Modern Horizons Draft Guide - Part 4 - The Archetypes Pt. 2

The Archtypes Pt. 2

GW Creature fall

Game Plan: This is your standard Green and White beatdown deck, with the distinction that its main plan doesn’t use combat tricks as its main tool to facilitate profitable combat steps. Instead, the good creature payoffs of this deck have lines of text that essentially read “as long as I’ve played a creature this turn, you can’t profitably block me.” This incentivizes you to build decks with 18ish creatures to ensure that your payoffs are turns on every turn. At first blush this sounds like a strategy that’s incompatible with the “you need to interact with your opponent’s creatures” incentives of the format. However, access to creatures that interact with your opponent’s blockers like Rhox Veteran and Zhalfiran Decoy, plus a few “reach out and kill something” spells filling your few non-creature slots is usually enough ammo to bring to the fight.  

How to get into this deck: I most commonly find myself in this deck when I’ve started the draft with a few good white cards and see a 3-5^th pick Good Fortune Unicorn. Starting base green usually leads me towards one of the other G archetypes as most of the enablers and payoffs for this deck lean white. A late Good Fortune Unicorn is another pretty strong incentive to be specifically GW.

Key Cards

Being a standard beatdown deck, there aren’t many “key cards” that the deck can’t function without, but here are some of the best aggressive cards for the deck

Good-Fortune Unicorn: One of the best cards for this deck and the GW deck’s “Kill on sight" creature

Rhox Veteran: As mentioned before, important for keeping your creature count high white still giving your deck interaction.

Battle Screech: Just an absurd card in general but at it’s best in this deck

Saddled Rimestag: Outputs a massive amount of damage for a two-mana investment

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards

Scale up: The best home for this card, 2 unblocked creatures on turn is usually lethal

Bellowing Elk: This just makes the cut to above replacement level. The 4-drop slot is hotly contested but if you don’t pick up any of the premium ones, this one gets the job done.

Underperformers

Springbloom Druid: Fantastic in every other green deck, but you don’t want a card that doesn’t contribute to your beat down plan

GW’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

GW Go Wide

Just like RB’s plan B deck, this deck isn’t so much a contingency plan, but an additional angle of attack your deck might employ if you pick up the right cards. There are a good number of cards in green and white that make multiple creatures so if you cross a certain threshold on those cards, a few copies of Stirring Address can work as common stand in’s for of Scale Up.

RW Slivers

Game Plan:  One of the most self-explanatory archetypes; your goal here is to shove as many pieces of cardboard that say “Sliver” on them into your deck with a curve that allows you to play them in a timely fashion. This is mostly a beatdown deck but can play the long game by just waiting out a stalled board until you draw the right Slivers to profitably attacks.  

How to get into this deck: The most common way I end up in this deck is drafting good red or white cards early and then noticing that Slivers are wheeling. Recognizing when you’re in a position where you take the best Sliver/Changeling out of a pack and knowing that another one will come back around is the best way to ensure your deck ends up with a critical mass of Slivers.

An early Cloudshredder Sliver is the one card that will truly incentivize me to try and draft this deck instead of just falling into it.

Key Cards

Lancer Sliver and Cleaver Sliver: These are the two most important Slivers to the deck and a lot of games come down to you assembling the combo of these two to make combat impossible for your opponents

The two drop Slivers: None of the two drop Slivers are insane on their own, but you need a critical mass of two drop Slivers to make sure that your Lancer and Cleaver Slivers can deliver the beatdown effectively.

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Hollowhead Sliver and First Sliver’s Chosen: These cards are good, and the first copy of each are better than your first random two drop sliver, but they aren’t integral to making the deck tick.

Shelter: Protecting your Slivers to ensure your entire game plan isn’t derailed with a single mid-combat removal spell is important. I like packing 1-2 copies of this card.

Underperformers

Lavabelly Sliver: This card is in a similar spot to Ruination Rioter in the GR deck. It’s a fine card and you’ll play it if you have slots, but not providing a combat relevant ability makes this card sort of underwhelming. The exception to this is when you get 3-4 in your deck and each of your Slivers start draining for 2-3. The more copies of this card I have, the more willing I am to play them all.

RW’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

RW Go Wide: Almost identical to GW’s Plan B deck except you get access to Goblin War Party as an additional tool to go wide, and Volatile Claws as another mass pump spell.

WB Changelings

Game Plan: WB Changelings is a midrange deck that’s trying to capitalize on its access to the greatest number of Changelings amongst any colour pair. Past that, its game plan is pretty dependant on how your draft goes and how you build, as you can slant this deck towards being aggressive or grindy pretty fluidly.

How to get into this deck: Starting the draft off with good white or black cards, and then picking up some of the “Changeling lords” like  Cordial Vampire or King of the Pride (lords that don’t actually have a deck that they belong to besides the Changeling deck)

Key Cards

Tribal lords: Undead Auger, King of the Pride, Cordial Vampire and Sling-Gang Commander are all good reasons to shove as many Changelings as you can into your deck

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Any card that says Changeling one it. All the Changelings are playable so the more the merrier

Underperformers

Etchings of the Chosen: This card needs a critical mass of Changelings before it’s better than a replacement level card. A deck with 6 Changelings isn’t going to be able to play this card unless if happens to also have a high density of an actual creature type like Goblins or Ninja’s

BW’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

BW ….Non-Changeling Midrange?

BW is far from the most complex or deep archetype, so your backdoor for this just a reasonable BW deck with good cards in it. You can play small packages on synergy you pick up to make the deck more than the sum of its parts but there’s not a lot going on here outside of its main plan of attack.

GB Midrange

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Game Plan: GB is the deck with the least amount of synergy embedded in its cards. WotC has this listed as GB graveyard but I don’t think there’s really enough going on in that department to label it as such. Sure, there are some small things here and there, like casting Winding Way and rebuying the creatures you dump with a Graveshifter, but nothing that informs a whole strategy. View this deck as a pile of generically good cards, with some minor interactions between them.

Another way to look at this deck is a snow deck that can’t usually play the snow payoffs. A good amount of the time when I’m drafting this deck, I find myself splashing powerful cards off Arcums Astrolabe and Springbloom Druid.

How to get into this deck:

Rotwidow Pack: A common design trick that R & D uses is giving a power boost to the signpost uncommon of archetypes that are lacking inherent synergy. Rotwidow Pack is a product of this strategy. Pack is a lot of power in one card and one of the only things that draws me into GB

Key Cards:

Rotwidow Pack

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Rotwidow Pack. Again.

GB’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

GB continues the trend of colour pairs with loose plan A’s not having clear plan B’s. Your plan B for this deck is generally just going to be jam as many powerful cards as you can in your deck and hope.

UW Blink

Game Plan: UW blink is another deck without a true linear plan. The idea is that your deck has a lot of creatures with good ETB’s, and you can grind some amount of value from them using Ephemerate and Soulherder. This is a fine strategy but its just not one I find myself in almost ever. I rather pair blue with any other colour by white and white with any other colour but blue. There aren’t many inventive to be in this deck, and since the colours don’t have much synergy between them, its not a deck I even fall into incidentally.

How to get into this deck: Like GB, UW’s sign post uncommon is absurdly powerful, and the one strong pull into this deck. An early Soulherder provides enough of a payoff and direction for a gameplan that I’m willing to draft around it.

Key Cards:

Soulherder: This is the epitome of a kill on sight creature. It grows huge while gaining incremental value what's not to love. 

Other Cards Above Replacement Level Cards:

Manowar, Watcher for Tomorrow: These are two of the best cards to blink. It’s hard to imagine a game you lose where Soulherder blinks either of these a few times.

UW’s Plan B/Backdoor Deck:

UW Flying Men

This one is pretty interesting. It’s a deck I wasn’t aware of until recently but have seen it preform well. The idea is that you get basically every Segovian Angel at the table you want, and you capitalize on them using Martyrs Soul and Moonblade Shinobi. This very much a “Ryan Saxe/ Christian Calcano” deck, a deck that picks up late commons that you know will wheel and uses them  in a way that no other deck at the table can. Here's an example from my friend Dysent.