Welcome to the last installment of my first Guildpact review. Today, I’ll round out the series by discussing the different three-color combinations opened with the coming of the new Guilds, and give you an overview on everything discussed, along with some Sealed Deck tips. Here goes!
W/R/b
As with the R/W/g deck, it’s not a viable option to play a very aggressive Boros-type deck, as your mana will mess your plans up too often. You should be looking to draft the Boros cards slightly differently than usual in Ravnica. If we check out what Black and White have to offer in the third booster, you’ll see that the best few commons are Shrieking Grotesque, Ghost Warden, Douse in Gloom, Ostiary Thrull, Blind Hunter, and Pillory of the Sleepless, all of which are especially good when you’re trying to hold the ground and attack through the air. So what I’ll be looking for in particular from Ravnica are cards with a similar function; I’ll rate flying creatures more highly, as well as spot removal effects like Faith’s Fetters and Thundersong Trumpeter to control the fatties.
W/R/u
As my example from yesterday shows, it’s hard to keep a consistent mana base in aggressive decks without slowing yourself down too much by playing color fixers. Therefore, if you want to draft W/R/u, I think you should be looking for more controllish cards to match with the Izzet Guild cards. Popular common Boros cards that fit this description are Thundersong Trumpeter, Benevolent Ancestor, Faith’s Fetters, Galvanic Arc, and Viashino Fangtail. The last mentioned combines greatly with Izzet’s ability to repeatedly deal a certain amount of damage; the Fangtail widens your range quite significantly.
U/B/r
At the first glimpse, Dimir and Izzet seem to have the best synergy of all Guilds, because of Dimir’s ability to easily take control of the board with cheap defenders and efficient removal spells, while building up card advantage using pure card advantage spells, card manipulation (Lurking Informant) and now also Izzet’s card advantage engine. Dimir also has quite a few cards that have great synergy in the comes-into-play effects theme: Peel from Reality, Mark of Eviction, Vedalken Dismisser, Keening Banshee, and Mausoleum Turnkey. The deck will sometimes have a hard time getting rid of a fatty without spending too many cards on it, but flying creatures combined with spells that are used for tempo advantage, like Dismisser or Repeal, also allow you to engage in a damage race if you can’t safely play the control game.
U/B/w
The Dimir-Orzhov deck seems like it could be an aggressive deck with many flying creatures, but I think it’s more likely that it’ll be a semi-control deck that has a very steady kill condition with its airborne menace. Black is the main color for this deck, meaning that you’ll have access to loads of good removal spells, both in Ravnica and Guildpact. Blue gives you some good defensive creatures and Snapping Drake, and it also provides the necessary card advantage spells. Where the old Dimir decks sometimes found it difficult in acquiring enough flying creatures, Guildpact offers two of the best flyers in Shrieking Grotesque and Blind Hunter, and any time you can get your hands on Stratozeppelid it’ll be amazing.
As for now, my favorite archetypes would be G/W/B and U/B/r. Selesnya/Golgari/Orzhov seems to be the deepest combination of Guilds, therefore it’s hard to get cut from your right badly enough. You might not always get the best deck at the table as it’ll be a popular drafting choice, but it’s also a very safe bet. Dimir/Izzet looks like it’s the most powerful deck on paper, and I’d like to start any draft with Dimir as I still think it’s the most powerful individual Guild. It is quite hard though to get into Dimir as it’s pretty popular and not very deep, since many players at the table will be dipping in on your Black removal spells.
Apart from the changes in Guild evaluation, individual cards have also changes in quality, so I’ll give you a summary of what Ravnica cards or strategies I think changed the most in their value.
Peel from Reality has gone waaaaaaaaaaaay up in value; you used to draft it more highly when you had a Vedalken Dismisser or Keening Banshee, and now Guildpact offers three commons that have incredible synergy with it: Steamcore Weird, Ogre Savant and Izzet Chronarch. Izzet often revolves around such effects and Peel from Reality is an ideal card to make it work.
The U/B/r deck has a pack less of fatty removal compared to the classic Dimir decks, and a pack of Guildpact containing a lot of card advantage tricks. Card-drawing spells are still good, but good answers to fatties like Clinging Darkness, Disembowel, and Stinkweed Imp should now be picked higher as they’re rarer.
Red is no longer the worst color by a mile, as most people agreed it was in the triple Ravnica draft format. This makes the best two Red commons; Viashino Fangtail and Galvanic Arc, a lot better as you should no longer be afraid to get trapped into Boros.
Cleansing Beam was also quite a good Red card, but it’s lost a lot of its power since people are more likely to be three or four colors, and there are a lot of playable sacrifice outlets in the new set.
I’ve always liked Rolling Spoil more than others, and it’s even better now, as you’re more likely to take out a color of mana your opponent had only one of. It kills more than you’d think in the format; most of the times I had it it’s been great to me and I think everyone should try it once more.
Signets, common dual-lands, and other mana fixers have become more valuable to everyone, as there aren’t that many decks around anymore that don’t necessarily need the mana fixing. Boros decks wanted a creature on each of turns 2 through 5, Dimir decks had many two-drops already and Selesnya decks were able to use their creatures as mana sources. Now it’s unlikely that you’ll play only two colors, so there isn’t any other real way than to grab mana fixers.
The classic aggressive Boros deck seems to have diminished; as the Boros cards will become more popular with the upgrade of Red as a color, and you don’t usually have enough packs to complete a Boros deck without splashing a third color. You’ll want to play a third color, and you’ll need color fixers to make it happen and that just doesn’t fit into aggressive game plans. The Boros cards are certainly not outdated; they should just be valued differently: you shouldn’t be forced to play cards like Sell-Sword Brute or Viashino Slasher anymore.
Millstone engines are harder to build a deck around since you’re missing a pack and I don’t think this is the way it should be done in this format. You can still play millstone-effects, but only as an additional game plan since most Dimir-based decks will now be capable of finishing games by means of dealing damage as well.
Again I’d like to stress how important a single Lurking Informant can be for a Blue- and Black-based deck, I’ve won so many games when the board position had stabilized but Lurking Informant gave me huge card quality advantage. Unless you’re in a tight spot and you need to draw your way out of the situation, it’s correct to use the Informant on your opponent and not on yourself. This is true because when you activate Lurking Informant, the activation has been successful when you mill the person that was targeted, and since everyone plays more spells than mana sources, you’re more likely to mill a card from your opponent’s deck than yours (assuming you mill every land on your side and spell on his side). Unless, of course, the concentration of lands and spells is very different from the deck’s average division, in which case you should count the amount of spells someone has drawn and estimate how many are left in his deck. Apart from this, you’ll want to mill your opponent rather than yourself if you have more millstone cards available.
Of course, you could skip all this strategy and draft a five color deck if you’re feeling lucky. You can pick up all the mana fixers that come in your way and every powerful spell in any Guild passing by, but I’m not sure if the color fixers are still picked low enough for this plan to work. In triple-Ravnica, the various Signets and common double-mana lands tended to go round the table really late, as not every deck needed these mana fixers, but I think that every drafter at the table wants a few of these. I’ll be surprised if they still go round as late as they used to.
That’s all I got for you at this point for the Draft portion of the Limited format, but I do have some tips on building your Sealed Deck as well. The Sealed Deck part of tournaments has never been my favorite, since the difference in quality of card pools is major, and you don’t have any influence on it apart from tipping the judges. I do think this Sealed format favors the better player more than other Sealed formats though, as every Sealed Deck I’ve seen so far had many options available and that’s all because of the many cards supporting multi-color decks. Choosing your colors in Sealed Deck has always been a question of power versus consistency, and this format is all about this principle, as you’ll have many, many options to splash in every Sealed Deck card pool you open, and not only one splash choice each time. Here are the four main questions I ask myself when I build a sealed deck, in any format:
Is your deck powerful enough on its own to avoid splashing and do you have enough cards for it?
Is the difference between the cards you’re cutting and splashing significant enough to make the splash worthwhile?
Are the cards you’re thinking of actually splashable? By this, I mean are they easy to cast (single colored mana), and are they still good in late-game situations when you have to wait until you’ve got the right mana to cast it?
Do you have enough color fixers to not mess up your mana base too much?
The last item is not usually a problem in this format, and that’s why the other three questions are a lot more important and your decision-making skills are put to the test even more.
Lastly I’d like to add the RRG Sealed Deck table that I introduced to Frank, who worked with it and applied it at Grand Prix Richmond. The table’s function is to eliminate color combinations that don’t have enough playable cards, and show you the rest clearly, as it’s otherwise often quite chaotic during deck construction. The idea is that you divide your playable cards into twelve piles, like this:
| U | ||||
| RU | UB | |||
| R | RW | W | BW | B |
| RG | WG | BG | ||
| G |
If you put a number next to each color or color combo that represents the amount of playable cards in that pile, you can easily add the numbers for each common three-color combination (a three-color combo with two Guilds in it) and eliminate the combinations that just don’t have enough cards available. It’s also relatively easy to put the piles out on a table like this, but probably still quite chaotic. Once the format has completed, I don’t know what to do during deck construction but try everything out, it will probably be harder than ever to build your deck optimally.
That’s all for my first review on the new Limited environment. Right now I don’t think that I could come up with a specific strategy that I’d say would be best, as I haven’t had the opportunity to try everything out yet, but I’ll try my best and if I think I’ve found one of the better archetypes, I’ll again try to put it to words and hopefully you’ll tune back in for more reading. As for now, thanks for taking the time to read this series of articles and I hope it helped you out!
-Julien