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.

Modern Horizons Draft Guide - Part 5 - Draft Navigation, Quick Tips, and Final Words

Draft Navigation AKA What to do When you Actually Open your Packs

We’ve basically covered everything you need to know about the set itself, but how do we apply this information? How do you navigate each pack when you’re sitting down at your FMN, or even Day 2 of a GP?

Here’s a breakdown of how I navigate a MH1 draft:

1.     For picks the first few picks of pack 1, my pick orders roughly go:

A.     Generically great cards like the best removal spells, good uncommons/rares/mythics that are good in any deck)

B.     Synergy pieces that go in multiple decks (think Bogardan Dragonheart, Springbloom Druid, Changeling Outcast)

C.     Synergy pieces that go in 1-2 decks (Faerie Seer, Winter’s Rest, Snow lands)

D.     Ok removal or removal you don’t want too many copies of (Settle Beyond Reality, Magmatic Sinkhole)

2.     Bias your picks towards staying one colour until the wheel. Each colour has self-contained pockets of synergy that don’t requite you to branch out into a second colour too early. If you aren’t sacrificing too much power, take the card that matches your good first or second pick cards

3.     Pay attention to the wheel. In high synergy formats, this is where you really get a sense of what’s open. If you’re consistently getting late Smoke Shrouds, Astrolabes, or Slivers in each pack of the wheel, that an important data point to keep tract of and a potential sign that you should move in.

4.     If you’re too far deep into your colours and can’t pivot, try and draft your colour pair’s Plan B deck. Even if someone close to you is taking your synergy cards, you should still end up with the right cards to make the backdoor strategy work.

Quick Hits

Here is a quick list of tips for the format that I didn't feel belonged anywhere else

·       Sword of Sinew and Steel is not an A plus level bomb. You’re almost always taking this card P1P1 because its powerful colourless cards, but once you know what lane you’re in there are cards ill take over it. If I’m solidly in Snow and I open this and Abominable Treefolk in Pack, I’m probably taking the Treefolk.

·       Pick up an Echo of Eons if you see one floating around late, it’s a near unbeatable sideboard card against the mill deck.

·       Making Concessions to your mana base is critical in this format. This set isn’t designed like most traditional limited sets in the past 10 years or so. In most sets they make a conscious effort to have very few double colour pipped cards at common and uncommon. That’s just not the case for this format, there's double pipped cards everywhere, you really need to pay attention to your mana especially because the format is so punishing if you miss a beat. A deck with Faerie Seer and Undead Auger in it is just asking to lose to its own manabase.

·       A list of Uncommons that you should P1P1 over every common in rough order of best to worst. I’ve left gold cards off the list because that comes down to preferences of how open/ willing to take a rider on gold card you want to be.

-        Battle Screech

-        Watcher for tomorrow

-        Graveshifter

-        Firebolt

-        Conifer Wurm

-        Oneirophage

-        Undead Auger

-        Sattled Rimestag

·       You’ll notice that Fact or Fiction and Crypt Rats aren’t on that list. I think both Man-o-War and Springbloom Druid are better than both of those cards P1P1 in this format. Fact or fiction has a common analog in Rain of Revelation so its not as unique of an effect as it is in most sets. Crypt rats is great, but you have to be heavy black for it to reliably be a field wipe so while its powerful, it’s narrower that it looks.

·       Without any snow payoffs you should play your on-colour snow lands if you have Goatnap or Fallen Shinobi BUT you shouldn’t play they if you don’t have those cards in your deck in case your opponent has a Fallen Shinobi of their own

·       The Horizon lands are worse than the cycle lands unless the Horizon land is fixing your mana

·       Talismans are not high picks and should basically almost never make your deck. Taking turn 2 off in this format is punishing, you can’t afford to not affect the board while your opponent plays a Sattled Rimestag. This isn’t cube or a set splashing is a default. In addition, most decks don’t want mana source 18/don’t care about the mana past if it’s not cast exactly on 2

Final word: I’ve played this format what I consider to be a decent amount and to good success (currently a 74% win rate across Phantom and Non-Phantom leagues) but I can only report on my own experiences with the format and the gathered knowledge I’ve gained from others good player.

I want to shout out @amrlx @_Malavi_ @jrpinato and @Alfaphrog on twitter, great players that helped me see a wide range of decks early in the format. 

Also want to shout out theory-craft collaboration with Ben and Ethan of Lords of Limited fame, and input from many members of the Lords of Limited discord.

If you’ve had experiences that differ from the information presented in this guide, I’d love to hear them, cross referencing other players is one of the best ways to fine tune your evaluations of a limited format. This format is super deep and there’s no way I could succinctly cover every notable interaction or synergy so if you think I’ve left out something feel free to let me know!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and would love to hear what you thought about it. You can reach me on Twitter at @Chord_O_Calls, and am always hanging out in the Lords of Limited Discord