Magical Hack – Learning New Limit(ed)s

With the Lorwyn prerelease tomorrow, we get to have a good gander at trying to figure out what makes Lorwyn move and shake. Last year, for Time Spiral, we here at Magical Hack chose not to reveal any “spoiled” cards outside of the Officially Teased Spoiler Cards. This year, for the start of the next Limited block, I don’t really feel as if the cards we’ve seen so far really give any hints as to the character of the set… and unlike last year with our Orb of Insight shenanigans listing all the keywords in Time Spiral, we can’t put the details together barring outside information.

Those of you who are actively trying to avoid spoilers can back away from your “Back” buttons. We aren’t going to talk about a single unofficially-previewed card… in anything resembling its actual form. I for one don’t feel like it is my place to make the decision to spoil or not to spoil for our good proprietor Pete Hoefling, and every time I write one of my prerelease preview articles I hear Groundskeeper Willie’s voice screaming “Hush, boy, d’ye want to get sued?” We can talk about a lot of the character of the expansion, and thus figure out its moving parts, without needing to discuss a single individual card. Last year this meant we got to look at all the keywords returning and bash them into each other to figure out how the cards worked. This led us to the early awareness of the fact that Time Spiral Limited was a very aggressive format, with time and therefore tempo being on everyone’s mind. This year we’re just going to see if we can’t figure out what makes the tribes tick, and how “tribal” your decks should aim to be. For many of us that will be readily apparent when we open a Sealed Deck pool tomorrow… but it isn’t tomorrow yet, and doing a bit of your thinking in advance can be a good way to use your time beneficially tomorrow.

As an example of how one should look at a new set, however, we’ll have a different method. I for one have been poking around with Masters Edition draft online, and one should have no reason to think they have learned enough about Limited in general to comment about a new and unknown Limited format such as Lorwyn if they can’t also show dividends in other Limited formats, even ones that aren’t neat and pretty. Masters Edition Draft is quite literally the opposite of “neat and pretty.” It’s full of terrible cards you don’t want to play, a basic land in each booster, and neither card draw nor mana-fixing. Adding to that, color-protection and landwalking and color opposition is everywhere… as are the double-colored mana symbols. My early looks into the format led me to drafting the most ridiculous deck I could imagine drafting in pretty much any format, given how well it works in the context of the format…

4 Cuombajj Witches

2 Brothers of Fire
2 Mindstab Thrull
1 Onulet
1 The Fallen
1 Derelor

3 Lightning Bolt
2 Fissure
2 Feast or Famine
2 Oubliette
1 Phyrexian Boon
1 Fire Covenant

1 Mishra’s Factory
9 Swamp
8 Mountain

If last week’s article was an extended lesson on how to go about building a deck that plays the same game over and over again, this could be the feather in its cap. This deck kills every creature the opponent plays, then beats down with some terribly inefficient creatures like 1/3s, or maybe a 2/3 that hits like a 3/3 if you’re really lucky. It doesn’t matter what you kill with, because everything your opponent plays is dead. I didn’t lose a game with this deck, and yes, this was a 4-3-2-2. I wanted to goof around and figure out how the parts work together, which meant before I put $15 on the line I wanted a safety net of two boosters if I lost my second match. If everyone is passing you the Black cards and the Red cards, sure, you can have a deck like this… but really, it shouldn’t work that way, you should be able to get one or the other, but not both.

Trying to get the same deck a second time didn’t work so well, because that second time there weren’t people asleep at the wheel passing Witches 6th to follow up on my fifth-pick Banishings. That was when I learned how easy it was to fall behind and never catch up, ending up with 18 playables you wouldn’t absolutely cringe to see, then filling it out with another awful creature or two, an Artifact Blast, then start on packing in some Bestial Furies. And let me tell you, I was pleasantly surprised… Bestial Fury on an Erg Raiders is a pretty sweet turn 2 / turn 3 play, if your opponent’s turn 2 play was Order of Leitbur. (Even sweeter when they don’t even bother to read Bestial Fury, and take five instead of two. Twice. This was a 4-3-2-2.) I’d escaped that draft with two boosters to my name, and a valuable lesson: accidents happen and you get shipped the nuts sometimes, but you can’t plan on accidents happening. That said, my plan was to avoid drafting what should generally be the two most desired colors at the same time, because there is not very much of a barrel to start scraping here in Masters Edition.

My continuing investigations led to a torrent of Black/Green decks, which wasn’t awful, but with which I never did better than 50/50. I played against a reasonable number of opponents, several of whom were even pretty decent… you don’t have to be afraid of someone with a 1750 Limited rating in a draft queue, but you should respect the fact that they are well above average in the “knows what they are doing” department. I saw some aggressive Green decks with lots of Ghazban Ogres, and pretty much everyone playing Green paired it with Black, just like I had done… and plenty of White decks trying to lock down combat behind a wall of banding, which of course falls completely apart with a single Cuombajj Witch or a well-timed Feast or Famine, of which I always had two or three. These B/G decks were pretty good… but I was still doing just a bit better than 50-50 with them, and never won a draft outright with them, generally losing in the finals to a better Black deck (and yes, it was usually the table’s Black/Red deck).

Somewhere in here I got a solid grasp of the format, perhaps around when I had to learn to beat an Order of Leitbur with a deck that was 80% Black cards. Your average White drafter was aiming to pair Black with his White, apparently, though why they were taking White cards at all could be raised as a valid question. And the format is absolutely chock-full of decks trying to have double colored mana on turn 2 or turn 3, and often different double-colored mana spells on those turns… Order of the Ebon Hand or Cuombajj Witches into Thorn Thallid, as a common opening hand would wastefully develop. Rarely is a game put away quickly, which is a problem because a lot of the Green decks really want to put the game away quickly. I’m not so thoroughly convinced that Quentin Martin’s B/G archetype from his Limited Information article this week is all that and a bag of chips, after all. Games, not to mention matches, tend to go long and give players plenty of time to play every card in their hand. The best color is a more controlling color, and with all of this Protection and Banding and what-not floating around out there, combat tends to devolve into a quagmire until someone gets one big threat rolling or pulls off an impressive push.

And out of all of this, I saw exactly two opponents in probably 40 matches playing Islands. One was a bad White deck that was trying to hold the fort with Illusionary Walls while its pesky small fliers chewed away at the opponent. The other was a bad Blue/Black deck that just happened to neatly pair up his Telekinesis with my Erg Raiders at rather inconvenient moments. I figured at first there had to be a reason, because Blue looked just awful, but maybe my perceptions were just skewed because I was always taking Oubliette over Phantom Monster. If the best Blue had to offer was Telekinesis, well… you’re joking, right?

But like I said, I was going 50-50 with pretty much everything, and that included decks that seemed ridiculous with a slew of Black removal spells. Then one time I started with the Red cards, waiting for the Black cards, and got passed a late Phantom Monster… which was how I learned that Blue-Red is actually quite amazing. My first deck of that sort had two Brothers of Fire, three Lightning Bolts, and so much quality I couldn’t believe it… it was a spicy little number that went something like this:

3 Dwarven Soldier
2 Horned Turtle
2 River Merfolk
1 Granite Gargoyle
2 Brothers of Fire
2 Phantom Monster
2 Mountain Yeti

2 Word of Undoing
2 Telekinesis
2 Fissure
3 Lightning Bolt

9 Island
8 Mountain

Unlike every other deck I ran into, I was playing good creatures on turns 2 through 4 and getting an early rush in, and actually had a solid combat trick (Telekinesis) to save my guys against the inevitable, format-defining Pump Knight blockers if I couldn’t keep one of my two Brothers of Fire in play long enough to wipe them out beforehand. The tempo-oriented push this deck was capable of was impressive, and I finished that first draft 3-0 with ease. I tried again… and got basically the same deck without the three Lightning Bolts, which I assumed meant I wasn’t winning this time. After all, the first had to be a fluke based on card strength, right? Another 3-0 and suddenly my eyes were open… and suddenly I was paying attention to what I was doing right, because that Vodalian Knights I’d stuck in my deck as card #23 actually destroyed my opponents’ aggressive pushes because they didn’t want to have to trade a pump knight for it… or couldn’t get past it with their fliers.

A third try, even messier than the second, “only” went 1-1; I faced a strong Red/Black deck and misplayed while I was at it, tapping mana wrong to skip playing River Merfolk one turn that actually ended up mattering. The fourth try, still messy and lacking Lightning Bolts, again went 3-0, bringing the total as of this article to 10-1 in the draft queues. Admittedly part of that could be chalked up to the fact that I was better than my opposition… but just talking deck on deck, it was never even close, I was winning matches in less than ten minutes and just stomping past the opponent because my cards allowed me to generate board situations that quickly overwhelmed the opponents’ defenses. It seems that in the world of double-colored one-toughness weenies, a more effective aggressive strategy can be put to work… especially when everyone’s claiming that there are no effective combat tricks in the format, even though there is at least one Instant-speed means of keeping your creature alive while either holding down something bigger or letting you trade your spell for their creature instead of your creature for their creature.

Does this look like a 3-0 draft deck to you? It didn’t to me… I was hoping to escape with two packs back and chalk it up to forcing a deck at the wrong time when I could have had Black cards out the wazoo… but it was in fact the winner of its table.

4 River Merfolk
2 Giant Tortoise
1 Dwarven Soldier
1 Vodalian Knights
1 Brothers of Fire
1 Dragon Engine
1 Mountain Yeti
2 Phantom Monster
2 Illusionary Forces

1 Homarid Spawning Bed
2 Telekinesis
3 Word of Undoing
2 Fissure

9 Island
8 Mountain

I for one thought I’d be lucky to escape with anything at all after wasting three packs and two tickets to pass Witches and Oubliettes and Feast or Famines every which way. Where’s the removal? What’s up with that janky Blue enchantment? In actuality, the creature beatdown curve was very efficient, and it’s not hard to drop a consistent beatdown with a single Blue mana up to keep your best creature alive against their removal spells. And that silly Spawning Bed was actually amazing… well, as amazing as any card can be that requires you to have a large number of Blue creatures in your deck before it does anything, in a format where it’s generally believed that Blue creatures not named Phantom Monster are terrible. It turned fliers into four power of attackers whenever a removal spell came calling, and made sure trades could never end up as favorable for the opponent so long as I had some mana available.

Why does this work, though, was the compelling question… after all, our example is to figure out what makes Masters Edition draft tick, so we can try and look at the same big picture for Lorwyn and figure out the correct approach to that Limited format by poking at it for insights. The reason this works, though, is the nature of the opponents’ cards and decks. With double-colored creatures everywhere, inefficiencies abound in the opponent’s opening hand… and while UU for River Merfolk doesn’t turn into 1RR for Brothers of Fire, that’s the only poor interaction, and Brothers of Fire isn’t a high value turn 3 play anyway due to its expensive activation cost. Aggressive push is very easy to manufacture, especially when you have the “better” cards like Lightning Bolt that don’t just bounce a creature but outright kill pretty much anything in the format short of Sea Sprite, Knights of Thorn, and Shambling Strider. Both Unsummon and Telekinesis prevent the opponent from killing your creatures, the former at any time you can keep up a Blue mana, the latter in combat regardless of first striking pump knights or what-have-you. The opponent’s attempts to build aggressive tempo are countered by those same one-mana cards, as well as the Wall of Turtle… of which I tend to play two, but usually have at least one more in the sideboard for aggressive decks with Erg Raiders and/or Ghazban Ogres.

And with the “important” cards being stuff like Telekinesis, as a combat trick, and things like Word of Undoing when people are taking Oubliette… well, it’s not exactly hard to get all the Blue cards you want at a table. With the record standing at 10-1 and climbing, this supposedly simplistic format might just be solved as far as I’m concerned. Quentin Martin presented one archetype as a “solution” to the format, while this is another… both he and I have had excellent results with our chosen archetypes so far, especially since we’re putting high value on our particular quirky cards (his Ghazban Ogres, my… well, Blue cards…) and willing to pass the opposition good cards to get them.

How can we try and figure out the same for Lorwyn, at least for a first pass? We can try and figure out how everything plays out in this new Tribal format, by looking at the mechanical interactions and the important things we’re always aiming for, combat tricks and removal spells. First off, we want to figure out how the tribes work, by putting them in contrast to things we already know:

If we want to think of the tribes as Guilds, comparing this to Ravnica-block draft, you have six two-color “guilds.” Selesnya (Kithkin), Boros (Giants), Azorius (Merfolk), Dimir (Faeries), Rakdos (Goblins) and Golgari (Elves). Blue has the fewest creature types overall, and thus seems almost to be the most focused tribe-wise, predominantly Merfolk and Faeries with some shapeshifting Changelings and some larger Elementals at the top of the mana curve. Presuming that tribal unity isn’t so easy to pull together… and let’s be honest, for most of these tribes you’re probably going to end up with mostly one tribe but probably a smattering of others as well, and not “just” the Changelings that will likely be the glue holding your deck together. Your White deck may be mostly the good Kithkin working together, but with some heavier-hitting Elementals, Treefolk, and Giants topping the curve, hopefully some of the ones that have mixed-tribe flavors going on in there with their little hobbit buddies.

If Blue is the most unified, and thus presumably the most potent as its commons and uncommons presumably work best together, Black is the most fragmented… it has Treefolk, Goblins, Faeries, and Elves among its major populations, as well as some changelings and elementals just like everybody else. Black makes up for this by being the color best equipped to kill creatures, as always, or at least matching with the discussion earlier about Masters Edition draft. If we want to look at the removal instead, we see:

Admittedly, we’re stretching the truth here… anything that could deal damage to something in combat besides via just blocking, or could prevent something from being able to attack, counted as “removal”… even if it’s bad removal, such as Blue’s “enchanted creature gains Flying and Defender” enchantment. Green likewise stretches to make “removal” count, since you can still count spells that create Provoke-type situations as “removal,” but for the most part these would be seen as so situational that they’d be laughed out of most serious discussions. White and Black have the most straight-up removal, caring very little about the size or other characteristics of the targeted creature, while Red is as before generally damage-based and thus limited by toughness. Green cares a lot about dealing with fliers more than any other type of creature, and gets removal specifically for them; the usual truths of the color pie and how those tendencies bias your removal effects continue to be true… unlike how things went the past two expansions with green Pacifisms and all that. Red and Black have the most plentiful removal, while Blue’s is generally limited to bounce (but also doesn’t count the plentiful Blue countermagic) and White’s is astoundingly versatile… and includes a Wrath in the rare slot, oh surprise of surprises. (This Wrath, however, is amazing. As in, amazingly unfair.)

So… overall, we’re going to see much the same status quo as always put forward by this Limited set: Green gets plenty of combat tricks but can’t really hurt a creature that doesn’t make the mistake of blocking. Blue is tricksy and can be absolutely dominant if all of its instant-speed plays work just right, and can either leave you hog-tied with all of your spells countered or get run over by the mounting tempo as things start wrong for them and never quite right themselves because countermagic does nothing to a permanent already in play. Black kills stuff and has reasonable creatures, in this case ones that have a harder time than average working well together… so you get more removal, but overall less card synergy which is where the other colors make up for that shortfall in plentiful removal. Red burns stuff, which is great when the problem cards are of manageable size but ineffective when we start talking about Giants and Treefolks and huge Elementals. White slides up and down the mana curve to suit your needs and works very well together with all of its creatures, since White’s “unity” theme is very powerfully advanced in a Tribal themed world; its removal isn’t plentiful but it is highly desirable due to its unusual potency. You can make any two-color combination work, in theory, but will want to trend towards things that promote “guild” unity, in a world with only six real guilds… and each color has its “any guild” cards, to work with what-have-you.

Card synergy, then, is more important than we usually see… and some guilds really can’t be that highly valued in Draft play, due to the fact that there are at least two tribes (Faeries and Kithkin) that can have a very punishing start if you start to fall behind. Kithkin swarm like effective White weenies, while Faeries tend to have tempo-positive effects… tap your guy, Force Spike your spell; fall behind an inch and they can push it to a mile, and did I mention they have a hefty dose of flying to their name? “Slow” is not the speed to aim for, which again will likely mean you’ll want to pick two tribes and two colors and stick to them… your slow and ponderous monsters can win you the day, but only if that faster tribe helps to ensure you’re still there when they come online instead of checking off the Drop box on the match slip.

So, is there any one best solution for Lorwyn Limited, as we go into the prerelease? An awareness of the format is probably a good thing to have… and it would look to me as if the “default” build you can expect your opponent to want to be playing is Black and Blue together: Blue for its countering and other instant-speed trickiness (often stapled to efficient fliers) and Black for its plentiful removal even if it doesn’t have plentiful card synergy among its mixed bag of tribes. Substitute Black with whichever color you actually have the most removal in, be it Red or White, and substitute Blue with whichever color you have the second-most removal in if the Blue isn’t quite strong. In every format regardless of the removal available in the other four colors, there’s always the Green option, a common actual default color for Sealed Deck play due to the fact that your Sealed Deck pool doesn’t always have plentiful removal. Green can easily supply sizable creatures and its own combat-oriented cards, meshing well with whatever color(s) of removal you have and usually being able to color-fix as well to gain access to multiple colors of fixing.

As to that last part… color fixing isn’t as plentiful as we’ve seen in recent blocks in the Green cards, but every color has access to a little help with some of the uncommon lands hearkening back to Odyssey’s weak fixers… and commons in the Land and Artifact slots that can help provide more than one color as well. The default build may actually be two colors plus a light splash… or, with enough shenanigans in the mana department, one main color, one “assist” color, and the best spells of the other three liberally splashed with nary a care in the world. Just because the tribal model suggests you’ll lean towards two main colors doesn’t mean you can’t get away with a little more if you try hard enough, and there are enough tools floating around out there to let your default concept “two color deck” spread into a true Invasion-era five-color sprawl of the best hits of your entire card pool regardless of color or tribe.

Along with the color-fixing, there’s actually plentiful tribe-fixing, too. “Changeling” is a known keyword that gives an entire tribe of creatures every creature type, meaning that weird humorous cards interacting with Goats actually does something besides earn a chuckle when you think of the concept of “goatnapping.” It’s also the glue that can hold a mixed-tribe deck together, this block’s Venser’s Sliver helping out in a subtle way by catching a bit of help from your cards and your opponent’s. This makes any Changelings you get in your pool more or less an auto-include if you can justify the color at all, since so many of the cards in Lorwyn have a more powerful effect as you add more cards of their tribe in your deck or gain some additional benefit for adding a tribe you might not even have access to in the colors you’re playing… but can always fudge with a shapeshifter.

So far, it doesn’t look like there’s an overpowering combination… just rules to remember when you see the opponent’s colors, like that Black has plentiful creature kill, Blue has plentiful counterspells… and Green can’t really kill a creature, at any rarity, with one Pacifism-type effect out of an entire color worth of cards.

Sean McKeown
smckeown @ livejournal.com