I've noticed a bunch of threads started on here by players that are obviously new to mtg (or to limited, anyway). Nothing wrong with that, we all had to start somewhere.
This thread aims to be a cheat sheet for newer players to play M14 and be smarter than the average bear.
Tip #1: Run one main colour and one splash colour
This is a distillation of a couple of threads about manabases. The short version is that you want to have most of your cards (and ALL of your colour intensive cards like Celestial Flare) in your main colour, and only the most powerful and splashable cards in your secondary colour.
Result: A typical manabase will be 10 swamps, 7 plains, but the fewer cards you splash, the more you can bias that up towards 14 swamps, 3 plains.
Tip #2: Archetypes in M14
Archetypes are decks where the synergy between the cards improves the power of each one and the deck as a whole. Usually core sets are archetype light, but there are the following (ranked in order of quality):
1. Mono-coloured (Black, then Green, then Blue. Often with a light splash for a handful of cards. Don't draft monoW or monoR)
2. UG (Zephyr Charge and Trained Condor make your green fatties fly)
3. RB Sacrifice (cards that sacrifice things like Blood Bairn, Gnawing Zombie and Bubbling Cauldron plus things you can sacrifice for value like Act of Treason, Tenacious Dead or Dragon Egg)
4. W/B/G Auras (Beneficial Auras like Trollhide and Mark of the Vampire on evasion or vigilant creatures. Just watch out for your creature being killed by removal in response to the aura)
5. UW Flyers (basically good in every limited format ever)
Result: Combined with Tip #1, you should basically always be trying to draft a mono-Coloured deck (for preference) or one of the above archetypes. MonoB is particularly good, since cards like Blood Bairn, Tenacious Dead, Festering Newt and Quag Sickness let you keep your options open for MonoB or RB sacrifice and Mark of the Vampire is strong in any Bx deck.
An alternate opinion is "You should try to be UG from the outset, with the option of substituting black for either color if they aren’t open. If neither blue or green are open, then you draft a RB sacrifice deck, and you avoid white like the plague."
Tip #3: Build around me cards are a TRAP, designed to punish you
These are cards that prey on your inability to understand basic probability. They promise a tremendous upside, but are so inconsistent that you will be lucky to win one game of the draft pulling off your combo. Some people like that. If you're reading this, you'd probably rather win the draft instead of winning a single game.
There's also a second level of cards which are fine in and of themselves, but try to trick you into making your deck worse by adding suboptimal cards to combo with it: Ajani's Chosen, Auramancer, Marauding Maulhorn, Blightcaster. These second level of cards are fine to play, but don't add other otherwise unplayable cards like Sanguine Bond to your deck because of them.
Note: Bogbrew Witch is a special case, because she doesn't require you to DRAW your combo, she actively searches out the rest of the combo herself, making her play much more consistently. So she is a GOOD combo to have.
Tip 4: Play spells and abilities at the right time
Typically you want to cast creatures in your SECOND main phase. This is so that you can bluff a combat trick, or pumping something like a Capeshan Knight. Once your opponent has blocked suboptimally or taken damage, THEN you can tap out to develop your board with the next creature.
As a general rule you want to wait as long as possible to play your spells or abilities. Some examples:
a. Gain life from Soulmender in the opponent's end step (if you do it in your turn, you lose the ability to choose to chump block with it during their attack).
b. If you want to avoid having your potential blocker tapped by their Master of Diversion, cast Shock on it during their Beginning of Combat step (which takes place before attackers are declared)
c. If you want to take down their Gladecover Scout that is enchanted with Trollhide and Mark of the Vampire that's also attacking with a Kalonian Tusker, block and kill the Tusker with your own creatures, then use Celestial Flare on them during your end of combat step (which happens after combat damage has happened)
d. Wait until after blockers are declared before using combat tricks like Giant Growth. This means that if they kill your creature in response, their creature is still blocked (or can't block a different attacker).
e. Don't chump block their Kalonian Tusker with your Child of Night when you still have a high life total. The only life point that matters is the last one. Similarly, casting Shock on your opponent early is a terrible terrible play. You should save burn to use primarily as creature removal, and only aim it at their face when it will actually kill them.
I would just like to state that I'm not buying this mono-colored thing that has cropped up in the past few days. It seems like a lot of buzz based on a few big names drafting mono-Blue publicly. I certainly don't think we have any real evidence to suggest that you "should" draft mono with any sort of intent, not the way that you "should" draft a 2-color deck in Return to Ravnica Block which was clearly demonstrated by multiple playgroups as a dominant strategy. (Also it was figured out pretty much immediately, unlike the mono trend which cropped up when many top players had already grown tired of the set.)
This type of advice is dangerous because if someone goes into a draft thinking "Well I've drafted 3 Blue cards, I guess that's all I can draft for the rest of this" they might throw away a perfectly fine 2-color deck. I feel like Mono is a terrible idea for a new-ish player because you have to make constant judgment calls about power vs. consistency.
Tip #3: Build around me cards are a TRAP, designed to punish you
These are cards that prey on your inability to understand basic probability. They promise a tremendous upside, but are so inconsistent that you will be lucky to win one game of the draft pulling off your combo. Some people like that. If you're reading this, you'd probably rather win the draft instead of winning a single game.
There's also a second level of cards which are fine in and of themselves, but try to trick you into making your deck worse by adding suboptimal cards to combo with it: Ajani's Chosen, Auramancer, [/card]Marauding Maulhorn[/card]
These second level of cards are fine to play, but don't add other cards to your deck because of them.
I think the line between "archetypes" and "build around me traps" is fairly blurred and more the subject of individual card discussion rather than general rules. I mean if accord cost W and there were more decent creatures with lifelink in the set then you wouldn't be calling it unplayable trash, it'd be an awesome archetype. It all comes down to the specifics, not a general rule. And on the ones you mention, I don't actually think blightcaster is a trap at all. BW auras is one of the archetypes you even mention as playable, and blightcaster is genuinely awesome in that. Getting just one blightcaster activation is good, once you get two or more it gets pretty bonkers. Also, I don't think marauding mulhorn can ever be a trap. It's a perfectly fine card on its own, good even, and advocate of the beast is playable on its own. Then if you get them together then it's bonkers - it's a perfect example of the kind of synergy you should be trying to draft.
I would just like to state that I'm not buying this mono-colored thing that has cropped up in the past few days. It seems like a lot of buzz based on a few big names drafting mono-Blue publicly. I certainly don't think we have any real evidence to suggest that you "should" draft mono with any sort of intent, not the way that you "should" draft a 2-color deck in Return to Ravnica Block which was clearly demonstrated by multiple playgroups as a dominant strategy. (Also it was figured out pretty much immediately, unlike the mono trend which cropped up when many top players had already grown tired of the set.)
This type of advice is dangerous because if someone goes into a draft thinking "Well I've drafted 3 Blue cards, I guess that's all I can draft for the rest of this" they might throw away a perfectly fine 2-color deck. I feel like Mono is a terrible idea for a new-ish player because you have to make constant judgment calls about power vs. consistency.
Well, I don't think you should be mono-coloured as much as your mindset in the draft should be to try to be mostly mono-coloured.
If you get lucky and your colour is flowing then you can end up with a mono-coloured deck. Otherwise you splash a second colour.
I think the line between "archetypes" and "build around me traps" is fairly blurred and more the subject of individual card discussion rather than general rules. I mean if accord cost W and there were more decent creatures with lifelink in the set then you wouldn't be calling it unplayable trash, it'd be an awesome archetype. It all comes down to the specifics, not a general rule. And on the ones you mention, I don't actually think blightcaster is a trap at all. BW auras is one of the archetypes you even mention as playable, and blightcaster is genuinely awesome in that. Getting just one blightcaster activation is good, once you get two or more it gets pretty bonkers. Also, I don't think marauding mulhorn can ever be a trap. It's a perfectly fine card on its own, good even, and advocate of the beast is playable on its own. Then if you get them together then it's bonkers - it's a perfect example of the kind of synergy you should be trying to draft.
I listed Marauding Maulhorn as an example of a card that newer players misevaluate.
Recently I have seen new players do the following things: Leave the Maulhorn out of their red deck entirely because they didn't have any Advocate of the Beast to offset the 'drawback'; and force green for Advocate of the Beast (when they already had better black cards and should have stuck with RB).
I'm not saying that these card don't have upside and work well together. Just that new players typically value the card synergies of these cards as being much more important than they are.
Blightcaster in particular is dangerous because new players sypically don't value creatures highly enough, and it encourages them to run crappy enchantments instead of creatures. That's not to say that Blightcaster can't be great in a deck with 4 Claustrophobia, just that you should only play those enchantments because they are good enough on their own merit, not because they combo well with Blightcaster. In hindsight, perhaps I should have put Blightcaster in the second group of cards, not the first.
b. If you want to avoid having your potential blocker tapped by their Master of Diversion, cast Shock on it during their Declare attackers step
c. If you want to take down their Gladecover Scout that is enchanted with Trollhide and Mark of the Vampire that's also attacking with a Kalonian Tusker, block and kill the Tusker with your own creatures, then use Celestial Flare on them during your end step
b.) You'll have to cast it before or during the Begin Combat step; your first chance during Declare Attackers is after they've been declared, and the ability is on the stack.
c.) The last you have to cast a meaningful Flare is during the End Combat step.
Not super important IRL in a casual draft, but critical on MTGO.
Thanks for putting this together! I'd love to see a Beginner's thread stickied...
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I don't think angelic accord is a "trap." It's a real archetype.
Is it? It's a deck but I feel like it gets overrated because the outcomes are so extreme. You either assemble your Angel-Tron and win a silly blowout with like 7 Angels on the board, or you roll over and die slowly because you never drew your Accord.
If anything I think the takeaway is that Bubbling Cauldron is a card in this format, regardless of Accord. If you have any kind of incentives for sacrificing creatures, it's playable.
I think the most prevalent piece of advice I find myself giving to newer players is to use their life totals as a resource and to understand that the opponent can do so as well.
This has a couple implications at the most basic of levels:
-Using cards like Shock to deal 2 damage to an opponent who isn't anywhere near 0 life, and, similarly, using cards like Giant Growth to push through 3 damage when it doesn't get you anywhere near killing the opponent.
-Blocking just to prevent damage, losing creatures in the process, all when you can easily just take the damage and maintain your board presence.
There are obviously exceptions to these, but at a very basic level, these types of plays tend to seem very appealing, mostly due to the "well, what else am I going to do with this" mentality that raw players tend to feel stems from an unspoken need to play something every turn.
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An archetype you may have glossed over: controlling Ux Archaeomancer decks, typically UB. Uses Archy to recur spells for card advantage - in blue itself you can fetch Divination for value (or Opportunity if you're super greedy), or you can give them a second Time Ebb (does wonders for your tempo if they have a 5+ drop). Your splash color will ideally provide some kind of removal spell that's also recurrable - so either black with Liturgy/Corrupt, or red with Shock/Outrage/FLAMES (last one is sooo busted if you can get it). Drafting this archetype is one of the ways I regularly 2-1 or 3-0 my swiss drafts.
Is it? It's a deck but I feel like it gets overrated because the outcomes are so extreme. You either assemble your Angel-Tron and win a silly blowout with like 7 Angels on the board, or you roll over and die slowly because you never drew your Accord.
If anything I think the takeaway is that Bubbling Cauldron is a card in this format, regardless of Accord. If you have any kind of incentives for sacrificing creatures, it's playable.
I would agree with this (at least the first half). for fun in my first M14 draft I drafted a sweet Angelic Accord deck with multiple Angelic Accords and Bubbling Cauldrons. I felt like my deck was about as good as the archetype could reasonably be and it still wasn't very good. There were a couple games were I combo-ed off and ended up with a bunch of angels, but it still lost to just straightforward good curves and good cards. I ended up going 2-1, which was fine. Obviously, drawing Angelic Accord without having a way to reliably gain 4 life is so bad, and drawing Bubbling Cauldron without a way to capitalize on the lifegain isn't good either. ymmv
b.) You'll have to cast it before or during the Begin Combat step; your first chance during Declare Attackers is after they've been declared, and the ability is on the stack.
c.) The last you have to cast a meaningful Flare is during the End Combat step.
Thanks! I knew in my head what I meant, but for some reason I typed out the wrong step in the OP. I've corected those.
I think the most prevalent piece of advice I find myself giving to newer players is to use their life totals as a resource and to understand that the opponent can do so as well.
This has a couple implications at the most basic of levels:
-Using cards like Shock to deal 2 damage to an opponent who isn't anywhere near 0 life, and, similarly, using cards like Giant Growth to push through 3 damage when it doesn't get you anywhere near killing the opponent.
-Blocking just to prevent damage, losing creatures in the process, all when you can easily just take the damage and maintain your board presence.
An archetype you may have glossed over: controlling Ux Archaeomancer decks, typically UB. Uses Archy to recur spells for card advantage - in blue itself you can fetch Divination for value (or Opportunity if you're super greedy), or you can give them a second Time Ebb (does wonders for your tempo if they have a 5+ drop). Your splash color will ideally provide some kind of removal spell that's also recurrable - so either black with Liturgy/Corrupt, or red with Shock/Outrage/FLAMES (last one is sooo busted if you can get it). Drafting this archetype is one of the ways I regularly 2-1 or 3-0 my swiss drafts.
For whatever reason, I have not had as much success with Archeomancer.dec in this format as in previous core sets. So I'd be hesitant to reccomend it to a complete beginner. Plus, it's basically just a card advantage engine within a U flyers shell anyway.
Thanks for the feedback everybody. Any more suggestions or corrections?
I have one to add: Know your combat tricks and direct damage cards. It's okay to trade a guy for Giant Growth sometimes, and sometimes you're gonna lose to a Lava Axe you haven't seen yet. But a big jump in skill level is being prepared for what your opponent might have.. this is similar to the poker tenet, "Play your opponent's hand, not your own."
For example, in M14, if your opponent passes the turn with WW up, suspect Celestial Flare. Sometimes the right move is to still play into it: good players bluff, and you won't want them to still have that when you drop your finisher.
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I have one to add: Know your combat tricks and direct damage cards. It's okay to trade a guy for Giant Growth sometimes, and sometimes you're gonna lose to a Lava Axe you haven't seen yet. But a big jump in skill level is being prepared for what your opponent might have.. this is similar to the poker tenet, "Play your opponent's hand, not your own."
For example, in M14, if your opponent passes the turn with WW up, suspect Celestial Flare. Sometimes the right move is to still play into it: good players bluff, and you won't want them to still have that when you drop your finisher.
Also, bluff yourself. Passing with Celestial flare mana up always gives you value. Just today someone let me eat one of their creatures to play around a celestial flare I did not have.
There are fewer bluffable cards in the format than usual, I feel, but flare is a big obvious one and if you can get some edge from bluffing seakite, NOBODY is attacking with a bear into four open mana from a blue player.
Also, bluff yourself. Passing with Celestial flare mana up always gives you value. Just today someone let me eat one of their creatures to play around a celestial flare I did not have.
There are fewer bluffable cards in the format than usual, I feel, but flare is a big obvious one and if you can get some edge from bluffing seakite, NOBODY is attacking with a bear into four open mana from a blue player.
I had started to write paragraphs on not playing unnecessary lands, but stopped due to scope... is this supposed to be a general primer for new players? Can we sticky a primer for new players?????
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I had started to write paragraphs on not playing unnecessary lands, but stopped due to scope... is this supposed to be a general primer for new players? Can we sticky a primer for new players?????
Yeah, I was a bit worried that my sections on manabases and archetypes are too complicated.
As it is I've probably got those 4 sections in the wrong orders.
But your point about combat tricks is a good one. It's for the intermediate players though...
R/W slivers? Even with thorncaster, I've never seen this deck work out. W/G slivers is usually what I've seen, and even then, its not very good.
U/G flyers..... In 40 or so drafts, I've never seen this. Not a good reason to play Zephyr charge.
U/W skies..... Early consensus had U as one of the best colors, I pretty much view it as the worst almost at this point. U/W skies is viable, but not as good as it was in M13, and not even close to as good as in M12. There's just not good enough stats on the flyers in relation to cc, and windstorm is a solid SB card that always goes late as well. In the last 6 or so drafts I have done, U was wide open, each one. I avoid it unless I pull a bomb early. Could be just my experience though, wondering how others view it.
Angelic Accord.dec is very much an archeytpe, and is a lot more viable than almost every other archetype you posted. Its to the point now where I feel its being forced in a lot of drafts as soon as an accord pops up.
I think the best archetype so far is actually just plain ol' B/G.
UR Tempo is a solid archetype. You get Firecat, Maulhorn, Scroll Thief and blue fliers along with not allowing your opponent to block (Time Ebb, Disperse, Frost Breath, Essence Scatter, red removal).
Which would have been unnecessary because this isn't even correct, so.
(This should be its own thread.)
Our experiences have apparently been wildly different. But I'm confident enough in mine to say that you're very, very wrong.
What you said isn't always true. Sometimes you hold unnecessary lands in hand as fodder for Mind Rot to avoid discarding a spell that you don't want to cast just yet, but certainly don't want to discard.
R/W slivers? Even with thorncaster, I've never seen this deck work out. W/G slivers is usually what I've seen, and even then, its not very good.
U/G flyers..... In 40 or so drafts, I've never seen this. Not a good reason to play Zephyr charge.
U/W skies..... Early consensus had U as one of the best colors, I pretty much view it as the worst almost at this point. U/W skies is viable, but not as good as it was in M13, and not even close to as good as in M12. There's just not good enough stats on the flyers in relation to cc, and windstorm is a solid SB card that always goes late as well. In the last 6 or so drafts I have done, U was wide open, each one. I avoid it unless I pull a bomb early. Could be just my experience though, wondering how others view it.
Angelic Accord.dec is very much an archeytpe, and is a lot more viable than almost every other archetype you posted. Its to the point now where I feel its being forced in a lot of drafts as soon as an accord pops up.
I think the best archetype so far is actually just plain ol' B/G.
You're right, and since this thread is aimed at newer players perhaps I sholdn't even be including those archetypes at all. Not that intermediate players can't draft them, just that they shouldn't be what's rattling around the head of a new player when they sit down to crack their first pack.
Which would have been unnecessary because this isn't even correct, so.
(This should be its own thread.)
It went something like this simplified concept: it's late game, 0 cards in hand. You draw a land. You have no activated abilities for want of mana.
Do not play the land. An opponent with 0 cards in hand is easy to plan around.
If next round, you draw something that needs that land, you can still play it. If you draw another land, you can play that.
No drawback, all beneficial.
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U/G flyers..... In 40 or so drafts, I've never seen this.
...
U/W skies..... Early consensus had U as one of the best colors, I pretty much view it as the worst almost at this point.
I just wanted to thank you all for the great advice and discussion. I am wanting very badly to get involved with limited events. I am not new to the game but am mostly a casual player but limited has always been an interest. Now I feel like I have more tools to pull off some great decks. Thank you
Blue has such depth at common in M14. There are only two commons that I consider unplayable or not maindeck: Tome Scour and the Merfolk Spy (I think). That's much lower than the other colors. Claustrophobia is powerful in this set, and Sensory Deprivation has consistently over-performed for me.
Most of the other colors have 4 or 5 commons that I look at distrustfully.
Black: Mind Rot, Duress, Vile Rebirth, Shrivel, Shadowborn Apostle, and Dark Favor are all conditional for me.
Red: Lave Axe, Dragon Hatchling, Thunder Strike, and Seismic Stomp, Cyclops Tyrant
Green: Plummet, Naturalize, Fog, Groundshaker Sliver, Lay of the Land
This thread aims to be a cheat sheet for newer players to play M14 and be smarter than the average bear.
Tip #1: Run one main colour and one splash colour
This is a distillation of a couple of threads about manabases. The short version is that you want to have most of your cards (and ALL of your colour intensive cards like Celestial Flare) in your main colour, and only the most powerful and splashable cards in your secondary colour.
Result: A typical manabase will be 10 swamps, 7 plains, but the fewer cards you splash, the more you can bias that up towards 14 swamps, 3 plains.
Tip #2: Archetypes in M14
Archetypes are decks where the synergy between the cards improves the power of each one and the deck as a whole. Usually core sets are archetype light, but there are the following (ranked in order of quality):
1. Mono-coloured (Black, then Green, then Blue. Often with a light splash for a handful of cards. Don't draft monoW or monoR)
2. UG (Zephyr Charge and Trained Condor make your green fatties fly)
3. RB Sacrifice (cards that sacrifice things like Blood Bairn, Gnawing Zombie and Bubbling Cauldron plus things you can sacrifice for value like Act of Treason, Tenacious Dead or Dragon Egg)
4. W/B/G Auras (Beneficial Auras like Trollhide and Mark of the Vampire on evasion or vigilant creatures. Just watch out for your creature being killed by removal in response to the aura)
5. UW Flyers (basically good in every limited format ever)
Result: Combined with Tip #1, you should basically always be trying to draft a mono-Coloured deck (for preference) or one of the above archetypes. MonoB is particularly good, since cards like Blood Bairn, Tenacious Dead, Festering Newt and Quag Sickness let you keep your options open for MonoB or RB sacrifice and Mark of the Vampire is strong in any Bx deck.
An alternate opinion is "You should try to be UG from the outset, with the option of substituting black for either color if they aren’t open. If neither blue or green are open, then you draft a RB sacrifice deck, and you avoid white like the plague."
Tip #3: Build around me cards are a TRAP, designed to punish you
These are cards that prey on your inability to understand basic probability. They promise a tremendous upside, but are so inconsistent that you will be lucky to win one game of the draft pulling off your combo. Some people like that. If you're reading this, you'd probably rather win the draft instead of winning a single game.
Examples of build-around-me trap cards: Shadowborn Apostle, Angelic Accord, Elite Arcanist, Tome Scour
There's also a second level of cards which are fine in and of themselves, but try to trick you into making your deck worse by adding suboptimal cards to combo with it: Ajani's Chosen, Auramancer, Marauding Maulhorn, Blightcaster. These second level of cards are fine to play, but don't add other otherwise unplayable cards like Sanguine Bond to your deck because of them.
Note: Bogbrew Witch is a special case, because she doesn't require you to DRAW your combo, she actively searches out the rest of the combo herself, making her play much more consistently. So she is a GOOD combo to have.
Tip 4: Play spells and abilities at the right time
Typically you want to cast creatures in your SECOND main phase. This is so that you can bluff a combat trick, or pumping something like a Capeshan Knight. Once your opponent has blocked suboptimally or taken damage, THEN you can tap out to develop your board with the next creature.
As a general rule you want to wait as long as possible to play your spells or abilities. Some examples:
a. Gain life from Soulmender in the opponent's end step (if you do it in your turn, you lose the ability to choose to chump block with it during their attack).
b. If you want to avoid having your potential blocker tapped by their Master of Diversion, cast Shock on it during their Beginning of Combat step (which takes place before attackers are declared)
c. If you want to take down their Gladecover Scout that is enchanted with Trollhide and Mark of the Vampire that's also attacking with a Kalonian Tusker, block and kill the Tusker with your own creatures, then use Celestial Flare on them during your end of combat step (which happens after combat damage has happened)
d. Wait until after blockers are declared before using combat tricks like Giant Growth. This means that if they kill your creature in response, their creature is still blocked (or can't block a different attacker).
e. Don't chump block their Kalonian Tusker with your Child of Night when you still have a high life total. The only life point that matters is the last one. Similarly, casting Shock on your opponent early is a terrible terrible play. You should save burn to use primarily as creature removal, and only aim it at their face when it will actually kill them.
Tip 5: Know the mana costs of the common and uncommon combat tricks
Your opponent has open mana. What could they have? Here's the sub-rare cards in M14 to be aware of that could disrupt your plans:
W Brave the Elements / Pay No Heed
1W Show of Valor
2W Fortify
3W Congregate
WW Celestial Flare
1U Disperse / Essence Scatter / Negate
2U Frost Breath
3U Nephalia Seakite
XU Spell Blast
1UU Cancel
4UU Opportunity
B Wring Flesh / Vile Rebirth
1B Altar's Reap / Doom Blade
R Shock
1R Thunder Strike
2RR Chandra's Outrage
XRR Volcanic Geyser
G Giant Growth / Ranger's Guile / Fog
1G Plummet / Naturalize
3G Briarpack Alpha
XG Windstorm
So there you have it. Any typos? Mistakes? Things I've left out?
This type of advice is dangerous because if someone goes into a draft thinking "Well I've drafted 3 Blue cards, I guess that's all I can draft for the rest of this" they might throw away a perfectly fine 2-color deck. I feel like Mono is a terrible idea for a new-ish player because you have to make constant judgment calls about power vs. consistency.
I think the line between "archetypes" and "build around me traps" is fairly blurred and more the subject of individual card discussion rather than general rules. I mean if accord cost W and there were more decent creatures with lifelink in the set then you wouldn't be calling it unplayable trash, it'd be an awesome archetype. It all comes down to the specifics, not a general rule. And on the ones you mention, I don't actually think blightcaster is a trap at all. BW auras is one of the archetypes you even mention as playable, and blightcaster is genuinely awesome in that. Getting just one blightcaster activation is good, once you get two or more it gets pretty bonkers. Also, I don't think marauding mulhorn can ever be a trap. It's a perfectly fine card on its own, good even, and advocate of the beast is playable on its own. Then if you get them together then it's bonkers - it's a perfect example of the kind of synergy you should be trying to draft.
Well, I don't think you should be mono-coloured as much as your mindset in the draft should be to try to be mostly mono-coloured.
If you get lucky and your colour is flowing then you can end up with a mono-coloured deck. Otherwise you splash a second colour.
I listed Marauding Maulhorn as an example of a card that newer players misevaluate.
Recently I have seen new players do the following things: Leave the Maulhorn out of their red deck entirely because they didn't have any Advocate of the Beast to offset the 'drawback'; and force green for Advocate of the Beast (when they already had better black cards and should have stuck with RB).
I'm not saying that these card don't have upside and work well together. Just that new players typically value the card synergies of these cards as being much more important than they are.
Blightcaster in particular is dangerous because new players sypically don't value creatures highly enough, and it encourages them to run crappy enchantments instead of creatures. That's not to say that Blightcaster can't be great in a deck with 4 Claustrophobia, just that you should only play those enchantments because they are good enough on their own merit, not because they combo well with Blightcaster. In hindsight, perhaps I should have put Blightcaster in the second group of cards, not the first.
Yes?
b.) You'll have to cast it before or during the Begin Combat step; your first chance during Declare Attackers is after they've been declared, and the ability is on the stack.
c.) The last you have to cast a meaningful Flare is during the End Combat step.
Not super important IRL in a casual draft, but critical on MTGO.
Thanks for putting this together! I'd love to see a Beginner's thread stickied...
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
*DCI Rules Advisor*
Is it? It's a deck but I feel like it gets overrated because the outcomes are so extreme. You either assemble your Angel-Tron and win a silly blowout with like 7 Angels on the board, or you roll over and die slowly because you never drew your Accord.
If anything I think the takeaway is that Bubbling Cauldron is a card in this format, regardless of Accord. If you have any kind of incentives for sacrificing creatures, it's playable.
This has a couple implications at the most basic of levels:
-Using cards like Shock to deal 2 damage to an opponent who isn't anywhere near 0 life, and, similarly, using cards like Giant Growth to push through 3 damage when it doesn't get you anywhere near killing the opponent.
-Blocking just to prevent damage, losing creatures in the process, all when you can easily just take the damage and maintain your board presence.
There are obviously exceptions to these, but at a very basic level, these types of plays tend to seem very appealing, mostly due to the "well, what else am I going to do with this" mentality that raw players tend to feel stems from an unspoken need to play something every turn.
:dance:Fact or Fiction of the [Limited] Clan:dance:
I would agree with this (at least the first half). for fun in my first M14 draft I drafted a sweet Angelic Accord deck with multiple Angelic Accords and Bubbling Cauldrons. I felt like my deck was about as good as the archetype could reasonably be and it still wasn't very good. There were a couple games were I combo-ed off and ended up with a bunch of angels, but it still lost to just straightforward good curves and good cards. I ended up going 2-1, which was fine. Obviously, drawing Angelic Accord without having a way to reliably gain 4 life is so bad, and drawing Bubbling Cauldron without a way to capitalize on the lifegain isn't good either. ymmv
Thanks! I knew in my head what I meant, but for some reason I typed out the wrong step in the OP. I've corected those.
For newer players that this thread is directed to, it's most definitely a trap.
Thanks! I've added these two to the OP.
For whatever reason, I have not had as much success with Archeomancer.dec in this format as in previous core sets. So I'd be hesitant to reccomend it to a complete beginner. Plus, it's basically just a card advantage engine within a U flyers shell anyway.
Thanks for the feedback everybody. Any more suggestions or corrections?
For example, in M14, if your opponent passes the turn with WW up, suspect Celestial Flare. Sometimes the right move is to still play into it: good players bluff, and you won't want them to still have that when you drop your finisher.
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
Also, bluff yourself. Passing with Celestial flare mana up always gives you value. Just today someone let me eat one of their creatures to play around a celestial flare I did not have.
There are fewer bluffable cards in the format than usual, I feel, but flare is a big obvious one and if you can get some edge from bluffing seakite, NOBODY is attacking with a bear into four open mana from a blue player.
I had started to write paragraphs on not playing unnecessary lands, but stopped due to scope... is this supposed to be a general primer for new players? Can we sticky a primer for new players?????
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 was a bit worried that my sections on manabases and archetypes are too complicated.
As it is I've probably got those 4 sections in the wrong orders.
But your point about combat tricks is a good one. It's for the intermediate players though...
Have some issues with your archetypes....
R/W slivers? Even with thorncaster, I've never seen this deck work out. W/G slivers is usually what I've seen, and even then, its not very good.
U/G flyers..... In 40 or so drafts, I've never seen this. Not a good reason to play Zephyr charge.
U/W skies..... Early consensus had U as one of the best colors, I pretty much view it as the worst almost at this point. U/W skies is viable, but not as good as it was in M13, and not even close to as good as in M12. There's just not good enough stats on the flyers in relation to cc, and windstorm is a solid SB card that always goes late as well. In the last 6 or so drafts I have done, U was wide open, each one. I avoid it unless I pull a bomb early. Could be just my experience though, wondering how others view it.
Angelic Accord.dec is very much an archeytpe, and is a lot more viable than almost every other archetype you posted. Its to the point now where I feel its being forced in a lot of drafts as soon as an accord pops up.
I think the best archetype so far is actually just plain ol' B/G.
Standard:
RW Boros devotion/Purphoros combo
RGB Jund Midrange
Modern:
WB Martyr.proc
Which would have been unnecessary because this isn't even correct, so.
(This should be its own thread.)
Our experiences have apparently been wildly different. But I'm confident enough in mine to say that you're very, very wrong.
What you said isn't always true. Sometimes you hold unnecessary lands in hand as fodder for Mind Rot to avoid discarding a spell that you don't want to cast just yet, but certainly don't want to discard.
New to Commander? Read the Above article.
You're right, and since this thread is aimed at newer players perhaps I sholdn't even be including those archetypes at all. Not that intermediate players can't draft them, just that they shouldn't be what's rattling around the head of a new player when they sit down to crack their first pack.
Thanks!
It went something like this simplified concept: it's late game, 0 cards in hand. You draw a land. You have no activated abilities for want of mana.
Do not play the land. An opponent with 0 cards in hand is easy to plan around.
If next round, you draw something that needs that land, you can still play it. If you draw another land, you can play that.
No drawback, all beneficial.
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
err, yeah, what ohdaisy said. Also:
Also:
Most of the other colors have 4 or 5 commons that I look at distrustfully.
Black: Mind Rot, Duress, Vile Rebirth, Shrivel, Shadowborn Apostle, and Dark Favor are all conditional for me.
Red: Lave Axe, Dragon Hatchling, Thunder Strike, and Seismic Stomp, Cyclops Tyrant
Green: Plummet, Naturalize, Fog, Groundshaker Sliver, Lay of the Land