As you can see i have all the best white heroic creatures, 3 ordeals and a lot of other ways to activate heroic, a lot of aggressive 1-2 drops and fantastic late game bombs.
As expected, the deck performed well, winning 2 of the swiss games and going to turns against a mono-red deck (the game finished 1-1), against wich i then lost the final.
This is all to say that red is a lot better than people give credit for in theros. Usually it is played only in combination with white because red has good heroic enablers in Dragon's Mantle, Titan's Strenght and Coordinated Assault, but i experienced that also mono-red can be devastating. The heroic enablers i mentioned, plus creatures like two headed cerberus, akroan crusader, minotaur skullcleaver, deathbellow raider and some good burn spells can lead to very fast kills. In late game Ill-Tempered Cyclops shines.
Well, maybe i just got a bit unlucky because i never went 1 drop into ordeal, and once i didn't have a second plains to cast hundred-handed one and phalanx leader,but even if all went the right way games against that mono red deck would have been extremely though.
The card i missed most was probably Voyage's End... with it maybe things would have been different.
Correction: "I played against a mono-red deck that was fantastic in its matchups."
The deck would have lost to Asp, black devotion, any control, or burn. Just about any color/combo in any format can be a great deck if the cards come for it; in THS red is just not deep enough for that to be a regular thing.
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I've never seen Mono Red be open. It sounds like the deck played similarly to RW Heroic except it didn't even need to bother with White because Red was so open. I highly doubt that's going to happen at many tables.
I think Mono Anything is always going to be very strong, because it has to be so open to even be viable. As long as you're not forcing it and drafting a bunch of crap just to stay Mono, because that offers no value.
I've seen mono-red (or close to mono-red) do fantastic plenty of times so I agree. Red isn't nearly as bad as people on the forum often make it out to be in Theros.
Hardened: I don't think the deck would have lost to all those things so easily.
Consider that in one of the games i lost i was able to break an ordeal of heliod and to bestow an hopeful eidolon, gaining about 20 life in total. Some of his threats were just overwhelming.... in particular dragon mantle transform everything into a huge threat, and put on a cerberus is ridiculous.
Mono-red is really scary up until you get a little bit of bounce or removal going on and then it falls apart. The reason the deck seemed so strong to you is because you were running zero Voyage's End or Griptide, and your Last Breaths were in the side (did you ever bring them in?)
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
Red isn't nearly as bad as people on the forum often make it out to be in Theros.
I think there are a few reasons you're getting push back on this. To try to avoid an escalating argument or worse, let me lay out some of the issues.
1) A single example of a deck is never enough to evaluate a deck type. All of us could 3-0 with generally weak strategies if we opened the right cards, if those colors were very open at the table, and if we drew well and played without mistakes.
To make judgments about archetypes, you need some larger data. Here's an excellent analysis of MTGO drafts which found that while Red was the least popular color to draft, it performed just fine. Also, Mono Anything was so rarely drafted that it didn't even warrant mentioning as a strategy in this analysis.
2) Have people been saying that Red is not good in Theros? I've been saying for a while from my own observations that the worst color is Green. But I've never called any color unplayable or a bad idea to draft, because the set is more or less balanced.
3) Certainly no one ever said that Red is bad when it's so open that you can draft Mono Red in a set that does not support Mono strategies!
Bottom line is that no one is arguing against what happened in your draft, they're arguing with the generalization that "Red is better than everyone thinks" based on one match. It's also very dangerous to throw around Mono strategies because there's a world of difference between drafting Mono because no one else at the table is touching that color (an excellent idea) vs. forcing Mono because you heard it's good (guaranteed disaster). You have to evaluate in the average case, not the outlier case.
How is mono-drafting (or as close to mono as you can get) not a strategy in Theros? Mono-Black is its own archtype as is Mono-Red (from my experience). And yes, people on this forum do, often, call red a weak/shallow/bad color. I can't count the number of times I've read some variation on "Lightning Strike (or any other good red card) is the best card in the pack but I'd rather take X. I don't want to be in red unless I have to be."
Mono drafting is not a viable strategy in Theros, because 99% of the time it is not open. You can be heavy Black or heavy Red or whatever, but not Mono colored. You can't just sit down to any table to draft Mono Black without seriously compromising your deck.
Can you draft a deck where the mana base is 12 Swamps and 5 of something else? Sure. But there's a world of difference between that an actual Mono where your lands and spells are effectively colorless and you can use that as a competitive advantage.
Mono drafting is not a viable strategy in Theros, because 99% of the time it is not open. You can be heavy Black or heavy Red or whatever, but not Mono colored.
You'll notice I repeatedly add "or close to mono-colored" when I mention drafting a mono colored deck. Sure pure mono-color is harder to draft but it's not required. Effectively mono-colored is close enough.
You can't just sit down to any table to draft Mono Black without seriously compromising your deck.
You can't sit down and expect to draft anything without compromising your deck so I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here. If "Heavy" Red (if that's what you prefer to call it) is open then you can draft it, if it's not then it's not. Same as anything else.
Can you draft a deck where the mana base is 12 Swamps and 5 of something else? Sure. But there's a world of difference between that an actual Mono where your lands and spells are effectively colorless and you can use that as a competitive advantage.
Frankly I think you're too hung up on technicalities and nit picking word choice here. Mono-Black and close to mono-black aren't that different nor are they different enough to nit pick about it like you are. If you prefer I say "heavy" black or "heavy" red then I will but the point remains the same. They are both reasonable archtypes (and in Black's case at least it is a fully recognized one that people mention often) and both can be drafted and done well with.
You can't sit down and expect to draft anything without compromising your deck so I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here. If "Heavy" Red (if that's what you prefer to call it) is open then you can draft it, if it's not then it's not. Same as anything else.
I imagine what he means is that mono-red isn't a presence in the metagame. It can come up, obviously, but it doesn't do it reliably enough to actually account for it. If someone first picks Fanatic of Mogis or Purphorous and thinks "hey, I'm gonna keep an eye out to see if I can make good use of these red devotion guys", they're generally going to be disappointed, because red on its own has glaring weaknesses in the mid- to late-game, and most pods don't offer the depth you'd need to play a fast enough deck to overcome them.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
From the drafts I've seen, "Mono-Red/Heavy Red" doesn't so much happen by first picking Fanatic/Purphorous and then hoping to be mono-red (neither being cards I'm overly concerned with having for a red deck anyway, though both could see play. Personally I consider "heavy red" to be DragonMantle.dec) as it does by starting to build a R/ heroic deck and just picking up more red then you did white, perhaps to the point of cutting white largely from the deck because you just have enough red you don't need it.
This is where I strongly disagree, and it's not just nitpicking the definition of "mono." Even if you run 3 cards of another color, that requires a significant color commitment of usually 5+ sources of that 2nd color compared to zero in a mono deck. That's why mono decks are potentially valuable -- if you can reduce the risk of color screw to literally zero, you have an advantage over your opponent. A 12/5 mana base may be more consistent than 9/8 but it's nowhere near as consistent as 17/0.
That's the point I'm trying to make. "Close to mono" is actually drastically different from actual mono because of how you have to construct your mana base. It's not a linear relationship because number of cards of a 2nd color and number of mana sources required to run them. If the relationship were linear, you could just draft 5-color every time out.
From the drafts I've seen, "Mono-Red/Heavy Red" doesn't so much happen by first picking Fanatic/Purphorous and then hoping to be mono-red (neither being cards I'm overly concerned with having for a red deck anyway, though both could see play.
The specific cards don't matter. The point is that you can't realistically say, "Mono-red is an archetype I'm considering building" because Mono-red isn't an archetype. It's a coincidence.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
Ok, probably the name i gave to this thread is wrong, I recognize that mono-red is not a realistic archetype, so i should just say "red is a fantastic color in theros", a lot better than people think.
i should just say "red is a fantastic color in theros", a lot better than people think.
Compared to what? I actually think THS is a well-balanced format, but as in any format, something has to come out on bottom, even if it's by a small margin. It's clearly not "fantastic" compared to White or Blue, and it's not as viable by itself as Black. One could make the argument that it's on a similar level with Green, but I would say that Asp, Voyaging Satyr and Leafcrown Dryad beat out Lightning Strike, Dragon Mantle and Minotaur Skullcleaver.
I agree that people think less of it than it deserves, and it shouldn't be all-out avoided like White in ROE, but it is the weakest color in THS.. it also doesn't combo well with Black or Blue, so you're likely gonna be RW heroic, and there are likely one or two other people at the table fighting you for it.
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I agree that people think less of it than it deserves, and it shouldn't be all-out avoided like White in ROE, but it is the weakest color in THS.. it also doesn't combo well with Black or Blue, so you're likely gonna be RW heroic, and there are likely one or two other people at the table fighting you for it.
Yeah, I only really like red in conjunction with white decks (white on the other hand can be paired with every colour except *maybe* green).
Part of the problem with the 'weakest' colour in every set is that it's overdrafted by players with poor card evaluation skills. Otherwise draft is inherently self-balancing. If you can have all the red to yourself at a table, it's a fine colour.
I've seen mono-anything be good.. As others have said, if a color is so open at a table that you are able to have it almost completely to yourself, you can often pick up some really good cards and have very good consistency in your deck.
I guess you'll need really good cards and lucky picks though if it's better than splashing for some very powerful cards in another color.
The worst color often tends to create fine monocolored decks once the format get's older.
At first all colors are drafted roughly equal and red sucked. After some point people start to dislike red heavily and take stuff like voyage's end over lightning strike because lightning strike has a much higher chance of not being played because red is so shallow. Sometimes though this goes so far that just one persons ends up playing red and get's an insane deck.
If the format is fresh it's really crucial to know what the weak colors are to avoid them. After it stabilizes those weak colors get interesting again because they are so underdrafted. Any color can make good monocolored decks these way but in theros for example you'll never be monoblue because too many players will be picking it.
1) Seeing late-pack Fanatics and Lightning Strikes are your green light to go for this strategy, but it's the Raiders and Oreads that do most of your heavy lifting. Even un-Bestowed, you'd be surprised at how often a 2/2 first strike is the most interesting thing on the board.
2) The two matches I lost, I lost to U/R Monstrous's big dudes and G/U Heroic's Centaur Battlemaster. Specifically, I lost to creatures too big for me to effectively deal with. Portent of Betrayal is probably the sleeper hit of a Red-based deck, provided you cast it on the right turn and target the right creature.
3) The more Oreads and Cerberuses you have, the better Spark Jolt gets. You'd rather have Titan's Strength, it's true, but those don't go as late in a pack and I killed many a 3-toughness creature with a Jolt and an Oread's first strike damage.
4) The real hardest part of making Red your main color in Theros isn't a shortage of good cards, it's that the best red cards are splashable in someone else's deck. The Heroic guy is taking your Titan's Strengths and Oreads, the Monstrous Ramp guy is taking your Ill-Tempered Cyclops and Stoneshock Giant, and everybody's snatching Lightning Strike just to keep you from getting them.
5) If you do try for this strategy, I have to echo what everybody else is saying- don't let the commitment to Mono-Red cheat you out of playing stronger cards. I didn't have anything in my maindeck that didn't deserve a maindeck slot, but I did have a Polis Crusher in my sideboard that I regret not splashing for.
The big thing is, I can't think of a single time I wanted to play Mono-Red in any of the Theros drafts I've done. W/R Heroic, G/R Monstrosity and R/B Minotaurs were all decks I'd played multiple times... but I can't ever remember drafting and actively thinking "I want be in Mono Red".
If you've got ~5 Dragon Mantles/Titan's Strength + ~2 Two-Headed Cerberus I can certainly think of reasons why "Mono-Red" (or close to mono-red) would be the goal of that draft. Sure play Favored Hoplites/Wingsteed Riders if you get them but other then that there isn't a major reason to add white over red options. A red 2/1 trampler vs a white 2/1 tapper isn't a big enough difference to make the mana base worse.
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2x Hopeful Eidolon
Favored Hoplite
2x Ordeal of Thassa[/CARD]
Ordeal of Heliod
Omenspeaker
Vaporkin
Phalanx Leader
Battlewise Hoplite
Battlewise Valor
Chosen by Heliod
Fate Foretold
2x Nimbus Naiad
Observant Alseid
Wingsteed Rider
Hundred-Handed One
2x Sea God's Revenge
Evangel of Heliod
Medomai the Ageless
10x Plains
8x Island
Sideboard:
Ray of Dissolution
2x Last Breath
Lagonna Band Elder
As you can see i have all the best white heroic creatures, 3 ordeals and a lot of other ways to activate heroic, a lot of aggressive 1-2 drops and fantastic late game bombs.
As expected, the deck performed well, winning 2 of the swiss games and going to turns against a mono-red deck (the game finished 1-1), against wich i then lost the final.
This is all to say that red is a lot better than people give credit for in theros. Usually it is played only in combination with white because red has good heroic enablers in Dragon's Mantle, Titan's Strenght and Coordinated Assault, but i experienced that also mono-red can be devastating. The heroic enablers i mentioned, plus creatures like two headed cerberus, akroan crusader, minotaur skullcleaver, deathbellow raider and some good burn spells can lead to very fast kills. In late game Ill-Tempered Cyclops shines.
Well, maybe i just got a bit unlucky because i never went 1 drop into ordeal, and once i didn't have a second plains to cast hundred-handed one and phalanx leader,but even if all went the right way games against that mono red deck would have been extremely though.
The card i missed most was probably Voyage's End... with it maybe things would have been different.
The deck would have lost to Asp, black devotion, any control, or burn. Just about any color/combo in any format can be a great deck if the cards come for it; in THS red is just not deep enough for that to be a regular thing.
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
I think Mono Anything is always going to be very strong, because it has to be so open to even be viable. As long as you're not forcing it and drafting a bunch of crap just to stay Mono, because that offers no value.
Consider that in one of the games i lost i was able to break an ordeal of heliod and to bestow an hopeful eidolon, gaining about 20 life in total. Some of his threats were just overwhelming.... in particular dragon mantle transform everything into a huge threat, and put on a cerberus is ridiculous.
I think there are a few reasons you're getting push back on this. To try to avoid an escalating argument or worse, let me lay out some of the issues.
1) A single example of a deck is never enough to evaluate a deck type. All of us could 3-0 with generally weak strategies if we opened the right cards, if those colors were very open at the table, and if we drew well and played without mistakes.
To make judgments about archetypes, you need some larger data. Here's an excellent analysis of MTGO drafts which found that while Red was the least popular color to draft, it performed just fine. Also, Mono Anything was so rarely drafted that it didn't even warrant mentioning as a strategy in this analysis.
http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-theros-draft-overview
2) Have people been saying that Red is not good in Theros? I've been saying for a while from my own observations that the worst color is Green. But I've never called any color unplayable or a bad idea to draft, because the set is more or less balanced.
3) Certainly no one ever said that Red is bad when it's so open that you can draft Mono Red in a set that does not support Mono strategies!
Bottom line is that no one is arguing against what happened in your draft, they're arguing with the generalization that "Red is better than everyone thinks" based on one match. It's also very dangerous to throw around Mono strategies because there's a world of difference between drafting Mono because no one else at the table is touching that color (an excellent idea) vs. forcing Mono because you heard it's good (guaranteed disaster). You have to evaluate in the average case, not the outlier case.
Can you draft a deck where the mana base is 12 Swamps and 5 of something else? Sure. But there's a world of difference between that an actual Mono where your lands and spells are effectively colorless and you can use that as a competitive advantage.
You'll notice I repeatedly add "or close to mono-colored" when I mention drafting a mono colored deck. Sure pure mono-color is harder to draft but it's not required. Effectively mono-colored is close enough.
You can't sit down and expect to draft anything without compromising your deck so I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here. If "Heavy" Red (if that's what you prefer to call it) is open then you can draft it, if it's not then it's not. Same as anything else.
Frankly I think you're too hung up on technicalities and nit picking word choice here. Mono-Black and close to mono-black aren't that different nor are they different enough to nit pick about it like you are. If you prefer I say "heavy" black or "heavy" red then I will but the point remains the same. They are both reasonable archtypes (and in Black's case at least it is a fully recognized one that people mention often) and both can be drafted and done well with.
I imagine what he means is that mono-red isn't a presence in the metagame. It can come up, obviously, but it doesn't do it reliably enough to actually account for it. If someone first picks Fanatic of Mogis or Purphorous and thinks "hey, I'm gonna keep an eye out to see if I can make good use of these red devotion guys", they're generally going to be disappointed, because red on its own has glaring weaknesses in the mid- to late-game, and most pods don't offer the depth you'd need to play a fast enough deck to overcome them.
This is where I strongly disagree, and it's not just nitpicking the definition of "mono." Even if you run 3 cards of another color, that requires a significant color commitment of usually 5+ sources of that 2nd color compared to zero in a mono deck. That's why mono decks are potentially valuable -- if you can reduce the risk of color screw to literally zero, you have an advantage over your opponent. A 12/5 mana base may be more consistent than 9/8 but it's nowhere near as consistent as 17/0.
That's the point I'm trying to make. "Close to mono" is actually drastically different from actual mono because of how you have to construct your mana base. It's not a linear relationship because number of cards of a 2nd color and number of mana sources required to run them. If the relationship were linear, you could just draft 5-color every time out.
The specific cards don't matter. The point is that you can't realistically say, "Mono-red is an archetype I'm considering building" because Mono-red isn't an archetype. It's a coincidence.
Compared to what? I actually think THS is a well-balanced format, but as in any format, something has to come out on bottom, even if it's by a small margin. It's clearly not "fantastic" compared to White or Blue, and it's not as viable by itself as Black. One could make the argument that it's on a similar level with Green, but I would say that Asp, Voyaging Satyr and Leafcrown Dryad beat out Lightning Strike, Dragon Mantle and Minotaur Skullcleaver.
I agree that people think less of it than it deserves, and it shouldn't be all-out avoided like White in ROE, but it is the weakest color in THS.. it also doesn't combo well with Black or Blue, so you're likely gonna be RW heroic, and there are likely one or two other people at the table fighting you for it.
My Decks:
EDH: Sygg, River Cutthroat , Road to Scion
Grimgrin, Corpseborn
Modern: Polytokes
IRL: Progenitus Polymorph , Goblins
Just a friendly reminder that I will drive this car off a bridge
Yeah, I only really like red in conjunction with white decks (white on the other hand can be paired with every colour except *maybe* green).
Part of the problem with the 'weakest' colour in every set is that it's overdrafted by players with poor card evaluation skills. Otherwise draft is inherently self-balancing. If you can have all the red to yourself at a table, it's a fine colour.
I guess you'll need really good cards and lucky picks though if it's better than splashing for some very powerful cards in another color.
At first all colors are drafted roughly equal and red sucked. After some point people start to dislike red heavily and take stuff like voyage's end over lightning strike because lightning strike has a much higher chance of not being played because red is so shallow. Sometimes though this goes so far that just one persons ends up playing red and get's an insane deck.
If the format is fresh it's really crucial to know what the weak colors are to avoid them. After it stabilizes those weak colors get interesting again because they are so underdrafted. Any color can make good monocolored decks these way but in theros for example you'll never be monoblue because too many players will be picking it.
1) Seeing late-pack Fanatics and Lightning Strikes are your green light to go for this strategy, but it's the Raiders and Oreads that do most of your heavy lifting. Even un-Bestowed, you'd be surprised at how often a 2/2 first strike is the most interesting thing on the board.
2) The two matches I lost, I lost to U/R Monstrous's big dudes and G/U Heroic's Centaur Battlemaster. Specifically, I lost to creatures too big for me to effectively deal with. Portent of Betrayal is probably the sleeper hit of a Red-based deck, provided you cast it on the right turn and target the right creature.
3) The more Oreads and Cerberuses you have, the better Spark Jolt gets. You'd rather have Titan's Strength, it's true, but those don't go as late in a pack and I killed many a 3-toughness creature with a Jolt and an Oread's first strike damage.
4) The real hardest part of making Red your main color in Theros isn't a shortage of good cards, it's that the best red cards are splashable in someone else's deck. The Heroic guy is taking your Titan's Strengths and Oreads, the Monstrous Ramp guy is taking your Ill-Tempered Cyclops and Stoneshock Giant, and everybody's snatching Lightning Strike just to keep you from getting them.
5) If you do try for this strategy, I have to echo what everybody else is saying- don't let the commitment to Mono-Red cheat you out of playing stronger cards. I didn't have anything in my maindeck that didn't deserve a maindeck slot, but I did have a Polis Crusher in my sideboard that I regret not splashing for.