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.