This week, let’s bust out our tiny archaeologist’s brush, because we’re going to look at some draft decks you won’t find in a tournament report for brags. No, these are the decks that walked the path of extinction—and with good reason.
One way to isolate a successful strategy is to rule out unsuccessful ones. No, not rudimentary problems like “play more creatures” or “play more lands.” These are subtle killers.
You Drafted an Unknown Archetype
At GP Austin (pre-Dark Ascension), I drafted a four-color deck that could profit off of Parallel Lives with an Undead Alchemist, Mayor of Avabruck, Spider Spawning, or Stitcher’s Apprentice. It also had Burning Vengeance as a second engine. It looked pretty silly, but it was simply a combination of a couple well-known archetypes. I drafted a lot of fixing to make it work and 3-0ed the pod.
However, my second draft deck was much less competitive. While it didn’t seem like the worst deck at the time and was even compared to Standard in the coverage, it rolled over to Pat Cox in each game he didn’t stall on three lands. Unfortunately, I also lost my next round, eliminating me from Top 8 contention. Let’s take a look.
Creatures (13)
- 1 Stitched Drake
- 2 Stitcher's Apprentice
- 1 Invisible Stalker
- 1 Deranged Assistant
- 1 Falkenrath Noble
- 2 Brain Weevil
- 2 Moon Heron
- 3 Delver of Secrets
Lands (17)
Spells (10)
After I drew into Top 32, I had plenty of time to think about what went wrong. My conclusion?
“I should have known better.”
When’s the last time you heard of the “3/2 fliers, one- and four-drops” archetype? Unless you just experienced déja vu, never…
…because it’s not an archetype.
I’m not saying you should never try anything new. In fact, a lot of the fun of Magic is in trying new things. When you do try something new, though, be very careful. The possibility is very high that your draft archetype isn’t new at all but is actually something many people have tried and failed with. It should go without saying, then, that it’s best to try these new and interesting strategies before a major event, certainly not when a Top 8 is on the line.
The Synergies Aren’t Real
What, specifically, was wrong with that deck from Austin? Essentially, it was a Baby’s First Standard Deck. Sure, it had many of the same or similar cards to Standard Delver, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
A real Delver deck has 33% instants and sorceries, while this one had only 25%. Include the absence of Ponder and odds are you’re actually playing Wandering Ones. A real Delver deck has one equipment per fifteen cards, while this one has one per 40. Worse yet, it has 25% fewer instants and sorceries to make the Pike playable, and most of them you really want to be exiling with flashback.
I hoped (naively) that Dissipate could serve as a poor man’s Mana Leak, keeping my opponent off of larger creatures while I rode my tempo to victory.
Um, what tempo? Unflipped Delver? That unblockable 1/1 for two that you’ll never draw with the Runechanter’s Pike?
Don’t even get me started on the unsightly four-drops.
My point, though, is that even though all of these little interactions look good when the deck is laid out in front of you, if the benefits are more cute than game breaking, they don’t mean anything. A Standard Delver deck is beautiful. It doesn’t care much for card advantage, but it ekes out every tempo advantage it can get. In the end, it’s almost killed itself with Phyrexian mana spells, but its opponent is at exactly zero. There’s no way a draft deck can hope to have this level of consistency. And this one is running two Brain Weevils. Boy.
The Cards Don’t Stand On Their Own
A few weeks ago, I cautioned GP-goers about the swingy nature Dark Ascension has had on Sealed. It turned out that I’d given myself a portentous finger from the past, because at GP Nashville I ended up opening a pretty bad pool. This was the sort of deck against which your opponent would try to sacrifice a Torch Fiend with no targets. Even though all he did was show you Tragic Slip, you’d be powerless to do anything about it.
Even though it’s a Sealed and not a Draft deck, it illustrates this point perfectly.
Creatures (15)
- 1 Dearly Departed
- 1 Stromkirk Noble
- 1 Crossway Vampire
- 2 Kessig Wolf
- 1 Pitchburn Devils
- 1 Silverchase Fox
- 1 Mondronen Shaman
- 1 Pyreheart Wolf
- 1 Hellrider
- 1 Midnight Guard
- 2 Niblis of the Mist
- 1 Torch Fiend
- 1 Hinterland Hermit
Lands (17)
Spells (7)
I showed this deck to my friends, and they frequently told me it wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be. Of course, looking through the deck in your hands won’t look as bad as it does laid out; it’s all three-drops!
And look at which three-drops in particular: two Kessig Wolves, two Niblis of the Mist, and a Crossway Vampire. What great synergy, right? After getting three power on the table, you can just tap down their blockers and aggro them out. Maybe you can drop a Pyreheart Wolf at some point and then make all your creatures awkward to block!
What a pipe dream. Do you really think you’re going to draw all these cards in that order? And nothing is going to go wrong? Sorry, but here’s what’s really going to happen: you’re going to curve out from Crossway Vampire into Mondronen Shaman, and you’re going to have to trade both of them with Silverchase Foxes. Or maybe you’ll trade one with a Somberwald Dryad, which would almost be good except that you never draw your Forest. Those Niblis of the Mist? They die to half a Midnight Haunting or a quarter of a Lingering Souls.
The point of this isn’t to bemoan a terrible Sealed pool; it’s to observe why it didn’t work as a Sealed pool because it wouldn’t work as a Draft deck, either.
There’s much more wrong here than your typical abominable curve. The deck can’t actually do anything if it doesn’t draw all the right cards in the right order, including a pair of splashed finishers. Sure it looks reasonable on the table if you imagine you drew the cards “correctly.” But that’s not how Magic works. You’re going to draw Wild Hungers in your opening hand, causing an effective mulligan because you have no way to get it into your graveyard.
You certainly want to play your cards in the “correct” order, but you’re going to draw them randomly. You probably know that playing too many situational spells can lead to your doom. However, having situational creatures can create a similar problem. It’s just not as immediately obvious.
You Didn’t Consider the Format
How can we tell if our creatures are ineffectual? During Pro Tour Dark Ascension, I drafted a Black/Red Vampire deck with no actual Lords. This is a sure-fire way to go 1-2 in Dark Ascension draft. I boarded into a Death’s Caress as much as possible, but with only two Fires of Undeath my creatures were basically on their own. And, as it turns out, every creature in Black/Red Vampires is awful. I’m mainly talking about Bloodcrazed Neonate and Erdwal Ripper here.
How did I expect 2/1 Sliths to get there when Horned Turtles are crawling out of the woodwork and Fires of Undeath is completely helpless to stop them? This, essentially, is why black/red is not a 3-0 archetype. Unless you have a number of Vampire Interlopers and Screeching Bats, your creatures can’t get past a simple wall. This might be fine…in a format with no walls. But in Dark Ascension even if you wanted to blow removal on a 1/4, you’d probably find it perfectly immune to all but the biggest guns. Almost no burn will kill it, including Corpse Lunge and Harvest Pyre, and Victim of Night frequently misses. Wrack with Madness is right out.
(And no, there aren’t actually that many 1/4s. But there are quite a lot of 2/3s, 3/3s, and Spirit tokens. I found that my opponent getting out more than one of any of these was generally enough to ruin my day.)
There are quite a lot of 2/2 bears in Dark Ascension draft, which is why I value Riot Devils so highly. Russet Wolves is even better since it kills the 2/3s. It’s like a tiny Constructed metagame!Adorable.
To go back to the example from Nashville, Kessig Wolf isn’t super-exciting because of its propensity to just die to one of a pair of Grizzly Bears or a single Geistflame/Forge[/author] Devil”][author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] Devil. Niblis of the Mist is the worst of the bunch because not only does it die to a ping, but it also trades with Spirit tokens that are just everywhere. I guess it’s supposed to be sad or something that Innistrad is so full of ghosts, but for the player it’s just inconvenient.
These 2/1s could be fine in another format, and they could even be decent as support creatures in this one. However, when most of your creatures roll over and die to a Doomed Traveler, it’s time to reconsider the relative strength of your Draft deck.
In Closing
A lot can go wrong during a draft, and a deck’s problems are not always immediately clear. I hope my failures can help you achieve success, especially if you choose to play in an SCG Draft Open sometime soon.