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 MummyThose 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 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.
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.
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