It’s that time of year! The time of year when I feel I have enough experience with a new set to give some tips on drafting the new set. I’ve been quite happy with how these predictions have turned out over the past few sets, so hopefully you guys can get some use out of this and tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
This draft format is very fast, with a lot of the decks capable of steamrolling any stumbles in curve or mana. It’s also a strange format, since most of the awesome two drops require one of each colour of their respective guilds, meaning you immediately need both guild colours, tempting people to add guildgates to their aggressive decks. I’m still not sure if this is correct, but I definitely advocate running at least one or two if your deck doesn’t have 1 drops.
All of the guilds are playable, though that is more a feature of supply and demand than sheer equality. Dimir is quite a bit worse than Boros, but every table will have at least 2 boros drafters, if not 3, and the one dimir player ends up with enough uncommons to build a pretty decent deck. My ranking for the guilds based on power level would be:
Boros
Gruul
Orzhov
Simic
Dimir
Though my ranking based on preference is:
Boros
Orzhov
Gruul
Dimir
Simic
The actual games play out very differently from Return to Ravnica, since more games are decided early by curve or colour screw, but once you hit the late game it has more play to it. In RTR, you had to worry about Pack Rat, [card]Mizzium Mortars[/card], [card]Cyclonic Rift[/card], [card]Angel of Serenity[/card], Mercurial Chmister, and countless other huge bombs, so I find in Gatecrash, if you can get past turn 7 or so, the games do become pretty interesting. There’s a lot of tension in the set, with 4 of the guilds being very swingy based on their mechanics. With Boros you constantly need to be aware of how a haste creature or act of treason can affect battalion triggers, with Gruul you need to figure out which of their 372 combat tricks you can afford to play around, with Simic you need to plan your blockers for multiple different scenarios based on the likelihood of them evolving one or more of their creatures and for Dimir, one cipher card can often present insurmountable card advantage. With that being said, here is my list for the overvalued and undervalued cards of the new set.
Overrated:
Simic.
Ok seriously though. Most people know that Dimir isn’t very good, but Simic is just deceptively bad. To give a perfect example of why, let look at a hand I had against Lucas Siow in one of our “honour” drafts on Saturday after the PT. On the play, I had: Island, Island, Forest, [card]Shambleshark[/card], [card]Crocanura[/card], [card]Burst of Strength[/card], Pit fight. The hand was good, though Lucas’ deck was really strong. I led with island, pass, then drew a [card]Cloudfin Raptor[/card] as my first card. If I am on the draw, that hand becomes a steamrolling, but on the play, the Raptor turned in to an actual blank, until turn 5 when I drew a 5 drop and it suddenly gained one point of power. Awesome! This happens a lot with the deck, but to be more specific:
[card]Cloudfin Raptor[/card]
Pascal and I both simultaneously found a strong dislike for this card. Although his reasoning “that it only attacks for 1 on turn 2, 2 on turn 3 and 3 on turn 4” made little sense, it’s the times that it DOESN’T do this that will drive you nuts. It would be bad enough to be slapped in the face by topdecking a 0/1 in the lategame, but to top it off I have had multiple times when I just think “please let me draw a creature to evolve my 2 guys for the win..” and proceed to want to kill myself. Ok next card.
…
Actually, no. I’m not done. I want to rant about Simic a bit more. Let’s say you have Raptor in to [card]Shambleshark[/card] in to Crocanura in to Scab-clan Charger in to [card]Adaptive Snapjaw[/card]. All commons. On turn 5 you have 20 power worth of guys (with 21 toughness), and have goldfished 29 damage. Against any deck that just plays a few creatures, even if they hit their curve, they are likely dead.
Now replace the Crocanura with a blank, or let’s say for that turn you WOULD have had a 3 drop but had to play a guildgate instead. Your 29 damage? Only 18 now. You also only have 15 power and 14 toughness. Evolve is such a strange mechanic because its cards reward variety instead of consistency. It is way better to draw a Crocanura and an [card]Elusive Krasis[/card] instead of 2 of either. It drives me nuts every time I play [card]Shambleshark[/card] in to [card]Slaughterhorn[/card] or Crocanura in to [card]Frilled Oculus[/card] (or an extra spicy one that came up in testing a few times… [card]Cloudfin Raptor[/card] in to [card]Simic Manipulator[/card]. Awkward)
[card]Shadow Slice[/card]
This card kills very very quickly, the problem is; which black deck are you drafting that wants to kill quickly with evasion? Orzhov wants the game to go long, and Dimir is either mill or mono-removal.deck. I may be biased though since I find a lot of the evasive cards to be bad. Typically in order to have evasion you are giving up a point or two of power or toughness, but in this format you are either racing or on the defensive right away, and you rarely enter stalls. Even for those times when you do enter stalls, typically just having an evasion creature is enough, and you don’t need to suit it up to kill quicker.
[card]Fortress Cyclops[/card]
I actually really dislike this guy. Not only do you want your Boros curve to be as low as possible (to turn on battalion sooner), you also want your 5 drop to do more than just trade with a 2 drop. The annoying part is that you often feel the need to swing with him in order to have your third attacker, but his 3 toughness means he never lives to trigger the next attack. I think he would be better with the reverse abilities.
[card]Pit Fight[/card]
[card]Pit Fight[/card] at first seemed like an excellent first pick for a draft, because it fits in to Simic, Gruul or Boros. The two issues I have are first of all that the best of those three guilds (Boros) doesn’t have much use for a [card]Pit Fight[/card], since all of their guys are tiny. The second issue I have is that the fight mechanic, while still strong, is not as good as it was in Innistrad or M13. In Innistrad, there were lots of undercosted fatties you could use to kill things ([card]Makeshift Mauler[/card], [card]Darkthicket Wolf[/card], [card]Stitched Drake[/card], and a lot of the flipped werewolves). In M13, a lot of the things you wanted to kill were small fliers. In this set, the stuff you need to deal with are those pesky 3 power 2 drops! [card]Pit Fight[/card] is still a fine card and a somewhat reasonable first pick, but it has underperformed for me.
Underrated:
[card]Court Street Denizen[/card] (in Boros)
This guy is very marginal in Orzhov (and likely also marginal in Azorius or Selesnya, if you decide to draft how Maksym does…) but really puts the hurt on in Boros. The fact that you often need to send in a third creature to trigger all of your cards makes that one really awkward blocker go away. If you have 2 [card]Scorchwalker[/card]s you get to tap their 1/1 and swing. If you have a bunch of 2/2s you get to tap their 2/3. Just try him out, he is a higher pick than I thought.
[card]Truefire Paladin[/card]
He is the best uncommon in the set. THE. BEST.
[card]Basilica Guards[/card]
I would play 10 of these in every Orzhov deck if I could. It’s the only extort creature that actually blocks things, and the more he blocks things, the longer the game goes, the more extort you get to use! I have been impressed with how much I actually like the extort mechanic, and not only are all the extort cards playable, they are all pretty high picks.
[card]Foundry Street Denizen[/card]
Often in Boros, you end up skipping an attack step so that you can trigger your battalion. If your opponent plays a [card]Basilica Guards[/card], you can afford to wait to get your [card]Daring Skyjek[/card] through. However playing a one drop means you trigger it that much earlier. [card]Foundry Street Denizen[/card] into Skyjek (or [card]Halberdier[/card]s) into [card]Skyknight Legionnaire[/card] is a fantastic curve, and happens quite frequently. Having a one drop is also great with [card]Madcap Skills[/card] (another card that I would put on this list, but I think people have figured it out already).
[card]Zarichi Tiger[/card] (in Orzhov)
This guy is amazingly annoying. Not only does 2/3 seem to be the magic number, but he is actually quite hard to race, and pulls you ahead on a stalled board. It’s common to have this guy give you 10-14 life before he trades with a card, and it gives your extort cards time to do their work. At first this guy was never making the cut, but now I actively want one in every Orzhov deck, and would play 2 or 3 of them without hesitation.
Alright that should do for now, it’s not an exhaustive list but hopefully it helps. I also plan on writing a report on our Toronto-Montreal trip dynamic, since although overall our team didn’t do exceptionally well (one top 16 one top 50 one top 100) there were a lot of good stories and insight to be shared. Look forward to it shortly!
Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson is the current Canadian National champion. At the most recent World Championship, he was able to add a 12th place finish to his resume.