/+1 counters seem pretty easy to
make work. I think Conifer Strider might be the unsung hero of this archetype, as its low toughness naturally picks up bolster, and then you have a giant
hexproof creature and good access to tricks when your opponent has to try to get in combat with it. This is great with every trick and all the bolster, and
I’ve often seen it go late. Champion of Arashin is more vulnerable but fills a similar role in that it comes down right before all the five mana bolster
commons (have you noticed how many of those there are? Sandsteppe Scavenger, Pinion Feast, Enduring Victory, and Aven Tactiction, not to mention Dromoka’s
Gift at uncommon, and, of course, Elite Scaleguard–it’s safe to assume a bolster is going to happen on the fifth turn with this deck), and it’s excellent
to bolster onto.
Both of those creatures, as well as others like Dromoka Captain and Aven Sunstriker, really like pump spells, so I’d probably prioritize those over fight
cards as my non-bolster spells in this archetype.
I don’t have enough experience to confidently predict this archetype’s matchups.
As for the enemy color pairs:
White/Black
Harsh Sustenance is a really big payoff card, and while there aren’t as many as there were, there are still some warrior synergies here. I think this will
play a little like Red/Black in that your deck is going to be able to play relatively small creatures for the format and use removal to get them through,
but having Harsh Sustenance along with fewer dash creatures and less burn pushes you more toward building up a board. With allied color pairs, the set was
designed such that, for the most part, the keyword/watermark somewhat reliably told you which cards you’d actually want for your deck, but with the enemy
pairs, it’s a lot murkier. None of dash, exploit, bolster, or rebound seem especially suited to this pair, which might mean you just end up building around
mostly cards that have none of those mechanics, while other people are prioritizing them for their own synergies. If this leaves you with removal spells,
Ukud Cobra, some megamorph creatures, and some fliers, that sounds just fine to me.
Blue/Red
Exploit kind of works here where you can get it in that Dragon Fodder and sometimes Lose Calm are good cards to fuel exploit, and Collateral Damage is a
kind of a red exploit card. Rebound and the noncreature synergies also work well here, as this is still basically like a Jeskai deck, and red has good
instants and Tormenting Voice to support prowess and related effects. You’re not great at killing dragons. You don’t have Pacifism, Sandblast, or Enduring
Victory from white; Pinion Feast, Return to the Early, or fight cards from green; or Reach of Shadows, Flatten, and Coat with Venom from black. You’re not
great at fueling Tail Slash, though you can sometimes manage, and outside of that, Bathe in Dragonfire might work. Then you have Sarkhan’s Rage, or maybe
Reduce in Stature. I’d rather try to avoid dragons altogether and play this as a tempo deck using the aggressive red cards, especially creatures with high
power relative to their toughness and the blue aggressive spells from the U/W aggro decks.
Green/Black
I’ve seen a couple horrendous Black/Green decks, and in both cases their big failing was playing too many two- and three-drops, and then just getting
outclassed. Black and green have a lot of great removal, but they have no real synergy or card advantage. You’re going to be worse at getting under people
than the other aggro decks, so you have to go big. You want to play good blockers like Colossodon Yearling, Aerie Bowmasters, and Ukud Cobra that give you
“virtual card advantage” by holding off multiple creatures that will allow you to save your removal for creatures that really matter, and then you want to
play big creatures, creatures big enough that they won’t just trade with the small creatures your blockers have blanked. This is the place to put those
Marsh Hulks and Segmented Krotiqs.
Red/White
I don’t think I’ve seen a Red/White deck yet, but obviously the payoff you’re expecting is War Flare, so you probably want to draft a deck where it will be
good. Dragon Fodder and Sabertooth Outrider are the first cards that come to mind that would really like that. Sabertooth Outrider also happens to be a
nice creature to bolster onto, and it’s good with the white rebound tricks, so that might be one of the more important cards for the archetype. This is
another archetype that I can’t imagine drafting anything but an aggro deck with, though I suppose if you open the right dragons, any deck can just load up
on removal and dragons.
Blue/Green
These decks always play as green creatures supported by blue spells, as that’s what each color is good at. The fight cards and the fact that anti-flier
cards are more maindeckable means this archetype has more removal than usual, but you’re still fundamentally going to play as a tempo deck most of the
time. Sometimes most of your attackers will be blue fliers, and you’ll basically just be holding the ground with green creatures, but usually, you’re going
to use things like Taigam’s Strike and Ojutai’s Breath to win races with big green creatures. This is another pair where none of the mechanics are
particularly exciting, and you’re basically just going to play generically good cards along the tempo axis. Sadly, the payoff you get, Ethereal Ambush, is
relatively unexciting.
That’s my initial overview of the format. I’m looking forward to fine tuning this over the coming weeks, but so far, I’ve been happy with how it plays.
Sometimes, I feel completely hopeless as I get crushed by a few rare dragons, but other times, I feel like a genius as I easily dispatch my opponent’s
dragons and win with synergies. I never seem to open the dragons myself, but I think WOTC did a good job of making the dragons play pretty well in Limited.