Going straight from M12 Limited to Innistrad has been about as comfortable as losing the hot water in the middle of a shower. While M12 cards were familiar and loveable, Innistrad cards are terrifying—and I’m not talking about the set’s flavor. In general you could evaluate an M12 deck in about sixty seconds by scanning the list for the number of Doom Blades, Incinerates, and bomb rares it contained. Some cards were good; some cards were bad; and you could tell which were which just by reading the text on them. Such is not the case with Innistrad.
You can’t evaluate a card without the context of the rest of your deck in this new format. There’s no way to describe in a single sentence, or even a single article, what it takes to win in Innistrad Limited. I challenge anyone who doesn’t believe me to browse through the undefeated sealed decks from last weekend’s GP Santiago and try to find common trends. Before a hundred wise guys respond to tell me that all four of the decks are white, I’ll acknowledge that there are similarities, but not many clear lessons about what’s important in sealed deck construction. Things become even more muddled if you add in the undefeated decks from GP Milan. We certainly can’t say anything like, “Wow, all of these successful Zendikar decks are B/R with tons of removal and Vampire Nighthawk!”
The Value of Milling
Until now we were spoiled. Building a Limited deck was at least straightforward, if not easy. We could evaluate cards simply by asking: “how much do I want to draw this?” The graveyard mechanics of Innistrad have desecrated this sacred question. One thing that makes Innistrad unlike any Limited format that’s come before is the ability to put cards directly from your library into your graveyard. The element of milling yourself adds a new dimension to drafting, deck construction, and Limited gameplay. If it’s even a small part of your game plan, you have to evaluate cards not only by how good they are to have in your hand, but also how good they are to have in your graveyard.
Getting milled is a good thing in Innistrad. You should never mill your opponent; any time I use the word “mill,” it’s in reference to milling yourself. Milling is comparable to drawing cards in the sense that it adds to your pool of resources—resources that can be used immediately or saved for later in the game. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to make a general statement about how valuable it is to mill because it depends on the contents of your specific deck.
In particular, it depends on your number and quality of flashback cards and cards that use the graveyard (Skaabs, Harvest Pyre, etc.). However, the value of milling is also not constant throughout the course of the game. Skaabs require you to have a creature in your graveyard and don’t get more powerful if you happen to have more than that. Flashback costs tend to be so high that you can’t cast multiple spells in the same turn anyway. Perhaps most importantly, the risk of milling to death or of running out of win conditions increases as the game goes longer and as you dump more cards from your library into your graveyard. The diminishing returns and escalating risks to milling mean two things: from a drafting and deck construction perspective, your first graveyard enabler (mill card) is more valuable than your seventh or eighth; from a theory perspective, any approximation we can come up with is likely to overstate the value of milling.
Let’s take a deck with no Skaabs that can generate the value of four cards if every flashback card is milled and cast from the graveyard. Maybe it simply has four Think Twices. Maybe it has a variety of spells, and we have to assign approximate values to weaker flashback effects, such as one half of Feeling of Dread equals one half of a card. Either way, these values add up to four for this particular deck. Milling forty cards (the whole deck) has the value of four cards, so milling ten has the value of one card. Dream Twist is clearly not playable in this deck, and Ghoulcaller’s Bell and Curse of the Bloody Tomb are much too slow to be a consideration.
A card like Forbidden Alchemy replaces itself and provides quite significant value from milling three other cards. However, the milling should be considered a nice bonus, rather than the main reason for playing the card. It’s conceivable that some decks could generate much more value than the deck in this example. However, as I mentioned above, even this simplified case is complicated by the diminishing returns to milling. With the abundance of better options, cards that do nothing other than mill are typically not playable.
Flashback
Flashback cards are at a premium in Innistrad. The ability to get double duty out of a card is naturally very powerful in any game that goes long. What’s more, though, is that you can get a “free” effect from a flashback card that gets milled. If you have a healthy number of flashback cards and the ability to mill, you don’t even need cards in your hand to win the game! Imagine being virtually immune to mana flood!
There are some cards that are good enough to be playable even if you ignore the fact that they have flashback. Grasp of Phantoms and Unburial Rites are top draft picks, and Devil’s Play might be the very best card in the format. In many of the commons—Think Twice, Geistflame, Silent Departure—the flashback ability puts them well into the category of playable, and they should be the bread and butter cards of any graveyard deck. Beyond these, every single flashback card in the set is playable in the right circumstances, at least as a sideboard option.
Even the weak flashback cards can be playable because they provide “free” value from being milled or discarded. What I omitted from the example above is that Dream Twist itself adds something to the “mill value” of the deck! If it’s milled, it doesn’t cost a card and mills you deeper towards one of the Think Twices. In the right deck, that benefit can make Dream Twist playable, in contrast to Ghoulcaller’s Bell.
In this case, the “mill value” doesn’t outweigh the risk of drawing a dead card, but it’s quite significant! The presence of two Civilized Scholars or a light splash of white could definitely make Feeling of Dread worthwhile for this deck. However, it’s always best to be splashing the flashback color of a card rather than its main color because drawing an uncastable card is a very big risk to take.
Every graveyard deck needs at least some flashback cards, and they should be a priority during drafting. Traditional pick orders might put cards like Stitched Drake, Harvest Pyre, and the graveyard enablers over the common flashback spells, but those pick orders need to be adjusted as the draft gets deeper and holes begin to appear in your deck. It’s tragic to end up with the potential to mill yourself, but no flashback cards to mill into. Skaabs, Harvest Pyre, and Corpse Lunge can be great, but they’re only slight improvements over the options available to non-graveyard decks. The real strength of milling yourself is adding spells to your pool of resources at no cost.
Skaabs
The Skaabs—Stitched Drake, Makeshift Mauler, Skaab Goliath, Skaab Ruinator, (Corpse Lunge)—are discounted in terms of mana, but require you to remove creatures from your graveyard to play them. No Limited deck ever turns down an undercosted fatty, but the Skaabs tend to be particularly excellent in any deck built for them. Graveyard decks have great late games, so cheap, high-toughness blockers are invaluable. At the same time, graveyard decks need to play high numbers of finisher cards so that they can still close a game after some get milled. Skaabs play both of these roles.
As powerful as the Skaabs are, they can get you into trouble, as they sometimes can’t be cast on time and are bad in multiples. Skaab Goliath is a top draft pick in pack one. Makeshift Mauler isn’t because you can only play a limited number of Skaabs, and Stitched Drake and the others are better than the Mauler. However, as the draft goes on, both of those ratings can change. Pass on a Skaab Goliath in pack three if your deck can’t support him, and put a premium on Makeshift Mauler if he fills a necessary role.
If Skaabs are excellent, but bad in multiples, the most important question is what’s the highest number of Skaabs a deck can support? From my experience, a non-graveyard deck, like a straightforward U/W deck with fifteen or sixteen creatures, can comfortably support one Skaab, just from everyday trading of creatures. I’d play two Skaabs, but wouldn’t go out of my way for the second. A dedicated graveyard deck, with three or more enablers and fourteen or fifteen creatures can comfortably support three. I’d play four, but wouldn’t go out of my way for the fourth.
The presence of Skaabs also changes the value of other cards in your deck. Mediocre creatures become better, as they now provide a small value when they’re milled or otherwise find their way to the graveyard. Too many Skaabs preclude certain other cards that take advantage of the graveyard like Boneyard Wurm, Spider Spawning, and reanimation effects. Beware this trap! These cards are good in the same decks that Skaabs are good in but can’t be played alongside an army of the blue Zombies.
The U/B color combination faces a unique dilemma, as Skaabs are a double-edged sword with Ghoulraiser and Ghoulcaller’s Chant. On the one hand, they’re Zombies themselves, but on the other they drain your graveyard of the creatures you need to make the Zombie tribal cards good. The solution is to view the black cards as filling one of the “Skaab slots,” or at least a fraction of one. Instead of playing 3-4 Skaabs in your dedicated graveyard deck, you could play two alongside a Ghoulraiser and a Ghoulcaller’s Chant.
Analyzing an Example Deck
This is a graveyard deck I drafted when I was first learning the format. It was pretty good but could have been much better.
Five Skaabs worked because of my high creature count (eighteen) and overabundance of enablers. Even so, I was pushing my luck and ran into minor troubles in some games. They changed Boneyard Wurm from a potential bomb into a chore and forced me to leave Gnaw to the Bone in my sideboard, which I would have gladly played otherwise.
The sheer number of mill cards that I played had the potential to get me into trouble in the late game. I remember in one game that went long, I declined to play my Armored Skaab because I was too scared to mill Garruk Relentless, which I needed to win. On the whole, I was again only saved by my high creature count and aggressive potential; I didn’t really want the game to go long with this deck.
Even a glance at the deck shows an awkward mana curve with a glut of three-drops. Boneyard Wurm can’t even be played on turn 2! This is a real problem for the color blue in general and is the reason that I rate Deranged Assistant among the best commons. Stitcher’s Apprentice is also quite good, as it’s an early play that has a relevant ability in the late game. Any creature that can trade on turn 2 is good, as it keeps you alive and even facilitates an early Skaab.
The biggest problem with this deck was the lack of flashback spells. I had so much mill, but without my Boneyard Wurm in play, what was the point? Add a Think Twice and a Grasp of Phantoms to this deck and I’d consider it a masterpiece. As it was, I went 1-1, but I feel that a better drafter, or even the wiser reiderrabbit of today, could have gone 3-0 in my place.
Food for Thought: The Forty-Card Minimum
“Play exactly forty cards” is a tidbit of MTG wisdom that follows directly from evaluating cards on the “how much do I want to draw this?” scale. You might want to draw your Vastwood Gorger, but certainly not as much as you want to draw your Garruk, Primal Hunter and your Overrun! You wouldn’t play forty-one cards because adding the Vastwood Gorger would reduce your chances of drawing the cards that you really want.
In Innistrad Limited, though, the twenty-three cards that end up in your deck don’t have to strictly be the twenty-three that you most want to draw. Maybe you’d slightly prefer to draw your Moment of Heroism, but you play Silent Departure instead because of the value you get when you mill it. Alternatively, maybe you want to cut that mediocre five-drop, but you feel like you’d be too short on win conditions without it. If your deck contains cards for reasons other than wanting to see them in your opening hand, then playing more than forty cards becomes an option.
What’s more, this is a format where decking yourself is a real factor. It’s rare for a game to officially end by a player being unable to draw a card from his empty library, but in many games, a player gets so low on cards that she declines to loot with her Murder of Crows or flashback her Forbidden Alchemy.
What’s to keep you from submitting a forty-four-card deck? Maybe it lets you flashback your second Forbidden Alchemy without the risk of milling out. Maybe it lets you play one more flashback card to mill and get free value from. Maybe it helps you find room for the Stromkirk Patrol, which can close a game for you or get removed to Skaab Goliath.
Building a Balanced Deck
Breaking the forty-card rule is an advanced technique and shouldn’t be used frivolously. Naturally, it only applies to graveyard decks. Even in graveyard decks, though, it’s important to remember that “how much do I want to draw this?” is still the number one criteria for playing with a card; it’s just not the only criteria.
In my opinion, blue is the best color in Innistrad draft, and the graveyard synergies can provide a little extra edge and put you in a class above normal draft decks. However, my best experiences have been with well-balanced decks that merely take advantage of the graveyard on the side. There’s too much room for failure when you build a gimmicky deck with Burning Vengeance as the only win condition.
Always remember that you’re playing Limited and not Constructed. The most important things in Limited are a good mana curve, solid creatures, removal, and card advantage. Those are still the most important things in Innistrad graveyard decks, and they will still be the most important things in every deck in every Limited format until the end of time. Take your cards in the context of your deck as a whole. Take your deck in the context of the game as a whole. You won’t go wrong.