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Diving into Dark Ascension Limited

Hello again!

Today we’re going to dive in to the land of Dark Ascension limited! I’m writing this right from the airport in lovely Honolulu after a mediocre Pro Tour showing, but with over a dozen drafts under my belt, as well as watching a few others, I thought I’d give my first impressions.

The first thing to notice is that we have one less pack of Innistrad. That may seem like obvious advice, but it means one less pack of [card]Spider Spawning[/card], [card]Burning Vengeance[/card] and [card]Curse of the Bloody Tome[/card]s. All the cute gimmick decks of triple Innistrad have become that much harder to build; especially not knowing after pack one if your deck will even have one of the key pieces needed. There are replacements in Dark Ascension, but so far most of them have seemed weaker to me than their Innistrad counterparts. This doesn’t mean those strategies have become completely unplayable, just that it will be harder to gauge what is open while the format is still fresh.

On the complete opposite side of things, some cards have been printed that seem to open up more gimmicky decks! Just because you first pick one of the tribal captains, or a [card]Skirsdag Flayer[/card], doesn’t mean that you have to draft dedicated to that card. In one of my first drafts with the new set, after first picking a [card]Stromkirk Captain[/card], I went into tunnel vision mode and picked vampires over better cards in packs 2 and 3. What I should have realized is that a 2/2 first strike for 3 is more than acceptable on its own, and any additional benefits it gives me is just a bonus.

The volume and power level of the low drops in Dark Ascension seems to have dropped. It is now more difficult to build a streamlined aggressive deck, but it is also more rewarding. With the average converted mana cost of draft decks rising, a good aggressive deck can punish awkward draws more often than they could before. The removal is also more expensive, with stuff like [card]Chant of the Skifsang[/card], [card]Wrack with Madness[/card] and 3bb destroy target creature replacing the slots for [card]Sensory Deprivation[/card], [card]Brimstone Volley[/card] and [card]Victim of Night[/card].

While drafting, this means you should prioritize low drops even more than before. It is fairly easy to pick up some four and five drops, so I try to take twos and threes over slightly more powerful cards when I can. My approach to drafting the color combinations has not changed much, but I will try to give an idea of where you should end up after your first few picks have started to give you some direction.

Green is my least favorite color in the new set. It is missing the [card]Prey Upon[/card]s and [card]Darkthicket Wolf[/card] that made it better in Innistrad. With one pack less of [card]Travel Preparations[/card] and good 2 drops, the GW deck is now harder to run. GR has improved a lot with [card]Wild Hunger[/card] and “normal” GU decks should also get better now that [card]Spider Spawning[/card] is harder to draft. GB has gotten worse, since there are no real cards to tie it together and it was already pretty marginal.

Blue has become more polarized. In Innistrad blue was filled with role players for different archetypes but now blue has some all-star commons alongside a bunch of filler. Sea Kite Drake (aka [card]Nephalia Seakite[/card]) and 1uu flier are quite good, while [card]Headless Skaab[/card] and [card]Shriekgeist[/card] are not. All the combinations with blue are going to look very similar in pack one, so realizing which colors are open is going to help the blue drafters a lot.

Red has gotten much better. In my opinion, red gained the most in the new set. [card]Burning Oil[/card] and [card]Wild Hunger[/card] helped make the worse red color pairs stronger, RU gained [card]Faithless Looting[/card] and RB gained some solid creatures.

Black has me kind of on the fence. Its individual cards seem underpowered but some of them play out better than they look at first glance. For example 2b sacadude ([card]Falkenrath Torturer[/card]) is nothing special but fills a great slot in the morbid deck. I think black decks might become better once the archetypes are more fleshed out but as of now I’m not too happy with Swamps.

White is weaker than it was in Innistrad, but Innistrad white was bordering on ridiculous. White’s commons still contain some good fliers, and enough humans to keep the UW and BW builds happy. Between Dark Ascension and Innistrad, there are a million different tricks white can represent

How to build a good 40 card manabase

I really cringe when I see [card]Shimmering Grotto[/card] in 2 color decks. Even without the fancy lands though, far too often I see builds that are way too greedy or not the right mix. There are tons of “rule of thumb” tricks to build a manabase, but following blindly will often lead deck builders astray. For example counting all the forest symbols versus all the swamp symbols might end up with 13 green 11 black, leading to a 9/8 split in favor of swamps, but if all 13 of those green symbols are singular, combined with some double or triple black spells, the mana should likely be reversed or even 10 swamps.

Apart from crazy formats like Ravnica or Eventide drafts, there are really only ever 3 typical styles of decks. Mono color with a splash, straight 2 color, and 2 color base with one or more splashes. The process then goes as follows:

Step 1: Figure out whether you can afford to splash.

There is a difference between being able to splash and having to splash. If your mana is perfect and you have the option of splashing or not, try to figure out how valuable the splash cards are to your deck. The most common thing to splash is removal, but if your deck already has plenty then don’t bother splashing! Typically you want to splash 3 cards or less, they should all be high impact late game cards, and none of them should cost more than a single of that color (i.e. no splashing [card]Overrun[/card]). You don’t want to splash 2 drops, because your mana will need to be stretched if you need the source by turn 2.

Step 2: Figure out how many lands you need.

There are often good reasons to play more or less than the standard 17 lands in every deck. In Ravnica, not only did bounce lands count as extra land drops, you also had signets plus other mana equivalents to go down to 16 or 15 lands. On the other hand, if your deck is super powerful, or has lots of late game bombs, then the most likely way for you to lose is not hitting lands in time, so play extra. Another situation where I often add an extra land is if my 23rd card would really not help the deck at all, sometimes adding an extra land to get that 8th green source is going to be better.

Step 3: Figure out the split.

As much as I loathe a rule of thumb, I’m giving one anyways. In general, for splashes you need to have x+1 of that source, so a [card]Bonds of Faith[/card] and a [card]Slayer of the Wicked[/card] needs 3 white sources. Then, your main colors should have seven, eight, nine or ten sources. Seven if you don’t have any double symbols below six mana (i.e. a [card]Grave Titan[/card] plus assorted 1b, 2b, 3b etc cards only needs seven sources). Eight if you have a couple double symbol cards that cost at least 3 (i.e. a [card]Kruin Outlaw[/card], a [card]Skirsdag Cultist[/card] and an [card]Into the Maw of Hell[/card]). Nine if you have any double symbol two drops and ten if you have multiple two or three drops with double symbol, or any triple symbol cards.

[cardlist title=Example #1]
Doomed Traveler
Selfless Cathar
Avacynian Priest
Cloistered Youth
Silverchase Fox
Midnight Haunting
Elder Cathar
Voiceless Spirit
Village Bell-Ringer
Fiend Hunter
Thraben Sentry
Mausoleum Guard
Gallows Warden
Gatstaf Shepherd
Villagers of Estwald
Orchard Spirit
Festerhide Boar
Grizzled Outcasts
Moment of Heroism
Bonds of Faith
Ranger’s Guile
Travel Preparations
Garruk Relentless
Gavony Township
[/cardlist]
 
For this deck the mana requirements are very light. We start by adding the bare minimum. I have only included 23 cards plus the Township, but this would likely be a 17 land deck anyways since there are multiple five drops and no Pilgrims or other accelerants. The minimum requirement for white is eight sources, since everything except the [card]Fiend Hunter[/card] is single symbol. The minimum requirement for green is seven, since every card is single color. Adding the Township would have been necessary anyway, but in this case there is room for it plus another land. The last land I would add would be a Plains, since there are so few green cards, and having the 1 drops on time is important to an aggressive deck.

[cardlist title=Example #2]
Typhoid Rats
Diregraf Ghoul
Walking Corpse
Ghoulraiser
Screeching Bat
Bloodline Keeper
Abattoir Ghoul
Rotting Fensnake
Deranged Assistant
Stitcher’s Apprentice
Stitched Drake
Selhoff Occultist
Fortress Crab
Sturmgeist
Dead Weight
Victim of Night
Moan of the Unhallowed
Sensory Deprivation
Silent Departure
Claustrophobia
Forbidden Alchemy
Brimstone Volley
Heretic’s Punishment
Stensia Bloodhall
[/cardlist]
 
Here we are more stretched. Our bare minimum for black is eight, eight for blue as well and three red sources. There is no fixing, so that makes 19 without even taking the Bloodhall into account. What I do here is still lay out all 19, then start making cuts. The first thing to notice is that the mana is bad and the deck is powerful. I would definitely start by cutting the [card]Rotting Fensnake[/card] for an 18th land. The Bloodhall is a bit too greedy for not enough of a gain so that goes next. With one more cut necessary it would either be an Island or a Mountain, since you need the eighth swamp more than the rest. In this situation I would likely cut the third mountain, and perhaps consider cutting one of the red cards and re-adding the Fensnake just to make the mana better. There is no worse feeling than having powerful game changing cards stranded in your hand because your mana is not cooperating.

Well hopefully that came through clearly enough. Trying to explain my mana process was a bit more difficult than I envisioned but I think I got the idea across. If this is a topic you would like to hear more about, I can definitely delve deeper in the future. Thanks for reading, and I will at the latest see you all again next month!

Cheers,

Marc Anderson

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