SCG Talent Search – No Idea’s Original

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.


Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1 Verse 9

No idea’s original, there’s nothin’ new under the sun / It’s never what you do, but how it’s done.


No Idea’s Original, Nas

After some of the heart-warming feedback from the forums last week, it seems that I should embrace that creeping feeling that I’m turning into something of an Old Fogey. So, pull up a chair, grab a delicious beverage, and we can have a nice chat about the history of Booster Draft.

Of course, talking about history for history’s sake is simply indulgent. We don’t talk about history to make ourselves feel smart, we talk about history to
learn.
Specifically, to learn things that are useful
now.
We learn from history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past. We learn from history to do something that humans are very good at (sometimes too good at) — to look for patterns.

Now, what patterns are we looking for, and to what end? Simply put, we’re looking for patterns, for structures, for common factors across Draft formats, and we’re looking at how they apply to modern Magic sets. Like a geologist mapping out rock strata, we can identify time periods where similar conditions prevailed, and where conditions were different, and we try to work out how.

Of course, you might well ask, what’s in it for me? Well, what’s in it for you is that I hope to leave you with a better understanding of some of the fundamental questions that you can benefit from asking when you see a new Magic set. Want to be ahead of the curve as early as the morning of the Prerelease? Then you need to look at that mess of a spoiler with a disciplined, critical eye. And once you’re actually drafting a set, there are more important questions that you need to be trying to answer.

Oh, and hopefully I’ll entertain you in the process. I
always
forget that part.

Now, given that sadly I have limited space within which to pontificate, I’m going to break a few key factors out of the seething, messy, dynamic world of Draft on which to focus:
Color,
from explicitly multicolored sets, to the demands a set places on your colored mana, to formats where the balance of colors shifts substantially over the block.
Tempo
, that is, how fast or slow the format is, and how this changes our evaluation of cards within it, particularly cards that play against that prevailing trend. And finally some examination of the role of
mechanics
and “set themes.” All sets have broad themes and flagship mechanics, but they reward investment in a draft to varying degrees. And beyond that, working out how those mechanics interact
with each other
can give you a huge boost.

Color

So first, color. One of the first things to look at when you look at a new set is how the colors “work.” So to jump right in, some questions to ask yourself when you look at a new set (in no particular order):

1)                        How color-intensive are the mana costs in the set?

Is there a tendency towards WW two-drops, 1GG three-drops, 2UU four-drops and BB instants? If so, your initial drafts should probably lean towards drafting decks with a single main color and a splash of a second. Drafting a fully two-color deck in a colored-mana-hungry environment is “B/W in M10” syndrome. You have all these high-pick great cards in both colors — Blinding Mage, Pacifism, Doom Blade, and so on. Then, as soon as you start to fill out your deck, it all starts to go wrong. Veteran Armorsmith fights with Dread Warlock, Armored Ascension fights with Tendrils of Corruption, White Knight fights with Black Knight. It may be that, as in M10, only some colors are particularly greedy — knowing what they are before you sit down can help you avoid some unpleasant surprises.

On the other extreme, in some sets there are

mechanics that give you access to “generic” cards of some kind — artifacts, or cards with morph or cycling, that can be used to fill out any deck. Onslaught Draft decks, for example, never had to worry about their three-drops, and neither do Scars of Mirrodin Draft decks, between Replicas and Snapsail Gliders (or one of five Myr on turn 2 to skip you
past
your three-drop if you don’t have one.) If you know in advance that you’ll
always
be able to hit 23 playables, you could be more open to taking some risks over the course of the draft. You might, for example, be more prepared to switch colors later than usual, or be more prepared to take an off-color bomb and try to make it work.

2)                        Are you explicitly rewarded for sticking to single colors?

A good example of a full set that rewarded this behavior was Shadowmoor. It took a little time for the full implications of hybrid mana to filter through, as hybrid enabled two different approaches to color. The first was to draft a two-color deck, giving access to the mono-colored cards in those colors, and all but the most intensive hybrids across those colors, while having fairly “normal” mana.

The second was to draft a monocolor deck, which gave you access to only a single color’s monocolor cards, but
all
of the hybrids across
two
hybrid pairs. In addition to rock-solid mana, you got access to, for example, the triple-hybrid cycle of uncommons that featured Boggart Ram-Gang, Ashenmoor Gouger, and Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers. There were also explicit rewards for drafting monocolor decks — Jaws of Stone, Howl of the Night Pack, et al.

3)                        How good is the mana fixing?

Is it restricted to green cards, maybe a Terramorphic Expanse, maybe a Prismatic Lens? Or are there full-fledged cycles of common fixers? Particularly in gold sets, the quantity and quality of fixing can be critically important. In Shards, decks were aggressive enough and fixers slow enough that drafting a shard was often not the best plan — a two-color aggro deck, possibly with a splash of the third color, was often the way to go. After all, when your opponent can play turn 1 Wild Nacatl, turn 2 Steward of Valeron, turn 3, well, pretty much anything, do you really want to be spending your time cracking Panoramas and casting Obelisks?

Full Ravnica block, by contrast, featured both better fixing and a less aggressive environment, allowed three, four, or even five-color decks to flourish. Outside of gold sets, incidental fixing like the aforementioned Expanse and Lens can make splashing for cards like Fireball a lot easier.

4)                        At a glance, do the colors look balanced in terms of power level in the common slot?

This is probably the hardest question to answer without actually playing the set, but it can be helpful just to make a list, ordered by mana cost, of the common creatures available to each color, then add the spells that you consider significant draws towards the color. If one color looks deeper or shallower than the rest, it’s worth knowing.

A weak color, for example, might not be worth drafting at the Prerelease, as many people draft to their normal preferences without giving much thought to the makeup of the new set. A few weeks in, when everyone knows that color is the worst and avoids it, it can become a viable strategy.

In my experience, this was true of green in Zendikar, the color widely considered the worst in triple Zendikar draft. While the color was relatively weak, there were a number of green cards that were particularly effective in a
heavily
green decks, notably Nissa’s Chosen, Timbermaw Larva and Primal Bellow, powerful cards that, given the lack of love for the color, would go far later than you might normally expect.

5)                        If this is the second or third set in the block, is the existing color balance carried through in the new set?

If not, there is potential for advantage in working it out early. As far back as Mirage block, the first block ever developed with Limited in mind, blocks have seen colors fluctuate in power from set to set.

In 2001, Zvi Mowshowitz wrote about something called
The Rule
of Draft formats. In full Mirage block, he wrote, The Rule was to force U/W. While everyone else takes Kaervek’s Torch, Incinerate, Dark Banishing, or Drain Life in Mirage, you should be taking Pacifism, assorted Griffins and Drakes, Ray of Command. You started off taking worse cards, but as blue and white improved in Visions and Weatherlight, your investment paid off — Man-o’-War, Undo, Knight of the Mists, Empyrial Armor, Ballista Squad. I strongly recommend checking out Zvi’s original article (linked above) to see how the concept of The Rule developed from Mirage to Invasion.

While most applicable to those early, less balanced sets, the core of The Rule for Mirage is still applicable today — if colors change in value over the course of a block, accepting weaker cards in pack 1 to set yourself up for a big payoff can still work wonders.

Now, of course, the new set will be the first set that is drafted, but the principle is still the same. You know roughly what is coming in the later boosters — use that knowledge. An awful lot of people just draft the cards in front of them, without giving serious consideration to what’s coming up on the horizon.

Tempo

Moving on to tempo, the important questions are much simpler, but trickier to answer conclusively:

1)      How fast is the format?

2)      Given the speed of the format, what can we do to exploit that?

To illustrate what I mean by this, think back to triple Zendikar draft. Zendikar was, to put it mildly, an aggressive draft format. Steppe Lynx, Vampire Lacerator, Plated Geopede, and Welkin Tern were all-star aggressive creatures low on the curve, and the landfall mechanic provided a huge mechanical bias in favor of attacking. Blocking became either impossible, relegated to chumping, or fraught with incredible danger for those attempting to gang-block some huge landfall-pumped beast.

All of this shook out fairly quickly as people started to draft the format, and you could only get so much of a head start by noticing this quickly. The interesting thing, in my opinion, is what took a little longer to sink in. The aggressive nature of the format made the
best
defensive creatures unusually effective. I’m thinking particularly of Kraken Hatchling and Giant Scorpion.

Noticing that Steppe Lynx attacks for two on turn 2, and that blocking landfall creatures is horrible? That’s not that tricky.

Taking that second step, and running Kraken Hatchling in your base-blue
aggro
deck? That’s more of a leap, and it’s that kind of understanding that remembering your history can help trigger. It’s not really about saying, “It’s a fast format; I’ll draft a slow deck.” It’s about saying, “It’s a fast format;
how am I winning this race?”

If you’re expecting a slew of aggro mirrors, playing a couple of the very best defensive creatures in your aggro deck, particularly if you plan to win through evasion, could be just what the doctor ordered.

By contrast, Rise of the Eldrazi Draft was one of the most control-friendly draft formats ever. The most popular aggressive archetypes invested a lot of mana into a single leveled-up threat, while slower decks ramped up into eight-drops and beyond, casting costs completely alien to most formats. Finding ways to break through creatures like Halimar Wavewatch, Overgrown Battlement, and Ikiral Outrider was absolutely necessary for anyone that hoped to go aggro.

So, at the Rise Prerelease, I started experimenting with cards like Battle-Rattle Shaman, Wrap in Flames, and Goblin Tunneler in R/W aggro decks, making use of cards like Glory Seeker that were going completely undrafted, along with the more conventional levelers like Knight of Cliffhaven.

Later on in the format, the Raid Bombardment deck broke out, throwing masses of Eldrazi Spawn into the fray, not even caring if they were blocked.

Mechanics and Themes

The final area that I want to touch on is that of set themes and mechanics. Most sets have some core mechanics and keywords that tie them together, and you should make it a priority to assess the strength of those mechanics. In general, focal mechanics of modern Magic sets will be “strong” mechanics that are Limited-relevant. The tribal mechanics in Lorwyn, the shard mechanics of Shards of Alara (although more on this later), the landfall and Ally mechanics in Zendikar, the Eldrazi theme and level mechanic in Rise of the Eldrazi, metalcraft and infect in Scars of Mirrodin.

Now, these mechanics aren’t hidden in any way. Preview articles will make sure that everyone knows what the important mechanics are in any given set. Where you can gain value is in looking at how those mechanics interact
with each other.
This isn’t so much a matter of asking general questions as just mapping out the mechanical themes of the set and spending at least a couple of minutes mentally checking each pairing for interactions.

To take examples from relatively recent formats, there was a lot to be gained in understanding the ways in which the different Lorwyn tribes could work together within a single deck. Some of the connections were signposted quite strongly — Silvergill Douser’s activated ability counting Merfolk and Faeries, or Marsh Flitter and Lowland Oaf providing sacrifice outlets for Goblins like Mudbutton Torchrunner.

The Changeling mechanic, however, threw some interesting wrinkles into that setup. For example, Elvish Handservant seems to say, “Hey, draft Elves with Giants!” What it could actually mean, however, was, “Hey, draft Elves with Woodland Changeling and Fire-Belly Changeling!” A one-drop that gets better when you play your two-drops is, of course, a lot more exciting than a one-drop that gets better when you play your four- and five-drops. Without changeling, cards like Elvish Handservant and Boggart Sprite-Chaser would’ve been little more than rarely relevant curiosities. With it, they could be significant cards in their own right.

Turning to Shards, there was quite a lot of interplay between the shard mechanics lurking just under the surface. Certainly it was likely intended to to some extent, but it was obscured by the attention paid to the shards as independent entities (indeed, designed by separate, if overlapping, design teams.)

Looking at a spoiler can tell you that there are devour creatures and token generators, unearth creatures and Bone Splinters, five-power creatures with “five-power matters” abilities.

It took time, however, to uncover all of the ways in which those disparate abilities could be exploited together. It turned out that Grixis unearth creatures were just as good as Jund’s tokens at satisfying the hunger of devour creatures. It turned out that Akrasan Squire and Sighted-Caste Sorcerer were pretty good at assembling an impromptu five-power creature for Mosstodon to grant trample to. Jund’s devour creatures? Those were pretty good at hitting five power too.

Finding Easter egg synergies between mechanics can be immensely valuable, particularly if some of the cards involved are currently not valued highly (as was the case with Handservant before it became something of an established archetype in its own right.)

A quick aside — when a new set joins a block, be sure to check whether the mechanical themes established in the first set are weaker or stronger. In Ravnica block, for example, there was little mechanical interplay between the sets. Triple-Ravnica draft decks tended to either be strongly guild-based decks, possibly splashing removal or bombs from outside the core guild colors, or, later in the format, oddities like the Drake Familiar deck. Adding Guildpact, and later, Dissension to the mix pushed the format towards mechanically disconnected good-stuff decks.

I guess what I’m really saying is, don’t be the guy still vainly trying to draft Dimir mill in full block Draft!

Scars of Mirrodin block looks set to provide an interesting example of this shift in mechanical emphasis, as Phyresis spreads across Mirrodin and brings with it an ever-increasing tide of infect and proliferate, at the expense of metalcraft and the other Mirran mechanics. In full block Draft, it could well turn out that infect decks make up most of the table — maybe you’ll want to be the one forcing metalcraft and hoping for those late Auriok Sunchasers and Ghalma’s Wardens?

Oh, and before I go, just to remind you that there is

one

more thing you should be looking out for when you first get your brain around a new set…

I hope you found this useful, and if there’s anything you feel that I’ve missed, let me know in the forums, and we can hopefully get some useful discussions going. Or, of course, if you’ve enjoyed that “Eureka!” moment, where something about a new format suddenly clicks in your head, and you sit back and smile as you wait for the world to catch up…

I can only hope that more of you can now look forward to those moments in the future!