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.