Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions – A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Horizons Draft - Part 1 -The Big Picture

Modern Horizons has proven to be one of the deepest, most complex, and frankly, most difficult draft formats we’ve had in years. Not only are the individual cards markedly more complex than in most sets, (alright, maybe this doesn’t ring totally true after just coming off the heels of War of the Spark) but finding the optimal lane is challenging in a set with countless interwoven synergies and a plethora of playables. This guide to Modern Horizons draft aims to provide big picture ideas to explain what successful MH1 drafts/decks look like, while also delving into specifics of single card evaluation, and archetype (plus sub-archetype) breakdowns.

The Big Picture

What is your mission statement?

When learning a new limited format, one of the first questions I’m looking to answer in my first ten or so drafts is “What is my mission statement for this format?” That is, in a broad sense, what should my deck be trying to do in order to:

A. Best take advantage of how the cards in the format line up against each other

B. Capitalize on the incentives the cards present to you.

For example, in War of the Spark, my mission statement was: Build your deck to include meaningful early plays to pressure Planeswalkers, and ways to go over the top of your opponents bombs in the late game.

Figuring out your mission statement for a given format helps to inform decisions in both your draft and your game-play. During the draft, keeping your mission statement in mind can help you fill in gaps in your current card pool (e.g. When faced with a generically good B- level card and a Lazotep Reaver, consider if you’ve met your quota for meaningful early game plays.) Likewise, during the game, your mission statement can help to inform your plays (e.g. Instead of casting a Tamiyo’s Epiphany, take the less mana efficient play and cast your Burning Prophet because your current board has no chance of pressuring an opposing walker)

For Modern Horizons, my mission statement is: Find the correct balance of disrupting your opponent’s momentum and advancing your own game plan.

You could argue that this is your goal in most games of limited, but thanks to how the archetypes are constructed and how some of the enablers/payoffs operate, this idea is more pronounced than usual. 

Decks in the format tend to snowball the in similar ways that an unopposed walker on turn four did in War of the Spark. UB, RW, UR, GW (and to some extent RB and UG) spiral out of control if they're allowed to enact their game plan and continue to do so unopposed. Each of these decks are trying to do a certain on-board “thing” where each time they get to "do their thing" it becomes much harder for you to make a relevant counter-play. Some examples of decks “doing their thing” are:       

UB: Ninjutsus something out while picking up a good ETB creature   
RW: Plays X sliver each turn, making their team exponentially better 
UR: Triggers a draw 2 effect for cheap or attacking with a Thundering Djinn
BR: Doming you for 4 a few times with Bogardan Dragonheart while gaining incremental  value 

When your opponent is free to carry out these actions uncontested, they start to run away with the game and each successive “thing” they're trying to do becomes easier and more effective. By prioritizing ways to disrupt your opponent’s momentum, (usually cheap removal) you make it meaningfully more difficult for the opponent to get their snowball rolling.

Applying your mission statement

Ok great, we’ve established our mission statement for the format but how do we put this into practice? How is the idea disrupting your opponent’s momentum and advancing your own game plan different than what you do in any other format? Isn’t that just shorthand for use removal on our opponent’s important cards? 

Well, sort of. The thing that differentiates MH1 from many formats is a need for a shift in threat assessment heuristics: 

When in doubt, kill the enabler, don’t wait for the payoff.

One play that I often make that really illustrates how to put this into practice is snapping off a removal spell on your UB opponent’s Faerie Seer or Changing Outcast on turn 1-2. A 1 powered creature in usually not a relevant threat, but if the Ninja deck is allowed to get even one hit with their Ingenious Infiltrator or Moonblade Shinobi, the advantage bar swings sharply in their favor because that’s the start of how the Ninja deck snowballs. The same “kill the enabler on sight” principle is true with cards like Undead auger, Carion Feeder, Bogardan Dragonheart, Gluttonous slug, Hollowhead Sliver and basically any of the gold uncommons.

Cards that look unassuming but have the potential to enable a large part of what you opponent’s deck wants to do usually need to be dealt with ASAP. There are some cases that you do save your removal for their payoffs, for example when you know your deck can brick-wall 2/X’s all day so the only card you really care about from your RW sliver opponent is Cleaving Sliver, but that’s more of the exception than the rule (Slivers sort of inherently blur the enabler/payoff line anyways.)

Ok, so our goal in MH1 is to just kill all of our opponent’s enablers, some of their payoffs and eventually win with a ham sandwich, right? Well not exactly. The enablers and a good chunk of the payoffs are 1-3 mana so unless you somehow ended up with Deflie.dec, you usually won’t have enough cheap removal for your plan A to just be kill anything that hits the table. In addition to this, certain green decks (mainly mutli-coloured snow, snow mill, and GB) can really punish decks that don’t pressure them, as they have ways to go over the top. At the start of the format I had the unfortunate experience of drafting a 12 removal spell RB deck and just when I was about to turn the corner against my opponent, they cast Fact or Fiction into Reap the Past for 7. Yuck.

Here’s where the other half of my mission statement comes in. Your plan A should still be to enact your own plan to close the game out in a timely matter, but you need to balance that with disrupting them when they do something worth disrupting. In practice, this means your plan A should be to make plays that advance your own game plan, but when, for example, your UR opponent plays a premium enabler like Hollowhead Sliver on turn 3, understand that you need to kill it with your Urza’s rage instead of playing your Bogardan Dragonheart.

When trying to find a balance of disruption and enabling your own game plan during the draft, I like to employ a rough 70-30 rule, meaning my picks are largely going to be weighted towards taking card that build towards my own game plan, but I want about 30 percent of you deck to be some form of interaction. Let’s say in pack 3 I’m solidly in UR “draw 2” with three Eyekites and 2 Spinehorn Minotaur and I’m faced with a pick between my third Fist of Flames and my first string of disappearance. Fist of Flames would be a great pick up as the premier enabler for the archetype, but if I’m light on interaction I consider the responsible choice in that situation to be String of Disappearance. You just can’t afford to try in goldfish in this format, no matter how synergistic or linear your deck is.

Modern Horizons Draft Guide - Part 2 - The Top Commons in Each Colour

The Top Commons in each Colour

Let’s get something important out of the way, Man-o-War is the best common in the set and it's sort of not close (alright, it’s a little bit close, but more on that later.) Man-o-War is the cardboard embodiment of “disrupt your opponents game plan while advancing your own.” MH1 is a format where spending mana in meaningful ways every turn is extremely important thanks to how easy it is to fall behind if your opponent starts to snowball. Forcing your opponent to re-spend a chunk of mana just to keep pace can be backbreaking in the developing stages of the game. Not only is Man-o-war one of the best ways to stabilize against a fast Ninjutsu start or a good GW curve out, but it makes it nearly impossible for your opponent to come back if you are the one to have an explosive synergistic start.

Despite my previous hyperbole, there is certainly a respectable argument for Springbloom Druid being the best common thanks to how well it enables multiple green archetypes. I still give the nod to Man-o-War for being about as good on curve as Druid and not a mediocre play on turns 5+.

Ok, lets jump into the top 3 commons in each colour. These are the top commons only when considering your P1P1, as where you value certain cards varies fairly dramatically once you’ve settled into an archetype and when considering your curve.

When ranking my commons, I consider both their raw power, and their level of importance to multiple archetypes with weight towards the latter. For example, Trumpeting Heard is a generically powerful card that you can put in any green deck, but (spoiler alert) I have Springbloom druid as the best green common because of how integral is to both UG, GR, and a subset of GB decks. In GW and the inverse subset of GB decks (beatdown variants), you would prefer Trumpeting Heard over Springbloom Druid, but it’s not a key piece of what those decks are trying to do.

White

White is cursed with being an aggressive colour whose best cards are on average about four mana. When drafting a white colour pair, you need to keep in mind that you need to rely on your other colour to contribute cheap pieces of interaction to your deck, as white just doesn’t offer that. Reprobation technically qualifies as cheap interaction, but with basically every non-UW deck looking to win by attacking on the ground in some capacity, Reprobation isn’t the type of card you can really afford to include in your main deck.

What White does offer is quality aggressive creatures that line up well with what most of the White colour pairs are trying to do.

1.Irregular Cohort: Cohort and my number two pick, Rhox Veteran, are very close to each other in terms of power, but I give Cohort the nod because it so seamlessly contributes to every white deck’s main game plan. BW and RW care about the card being two Changelings, GW appreciates the ability to go wide, and it contributes to a density of good blink targets in UW.

2.Rhox Veteran: The latest model in the line of reasonably statted white creatures that tap something on attacks, Rhox veteran is just really good at what it does. Anyone who’s played with this type of card before knows they makes combat a nightmare for the opponent, and battle cry is just the icing on the cake. Four toughness means that if they want to kill it in combat, they usually have to double block, letting your smaller creatures get through for damage.

3.Answered Prayers: This is a recent edition to my top white commons, but it’s proven itself to be a real pain to deal with. Thanks to the density of spell like effects on the common creatures in this set (Man-o-War, Rhox veteran ect.) decks can get up to the 19ish creature count range, reliably making Answered Prayers a 3 mana 3/3 flying psudo-lifelink. Dodging sorcery speed removal ain’t too shabby either.

Honourable mention: Settle Beyond Reality: I think Settle Beyond Reality is a bit overrated 

currently. When you do cast the card, it's quite good, as you often get value from the second mode by blinking a good ETB creature or freeing a creature from an enchantment-based removal spell. The issue is that a 5 mana kill spell with no way to reduce its cost is clunk city, and there’s just too many games where you just can’t afford to wait till turn 5 to kill cards that matter. The card is a good inclusion in decks that already have cheap interaction, but I've grown cautious of picking this card early.

Blue

Blue’s commons are fairly deep, and its top commons do a good job of facilitating what you want to be doing in the format. All the way down to blue common #20, every blue common has a place in the format, meaning that it can support multiple drafters. Many of blues commons are archetype specific but the top 5 or so commons are welcome in multiples in most decks.  

1. Man-o-War: I gushed about this card earlier, but I don’t think I can overstate just how good this card is in MH1 draft. Pick Man-o-War early and often. It’s better than a good lot of the rares and uncommons and if you ever get upwards of 2 in your pile, it feels like you’re playing on easy mode.

2. String of Disappearance: In a format where cheap interaction is paramount, unsummon is unsurprisingly a good card. UB and UR both essentially being tempo decks love this card, and in UW, the Peel from Reality mode of it lets you rebuy your good ETB creatures without falling behind on board. As an additional point in its favor, the card just so happens to be quite good with the #1 blue common. When facing other blue decks, be careful when you cast this card. It’s caused many “shatter pause” moments from both sides of the table when either myself or my opponent momentarily forgot that this card is not just Unsummon 

3. Moonblade Shinobi: Getting in a turn 3 hit with Moonblade Shinobi swings the flow of the game in your favor pretty nicely. It’s very close to a must kill threat as leaving back a blocker as an attempt to deal with it is just asking for your opponent to cast a Smoke Shroud or a removal spell and leave you in the dust. You shouldn’t think of Moonblade Shinobi as solely a UB card, but you should consider that you need to pair it with enablers like Faerie Seer to maximize the card.

Honorable Mention: Rain of Revelation: This card floated around in my top 3 blue commons for a while, but the more I played the format, the more I realized that I should be valuing it the same as we valued Tamiyo’s Epiphany in WAR. Rain of Revelation is a powerful card, but in a format that is generally more about how you spend your mana to affect the board than how many cards you can draw, the card gets demoted to a card that you want a maximum of 2 copies of. One caveat to this is that while the top 3 blue commons are maximized in UR, UB, and UW, Rain of Revelation is generally better than String or Shinobi in UGx.

Black

Two for two, black’s commons are also quite deep. Comparable to blue, there are almost no cards that you’re embarrassed to play, however, past the top two commons, they’re all pretty flat in power level. The bulk of black’s commons fall into two categories:

1. Reasonable, cheap creature

2. Grindy card that gives you some amount of value

This isn’t a necessarily a bad place to be for black, it just means that since there aren’t many “synergy cards,” it’s harder to pick up on archetype specific signals being sent to you.

1. Defile: I’ll save the spiel about how important interacting with your opponent’s creatures is and just say that Defile is one of the best cards in the set for making sure that your opponent doesn’t snowball. To maximize on this card, you do need to build your mana base in a way that Defile actually kills early threats. Be cautious, as the card does have the issue of being a cheap removal spell that can’t always kill cheap creatures.

2. Mob: Most black decks want some combination of Deflie and Mob to round out their removal suite. Convoke on this card is a huge boon to this card. Unlike some of the more clunky removal in the set, convoke means that you can do things like audible out of your attack step to kill you opponent’s Good Fortune Unicorn NOW instead of letting your opponent get some amount of value from it. Having a card in your deck that can deal with a Murasa Behemoth or Conifer Wurm, while still have a mode that can interact in the early turns gives Mob a huge amount of flexibility.



3. Changeling Outcast: The number 3 best black common could arguably go to a list of 3-4 cards (Venomous Changeling, Putrid Goblin, Gluttonous Slug) but Changeling Outcast gets the nod. Good enablers are critical for UB, WB wants Changelings, and RB wants chip damage (being a goblin/sliver also doesn’t hurt either.) All the Changelings are better than they look, Changeling Outcast is no different

RED

Red has a good number of commons that are archetype specific, leading to baseline pick orders becoming less relevant earlier than they do in other colours. Igneous Elemental would probably be the best common if it always cost four mana, but not every colour pair can consistently enable it. There are times I’ve been solidly UR in pack 3 and gladly first picked Fist of flames over Pyrophobia because of how important the card is to its respective archetype. Red also has the issue of being home to a few clunkers like Viashino Sandsprinter and Geomancer’s gambit that are pretty much only playable in one or two archetypes. Luckily, the colour is deep enough that red can support 2-3 players. Less archetype agnostic is a slight hindrance to the colour, but it also means that paying attention to the archetype specific cards that wheel can meaningfully inform the direction of your draft.

1. Pyrophobia: Like Defile, Pyrophobia is one of the best ways to interact with early to midgame creatures. The non-green creatures in this set are fairly small meaning Pyrohobia rarely feels like It can’t kill the things you need to kill, and the trinket text on this card has won me more games than I ever expected it to.

2. Bogardan Dragonheart: Bogardan Dragonheart looks like it’s a card for the RB sac deck, and while it shines there, it's just a generically good card that I’m happy to play in almost any red deck. In the early turns it’s a flying Nantuko Husk, and in the mid to late game, it turns into a must kill creature that threatens to end the game in just a few turns. Small tip: it’s easy to forget that this card can gain haste, so don’t do that.

3. Magmatic Sinkhole: I’m not as high on this card as a lot of other players but it’s still a card I’m happy to pick up around the pick 3-6 range. The first copy of Magmatic Sinkhole is great, but the subsequent copies have noticeable diminishing returns. Drawing two copies in your top 10 cards is clunky and unlike in KTK, delving is an actual cost in MH1, thanks to a good number of cards that care about the contents of your graveyard. The card gets a bump in power if you are in GR or UR, as both of those decks fill have ways to incidentally fill their yard.

Honorable Mention: Igneous Elemental OR Fist of Flames/Spinehorn Minotaur: I would be happy to pick any of these cards over Bogardan Dragonheart once I know I’m in either GR or UR respectively. Once I’m in either of those decks, these cards become better then most of the other red commons because of how effective they are in their respective decks.

Green

Green is in an odd spot when it comes to evaluating it as a whole. Close to a third of green’s cards are mediocre to unplayable and yet, the colour pulls together and contributes to multiple good archetypes. Part of the allure of playing green in MH1 comes from its ability to play multiple colours, and the other part of its allure is Trumpeting Heard. Past that, the colour has a couple of generically good cards like Savage Swipe, Mother Bear, and Winding Way, some archetype specific stuff like Frostwalla, and then Murasa Behemoth, a good card, but not one you can have infinite of  The top 7ish cards in Green are quite good but be aware that it’s not as deep as the Grixis colours.

1. Springbloom Druid: This is my pick for second best common in the set and considered the best common by a lot of players whose opinion I respect. Druid is the glue that holds the green decks in the format together. While it’s not a card you want in most GW decks, it enables GR, UG, and GB so incredibly well that being bad in one deck is basically a non-issue. Here’s a quick rundown of its role in each deck

GR: Gets you GR’s glut of 4 + mana payoffs while putting a land in the grave for said payoffs

UG: Virtually increases the number of snow lands you’ll see in a given game, while fixing for the splash you likely have

GB: A mix of GR and UG (which is a reasonably apt description of what GB is as an archetype

GW: Gives your opponent a turn to breathe because you didn’t play a threat

When in UG and faced with the pick of Druid or Man-o-War, I’ve been defaulting to Druid 1-3 before I take my first Man-o-War over it in most spots.

2. Garruk Wildspeaker Trumpeting Herd: There’s not much to say about Trumpeting Herd other than it has a laughably good P/T to mana ratio for a common. It stabilizes vs. most aggressive starts and feels near impossible to win against if you are even slightly behind when your opponent casts it. Trumpeting Heard is the epitome of why you can’t afford to miss a beat in this format.

3. Mother Bear: I’ve heard this card being called overrated, but I’d say it falls more in the properly rated camp.  Mother bear has a lot of little things going for it that add up to a card that’s much better than the average bear. Aggressive decks can’t really attack into it early, it can be discarded/milled for value, and it can attack with some amount of impunity in the midgame. It’s not a key part to any of the green archetypes, but it’s an above replacement level two drop that scales well into the late game

Honorable Mention - Savage Swipe: I can see an argument for this being the third best common, but it’s not a high priority card in any deck that’s splashing since you have access to less conditional removal spells from other colours. In GW specifically, Savage Swipe is better than mother bear because GW lacks good cheap interaction and can’t afford to build a mana base that borrows good removal from another colour.

Dishourable mention - Krosan Tusker: Wow is this card so much worse than it’s ever been. This just isn’t a divination format and a 6/5 for 7 is abhorrent when put side by side basically every other creature in the set. Seeing my opponent spend turn three or four cycling a tusker prompts a sigh of relief. You just can’t spend the early turns of the game wheel spinning, turns 1-3 are critical in this format, you need to either be developing your board, or interacting with your opponent’s board.

Colourless

Arcum’s Astrolabe: This one deserves a special mention because it's what makes the snow deck tick. I’ve heard it called the common in the set because of the absurd things it enables, and while I’m not quite there, it is my go-to pick when there is nothing above replacement level in the pack. Getting a mid to late pack Astrolabe is a bigger sign that UG snow is open than basically any actual blue or green card.

Ranking the Colours

In most formats I like to have a general idea of the ranking each colour to use as a tiebreaker in early picks (e.g. In WAR, Law-Rune Enforcer and Spark Harvest are close in power level but black is a better colour that white so I’ll take Spark Harvest) but I don’t actually think that matters all that much in MH1. Most of the colours are so close that my tiebreaker for this format is the rest of the contents of the pack, trying to predict what I can reasonably wheel to better steer me into an archetype.

White is the one colour that is noticeably weaker than the rest, but I haven’t found that fact to influence my picks often.  If I absolutely had to rank the colours it would be:

U>B=R>G>W

Every colour pair is playable, so don’t bias your decisions based on colour unless you personally feel very strongly about certain colours.

Modern Horizons Draft Guide - Part 3 - The Archetypes Pt 1.

The Archetypes

One thing to recognize about MH1 is that there are a bunch of ways to successfully build each colour pair. The paint by numbers “This is what X colour pair is trying to do” approach to the ten colour pairs we see in most sets doesn’t quite pan out in the way seasoned drafters have become accustomed to. Each colour pair still has a WotC prescribed theme that for most colour pairs, is the default deck you’ll fall into, but there are a bunch of options for customization.

I view MH1’s landscape of commons and uncommons as a deep roster of generically good cards with a handful of narrow but powerful archetype specific cards peppered in. The generically good cards (Irregular Cohort for example) have been designed to interact favorably/synergistically with more cards than the average common in a given set would. A higher number of favorable interactions means a higher potential for more archetypes to spawn. One of my keys to success in this format has been realizing that many colour pairs have secondary archetypes that are important to be aware of when you find yourself in a spot where you’re halfway thought the draft and lacking synergy pieces.

For examples, the UB deck based around the Ninjutsu mechanic needs the one drop enablers to be what I would consider to be a “good” version of that deck. If it’s mid to late in pack 3 and I don’t have any Faerie Seers or Changeling Outcasts (other players may have taken them or perhaps the packs just broke unfavorably) I’ll be looking to backdoor into UB’s secondary archetype, UB control. 

When going through each colour pair, ill list the primary archetype that I find myself in for that colour pair, and later go over the secondary or “backdoor” archetype you can audible into when the synergy pieces don’t present themselves. There are a ton of different ways to build each colour pair, the ones I’ll describe are just the ones I’ve encountered most often.

I'll be presenting the archetypes in a rough best to worst order, but take this as a grain of salt as every two-colour pair is playable. The top decks certainly stand out, but it's by no means a landslide. When talking about the “Key cards, above replacement level cards, good filler etc.” Assume that the top commons in each colour belong here unless otherwise stated.

UB Ninjas

Game Plan: UB Ninjas has my vote for best deck in the format. It checks all the boxes of what I want to be doing in this format and is composed of two of the best colours in the format. Your main plan has 3 steps

1.     Play a cheap evasive creature, ideally a one drop

2.     Ninjutsu in a Ninja payoff like Moonblade Shinobi or Ingenious Infiltrator

3.     Keep your opponent off balance with cheap removal and bounce spells as you get repeated value from your Ninjas connecting and picking up good ETB creatures as you Ninjutsu more threats into play

How to get into this deck: Opening one of the two busted Ninja rare’s (Fallen Shinobi and Mist-Syndicate Naga) or Ingenious Infiltrator are the three cards that really draw me into this deck early, but every single card with Ninjutsu is good. One of the common ways I get into this deck is I’ll be in a spot with 2 Moonblade shinobi’s a Man-o-War and some other reasonable blue, notice that some of the black common Ninja’s or Smoke Shroud are wheeling and i'll try to move in

Key Cards

One mana evasive creatures: The first place I look when someone asks me “Is this a good Ninja deck” is the one drop slot and if there are less than 3 Faerie Seers/Changing Outcasts (Cabal Therapist and Carrion feeder are acceptable in a pinch) then generally the answer is not really. I cannot stress how important the cheap enablers are for the Ninja deck. Ninjutsu is an inherently tempo-negative mechanic as you’re sacrificing board presence in order to activate a Ninjutsu ability. If the creatures you pick up are one drops, you sacrifice minimal tempo, and in some cases like with Azra Smokeshaper, you can even “make mana.” “Moving in” to the Ninja deck means valuing these enablers as high picks once you have some payoffs.

Smoke Shroud: The second place I look when someone asks me “Is this a good Ninja deck” is the two-drop slot to see if they have any Smoke Shrouds. Once you’ve gotten your Ninjutsu creatures in once, it can be difficult to get them in a second or third time. Smoke shroud fixes this issue while applying huge amounts of pressure, casting one on a Ninja of the New Moon that’s already gotten a hit in is close to game over.

Other Above Replacement Level Cards:
Anything that has Ninjutsu:  Azra Smokeshaper and Ninja of the New Moon aren’t tradition “value payoffs” for this deck, but they’re still quite good as they enable a the “hit you for large chunks of damage early and continuously” plan.

Watcher for Tomorrow: An excellent card, but even better here as your opponent either blocks and you get your card under it, or doesn’t block and you get to pick it up

Gluttonous slug: Does a decent impression of the one drop enablers while also being a threat itself

Underperformers

Exclude: Exclude being an underperformer is sort of true across most blue decks in the format. MH1 is a format that’s hostile towards strategies that are trying to leave up mana thanks to how punishing the early turns of this format can be.  When playing Ninjas, you’re often tapping out in the first 5 turns of the game so exclude loses an extra chunk of value.

UB’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck: UB Midrange/Control

When you don’t pick up many Ninja’s or notice that the one drop’s enablers aren’t wheeling, you can backdoor into UB midrange/control. This is your classic UB control deck with card draw, removal and whatever random finisher like Oneirophage or Future Sight you find. This deck has legs mostly because both blue and black have a high density of generically good cards, so getting a pile of good cards, while not an optimal strategy in this format, is a fine plan B.

UG Snow

Game Plan: UG snow is a midrange deck whose game plan is easier to describe as a deck building/draft exercise than trying to lay out what an ideal turns 1-5 look like. Your deck is trying to fulfill two basic requirements

1.     Jam as many good snow permanents as you can in your deck to maximize snow payoffs

2.     Play as many powerful off coloured cards as your mana base allows

Some versions of the deck will be more focused on maximizing how much raw power/colours you can fit into the deck and some will lean towards maximizing on the absurd snow payoffs like Conifer Wurm, Abominable Treefolk, and Dead of Winter. The very best UG snow decks are a balance of both, with Arcum’s Astrolabe being the lynchpin that ties together the two subthemes.

How to get into this deck: There are two main ways to get into UG snow:

1.     Opening/getting passed one of the absurd snow payoffs (the aforementioned Conifer Wurm, Abominable Treefolk, and Dead of Winter) and trying to cut snow as hard as you can (e.g., take the snow lands and payoffs over everything but premium/B level cards)

2.     Noticing mid-late pack U and G lands or Arcum’s Astrolabe and speculating that you should move in

      A table can support 3 UG snow drafters at very most (that number is closer to 2 a lot of the time) so you need to be vigilant when you try to move in early and it gets cut.  Likewise, read late U/G lands and Astrolabe as a data point, not a signal that you should jump in.  The snow drafters at your table may not be valuing those cards as highly as they should, leading you to read those cards as false signals.

      

     The nuts “I’m the only drafter at the table” snow deck is probably the actual best deck in the format, but enough people know that the deck is good that that won’t happen very often.

Key Cards

Arcum’s Astrolabe: Astrolabe is the most important card to this deck and getting one late should set off alarm bells that the deck may be open. A deck with 4 Astrolabes allows you to stretch your mana base pretty far and really maximize on your power level while sacrificing a minimal amount of consistency.  Astrolabe also lets you play an amount of off-colour snow lands, which allows you to maximize on how many snow permanents you can jam into your deck if that’s something your deck cares about.

Springbloom Druid: This is the second most important card to the deck and does many of the things that astrolabe does for you. Once you have 3 Astrolabes and 2-3 Druids you can virtually cast anything you draft barring you have enough green sources and snow lands




The Top Tier Snow Payoffs: 

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards

The typical cards you’d expect to be good in a midrange/ramp deck: Card draw like Fact or Fiction and Rain of revelation play any amount of incidental lifegain are great.  Glacial Revelation is a standout here, the card is a draw 3-5 in the best snow decks.

Anything that says “snow” on it:  There are virtually no bad snow permanents so when in doubt, take the Chillerpillar over the Pondering Mage so that you can maximize your snow count.

Underperformers

Low impact cards/Synergy reliant cards:  Low impact cards like Twin-Silk Spider or cards that need additional synergies to be good like or Eyekite don’t usually make the cut here. When you’re playing a deck that has mana sources 18-21 in its spell slots, you want each of your action spells to have real, meaningful impact on the game ( side note,  this is a point I’d argue is format agnostic, a common mistake I see in building ramp/midrange decks is too much fluff or defensive speed. This leads to ramping into nothing or flooding more times than not.)

UG’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck: Snow Crab Mill

A somewhat common occurrence when drafting this deck is first picking a great snow payoff, drafting the enablers like Astrolabe and the lands highly, but as you near the end of pack 2, you haven’t seen any more snow payoffs or cards that are worth splashing. My go-to back door plan for UG is crab mill. No one else at the table wants Iceberg Cancrix if you’ve snapped up most of the snow lands so you can pick these up for close to free. Three Cancrix is a comfortable number but there’s not really an upper limit on the number you’ll pay since they trigger each other. Ideally you want 70 percent of your deck to be permanents that trigger Cancrix with the rest being interaction and a few copies of Stream of Thought.

UR “draw two”

Game Plan: This deck’s game plan is pretty straightforward; play one of the payoff creatures (Eyekite, Spinehorn Minotaur, Onierophage, Thundering Djinn) then cast cheap draw spells and cycle cards to trigger the payoff creatures. In classic Izzet fashion, this deck is looking to leverage cheap removal and bounce to get in for massive chunks of damage.

How to get into this deck: The most common way I find myself ending up in this deck is taking an early Thundering Djinn (if you haven’t played with it, this card is absurd) and then picking up the enablers and payoffs to the deck slightly higher than I normally would. The other three payoff creatures are reasonable in other decks, so I don’t mind taking them mid-pack, even if it means I’m pushed to pivot into another deck.

Key Cards:

Thundering Djinn, Eyekite, Oneirophage, SpinehornMinotaur: These are the most important pieces in the deck. Once you know you’re in the deck, prioritize them reasonably highly as there are way more enablers than there are payoffs.

Fist of Flame: This is the deck’s best enabler. It’s cheap, it cycles, and it can deal massive amounts of damage.

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards

Cheap Cyclers: Prioritize the cards that cycle for one mana over the ones that cycle for two, they make your deck much leaner. Windcaller Aven is a standout here as it jumps your Spinehorn Minotaur

Hollowhead Sliver: The deck’s second-best enabler. Making sure your common payoffs are always “on” is big game.

Rain of Revelation: Rain of Revelation doesn’t pay you off any more than a cycler does if you only the common payoffs in play, but it’s silly with either of the uncommon payoffs.

Underperformers

Counterspells: This is mostly shorthand for anything that makes you leave mana up on your opponent’s turn. This deck is using its mana on your turn most of the time as the common payoffs aren’t very good on defense. Remember, it only takes one cycler to trigger your payoffs on your turn, but two on your opponent’s turn.

UR’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

UR control:

If you start the draft with a bunch of generically good blue and red cards, but none of the good payoffs, UR control has been a reasonable backdoor strategy for me. This deck is analogous to UB’s backdoor plan, the classic combination of removal spells, card draw and a few finishers.

RB Sacrifice

Game Plan:  If you’ve drafted RB in War of the Spark, you’ll be familiar with how this deck operates. RB sacrifice is most commonly an assertive leaning midrange deck. Your goal is to get on board early to pressure your opponent early and push through the mid to late game utilizing sacrifice synergies to press your on-board advantage. With access to cheap interaction and a proactive gameplay RB checks all the boxes of things you want to be doing in this for format.

When drafting this colour pair, I usually end up in an assertive deck, but RB has the outs to be built as aggressive or as grindy as you want. You can be a 16-land deck with multiple Goblin Champions, or you can play the long game, grinding out value with Return from Extinction and First-Sphere Gargantuan

How to get into this deck: RB is a deck that I sort of just fall into most of the time. It usually just starts with generically good red and black cards, and as the draft progresses, I pick up some of the sacrifice synergy cards like Bogardan Dragonheart and Putrid Goblin to start crafting a linear game plan.

Key Cards:

Bogardan Dragonheart: There are a lot of ways to build RB, but Bogardan Dragonheart is great in basically all of them. I mentioned that I wouldn’t list cards in the top 3 commons in this section, but Bogardan Dragonheart is so good in these decks that its worth an additional mention.

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Undead Auger: This is a generically powerful card but goes up in value when you can sacrifice your creatures at will. You don’t have to work very hard to make this card good as you usually incidentally end up with random zombies and Changelings



Putrid Goblin/Sling-GangLieutenant/ Goblin War Party: These three are the best sac fodder around. Generally, take Putrid Goblin over the other two because of curve considerations

Goatnap:  When you have 4-5 free sac outlets, Goatnap goes from filler to a card you actively want. Don’t take it highly, but recognize when your deck wants it.

Underperformers

Vengeful Devil: This card looks like it’s right at home is in this deck, but its just too unreliable. Even when you can activate it, there just aren’t that many X/1’s in the format.

Warteye Witch: Not to say this card is a bad card, but its just so aggressively medium. You can do better than this card most of the time.

BR’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

Thanks to how many ways you can build this deck, you rarely need to find a backdoor strategy to save yourself from train wrecking. Even if you don’t end up with any Bogardan Dragonhearts, you’ll still have a functioning deck, if black and red are open.

The one variant of this deck to look out for is giving the deck a minor goblin tribal theme. This comes up when you pick up copies of Munitions Expert and/or Goblin Matron. This doesn’t change the core strategy of the deck but may change your pick orders slightly.

GR “Lands in Grave Matter”

Game Plan:  GR is a midrange deck that has a two-step game plan

1.     Get some amount of lands in its grave on turns 1-3 via cycling lands, Winding Way or Springbloom Druid

2.     Cast a fattie payoff like Igneous Elemental, Murasa Behemoth, or Ore-Scale Guardian

How to get into this deck: Getting passed good red and Green Cards early and them picking up mid to late pack Igneous Elementals. There are basically no first pick cards that really push me towards drafting RG, it’s another deck that kind of comes together as you notice mid-late pack enablers and payoffs.

Key Cards

Ingenious Elemental: I mention Igneous Elemental specifically in the “how to get into this deck” section because it’s an excellent card when your deck can consistently enable it, and bad when you can’t. This means that as the GR drafter at the table, you should ostensibly want it more than any of the other red drafters.

The card isn’t quite Flame Tongue Kavu but it sure feels like it with the amount of X/2’s in the set. Being able to kill something on EBT makes up for the fact that your turn two may have just been casting Winding Way

Springbloom Druid//Cycling lands/Winding Way These are your three main enablers in order of importance. For your deck to be able to compete with a deck like Ninja’s or RB sac, you need to see one of these cards in your first 3 turns to start being about to play your payoffs

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Murasa Behemoth/Ore-Scale Guardian/ Excavating Anurid: These are your tier two payoffs. They’re still quite good but just a notch below Ingenious Elemental

Lava Dart: Your tier two enabler. This does a good impression of shock, and picking off two Ninja enablers is great, but saccing a land before turn 5 is usually bad unless its specifically to cast Ingenious elemental on turn 4.

Magmatic Sinkhole: This is the one deck I don’t mind playing up to 3 sinkholes because GR can fill up its grave consistently with winding way.

Underperformers

Ruination Rioters: By no means a bad card, but nowhere near as impactful or important as some of the other gold uncommons. It’s a good early play and sometimes domes your opponent for 5 in the late game, but don’t look at this as a high tier card. I’m taking a removal spell over this card in most spots.

GR’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

GR Beatdown

A running theme of these backdoor decks is using cards that you can pick up late and make some sort of cohesive deck out of and this one is no different. No enablers for your Ingenious elementals? This deck has you covered. Load up on two’s and threes and beatdown. Cards like Bellowing Elk, Treetop Ambusher, and Orcish hellraiser go late and with enough scrappy beatdown creatures, you have the makings of deck that stands a fighting chance. This isn’t a glamorous place to be, but it's better than being stuck with 3 Ingenious Elementals in your hand on turn 5