Limited Lessons — A Two-Headed Giant Draft Build Session

To refresh from last week’s 2HG walkthrough, the goal today is to build the best two decks possible from the following cardpool..

2HG Draft Cardpool

Nick Eisel

Test deck on 03-04-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (52)

Lands (3)

1 Desert
2 Gemstone Caverns

Spells (35)

As I mentioned in the walkthrough last week, when the draft was over we felt we’d end up with a G/R/b deck and a U/W one. This week I want to examine the number of different ways you can actually build this cardpool and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each.

The first thing we did during deck construction was to sort out the cards by color and also make a separate pile for the Slivers to see if there were enough to make it a viable theme. The list of Slivers is as follows.

Sinew Sliver
Sidewinder Sliver
Watcher Sliver
Reflex Sliver
Bonesplitter Sliver
Battering Sliver
Firewake Sliver

It didn’t take me long to make the executive decision that we would not be playing Slivers in these decks. After that we started looking at the actual colors, and the first issue that came up was whether or not we even had enough Blue to make a deck. Let’s take a closer look at the Blue after I take away all of the unplayables.

Blue
Temporal Eddy
Wipe Away
2 Spiketail Drakeling
2 Gossamer Phantasm
Shaper Parasite
Mistform Ultimus

Not looking very deep to me. I suppose I should’ve also included Mistform Ultimus in the Sliver section above, though it wouldn’t change anything anyway. While these cards are all playable in theory, I’ve already expressed my disdain for Temporal Eddy and there is a reason that the Gossamer Phantasms go last pick…they suck in 2HG. If you remove those cards from the above list of so-called playables, you’ll see that there’s no way Blue is deep enough to make a dent. The right call then is to just splash the Shaper Parasite into one of the decks and forget the rest of the Blue.

Black
Haunting Hymn
Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
Dark Withering
Dread Return
Brain Gorgers
Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore
Kor Dirge

It seems we’ve only drafted three colors with some splash potential here. I suppose it’d be possible to play the Haunting Hymn, Dark Withering, and Evil Eye, but looking over the card pool they just don’t seem to fit into the grand scheme of things. The better option in my mind is to just plan on splashing the Endrek Sahr and the Kor Dirge and to leave the rest of the Black on the bench because we don’t even have any real Madness outlets to power up the Withering on the splash.

Now that I’ve narrowed it down to essentially three colors with two potential splash options, what’s the next step? I had my teammate lay out the White cards by themselves to see exactly how deep they were. In the meantime I also laid out the G/R build and put some potential options off to the side.

The White cards were so deep that they were basically able to stand on their own and could easily support one of the two splash options with either the Blue or Black cards. It was nice too to be able to build a near Mono-White deck if we wanted so that our Shades of Trokair would be especially potent. At this point in the construction I had the Black splash laid into the G/R deck and we were considering the Shaper Parasite in the White deck. We also decided that the Desert definitely belonged in the White build simply because the mana was going to be really good there and there was no reason to compromise the G/R build with a colorless land. While we thought these builds were alright, I suggested we try G/B/u and W/R in order to also be able to power up the Ana Battlemage fully. The builds ended up looking like this.

Gemhide Sliver
Scryb Ranger
Kavu Predator
Thelonite Hermit
Shaper Parasite
2 Penumbra Spider
Scarwood Treefolk
Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder
Stonebrow, Krosan Hero
2 Citanul Woodreaders
Ana Battlemage

Chromatic Star
Molder
Might of Old Krosa
Evolution Charm
2 Strength in Numbers
Kor Dirge
Assault / Battery
Haunting Hymn
Dark Withering

I didn’t even bother figuring out the mana for this because I really didn’t like the looks of it after putting it together. Sure, it has lots of powerful spells, but it doesn’t add much board presence to the duo and some of the spells are pretty suboptimal as is the mana with the double splash going on. The real problem however was that there were far too many playables for the W/R deck and we didn’t even know where to begin cutting cards. It looked like this all laid out.

2 Shade of Trokair
2 Benalish Cavalry
Knight of the Holy Nimbus
2 Goblin Skycutter
2 Saltfield Recluse
Riftmarked Knight
Flickering Spirit
Calciderm
Stingscourger
3 Castle Raptors

Dawn Charm
Thunder Totem
Griffin Guide
Fortify
Dead / Gone
Rift Bolt
Conflagrate
Sulfurous Blast
Fire Whip
Return to Dust

That’s 26 playables. Care to cut three of them? I sure don’t want to put any of those cards in my sideboard in this format. If I had to do it, I’m sure I could figure out a way, but again the main problem with these two builds is that I didn’t like how the Green deck was set up at all and felt that it was much weaker than if we just built it G/R. Another problem with these builds is that we had both Molder and Return to Dust in the maindecks, and while I’d rather not cut Return to Dust from the W/R build, there are no better options in the Green deck since Gaea’s Anthem isn’t playable there at all.

After some consideration we decided to resort to the original G/R/b and W/u builds we had earlier before we finally put the pieces of the puzzle together, and found what I believe are the best builds for this card pool. The decision that resulted in our final builds seems so simple to me now but really made such a huge difference in overall card quality. All we did was simply switch the splashes! The G/R deck would now splash the Shaper Parasite and the Ana Battlemage Blue kicker, and the White deck would splash Endrek Sahr and Kor Dirge. Endrek Sahr is pretty good with three copies of Castle Raptors anyway, and we also had the Fortify in the White deck which got a ton better with the inclusion of Endrek. Another side benefit of this change was that our Hermit now had some deceptive ability with the Shaper Parasite as a second morph in the deck.

We ended up building the following two decks.

2HG Draft Deck 1

Nick Eisel

Test deck on 03-11-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (14)

Lands (17)

Spells (9)

This deck was somewhat difficult to build, and the final few cuts were crucial. I want to talk a bit about each card that didn’t make it, and the reasoning behind these choices.

Chromatic Star
If you look at how deep the White cards are, you’ll see that there’s no way this was ever going to fit into that deck. The logical place for it then would be here to power the Battlemage further as well as to smooth colors for something like Sulfurous Blast. This didn’t make the cut simply because I felt we had enough fixing with the Gemhide and Evolution Charm already as we could still cast the Battlemage without kicker and morph the Shaper.

Molder
I mentioned this one earlier and I was more than happy to leave it out of the deck since we were definitely running the Return to Dust in the White build.

Fury Charm
The only thing I can really see this helping with is to unsuspend the Riftmarked Knight early. We have artifact kill in Return to Dust and plenty of tricks and ways to give trample with the two Strength in Numbers.

Aetherflame Wall
I really wanted to play this guy because I love him in 2HG, but it just wasn’t happening this time around. All of the other two drops in the deck are much better and there are also the Penumbra Spiders and Castle Raptors to hold down the fort. If we had less removal I might try to squeeze this guy in but I can’t see ever having a problem with Shadow with so much burn.

Gaea’s Anthem
I was almost sure we would end up playing this card when we drafted it, and in fact I remember being very happy to get it later than expected. As it turned out, with Endrek Sahr not in the deck the card just didn’t do enough and had to be trimmed. It’s too bad because I’d love so see a 3/5 Penumbra Spider alongside a Castle Raptor and then see how our opponents planned on getting through it.

Might of Old Krosa
This is just worse than Strength in Numbers and pretty marginal overall in this format. I’d only play this if I really had no better options.

Suq’Ata Lancer
I know I was advocating Flanking in this format, and this guy was very close to making the cut in the deck. He had to get cut in the end as I think Goblin Skycutter is just far better, as it doubles as a removal spell and we already had plenty of Flanking in the White deck.

Flamecore Elemental
This guy can be great in 2HG, but this time around our card pool was just too strong and I’d rather have him in B/R anyway. We shouldn’t have much problem punching through and the only thing he really has going for him is that he survives Sulfurous Blast, but so do most of our guys anyway! He’s just a tad too slow to make the cut here.

Needlepeak Spider
Penumbra Spider doesn’t need any help. Thanks anyway though, and thanks for dying to any removal spell or creature you could possibly come in contact with. The sad thing is that this guy was in the deck until the last minute, when I finally convinced my teammate that we should just put Scarwood Treefolk back in as we had plenty of good guys on defense already.

On to the second deck.

2HG Draft Deck 2

Nick Eisel

Test deck on 03-11-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (15)

Lands (17)

Spells (8)

Dark Withering and Haunting Hymn could’ve both potentially made the cut. We decided it wasn’t worth screwing up the mana for them though, and the spells we have in the deck are basically just as good anyway. We also have Ana Battlemage on discard duty in the other deck, so the Hymn wasn’t as necessary. Finally, Desert is definitely getting played and this would make the mana rough with two Shades and many other double White cards. Zealot Il-Vec was the only real White card to get axed, as it was the worst card when the deck was laid out. I could see him making the cut and being fine in some decks, but our pool was again just too strong and we didn’t have any Scouts to search for him or any other reason to make him better than normal.

I feel like I’ve pretty much gone over everything I can think of in terms of why we built the way we did. You really need to examine every possibility, as it’s likely that your plan during the draft is not the best way to build your decks anyway. I’m sure sometimes it will be, and you can get better at this over time, but a few small picks can change the entire orientation of one of these drafts and affect what archetypes you end up in.

As far as the results for this draft, we played single elimination and won the first round in a very close game. The final turns involved Strength in Numbers and then a Rift Bolt to the face to deal exactly enough damage. Mantle of Leadership was also pretty strong in the first game. In the finals one of our opponents stumbled on lands, and our draws were very good. Needless to say it wasn’t a real game and we dispatched them pretty easily and won the whole draft.

I hope you enjoyed both parts of this walkthrough, and I’ll be more than willing to answer any questions you have in the forums.

Nick Eisel
Soooooo on MTGO
[email protected]