First Impressions of Guildpact

My last article generated a lot of forum talk, and none of it was about Magic. I won’t have any of that here. I won’t talk about anything but Magic today. No more insights into the excitement of my life and my indisputably correct and wise opinions on non-Magical things. No siree.

Today we will jump straight in and drown.

Guildpact: The Spoiler and the Set in General
It was front page news last week that Wizards of the Coast is suing the folks behind MTGSalvation.com, and there have been many opinions on whether this is a good or a bad thing. Debate rages on if this will lead to the end of early spoilers, to the point that all we get to see of a set before the prerelease is what Wizards wants us to see — i.e. the official previews. Personally I’d much rather go into the prerelease blind, and for a while I always fought the temptation to look at the spoiler. Now, however, I tend to judge on the first day of the pre-release, and as such don’t see the point of fighting the temptation to sneak a peek anymore.

Unfortunately, I would have been better off not looking at the spoiler this time. It was so full of mistakes that anyone who hadn’t seen it probably got an advantage at the prerelease. A mana here, two points of toughness there… it can make a big difference.

The real problem here is that the spoiler was full of good cards, whereas the actual set is full of rather mediocre ones. While Skeletal Vampire is still a bomb at six mana, Giant Solifuge goes from “awesome” to “mediocre at best” by only having one toughness instead of three. The number of common creatures with interesting abilities that are overcosted by at least one mana is staggering. All of this may be necessary to balance the set, and a lot of these cards will probably turn out to be so good that they need to cost that much, but for now I feel that all the hype generated by the spoiler has turned sour and the set is really rather bad, a few nice rares aside. It seems to be doomed for a supporting role while Ravnica hogs the limelight.

I’ve had some discussions on whether Guildpact speeds up the format or slows it down even more, and most people say it’s faster, though I’m not sure how. Yes, there is more removal, but the creatures are much worse and much slower in general. The exceptions are the bloodthirsty Gruulions, but Gruul are just the new Boros. Even so, they are slightly slower, trading some speed for a better mid/late game.

Keyword Mechanics
Looking at the keyword mechanics in the block so far, I feel the need to give R&D one big ole’ slap on the back for a job well done. What an interesting bunch of abilities, with many subtleties and a lot of intricate power. Few people could say just how good Dredge would be when it was first previewed, and people are still scratching their head over how best to abuse Transmute. Radiance can have all sorts of strange effects depending on what creatures are in play, and even Convoke can lead to interesting choices between tapping lands and tapping creatures. The three new boys are gearing up to be just as interesting.

Bloodthirst
While this ability is designed for mindless attacking, trying to get it to work can often be quite complicated and make your head spin. When your Gruul opponent attacks it is unlikely to be mindless; he could have a pump spell, or he could be bluffing to get bloodthirsty big boys into play, or he could just be a mindless automaton turning men sideways simply because that’s the natural state for them to be in. This can be a nightmare to play against.

Playing with it is equally difficult. Should you bluff? Do you have a correct read on how concerned your opponent is regarding bloodthirst? Can you afford to suicide your men at the off-chance that he won’t call your bluff and let you have that huge monster? This is all rather difficult, it also feeds into deck building and drafting, figuring out how to set your deck up with a good mix of bloodthirst guys and bloodthirst enablers to best take advantage of this potentially powerful ability.

Replicate
Replicate isn’t one of those abilities that gives character and definition to a guild, like Convoke and Bloodthirst, but it does have some interesting applications. It gives you something to do with your late game mana, whilst still being useful early on, and it means that a U/R opponent with a lot of untapped land and some cards in hand is truly frightening. Attack with all your guys to have them slaughtered by a bunch of Thunderheads or puny little guys who fall to a Leap of Flame.

Pyromatics looks weak, but it isn’t. It may cost four mana for a Shock, and as such could be considered severely overcosted, but a) it’s actually four mana for a Fire, and b) have you seen the rest of the non-Blue burn in this set? Me neither. Beggars could do worse than a six mana Arc Lightning.

Haunt
I still haven’t a clue how powerful this is. Of course, it all depends on how powerful the individual effect is, and also on how many ways you have of moving creatures to the graveyard, such as sacrifice outlets and removal spells. Having many recurring effects should be rather powerful, especially if you can put together a U/B/W deck with several bounce spells. Play Haunt creature, bounce it, play it again, sacrifice it, kill haunted creatures and you’ve had that great effect three times.

This seems like a good time to mention just how infested this set is with cantrips and other card advantage generators, like the last two mechanics I mentioned. This should have some kind of relevance, most notably a smoothing of draws, something that is hugely important in a format so full of gold cards and four-color spells.

Okay, so the format is not full of four-color spells, and to be honest I don’t think the few that are there are good enough to be played, but I may be wrong. Someone somewhere will at some point play them in some kind of Limited deck and beat everyone to a bloody pulp. Seriously, though, would it have hurt them to make creatures that don’t rely on attacking to be more than Hill Giants?

Prerelease Card Pool & Deck
Enough general chit-chat: it’s time to get specific with a card pool. In my Speed Demon series I have gone on at great length about how misleading and annoying the prerelease format with three boosters can be, but for now that’s all we’ve got so I’ll just present mine here. At least there are proper results to show for it.

Guildpact Pre-Release Cardpool

Martin Dingler

Junior Super Series on 02-05-2006

Ravnica Limited

Creatures (46)

Lands (5)

I’ll not dwell on card strengths and weaknesses. I’ll simply cut to the chase.

After the obligatory White Space of Doom, naturally.

…

Here’s the deck I played at the prerelease:

Creatures (15)
1 Silhana Ledgewalker
1 Mourning Thrull
1 Selesnya Evangel
1 Gristleback
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Silhana Starfletcher
1 Shrieking Grotesque
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Screeching Griffin
2 Gruul Scrapper
1 Ursapine
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Harrier Griffin
1 Siege Wurm

Other Spells (8)
1 Devouring Light
1 Faith’s Fetters
2 Pillory of the Sleepless
1 Putrefy
1 Wurmweaver Coil
1 Seeds of Strength
1 Gruul Signet

Lands (17)
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
1 Gruul Turf
1 Orzhov Basilica
3 Swamp
4 Plains
7 Forest

This deck has a nice amount of removal, some beefy creatures, some flyers and two big bombs in Ursapine and Wurmweaver Coil. Unsurprisingly, it is in one of the three-color combinations that covers three different guilds. I was actually torn for a very long time between this and — surprise! — a R/W/G build, but this won out for having more reliable removal and less White (thanks to the great Boros cards), allowing me to play more Forests thus making Ursapine more powerful. I went 4-1 with this deck, losing only to a deck that had more removal than should be legal. All of this despite overlooking something that, in this particular card pool, is easily a bomb:

Three Dreams
In the final round I was skimming through my sideboard when I suddenly realised that I can use Three Dreams to tutor for Faith’s Fetters, Pillory of the Sleepless and Wurmweaver Coil. How ludicrous would that be? I promptly sided it in and played it in both the remaining games. No, I never felt close to losing those…

Some further notes on individual/sets of cards:

Magemarks
How playable are these? I think the instinctive answer of “not very” is actually accurate in this case. They’ve been lulling us in with a host of great auras from Galvanic Arc to Pollenbright Wings, and now we’ve reached the point where we need to rediscover that auras aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. If all your creatures are enchanted with multiple Magemarks, then sure that’s impressive, but kill one creature mid-combat and suddenly they all lose the bonus and die. They look kinda more interesting than that, but, y’know, they’re not. [The Black Magemark ain’t too shabby… – Craig]

Silhana Ledgewalker
A lot of people don’t like this guy and question his inclusion, but he has a lot going for him. Sorry, just checked the art again, and it’s a girl. Either way, being untargettable by your opponent’s stuff can be huge, negating that drawback of auras for instance. The cheap Green quasi-flyer is also a superb way of enabling Bloodthirst. So, while her stats aren’t particularly impressive, her abilities are so useful and otherwise hard to find in Green, that she definitely deserves a spot on the squad.

Squad is a much cooler word than team, because there’s a Q in it, while there isn’t even an I in team.

Pillory of the Sleepless
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it hard to remember that most Pacifism effects are not Arrests, having played entirely too much with Faith’s Fetters over the past few months. I’m sure many of my opponents didn’t realise that it’s not Arrest since they didn’t sacrifice their pilloried creatures…

On a side note, it looks like we’re approaching a critical mass (not a Gnarled one) of enchantments and artifacts in the format, so that cards like Sundering Vitae and perhaps even Primeval Light deserve consideration as maindeck options. I definitely find it reassuring that a lot of the creature removal is so versatile, especially Faith’s Fetters, Mortify and Putrefy.

Wurmweaver Coil
Enchant Green creature is very annoying, and easy to forget. Keep an eye out for people playing this on their Screeching Griffins or Mourning Thrulls, because they can’t. I’m not accusing anyone of cheating here, just forgetfulness. It was like that one time when I was playing Mirage on Magic Online; I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t let me play my Armor of Thorns, until I realised that all creatures in play were Black and the Armor enchants non-Black creature. Ledgewalker is the target you really want for the Coil.

Triple Guildpact Draft
While this Draft format has no real relevance to anyone or their dog, it is a reasonably fun way of getting to know the new format. Unlike, say, Triple Betrayers, which was akin to banging your head against the wall until it bleeds. The wall that is, not your head. I did two such Drafts at the prerelease and drafted Gruul both times. My first deck was quite awful and had just no way of enabling Bloodthirst and no hope of winning unless the monsters were bloodthirsty. The second time round, I put a much greater emphasis on one-drops and guys that are good regardless, such as Streetbreaker Wurm, and I won the draft fairly comfortably.

I particularly recommend you try to draft the Izzet, as they’re really weird and it’s good to come to grips with that without any pesky Dimir or Boros cards clogging it all up.

Conclusion
Ravnica/Guildpact sealed is still a bit nebulous in my mind. Fortunately, there is still some time before the Pro Tour Qualifiers start around here, so I’ve got time to practice. I’ll be back soon, looking at some proper two Guildpact booster Sealed Decks.

Until then, may your Bloodthirst be sated.

Martin

Addendum: Rogue’s Gallery
In the last triple Ravnica Draft I did, I started off drafting Selesnya, but the cards for it just weren’t coming. So against all my instincts I started picking up Blue cards. There were, however, no Black cards around, and even if there were I would’ve avoided them. Instead I won the Draft with the U/G deck below, in large part due to the synergy of Bramble Elemental with Flight of Fancy. Remember, folks, just because you love them Blue cards, doesn’t mean you need to draft Dimir, the most boring deck ever. Better yet, if you draft U/G, then you take those precious Blue cards away from those filthy sneaky fellas. I know this is pretty pointless at this stage, but I didn’t feel comfortable ending an article without bitching about Dimir. I think this also bodes well for the U/G archetype once Dissension comes out.

Creatures (16)
1 Surveilling Sprite
1 Drake Familiar
1 Transluminant
1 Dimir Guildmage
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Golgari Brownscale
3 Snapping Drake
1 Scatter the Seeds
1 Belltower Sphinx
2 Bramble Elemental
1 Vedalken Dismisser
1 Halcyon Glaze

Other Spells (8)
1 Stasis Cell
1 Faith’s Fetters
2 Flight of Fancy
1 Gather Courage
2 Farseek
1 Dimir Signet

Lands (16)
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City Tree
2 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Plains
6 Forest
6 Island

Creatures (46)

Lands (5)

Spells (39)