Hey everyone!

This week I’m going to talk about Limited in the new, two-set format. As much as I’d like to discuss Standard (and some serious testing is underway, so I have a lot to discuss) with the Pro Tour coming up in less than a week, it’s highly classified information. I could tell you, but then Strangleroot Geist would have to kill you. So you’ll have to wait until next week’s article, or hopefully the Pro Tour coverage, to see the Australian tech in all its glory ;)

There are a few things that have emerged from our testing that aren’t highly classified. Standard in four bullet points:

Out of the existing archetypes, Humans gained the most from the new set. Gather the Townsfolk is nuts with either Champion of the Parish or Honor of the Pure, and if you’re lucky enough to draw all three, your deck goes off. Turn 4 goldfishes are fairly routine. Disrespect White Weenie at your own peril.
Geralf’s Messenger is an extremely powerful card, but mono-black isn’t great. Your cards are individually very good, but you don’t have synergy, and you’ll lose in the midgame to the token decks. There may be a Zombie deck out there, but it’s not as simple as playing four of all the good black cards and a bunch of Swamps.
Thought Scour is nice, but the fact is that other archetypes gained a lot more from Dark Ascension than Delver did. It’s not the only top dog anymore—if you really want to beat it, you probably can.
Lingering Souls is nuts. Strangleroot Geist only slightly less so. Play one or the other, or play Delver. (Probably don’t play all three.)

Limited

This draft format boils down to one very important concept: there are no top-quality removal spells. All the removal in the block is situational or otherwise awkward. Remember the days of M12, where we had Doom Blade, Incinerate, and Gideon’s Lawkeeper? In Innistrad, those have been replaced by Victim of Night, Avacynian Priest, and Harvest Pyre. Still not bad cards by any stretch of the imagination, but Victim doesn’t kill half the creatures, Priest doesn’t tap the other half, and Harvest Pyre sometimes doesn’t do anything at all.

Imagine a hypothetical Limited world in which there were no removal spells at all. What would we find?

Creature enhancements and combat tricks would become a lot better.
Evasion would be very important.
Expensive creatures would face a high barrier to entry, particularly large dorks.
It would be difficult to play control, as control in Limited is usually based on having enough answers to outlast the early tempo loss.
Any quasi-removal spells which did exist (like Frost Breath) would be awesome.
Falter effects would be sweet.

All of these are exactly what we see in the Innistrad Limited format. Typically, a card like Prey Upon would be good, not great. After all, it’s situational, and you run the risk of getting 2-for-1ed. But the world of Innistrad is different. In my entire Limited experience of the format, I have never gotten 2-for-1ed casting a Prey Upon. The instant-speed removal spells are few enough and narrow enough that’s it’s simple to play around them—use a Werewolf if you fear Victim of Night or a big creature if you fear a burn spell. (There’s literally nothing in the first set that removes a big Werewolf/Zombie at instant speed, not even bounce.)

Moment of Heroism is another card that would be of merely average quality in a typical Limited set, but Innistrad sees its value skyrocket. It’s a risk/reward type card—if your creature isn’t killed in response, it’s great, netting a favorable trade in combat and 4-6 life for just two mana. Having the Heroism at the right Moment turns races in your favor and gets you out of positions no other card would. The risk you run is, of course, getting two-for-oned by removal in response to your casting it, but the fact is that it just doesn’t happen all that often. If you’re playing against U/W, there is no card in the format they could have to punish you for an ill-timed combat trick—there’s no Unsummon or Disperse or Vapor Snag.

This concept holds even truer with the release of Dark Ascension. Let’s compare the common removal in Innistrad to that in the brand new set.

White Innistrad: Avacynian Priest, Bonds of Faith, Rebuke, Smite the Monstrous

White Dark Ascension: Burden of Guilt

Black Innistrad: Victim of Night, Dead Weight, Corpse Lunge

Black Dark Ascension: Death’s Caress, Tragic Slip

Blue Innistrad: Silent Departure, Claustrophobia

Blue Dark Ascension: Griptide

Green Innistrad: Prey Upon

Green Dark Ascension: Nothing

Red Innistrad: Brimstone Volley, Harvest Pyre, Geistflame

Red Dark Ascension: Fires of Undeath, Wrack with Madness

Obviously Dark Ascension is a much smaller set than Innistrad, so it makes sense that it should have half as many removal spells. But the removal here is actually even weaker. Burden of Guilt is awkward in mana-light hands; Death’s Caress and Wrack with Madness are clunky; and Griptide is not much of a removal spell at all (although you now do have something to respect out of U/W decks, so play those Moments of Heroism accordingly). The only two really quality removal spells in the set are Fires of Undeath and Tragic Slip—in Innistrad, any of the cards listed, barring perhaps Corpse Lunge, Rebuke, and Harvest Pyre, could be worthy of a first pick.

So the points listed above are very important to be aware of. Let’s examine each one of them in greater detail.

1. Creature enhancements and combat tricks are a lot better.

As mentioned above, Moment of Heroism is a card that benefits from this in a big way, but it’s not the only one. Skillful Lunge, Prey Upon, Wild Hunger, Spectral Flight, Butcher’s Cleaver, and even Ranger’s Guile are better than they would normally be. Slaughter Cry was cut more often than not from M12 draft decks, but it’s unlikely Skillful Lunge will suffer the same fate, even though pound for pound it’s a significantly worse card than Moment. Gaining six life incidentally is a big deal.

It’s important to note that removal isn’t actually nonexistent in Innistrad—merely a lot more situational. You can still get blown out if you use your tricks incautiously. Victim of Night is an important removal spell to be aware of, as is Harvest Pyre, as is Griptide, as is Rebuke.

2. Evasion is very important.

In formats with little removal, cheap evasive creatures are much better placed to get there. One of my favorite two-drops from the triple-Innistrad format was Spectral Rider. In games you started off Spectral Rider into Chapel Geist, they’d be on the back foot so quickly it was easy to finish it with a few tricks or a second flier.

Luckily for lovers of two-power, evasive two-drops everywhere, Spectral Rider has been reprinted at common in a small set. Of course, I’m talking about Highborn Ghoul. This guy is very good in any sort of aggressive black deck, and he makes Vampire Interloper better as well by providing redundancy. Somberwald Dryad is a card that I think is underappreciated—Cliff Threader was a reasonable fifth pick or so in Zendikar, and the Dryad has an extra point of toughness. Grizzly Bear 60% of the time and two-mana Phantom Warrior the other 40% averages out to a pretty good card.

White actually takes home the aggressively costed evasive guys trophy. Voiceless Spirit and Chapel Geist from Innistrad were already both very good, and they’re joined by Niblis of the Mist and Silverclaw Griffin in the new set. Niblis of the Breath is better than Gideon’s Lawkeeper if you’re beating down, and if you’re white, you should be aiming to beat down more often than not.

Another consequence of this is that Clinging Vines is much better than it would normally be. Also, Pyreheart Wolf is my early pick for most underrated card in Dark Ascension. Does anyone remember how good Caterwauling Boggart was in the mono-Goblin deck? Pyreheart Wolf is like that in every deck. Attacking with it isn’t even a losing proposition—they’re welcome to double block it, probably taking six in the process; it’ll just come back for more next turn.

3. Expensive creatures are clunky—you don’t want too many.

Alpha Tyrranax was basically my favorite card ever in the days of Scars of Mirrodin (I have more of him on MODO than almost any other common). But Scars was a format where a savvy green mage could pick up lots of Myrs and splash cheap creature kill. It was often correct to draw first in that format—you could trade one-for-one easily enough and often enough that you’d get to a late game in which Tyrranax would be the biggest thing standing.

Innistrad is an entirely different animal. Thanks to Silent Departure being one of the best “removal” spells, five- and six-drops that aren’t Bloodgift Demon don’t easily make the cut. Pitchburn Devils, Grizzled Outcasts, Nearheath Stalker—all perfectly good cards on their own merits, but having more than two or three in your deck risks clunking up your draw while they kill you with Niblis of the Mist and Feeling of Dread. In one of my early drafts with Dark Ascension, I decided to experiment if this was still true, taking Nearheath Stalker over Hinterland Hermit. Even though Stalker is pretty good, this still turned out to be a huge mistake. In Scars, sure, I have played three Alpha Tyrranaxes in the one deck, but these days you can’t reasonably expect to have enough removal for the early guys to justify playing five huge creatures—two or three is about maximum.

4. Control is different. You can’t play conventional control.

Control in Limited is not the same as control in Constructed. Well, in a sense I suppose it is—they’re both decks that try to stabilize the board and win with a big threat while the opponent topdecks Doomed Travelers. But Constructed decks are much more streamlined about it. In Limited, you don’t have Day of Judgment to stabilize the board; you have Instill Infections or whatever other nonsense you can pick up.

Removal is traditionally what you use to stabilize the board. However, in the absence of good creature kill, creative drafters have turned elsewhere. G/U Spider Spawning is an example of a control deck. Your “stabilize the board” effect is actually a single card—Spider Spawning; you don’t need the typical early removal spells because 7 or so Spiders shuts any offense down. Burning Vengeance is another example; you want to grind them out and kill all their creatures by turn 10 or so. So is U/B with tons of graveyard interactions, Forbidden Alchemies, Divinations, and Think Twices. It’s no longer a case of kill your guys, drop a 6/5; you want to gradually establish a dominating board presence.

Does Spawning still stay a deck with the release of Dark Ascension? It gains Screeching Skaab and Thought Scour to make up for the loss of a pack of Armored Skaab, Forbidden Alchemy, and Mulch. Tracker’s Instincts is a particularly nice one at uncommon. The main loss is a full pack’s worth of chances to pick up Spider Spawning itself. The difference between a U/G mill-yourself deck with this card and one without this card is enormous. You regularly put in excess of 10 Spiders onto the table, and good luck to them ever getting through that. Grim Flowering is pretty exciting though, and you can even get it back from your bin with Mystic Retrieval, so maybe there’s still something there.

5. Any quasi-removal spells are awesome.

I don’t believe Silent Departure would have been as good in any other format in the past three years as in Innistrad. Because so many games come down to tempo, this card is often Swords to Plowshares with flashback. This is a big part of the reason W/U beatdown is such a great archetype—efficient, evasive creatures plus tempo effects trump all the slower strategies.

Feeling of Dread is also exceptional. Frost Breath was good back in M12 (also a highly tempo-based format), and Feeling is mostly just better. It’s either a massive Falter effect for a single turn (a la Choking Tethers) or a Permafrost Trap-type card that locks down their relevant creatures for as long as necessary. Obviously don’t play this card if you’re trying to take the control role, but if you’re W/U and you’re not attacking with cheap fliers, you’re probably doing something wrong.

6. Falter effects are sweet.

Well, they would be, if there were any, really. Feeling of Dread does perform that role sometimes, but there’s a card that might actually be playable from Dark Ascension—Sudden Disappearance. A six-mana Falter would usually be trash, but it’s in a good color, and it has a couple other decent modes like killing tokens. Don’t slam this into just any white deck you draft, but with upwards of 16 creatures, especially if you’re lacking evasion, it might just make the cut. It also handles Spider Spawning, so bonus points for that.

Until next time,

Jeremy

tux_the_penguin on MODO