Mastering Hour of Devastation Limited

The time is nigh and the Hour of Devastation has come! 

Hour of Revelation Artwork by Raymond Swanland

Recently, I purchased a flight out this week for GP Toronto and wanted to get some practice in with the Hour of Devastation cards. My first impressions after doing my first Prerelease in over a year was: 'wow, this format is great!' Although I enjoyed Amonkhet Limited a lot, there were very serious balancing issues. Blue commons were awful and the aggressive decks had a lot of tools at 1-2 mana, almost too many, which made playing 7+ mana bombs like Cruel Reality and Sandwurm Convergence very difficult to justify. Now that I got my feet wet with a some of the new Hour of Devastation cards, I wanted to jot down some things I've noticed about the new cards and where I expect the metagame to be in the first few weeks. 

1) Blue Doesn't Suck Anymore! (Right?)

After Amonkhet's inability to deliver good incentives to draft Blue decks, HOU brings the punches with Unquenchable Thirst, Aerial Guide, and the long overdue return of Unsummon. These cards give Blue some flexibility to both be a tempo deck and apply a lot of early game pressure (U/R, U/W, U/B) while also having some tools to play a control strategy and delay the speed of the game so you can play your late-game spells (U/G and Grixis). Opening Amonkhet sealed pools felt very shallow when looking at Blue since your best common was Aven Initiate and Cartouche of Knowledge with not much else. Now you have the options of Cunning Survivor and Spellweaver Eternal to have aggressive two-drop creatures and Striped Riverwinder as a fine finisher in any control deck.

2) Gold and Synergistic Uncommons are still excellent.

In Amonhet, the gold uncommon cycle of cards were very powerful and often rewarded you for being in that archetype. With HOU Limited, the same still holds true. Unraveling Mummy, Resolute Survivors, Obelisk Spider, etc. are all great cards and work very well in their respective archetypes. Although these gold cards are not as powerful as their Amonkhet predecessors, there are additional pieces of mana fixing (Traveler's Amulet, Survivors' Encampment, and Crypt of the Eternals) in HOU that make splashing your 3rd color easier.

3) Removal spells and plenty of them

Beside all of Red's powerful removal at common: Open Fire, Blur of Blades, and Puncturing Blow, each color has an removal spell at common (most at instant speed). Green has Ambuscade, White has Sandblast, Black has Torment of Venom and Lethal Sting, while Blue has Unquenchable Thirst. Now that every color combination can interact with their opponent's creatures, this opens the doors for control decks as viable strategies as you have ways to slow the pace of the game down and stall until you play 6+ mana spells. Also, the sheer amount of additional wrath-effects at rare: Hour of Devastation, Hour of Revelation, Bontu's Last Reckoning, and Chaos Maw, aggro decks need to be more cautious when regurgitating all their creatures on the battlefield.

4) The mana cost of spells is higher... sort of

Looking at the premium removal spells in each color, the majority of them are around 3-5 mana, which is a huge increase from Amonkhet's Magma Spray and Gust Walker as premium commons. I have a few example decks that I've built below and the biggest difference you'll see between HOU and Amonkhet is a decreased emphasis in 2 drop creatures. Obviously, since Amonkhet is still a big part of HOU Limited, the aggressively costed spells and creatures are still available, so hyper-aggressive strategies are available but have slowed down since you won't often have access to as many copies of Slither Blade or Nef-Crop Entangler. In draft, I've noticed myself taking the best cards in my color and deserts while leaving the Amonkhet pack in P3 to fill up the curve if I'm missing 2 and 3 mana spells since they are so much better than the lower curve spells in HOU. 

5) Deserts matter

The payoffs for having deserts are very high. Sand Strangler and Desert's Hold being the premium uncommons to highlight the mechanic. HOU also has a large number of mediocre commons like Solitary Camel that become very powerful if you have access to Deserts in your deck. 

For the common cycle, they are very powerful and akin to the rare cycling land cycle in Amonkhet. You can play them when you need access to the land drop or color but cycle them away when you start flooding out AND they still provide the benefit to your Deserts-matter cards. In draft, I use them as metrics for identifying if a color is 'sort-of' open since someone who is drafting any particular strategy DOES want some amount of these in their deck to improve the overall consistency. Generally, I've been taking them around picks 5+ in draft, but I could see picking them sooner as correct. 

The uncommon cycle act like additional spells you can add to your deck for free while also providing the Desert subtext as a way to turn on other cards. Since they don't enter the battlefield tapped, they are also very good for curving out. So far, I've had very positive experiences playing with both the uncommon and common cycle and am always happy to sleeve up 3-4 deserts in each deck. 

HOU Sealed R/G Midrange (4-0)

In our first example, this is my HOU prerelease deck. It's a very stock example of R/G Deserts which is a midrange deck with good removal, a small handful of combat tricks and large creatures that want to punch in the red-zone. The 3 copies of Gilded Cerodons were very important in nullifying bockers and allowing my little guys to keep punching through. In this example, you'll notice only one Pride Sovereign as our rare. I feel that the rares in HOU are significantly less powerful the ones available in Amonkhet, so the incentive to 'reach' your deck to play them in terms of mana and curve is less enticing. I had access to a Bontu's Last Reckoning and Adorned Pouncer, both very good cards but the cost of forcing the fixing for both being Jund or Naya to splash either outweighted the benefit. In R4, I even got to play against my friend piloting his Grixis control deck featuring some real powerhouses.

Kevin Stoiber's HOU Prerelease Pool (WOW!)

Last week, I went to a draft FNM in a table of 10 people, so overall a lot of cards won't wheel and you'll end up seeing more cards, so I took the best card in each pack for the first 5 or so picks.

HOU Draft Pack 1 (Right to Left order)

Here's the final deck after 3 packs:

HOU Draft (R/W Aggro 5-0-2)

I thought this was one of the best draft decks I've ever drafted. It has all of the 2 drop creatures R/W is looking for including Gust Walker, Oketra's Avenger, and 2 copies of Earthshaker Khenra alongside handful of premium removal spells for any-sized creature. In P2, I made an error and took a Mummy Paramount over a Desert of the True thinking I could pick up a 3rd Desert in P3. Unfortunately, the Amonkhet Deserts are all pretty bad, so I didn't have an opportunity to pick one up that I'd be happy to play with. This choice left me with only 2 Deserts and it was difficult to 'active' my Desert matters cards in my matches. This mispick also cost me a color source in my mana base, so I could only sleeve up 7 Mountains instead of 8 which I wanted to reliably cast Puncturing Blow. Despite the misplay, the deck was a lot of fun to play and I feel I correctly identified White as the open color and was rewarded well in P3 with Amonkhet.

The next day, I battled in an HOU Sealed PPTQ at Campus Cards and Games and here's what I built.

HOU PPTQ Sealed (Jund 3-2)

The pool had some great Red cards, 3 copies of Frontline Devastator and 2 copies of Struggle // Survive, decent Green removal and creatures, alongside 3 great Black cards and not much else. Off the back of Evolving Wilds, Survivors' Encampment and a few cyclers, the splash into Black was doable to add some quality cards to the deck as spells 22-24. At one point, I got to cast Struggle on my opponent's Angel of Sanctions and then cast Survive to throw it back in their library. That was pretty sweet. I thought the deck performed well and I was able to sneak into 8th seed with a 3-2 record. Close one!

HOU PPTQ Draft (G/R Deserts 3-0)

Much of the same. Like my last HOU draft, I didn't prioritize Deserts heavily enough and was forced to play 2-off color Deserts to active my Hour of Promise. I started this draft with P1P1 Sand Strangler and picked a 2nd copy P2P2 with the person to my left also in Red taking an Hour of Devastation over it. Yikes. Shefet Monitor was also very impressive as it found Deserts to turn on my 3 copies of Sidewinder Naga.

G2 of PPTQ Finals

PPTQ Winner! About time

Now that I've talked about all my sweet Red-based decks in Hour of Devastation Limited, let's breakdown some P1P1 packs. Take a look at the image first, then pick the card you would take and afterwards, read my evaluation below! 

P1P1 #1 image courtesy of starcitygames.com

This pack is fairly weak with the best cards available to us Solitary Camel, Devotee of Strength, Accursed Horde, and Chaos Maw. First, we can identify that the two uncommons and our rare have a higher ceiling than the Solitary Camel since their effects are both unique and very powerful, so it's safe to rule out the common here. Devotee of Strength is a flexible creature with a 3/2 body which is a fine rate that maximizes itself in the mid-late game where you want to sink mana into it's ability to upgrade your creatures and attack/defend with them. We can see this being useful in R/G aggro, G/W aggro, G-based ramp, or B/G midrange. The Accursed Horde is very powerful and shines best in B/W Zombies or some U/B or R/B Afflict derivative where we want to be attacking often. Chaos Maw is an interesting card that is very powerful if we are able to cast it and hit our opponent's creatures. This type of card is very good in R/G ramp or Grixis control. I think the cards are close enough in power level that it's difficult to argue that any one is better than the other, but my pick here is Devotee of Strength. It is the most flexible card since it's ability is relevant for aggro decks and builds as the game progresses. This pick allows you to pivot the rest of your pack according to what's open and I'm happy to take it here.

P1P1 #2 image courtesy of starcitygames.com

Again, another fairly weak pack but we have an interesting choice to make. As we've looked in Pack 1, we have Devotee of Strength as a very powerful card with Sunset Pyramid and Sandblast being distant 2nd choices. I think the straightforward pick here is to take the Naga, but here I would take Sunset Pyramid as it is a way to stay open as a fine playable and a way to take whatever best cards in the 2nd or 3rd picks of this pack end up being. We also get to ship a pack that really only has one good card in it, so we can determine that the person to our left will absolutely take the Naga and the proceeding player will take Sandblast. I think this will put us in a good spot for P2. 

P1P1 #3 image courtesy of starcitygames.com

Here we have a lot of interesting choices. The two gold cards, Resolute Survivors and Unraveling Mummy are the two strongest cards in the pack with Wildfire Eternal, Feral Prowler, and Unsummon being fine playables. The problem with our common playables is that they are all pretty lower power level and we're not exactly thrilled to take any of them. Here, I take Unraveling Mummy. Although we don't know the odds that we get to sleeve it up in our deck, the ceiling if we do is very high, where turning all of our medium-sized zombies into Vampire Nighthawks is very, very powerful. Alternatively, we could take Resolute Survivors, but finding Exert creatures is sometimes difficult since the metagame bias is towards aggressive decks and a lot of players will want to take them. Furthermore, Resolute Survivors is a worse splash card than Unraveling Mummy, where our gold zombie is still very splashable if we end up being an off-color zombie deck (U/W or R/B) and the Resolute Survivors is really only playable in R/W Aggro.

Thanks so much for reading my thoughts on HOU Limited today. Let me know how your Prereleases and Draft weekends went and what cards really shined for you!

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-David J.

EDH Series: Emrakul, the Promised End

'Only one vault was great enough to hold Emrakul.'

Emrakul, the Promised End Artwork by Jaime Jones

Emrakul, the Promised End EDH Deck on tapped out.net

What inspired you to build this deck?

While playing in the 2HG Prerelease with my friend, Brandon, I was lucky enough to open this beautiful monster as my Prerelease promo card and new immediately I had to build a deck with it. Colorless EDH decks are very uncommon and most of them play Kozilek, Butcher of Truth or Kozilek, the Great Distortion as ways to refuel cards in the late game. Naturally, if I'm going to play sleeve up the Eldrazi Titans, I'm going to play the biggest titan possible as my commander. For this deck, I chose to run the new Titans (Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Kozilek, the Great Distortion) because the Annihilator ability on the older Titans makes what they do very linear and I didn't want the deck to be overshadowed by that.

A few things I want to note about this deck is a 39 land count. I typically start my decks off at 38 lands because I can consistently hit land 6-8, which I feel are the most important ones for the average deck. For Emrakul and her arsenal, the deck is very mana hungry and we often want to see lands 10+, so in addition to the artifact mana ramp like Thran Dynamo, Worn Powerstone, and Burnished Hart, we do often see opening hands with 3-5 lands and are happy to keep them. As I play the deck more, I can even see going to a 40th land at some point.

The next sweet thing about this deck is the Salvaging Station package that allows us to recur some interaction and advantage in the late game. We have access to Scrabbling Claws (fantastic card), Expedition Map (amazing card), Universal Solvent, and Codex Shredder as great targets to re-use over and over as the game drags on.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was Krark-Clan Ironworks and mention that it is the best card in the deck. Although my deck isn't built to do anything degenerate, the Krark-Clan Ironworks allows us to invest our cheap artifacts into a huge boost of mana and pump out a very early Emrakul, the Promised End that most opponent's are not able to defend against so early in the game. The artifact also has incredible synergy with the Salvaging Station package and loops using Scrap Trawler, Myr Retriever, and Junk Diver as ways to rebuy cards and generate a lot of advantage, while also producing mana.

Eldritch Moon Prerelease

What is your favorite part about playing this deck?

This deck has a lot of staying power and has the ability to survive some pretty hairy situations since so many of our spells are so powerful: Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, Perilous Vault, and Planar Portal to name a few. Even most of our lands have abilities, so we always have something to do with our mana at almost every point in the game. Consequentially, you often have a ton of different options every turn, which can make identifying the best line really difficult. Personally, I really enjoy the challenge of finding the best lines (or seemingly best) out of a sea of options. Naturally, you'll mistakes as you play, but having so many different abilities allows you to recover from mistakes which makes for great gameplay.

Emrakul, the Promised... quite frankly she's a HUGE beater in the air and terrifying to fight against. Watching opponent's try to play around her triggered ability is pretty amusing. For the table, it's so difficult for our opponents to create a reasonable board state, but not look too threatening that I would want to Mindslaver them. The deck creates some fantastic politics and it's very enjoyable to play.

Did Amonkhet bring any new cards for you to use?

Well, not quite. However, the Kaladesh block before it brought some sweet artifact support that I was eager to try out. Inventors' Fair being the best card printed, it's a land that gives you a small amount of life with each turn and allows you to tutor out an artifact from your library, which can help you find your Krark-Clan Ironworks in the midgame or find Mindslaver, Platinum Angel, or Oblivion Stone in the late game.

We also received Planar Bridge as an interesting addition. I don't believe it's as powerful as Planar Portal since you can find spells with Planar Portal and the activation of 6 mana is significantly easier to reach than 8, but the bridge puts any permanent from the deck in play, allowing it to be a very slow toolbox for your high-impact permanents.

Thanks for joining me for another Deck Tech of some of my EDH projects I've been working on it. Let me know if you've also made an Emrakul, the Promised deck and what cool deck designs you've done with her!

Check out the Casual Net Gaming Archive and join us on Facebook!

-David J.

Drafting Amonkhet Part 1

If you haven't already, please take a look at my last article: Mastering Amonkhet Limited which highlights some of the early fundamentals I took while starting to draft and build Amonkhet Limited decks. In the last couple of weeks, I've been grinding as much Amonkhet Limited as I can. I really enjoy the fast-paced games as well as the creativity in crafting decks to battle against what my opponents perceive as the best strategies.

Forsake the Worldly Artwork by Steve Argyle

I want to revisit metagaming in Limited really quick and focus on the first few weeks of Amonkhet. On day one of the Pro Tour, most of the pros identified aggressive decks as the most successful archetypes, looking at Red and White has having the highest quality commons/uncommons and R/W and U/W as being the Tier 1 archetypes. As Pro Tour weekend progresses, a lot of players tend to focus on Standard and follow the Standard decks throughout Day 2 and the Top 8. However, Day 2 still has plenty of draft content and we start to see some cards pop up that are stronger than at first evaluation. Here's a list of a few cards that we'll highlight as cards that get a lot better when everyone is focused on low land counts and curving out with small creatures.

Festering Mummy
Those Who Serve
Blazing Volley
Impeccable Timing
Sacred Cat
Tah-Crop Skirmisher
Splendid Agony
Supernatural Stamina
Soulstinger

This past week, there's also been a lot of discussion on one unassuming common: Slither Blade. On the surface, this card looks underpowered and in fact, it is. In a vacuum, this card attacks for 1 point of unblockable damage each turn, which is very non-impactful. When we start to look at the metagame of the format, revolving around Honed Khopesh, a suite of Cartouches, and combat tricks, Slither Blade can hold all of these very well with very little downside, turning a seemingly insignificant 1 point per turn to 2-3 points per turn, which can end a game very quickly if supported by pressure from other creatures. Although this card still needs a lot of support to be playable, we'll often see these go late in a draft (between picks 8-10) so you can draft your equipment and auras early and find the Slither Blades to hold all of your pump spells.

I've tried to cram in as many local drafts as I possibly could and I wanted to share a few decks I was able to sleeve up.

Amonkhet Draft (R/W Aggro 2-0-1)

For this first deck, we'll take a look at one of the more aggressive decks in the format, R/W Aggro. For this deck, I had 10 2-drop creatures to apply a massive amount of early-game pressure with a pair of cheap removal spells in the form of Compulsory Rest and Trial of Zeal. Cartouche of Zeal was perfect for stopping my opponent's from blocking for a turn and re-buying my two Trials, which added a small amount of card advantage to a deck that typically doesn't have any.

A few improvements I could have made to this deck include cutting a Plains to decrease the land count to 16 for an extra spell since our curve is low enough that flooding out is more dangerous than getting mana screwed. I would also cut the Pursue Glory for another one drop spell. Although Pursue Glory has cycling for 2 mana, 2 mana comes at a premium in this deck where our plan is to vomit 2 mana creatures onto the battlefield and taking a turn off to do so is a losing proposition.

A note about the amount of lands, typically you'll see an aggressive deck like this run between 15-16 lands and 24-25 spells. For this deck, I should have opted for 16 over 15 since we have ways to use excess mana by embalming our pair of Unwavering Initiates and Trueheart Duelist, Fan Bearer activations or pumping the pair of our Minotaur Sureshots.

As the metagame slants towards the entire table drafting aggressive strategies, we'll see that cards interacting with 1-2 drop creatures profitably will go up in our evaluation and we'll want to prioritize these cards. Let's take a look at an Amonkhet Draft a week after the PT.

Amonkhet Draft (R/G Aggro 3-0)

Quick maintenance: the mana base for this deck is actually 16 lands with 9 Mountains and 7 Forests.

In this R/G Aggro deck, you'll see a few key differences. Again, I include a large number of 2 mana creatures to apply pressure on my opponent, but I also focus on 3 toughness creatures with two copies of Nimble-Blade Khenra and two copies of Khenra Charioteer that help block most 2 drop creatures profitably or trade with them. Thresher Lizard's ability to become a 4/4 in the mid to late game was also vital on a lot of board states since 4 toughness is very difficult for aggressive decks to fight through.

In this deck, you'll see some of our main responses to aggressive decks, 3 copies of Magma Spray as a way to stave off early pressure from your opponent as well as clear small blockers when we turn the corner and start attacking.

Another card I want to focus on is Honed Khopesh. When our mana curve of creatures is so low, sometimes our opponent will be able to outclass our attackers with a 4-5 toughness creature or even a Scaled Behemoth to stall out our ability to attack. In these scenarios, Honed Khopesh gives us reach where our 3 mana 3 power creatures can profitably trade with our opponent's 5 or even 6 mana X/4s, giving us a huge competitive edge. In the reverse scenario where we are defending ourselves against our opponent's army of smaller creatures, making an X/4 creature to make combat difficult for our opponent's is very important on a lot of board states, where fading a combat step for a turn or two giving us time to get ahead can be the difference between winning and losing those games.

An interaction I found really fun with this deck was the 3 copies of Bitterblade Warrior with our two copies of Khenra Charioteer where exerting our 2/2 for +1/+0 and Deathtouch allows us to crash right through combat, where if our opponent blocks, we can have our Bitterblade Warrior deal one point of lethal Deathtouch damage to their blocker and Trample over for 2 more points of damage, making blocking a nightmare for our opponents.

Amonkhet Team Draft (B/W Zombies 3-0)

In this deck was a very fun B/W Zombies deck from a Team Draft I did. In this format, you spend more time prioritizing cutting good cards from circulation to prevent the opposing team from playing bombs against you. Consequentially, the decks tend to be a little worse off from there only being 6 players worth of cards instead of the traditional 8 in a normal draft and with all the cutting, typically you won't end up with very synergistic decks. In this draft, I was primarily mono-White and took a late Lord of the Accursed and Merciless Javelineer along with a pair of Painted Bluffs for the splash. The real highlight of the deck is the curve, the creatures are nicely spread across the 2-4 mana with a Supply Caravan filling up the top-end with a very low curve of combat tricks and removal. Although definitely not our most powerful deck, I was very happy with how this one turned out.

Amonkhet Draft (G/W Midrange 2-1)

In our last example, I want to talk about a deck that I was very disappointed in. I was grateful enough to first pick a Rhonas the Indomitable and 2nd pick a Fan Bearer, but then the rest of Pack 1 dried out quickly. I did my best to stay on Green in Pack 1, but started dipping into both Black and White. I was able to pick up some late Green cards in Pack 3, but overall I felt the deck was very underpowered. Looking at the curve, our 2 drop slot is very light. Had we more early creatures, we could have capitalized on the sheer amount of combat tricks (2 copies of Shed Weakness, Djeru's Resolve, Impeccable Timing, and Spidery Grasp) we have to apply a ton of pressure to our opponents. In hindsight, I should have jumped off of Green and into U/W since Blue was very open in my seat. Overall, the deck performed fine, but I wanted to share it so you can see some of its weaknesses.

Similar to last week's article, let's take a look at some Pack One Pick Ones. First, take a look at the image and then make your pick before reading my analysis of the pack below!

(Graphic courtesy of starcitygames.com)

In this pack, we can identify the best cards being Magma Spray, Aven Initiate, Nef-Crop Entangler, Stir the Sands, and Oracle's Vault. Let's start step by step.

Step 1: Magma Spray is the strongest red card in the pack. Here, we can dismiss Nef-Crop Entangler.
Step 2: Blue cards are best paired with White or Red. Good Blue commons will also come later in the draft, so we will likely have access to Aven Initiate later if we want one in our deck. In a hypothetical U/R deck, Magma Spray will be more flexible. Here, we can rule out Aven Initiate.
Step 3: Although card advantage is fantastic, a lot of the cards in Amonkhet have built-in card advantage between the bonuses granted from Exert, the extra body you get from Embalm creatures, and the cycling mechanic inherently grants you advantage if you're missing land drops or have a payoff card. The deck that benefits the most from a card like Oracle's Vault is in a deck stalling out the board and gaining advantage in the late game, so typically G/B or U/G (and these are decks that will already have big payoffs for delaying the game). Since we don't want to commit ourselves to a card that's generally redundant with the Top Tier strategies, we can rule out Oracle's Vault.

The pick now comes down to Magma Spray and Stir the Sands. Here, I'll admit that Magma Spray is the 'correct' pick when talking about flexibility and power level. However, the more I play the format, the more I enjoy taking slightly narrow uncommons that are very powerful in their respective strategy. While other players are looking to stay open, you can capitalize on some of the payoff uncommons that wheel around in Pack 1 as players are trying to stay flexible and might take weaker cards. In the case of Stir the Sands specifically, I think the card is very powerful and has very high upside in either B/W Zombies, U/B Cycling, or R/B Aggro. Although the card is not a payoff multicolored card, we can treat it this way since it's highest ceiling is alongside Binding Mummy and Wayward Servant in B/W Zombies. You also have the added benefit of not passing any black cards to the left so you'll be in a position to solidify into black in Pack 1. Here, I take Stir the Sands. 

(Graphic courtesy of starcitygames.com)

In this pack, we have a lot of weaker cards. Our best cards are Nef-Crop Entangler, Weaver of Currents, Defiant Greatmaw and Devoted Crop-Mate. In this pack, we'll also highlight Scared Cat, Bloodlust Inciter, Fling and Mighty Leap as the playables leftover in this pack. Unfortunately, while the pack is bad, there are also fine playables from only both White and Red leftover. This makes it hard for me to take a Red or White card here since I'm placing both Red and White cards in my opponents' card pools. Although Devoted Crop-Mate is probably the best card by sheer power level, it only shines brightest in R/W or U/W, so I view the card as a hidden gold card.

Similar to last week's article, we should analyze what cards may come from the wheel. If we take Devoted Crop-Mate, we are likely to get Mighty Leap on the wheel. If we take Nef-Crop Entangler, we are likely to get Nimble-Blade Khenra on the wheel. And if we take Defiant Greatmaw, we are likely to wheel Weaver of Currents because most players will be trying to stay open in Pack 1, so the odds of a gold card coming back are pretty good. In these pairings, although riskier, the Defiant Greatmaw/Weaver of Currents pairing is stronger, so here my pick is Defiant Greatmaw and we would slant our subsequent picks towards Blue.

(Graphic courtesy of starcitygames.com)

This will definitely be our most difficult pack to evaluate since it has a lot of very powerful cards. Cards that we want to keep our eye on are Emberhorn Minotaur, Aven Initiate, Magma Spray, Hooded Brawler, Final Reward, Battlefield Scavenger, Shefet Monitor, and Mouth // Feed. We even have to pay attention to cards that may come on the wheel: Supernatural Stamina, Soulstinger, Quarry Hauler, River Serpent and Aven Wind Guide, all of which are fine playables.

Step 1: Identify the best card in each color. For Red, this is naturally Magma Spray. For Black, this will be Final Reward. And for Green, Mouth // Feed is very powerful since Feed can draw us a ton of cards if we build our deck well, which makes it slightly better than Hooded Brawler. And for Blue, we have Aven Initiate (with Aven Wind Guide as a natural pairing).
Step 2: Which cards are better than the others? We already discussed Magma Spray over Aven Initiate, so we can rule out the flyer here. I really do like Final Reward since it's a premium removal spell that can answer our opponents's bomb rares. For Mouth // Feed, the payoff is very high if you can have a couple of 3 power creatures and then Feed for 2-3 cards is so powerful when you're hitting the mid-late stages in the game. Between the two, I think they're both close with Final Reward being only a tad better since it's easily splashable and doesn't commit us so heavily to one color.

Here, we can identify Magma Spray as the pick, since it and Final Reward do similar things in this relatively aggressive format and is more flexible than the both Final Reward and Mouth // Feed (being a premium card in more archetypes). In this pack, we also see that we end up passing a lot of great playables, many of which will be Green, so taking Mouth // Feed and passing both Hooded Brawler and Shefet Monitor is unreasonable. By taking Magma Spray, although we are unlikely to wheel anything, we 'could' wheel Battlefield Scavenger just because of the sheer depth of this pack. Even more probable, we could receive a Supernatural Stamina or Soulstinger on the wheel, both of which I really like in R/B and would slant the rest of this pack towards Black.

As a special piece for this week, I want to take a look at one of Gaby Spartz's drafts that she had on her stream recently.

In Gaby's first pack, she opens the bomb rare, Hazoret the Fervent. This card is incredibly powerful and there's no feasible way we can pass it. If we look closely, in the 4 best cards in this pack, 3 of them are red (including Ahn-Crop Crasher, Thresher Lizard, and Hooded Brawler). In this case, we'll be shipping some great Red cards to our left and be mindful of that in the upcoming picks.

For Pack 1, Pick 2 after taking our Hazoret the Fervent, we see a Final Reward, Aven Initiate, and Cartouche of Zeal as the best three cards, with Pathmaker Initiate as a distant 4th. Since we started our draft with a bomb red rare, we want to optimize our probability of playing it in our deck and cut red off as much as possible (if possible) from the players to our left so they are dissuaded in picking up Red cards in Pack 2. Although the most flexible pick would be either Final Reward, Aven Initiate (as the strongest two cards), we should stick to Red cards if the power level is close to what we're passing. Although I would rate Cartouche of Zeal lower than the other two cards, I think it is clearly the pick since it plays well with our Hazoret the Fervent and stays on color. At this point, you can even take Pathmaker Initiate if you have a higher preference for the 2 drop; I think the correct pick here is to take a Red card.

And finally for Pack 1, Pick 3 we have a similar situation. The best card in this pack is Ruthless Sniper that even has some synergy with our Hazoret the Fervent as we can discard cards to hit our opponent and shrink their creatures with -1/-1 counters. However, at this point in the draft, we need to solidify Red as our dominant color and I would take Emberhorn Minotaur since it is a very good Red common and will fit nicely in any Red deck that we decide to play. Although we would potentially love to have a Ruthless Sniper in our pile, we can't afford to take it here.

I wanted to bring up this draft as a lesson in weighing both staying flexible/open vs commitment. In the case of bomb rares that can end the games you get to cast it, you should often commit to those colors and maximize the odds that you get to play with those cards since they will increase your win percentage. Quick thanks to Starcitygames and Gaby Spartz for all the content they produce and I hope you guys enjoyed this week's Amonkhet Limited article. Let me know what cards you would have picked!

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-David J.

EDH Series: Dragonlord Silumgar

'Silumgar never passes up an opportunity to add to his opulence.' 

Dragonlord Silumgar Artwork by Steven Belledin

Hey guys! Welcome to our EDH Series where we'll be placing a spotlight on some of the sweet decks I've built or my friends have built in our playgroup. It's been a while since I've played Commander, but I'm really excited to cast some of the biggest and flashiest spells Magic has to offer once again with good friends.

What inspired you to build this deck?

Before I left for Peru, I built this EDH Dragonlord Silumgar deck that is now one of my pride and joys. At the time, I was exploring deck-building constraints. In the vast landscape of Commander with thousands of different cards, it's easy to default to some of the format's best spells and end up playing a deck with lots of value and very little synergy. In this deck, I thought about what Dragonlord Silumgar is. As one of these most greedy Elder Dragons, his whole focus is on stealing and collecting what belongs to others. Naturally, I wanted to play every card that stole permanents and spells, but I thought more about this dragon's intentions. He has no interest in destroying anything, he wants everything to be his. That's where I got the idea of the largest deck-building constraint: no destroy effects.

Outside of a lone copy of Crux of Fate (as a dragon-themed Wrath of God), our deck has very limited ways to killing our opponent's permanents. In some ways, this forces us to either steal it or let our opponent keep it. This dilemma has created some really interesting game interactions where I've had a Spelljack in my hand and I've had to hold it through several turn cycles to make sure that's the spell I wanted to steal.

Following closely to the theme, the deck has no actual win conditions. The only ways Silumgar can conquer a game is with other people's stuff. Often this can be really challenging when one of your opponent's casts a Coat of Arms that really doesn't care who controls it, just that it stays on the battlefield pumping up their army of Myr tokens. Those games challenge me to navigate the small amount of permission spells I do have like Forbid and Capsize and try to maximize the value I get out of each one.

What is your favorite part about playing this deck?

My favorite thing about this deck is trying to construct a gameplan with your opponents' permanents. Often your opponent's have these really fine-tuned engines that hum really well together. Mostly we steal the cards that are vital to their engines but really don't have a purpose with our deck. The fun is in free-for-all games to try and put all of those cards together into a cohesive gameplan to eventually win the game. Those games tend to really push me to be creative and I really enjoy playing those games.

Did Amonkhet bring any new cards for you to use?

The first and obvious inclusion was Fetid Pools since it is a cycling dual land that is also an Island and counts towards our Vedalken Shackles count. In the late game, we can cycle this away for another shot at a spell which can give you the slightest edge you need to draw the game-winning spell.

Amonket also brought us As Foretold, a very powerful enchantment that acts as Aether Vial allowing you to cast spells for free both on your and your opponents' turns. Although As Foretold is definitely a slow card, the games with Dragonlord Silumgar  tend to go longer, so you have time to build up your time counters. Alongside Vedalken Orrery, you're able to cast spells on each turn and recast Dragonlord Silumgar  over and over again through countermagic and removal spells.

Lay Claim is also another card I'd like to give a shot over Confiscate. Although it costs one more mana, it can cycle itself away if I need to draw a land in the early game.

Thanks for reading about my Dragonlord Silumgar EDH deck. I think it's the pefect deck to sleeve up if you're looking to play a strict control deck and are looking for a challenge. Please let me know what you think and share your stories of battling Commander with me!

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-David J.

Mastering Amokhet Limited

Rising of the undead, rare full-art basic lands, God cards, and the looming horns of none other than Nicol Bolas. With so much beauty and dread, how do we navigate the Draft and Sealed landscape of Amonkhet?

Artwork by Aleksi Briclot

Like every Limited format before it and each one to come, the best way to prepare for drafts at your local game store is to familiarize yourself with the cards in the set (Amonkhet Set List) and practice, practice, practice. One of the best ways to understand an individual card's potential is to actually play with and against the card itself. You can apply the same philosophy to archetypes; if you want to explore B/W Zombies or R/W Exert strategies in Amonkhet, the best way to do that is to draft the archetype and jam some games in.

Typically, I like to divide each format in two different ways. The first is by the three pillars: Aggressive decks, Midrange decks, and finally Control decks. The purpose of each to define the pace of each gameplan. Aggressive decks will naturally have a low mana curve of creatures and spells while applying a lot of pressure in the early game. Midrange decks will have slightly larger creatures and have more of their deck dedicated to removal spells, hand disruption, or light ways to generate card advantage. For Control decks, their gameplan is to use an engine (ex: Drake Haven) to generate tons of card advantage and dedicate most of the game to surviving and drawing cards until that engine can be assembled.

The second division is by color pairs. I like to look at how the Green cards interact with the Red ones, the Green with the Blue ones, etc. Looking at some of the gold cards like Khenra Charioteer or Weaver of Currents tend to lend some clues as to what the archetype is attempting to do. I like to take each color pair and categorize them within each of the three pillars to get an idea of what pace those games will play out. This also helps me prioritize what cards in each color will be most valuable to each archetype. A great example is a simple card like Splendid Agony. On the surface, this card can kill off an opposing 2 toughness creature, two one toughness creatures, or shrink your opponent's large creatures. Once we start looking into the G/B -1/-1 archetype, we start to notice a lot of synergies of placing -1/-1 counters on both our creatures and our opponent's creatures. We can draw extra insect tokens off of Nest of Scarabs or gain another life point off of an attacking Exemplar of Strength, we start to see how versatile this card can be in the right strategy. Another example is a common like Sacred Cat which is a relatively low-impact 1/1 with Lifelink and Embalm. We start to see synergies pop up when we look at W/B Zombies and our cat begins draining our opponent for 1 with Wayward Servant after we embalm him. We can even sacrifice our cat to Start // Finish to destroy one of our opponent's creatures and still have the cat to resurrect later. The key to strong deck-building is first being aware of the small interactions then abusing them to defeat your opponent.

Another quick example of a card that is difficult to evaluate is Warfire Javelineer. This 2/3 minotaur hits an opponent's creature for X where X is equal to the number of instants/sorcery cards in your graveyard. For 4 mana, a 2/3 body is a relatively poor rate. Its triggered ability is also only really useful if you have 2+ instants/sorceries in your graveyard. If we start evaluating what the R/G or R/W strategies are doing, you'll notice that each archetype is aggressive and trying to put out as many creatures as possible. Often, you won't have time to play your instants/sorceries by the time you hit 4 mana to play our Javelineer. However, if we start to look at R/U and even R/B, cycling away our instants/sorceries for cycling engines or powering up our Enigma Drake, we start to see that the Javelineer could be dealing 3-4 damage pretty consistently. The stock of our Warfire Javelineer goes up or down in our evaluation of Red cards for our deck depending on the archetype we're electing to play.

For Amonkhet Limited, let's take a look at the 3 major mechanics: Exert, Embalm, and Cycling.

Exert
The Exert creatures give you a choice whether to attack with them normally or have them grant you a bonus when they attack, but doesn't allow them to untap during your next Untap Step. Typically you'll find these creatures in Green, White, or Red. Any effect like Sparring Mummy or Spidery Grasp have a little extra stock. The synergies are built within the cards and you don't have to stretch very far to find it. The deck benefits from applying a ton of early pressure to your opponent supplementing the assault with combat tricks and cheap removal spells.

Embalm
The Embalm creatures give you an extra body when they're in the graveyard. So the going 2 mana rate for your 2/2 Trueheart Duelist grows as he also turns into a 3 mana 2/2 as a virtual extra card in your hand. Generally, the Embalm creaures are White or Blue with a few exceptions. Since these creatures can fight on the battlefield twice, you'll see tempo-based aggro decks that use the cheap suite of Embalm creatures along with Blue's spell-heavy commons/uncommons to ensure that your team continues pushing in for damage. Cards like Decision Paralysis and Winds of Rebuke really shines here.

Cycling
And the last major mechanic is Cycling. This mechanic allows you to discard the spell from your hand to draw a card. Sometimes your cycling card will have an extra ability like Shefet Monitor that allows you to search for a basic land or Desert while also drawing you a card. This mechanic goes the deepest since it bleeds into all 5 colors, allowing you to play narrow sideboard cards like Stinging Shot or Violent Impact with the ability to cycle them away if they aren't useful in the current game. The Cycling archetype typically draws from Blue and Black spells with powerful engines at the Uncommon and Rare level including Drake Haven, Sacred Excavation, and Archfiend of Ifnir. Although these cards won't be included in every draft, they build the foundation for a powerful synergy that's not easily overcome when all of its moving parts are together.


Let's take a look at some quick Limited examples:

Amonkhet Draft - U/B Cycling (2-1)

This one I built in a draft side event on the Friday before GP Richmond. The deck has 11 cycling cards with a few payoff cards in Drake Haven, Pitiless Vizier, Wander in Death, and Sacred Excavation. The cards that really allow us to survive to the late game are our real all stars: Rags//Riches, our pair of Wasteland Scorpions and Edifice of Authority were all all-stars in serving as early ways to stave off damage and allow us to play Liliana's Mastery or arguably the best card in our deck, Lay Claim. In this draft, I even got to Lay Claim my opponent's Sacred Cat holding a Cartouche of Knowledge. Oh yeah.

Grand Prix Richmond '17 (Amonkhet Sealed) - Jund Midrange (5-4)

This was my sealed deck from GP Richmond. This deck turned out to be a very average midrange deck with fine removal spells and big creatures. Some of the biggest weaknesses of the deck are the 5 copies of 5 mana spells, which were often difficult to cast in succession if I was stumbling on making the 5th land drop. You'll also notice the 2 and 3 mana slots are slightly low and that made punishing an opponent's mulligan or recovering from my own difficult. The allstar in the deck was definitely Bloodlust Inciter, who granted Haste to my giant Colossapede army allowing me to fight under opponents who were biding time to play their bomb rares. Even though the deck didn't get us to Day 2, I think there were a lot of good things going for it and we can learn to build our decks with our mana curve in mind for the future. 

Round 4 Defeating PVDDR at GP Richmond '17

Stephen and I at GP Richmond '17

One very overlooked concept in Limited is: Metagaming

After GP Richmond, we had the results and coverage of Pro Tour Amonkhet. Thousands of viewers watched as the professional Magic players lent their thoughts on Amonkhet Limited. Ideologies on the best strategies became obvious very quickly: aggressive decks were the best decks. After the release of every set, the prevalent attitudes on the PT will dominate how players play the Draft/Sealed format for the upcoming months.

Amonkhet Sealed R/W Aggro (3-0-1)

In this R/W Exert deck, you'll notice a plethora of 2 mana creatures supplemented with a couple of combat tricks and cheap removal. The deck's plan is very straightforward and punishes players who stumble on mana, mulligans, or don't sufficiently defend themselves before getting their engines online.

After identifying the baseline 'Level 0' thinking, we can start evaluating what players already know and what they may be doing because of this knowledge. As a follow-up, we should try to identify what the next step is (Level 1 Thinking). If every player at our draft table is drafting aggressive decks, what cards are good against those strategies?

Level 0 Pillars:
Red is the best color in the format
Aggressive decks are the best decks in the format
Blue is the worst color in the format

Level 1 Thinking:
Create a lower curve of creatures or removal
Generate small amounts of card advantage when possible
Cheap combat tricks to keep your creatures on the table

Amonkhet Prerelease (Rebound) Jund Midrange (3-0)

In this example, you'll see a deck I made knowing that aggressive decks were prevalent in the format post-PT. I used 3 copies of Wasteland Scorpion and a pair of Soulstingers to stave off early pressure and and a pair of Gift of Paradise to reliably cast my splash-colored spells, gain 3 life (essentially replacing itself for taking time off that turn) and ramping into my bigger spells. Since my bigger spells like Scaled Behemoth, Samut, Voice of Disent, Sandwurm Convergence, and Heaven//Earth will just win the game, surviving until that point is vital to my gameplan. After the ground is clogged with creatures and I've killed off my opponent's flyers, victory is only a few turns away.

After looking at a few examples, let's analyze a few Amonkhet Booster Packs. Take a quick glance at the pack, choose the card you would pick and then read my analysis below the photo!

Pack 1 - First Pick?

At first glance, this pack is very strong. You have 4 solid Exert creatures, Watchful Naga, and Gravedigger as all fine cards to choose from. Of the Exert creatures, our rare, Glory-Bound Initiate stands out as its 2 mana cost and ability to punch as a 4/4 with Lifelink is unmatched. From a metagame perspective, the 2 fits nicely into the curve of any of the aggressive white decks we've outlined. Although we are unlikely to wheel any cards of consequence when this pack returns to us, the power level of Glory-Bound Initiate is much higher than the other cards in this pack and we are happy to take it here.

Pack 2

In this pack, we have 3 cards that stand out to me the most: Final Reward, Angler Drake, and Vizier of Many Faces with Cartouche of Zeal being a distant 4th. I actually do enjoy playing Blue in this format and both Angler Drake and our rare are very strong. For color purposes, I believe Blue is a relatively shallow color that can only really support two drafters at the table. Unfortunately, the power level of both the  Angler Drake and Vizier of Many Faces are very similar. If we take Angler Drake here, the person to our left is very likely to take Vizier and vice versa. Surprisingly, I would take Final Reward here in the hopes of creating two Blue drafters to our left so we can avoid fighting for what I predict to be coveted Blue cards in both packs 2 and 3. Luckily, Final Reward is not far behind in power level to our two Blue cards, so we're not unhappy to make this trade off.

Pack 3

Naturally, we saved our most difficult pack for last. This pack is relatively shallow with the best cards being Gust Walker, Aven Initiative, Cartouche of Zeal, and Destined//Lead. Since Destined//Lead is best as a Gold card (when we can cast both modes), we'll consider it a G/B card. Unfortunately, it isn't strong enough to justify taking it as a first pick, so we can immediately rule it out. Next we can evaluate the remaining three cards on power level. After playing with the cards, I really enjoy playing with Gust Walker and Aven Initiative. Both play relatively similar roles in aggro/tempo decks while Aven Initiative can reach into some control decks. I believe Gust Walker is the better common of the two, but not by a significant amount. At this point, we should evaluate the rest of the pack. Assuming the best cards from this pack are taken, that will probably leave us with some combination of Djeru's Resolve, Violent Impact, Onward//Victory, Naga Oracle, Supernatural Stamina, Flameblade Adept, etc. For this pack, I want to evaluate cards on the wheel that will pair well with our first pick. For Gust Walker, we can expect to wheel Djeru's Resolve and for our Aven Initiative it would pair with Naga Oracle. We can identify that a Gust Walker/Djeru's Resolve pairing is more synergistic and fits better with our curve than a pairing between Aven Initiative/Naga Oracle. In addition with a slant towards White in the format, Gust Walker comes out as our pick.

I hope you guys enjoyed my review of Amonkhet Limited. I'll be writing more about the format in the coming weeks as I draft more and explore more of its archetypes. Thanks for tuning in!

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-David J.