Introduction
The annoying thing about exploring a completely new environment is that many lessons need to be learned the hard way. Granted, losing in a random sealed deck tournament among friends is not the end of the world or anything, and there is nothing wrong with losing at a random sealed deck tournament among friends, but losing tends to bug me when I don’t know why it is happening, even in a random sealed deck tournament among friends. In a new environment, as we have now, it often happens that I have no idea what’s going on and what I’m doing wrong, leading to annoyance and unhappiness all round.
I opened a sealed deck that I was quite happy with as it finally let me utilize the power of the Golgari and contained a nice splashed bomb in Flame Fusillade. I lost all three matches I played with it, and apart from one I lost to an obvious misplay, I don’t know why I lost. Well, that’s enough of the usual whining, now it’s time to look at the pertinent questions that are going through everyone’s mind trying to get to grips with this set for Limited. Okay, the pertinent questions going through my mind. Doesn’t everybody think that everybody else thinks just like them? Hang on, I don’t even think that, or else the world would be a happy place, devoid of politics and economics, bereft of lawyers and sans the French*.
Mana base Issues
Returning from one world happier than the one we live in to another, Ravnica. The most obvious issue arising when building any kind of Limited deck in this format is what amount and mix of lands do you use? At a GP Trial the other day (which I shall mention no more, as I failed to get any byes and it still used Kamigawa Block), a bunch of us were looking back fondly at Invasion block (the golden age of Magic, as far as I am concerned) and one thing that Richard Collins, who used to be the number one ranked Limited player in England, said was that that set taught us all how to build multi-color mana bases and those of us who were there hence have an advantage now that Ravnica has returned to colorful goodness.
Personally I can’t remember much about the golden days of Invasion, and what I do remember is obscured by the tears in my eyes and the other manifestations of nostalgia for the good old days of yore. It is also important to take into account that which has come since the golden age and derive lessons from that. Most notably here is Mirrodin, which taught us how to build decks that are land-starved, because they have a lot of other sources on which to rely, such as mana myr, Talismans and the Affinity mechanic.
Now again we have a format filled with mana artifacts and other forms of acceleration and fixing. In his article “Miller’s Crossing – Drafting Dimir in Ravnica“, Aaron Cutler presents the cards from a draft and suggest it could easily run on 14 land, even as a 4-color deck. It had additional mana generation in the form of 3 Signets, a Farseek, an Elves of Deep Shadow, a Civic Wayfinder and some of the double lands. I think that while it is possible and usually necessary in this format to cut some of the usual 17-18 lands, those who go to far will be punished as much as those who don’t even try to adapt. There is a danger in this whole process that will find people unable to find any land and hence unable to play any of those other mana sources. While the double lands offer more mana than a normal land, they are utterly useless unless they are accompanied by another land. Another horrible situation is looking at the one-land-and-a-Signet hand. Do you keep that hand, considering there are only 13 other lands left in your deck?
It’s time to take a step back and look at why Mirrodin let us play without the usual amount of lands. For starters, because a large proportion of the set consisted of artifacts it was never necessary to play lots of land to ensure getting the right colors. Usually playing a 3+ color deck pushes you toward playing more, ordinarily 18, lands, but in Mirrodin block that just wasn’t required. Then there was copious amounts of equipment, which meant you could build large creatures over several turns and didn’t need that much mana in any given turn. Obviously there was also mana acceleration. Most notably here are the mana myr that were particularly good because they were also creatures. It didn’t usually matter whether they were on-color or not. Finally, the spellbombs gave ultra-cheap cantrips to the world. Interestingly, the mana curves of decks at that time weren’t particularly low, but all of the above, combined with the affinity mechanic, lead to a format that could run on very little land nonetheless.
So let’s compare our brand new format to Mirrodin, ticking the boxes.
1) Ravnica doesn’t have many artifacts, on the contrary, there are lots of gold cards, meaning color requirements are rather stringent. Hybrid cards help when playing the right color combination, but there aren’t many of those either. The one mitigating factor here is the abundance of dual lands and other fixers.
2) While there are a lot of auras around, they don’t really serve the purpose of building large creatures. The only cards that can be used in this way are Moldervine Cloak and some of the equipment, but none of these cards are common. Oftentimes gold creatures seem preconstructed in this way, but Watchwolf (again an uncommon) aside, there aren’t really many especially efficient cheap gold creatures around.
3) Time to look at the non-land mana. The obvious starting place is of course the Signets. These are often very useful for churning out four-drops on turn 3, even off-color, and they can fix your mana if they are on-color. The question is, to what extent they allow you to cut lands. Unlike mana myr, they don’t do double duty as creatures and they are often far more useful as mana-fixers rather than accelerants, diminishing the use of off-color ones and hence reducing the number of mana artifacts available to people. There are also only four of them, unlike the five you usually find in such cycles. Beyond the Signets there is Spectral Searchlight, which is uncommon and somewhat expensive, and some Green mana generators. In Green there is Elves of Deep Shadow (and the rare Birds of Paradise) as one-drop mana generators, Farseek at two, and Civic Wayfinder at three.
4) Next point of comparison is cheap card-drawing. The only ones I see as relevant here are cards that can replace themselves for two mana or less. In White we find Festival of the Guildpact, the effect of which is less than stellar but it replaces itself for only one mana if necessary. In Black we have the largely-unplayable-as-very-risky Dark Confidant and Shadow of Doubt that can occasionally act as a counterspell, but often won’t do an awful lot except replace itself. Red gives us Reroute, which is too situational to help reliably in setting up a mana base. Blue has several options including Remand, Telling Time, Quickchange and Surveiling Sprite. Finally we have Terrarion for all colors. How many of these cards are common? The answer is a whole three of them, and two of those are Blue, and one of those requires your opponent doing something to kill it. I think it’s safe to say that as far as cheap cantrips go this set is hardly the new Mirrodin.
5) Last but not least is a look at the typical mana curves of decks in this format. Here we see a great demonstration of how different the guilds are. What’s the mana curve of a deck full of Convoke spells? A R/W deck will often top out at four mana, whereas any Green deck will average out at almost four mana, and in a U/B deck it fluctuates widely depending on how aggressive or controlling the deck is.
Putting this all together, this is my summary of mana requirements for the different guild archetypes, including possible splashes.
R/W
A typical R/W deck will be extremely aggressive and should not have any spells that cost more than four mana except for the occasional bomb. The low curve makes it possible and tempting to play fewer lands, but you can’t afford too many cuts as missing an early land-drop might mean the death of you. The other problem is that the mana acceleration/fixing is bad for your tempo and unlike other archetypes the Boros tend to stand or fall by having the upper hand with regards to tempo. Most people will be happy to spend turn two playing a signet, but R/W really needs to be dropping a bear if it is hoping to win that game. All in all I wouldn’t play this archetype with less than 16 lands, especially since it is the one that gains the least from Signets and double lands.
Splashing in this archetype is generally difficult, as unreliable mana can often hurt the quick kill you are after. On the other hand it may make you less reliant on that quick kill and can make those signets and lands more useful. I can’t help but feel, though that R/W/x needs to be treated as a different archetype most of the time.
G/W
This one is the most difficult to get your head around. On the one hand you have loads of mana producers, on the other you have Convoke. There is an interesting parallel here. If you cut too many lands for other cards that produce mana, you can easily find yourself with a handful of Signets and Farseeks and no second mana to play them. Similarly, if you cut too many genuinely cheap creatures for creatures made cheap by Convoke you will often find yourself with a hand full of Convoke spells and without enough mana or creatures to play any of them.
Of course being a Green deck, this is rather flexible concerning the number of lands you can play. The most obvious variable is the number of Elves and/or Birds. Unlike all the other mana generators the one drops can almost always be relied upon doing the job of a land, and at the time you need it. So lots of Elves of Deep Shadow, while they are painful and off-color, can make the necessary land count go down. If you have some Elves and a few signets, then 15 lands should do just fine.
Splashing is almost a non-issue in Green decks, it is truly trivial. Of course this set does open up the possibility of straight 3-color decks, but more on that later.
B/G
I haven’t been able to put together a good B/G deck so far, but have played against many of them. They tend to be quite controlling, without many good early drops, but with a lot of removal, followed by relatively expensive but powerful creatures such as Golgari Rotwurm. In a traditional Constructed control deck, missing a land drop can mean instant annihilation and it shouldn’t be that much different here. On the other hand, this guild has more mana-fixing and acceleration than any other and can often seem pretty fast when it plays that Rotwurm on turn 4 or even turn 3. The archetype sometimes needs to go a little bit aggro so it doesn’t die to excessive dredging (especially against U/B).
I just realized that the whole Dredge mechanic is underexplored and probably underused, which shall warrant future investigation. For now let’s say that the Golgari are mana-hungry but bring their own lunch a lot, so again cutting some land is a possibility. Again, splashing is easy and even seems like part of the identity of the Golgari.
U/B
Here as always comes the split between the control/mill deck and the aggro-control/flyers deck. Both of these decks have many key cards at four mana and hence love love love the p***y. Sorry, fell into Jay mode there, no, they don’t love cats. They love Signets. With a passion or two. Coming back to the point, both these archetypes love signets, even off-color ones, and want loads of them, and when they have loads of them there’s no harm in cutting a land or perhaps even two. Without them lovely Signets, though, these decks need to stick to the classical 17 or 18 lands as the mana curve isn’t anything to write home about and manascrew just isn’t gonna fly in the face of a quick or accelerated assault.
On the question of splashing in U/B decks, I think it is important to stress that a splash really needs to fit into the overall game plan of the U/B deck and not work at odds to it. Don’t splash beatdown if you intend to mill your opponent to death. However, splashing cards like Putrefy or Faith’s Fetters can be well and proper, and a piece of cake, too, if you managed to pick up those Signets.
To round off this section I’ll give a few more general notes about mana bases. People are jumping on the bandwagon of cutting lands left and right, and this can be very powerful as manascrew tends to be far less fatal than manaflood. The extent to which people seem to be going though gives me cause for concern. In many ways this set is the opposite of Mirrodin, and drawing the right land and not just the right number of lands is crucial. Also, the double lands are seen as giving additional mana and while this is true they still carry the danger of clogging up your opening hand without a normal land. By what I have seen and experienced so far, I think Nick Eisel has hit the nail square on the head by saying that 16 is the right number of lands almost regardless of everything else. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but then there were draft decks in Kamigawa block where I was asking myself whether I needed the 16th land. Just be smart, make sure your mana base can handle your deck and keep in mind those cheap cantrips no matter how pointless they seem. Spellbombs make mana-starved decks run!
Process of Building a Ravnica Sealed Deck
This feels like it’s a bit more basic than things I generally prefer discussing, but I find it an interesting point. What do you do with those 75 cards when you sit down to build a sealed deck? What’s different to previous blocks? The latter point is particularly interesting as the presence of multi-color and hybrid cards make this far more challenging, plus the fact that splashing is so much easier to the point that even two identical colored mana symbols doesn’t take cards out of the potential splash pool. Colors are much harder to dismiss since the synergies within guilds may make suboptimal colors, based on pure power level of individual cards, much more appealing. So let’s take a look at an example card pool here.
Red
1 Coalhauler Swine
1 Greater Forgeling
1 Goblin Fire Fiend
1 Sabertooth Alley Cat
1 Sell-Sword Brute
1 War-Torch Goblin
1 Frenzied Goblin
1 Dogpile
1 Incite Hysteria
1 Fiery Conclusion
1 Rain of Embers
1 Surge of Zeal
Black
1 Undercity Shade
1 Keening Banshee
1 Dimir House Guard
1 Sadistic Augermage
1 Stinkweed Imp
1 Infectious Host
1 Thoughtpicker Witch
1 Strands of Undeath
1 Shred Memory
1 Disembowel
Blue
1 Vedalken Dismisser
1 Tidewater Minion
1 Belltower Sphinx
1 Snapping Drake
1 Vedalken Entrancer
1 Drift of Phantasms
1 Drake Familiar
1 Lore Broker
1 Mnemonic Nexus
1 Flight of Fancy
1 Convolute
1 Peel from Reality
1 Quickchange
1 Remand
White
1 Divebomber Griffin
1 Hunted Lammasu
1 Screeching Griffin
1 Gate Hound
1 Courier Hawk
1 Light of Sanction
1 Boros Fury-Shield
1 Leave No Trace
Green
1 Siege Wurm
1 Scatter the Seeds
1 Stone-Seeder Hierophant
1 Nullmage Shepherd
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Carven Caryatid
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Transluminant
1 Chord of Calling
1 Sundering Vitae
1 Fists of Ironwood
1 Gather Courage
Multicolor and Hybrid
1 Sunhome Enforcer
1 Skynight Legionnaire
1 Twisted Justice
1 Woodwraith Corrupter
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Selesnya Sagittars
1 Seeds of Strength
1 Boros Recruit
1 Lurking Informant
1 Centaur Safeguard
Artifacts and Lands
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Dimir Signet
1 Boros Signet
1 Selesnya Signet
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Duskmantle, House of Shadow
The first thing to look at are definitely the Gold cards, as well as any other cards that can only work in one guild combination. In this pool we see that R/W has some nice goodies, as does G/B, G/W only has Seeds of Strength and U/B has basically nothing. So we’ve identified R/W and G/B as desirable guilds. Next we look at the individual colors. Red is a bit thin on burn and doesn’t have enough two- or three-drops to keep the pressure on, and white has a grand total of four playable cards, none of which fill the gap in red. No R/W deck from this pool then. The dearth of White also leaves G/W out of the equation. Blue has no early game, and while it does have all the nice creatures that make a millstone deck possible, the support for it isn’t there. In particular, there is very little Black removal, or removal in general. The Blue and Black is also too slow for a more aggressive build, leaving the only viable guild archetype as G/B. A splash is looking quite easy here, and necessary too, so let’s look at the options. Red has Dogpile and Fiery Conclusion, neither is the ideal kind of removal, but it does fill a hole. White has some flyers, though the better ones require WW. Blue also has some flyers and they are much more splashable, not to mention that we have both a signet and a double land to help out. So this is the resulting deck:
Creatures (17)
1 Lurking Informant
1 Transluminant
1 Stinkweed Imp
1 Sadistic Augermage
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Carven Caryatid
1 Golgari Brownscale
1 Keening Banshee
1 Dimir Houseguard
1 Snapping Drake
1 Undercity Shade
1 Golgari Rotwurm
1 Scatter the Seeds
1 Belltower Sphinx
1 Woodwraith Corrupter
1 Siege Wurm
Other Spells (7)
1 Strands of Undeath
1 Chord of Calling
1 Fists of Ironwood
1 Disembowel
1 Gather Courage
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Dimir Signet
Lands (16)
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Dimir Aqueduct
1 Island
8 Forest
4 Swamp
Now wasn’t that easy? Yes, it was, and that’s the danger of choosing a random deck for such an exercise. Many of you will have gone through a similar thought process on less obvious card pools, however, and hence may have missed out this trick.
Limitations and Problems of Guild Archetypes
Sometimes a card pool makes it sensible and necessary to forego the power of the guilds and just build a U/W, R/G or R/B deck. Usually it is possible to splash in some guilded cards, but that doesn’t change the essentials of the deck. I opened a deck that included Szadek, Lord of Secrets, and the rest of the Blue and Black just didn’t support him at all. Then I realized that the way to go was to build the deck U/W/b, as White had lots of creature removal, was clearly the best color and didn’t really need any support from it’s guild cousins. Here’s the deck I built from that pool:
Creatures (15)
1 Dimir Infiltrator
1 Lore Broker
1 Veteran Armorer
2 Courier Hawk
1 Terraformer
1 Benevolent Ancestor
1 Centaur Safeguard
1 Nightguard Patrol
1 Mausoleum Turnkey
1 Vedalken Entrancer
1 Tidewater Minion
1 Ethereal Usher
1 Oathsworn Giant
1 Szadek, Lord of Secrets
Other Spells (8)
1 Stasis Cell
1 Faith’s Fetters
1 Devouring Light
1 Last Gasp
1 Flight of Fancy
1 Spectral Searchlight
1 Convolute
1 Consult the Necrosages
Lands (17)
1 Dimir Aqueduct
3 Swamp
6 Island
7 Plains
Sometimes you just need to take a step back and re-examine what you are doing. If you are putting a lot of mediocre black cards into your deck because your Golgari gold is the nuts it may be necessary to go for a R/G deck that only splashes that nuts B/G. Sometimes – followers of my work know I don’t recommend this lightly – you just have to go for that 3-color build, like this one here:
Creatures (15)
1 Lurking Informant
1 Viashino Slasher
1 Roofstalker Wight
1 Stinkweed Imp
1 Civic Wayfinder
1 Goblin Spelunkers
1 Wojek Embermage
1 Greater Mossdog
1 Ordruun Commando
1 Mortipede
1 Viashino Fangtail
1 Bramble Elemental
1 Hunted Dragon
1 Coalhauler Swine
1 Drooling Groodion
Other Spells (9)
1 Flash Conscription
1 Cleansing Beam
1 Master Warcraft
2 Gaze of the Gorgon
1 Putrefy
1 Last Gasp
1 Golgari Signet
1 Terrarion
Lands (16)
1 Overgrown Tomb
4 Forest
4 Swamp
7 Mountain
Always remember that while the guilds are powerful, they also like to use that power to brainwash you into doing their bidding, and sometimes their bidding wants you to lose. Keep that in mind next time your Hunted Dragon misses his White friends.
Conclusion
Ravnica finally hits the shelves as my preparation for GP: Nottingham enters the final lap. Next week, I’ll look more closely at draft whatever else catches my gaze.
Martin
darkheartothorny on StarCityGames forums.
*There’s nothing wrong with Frenchmen as individuals. It’s just when they come together that they become this evil hive mind, eat frog legs, sing the Marseillaise, call themselves La Grande Nation and think of themselves as superior to the rest of the world. Apart from that, though, there’s nothing wrong with the French. I would also like to point out that any misgivings I have for the French is nothing compared to the misgivings I have for footnotes. Using footnotes is retarded.