Since I got into limited around M12 pretty much every format for 4+ years has been better as a 3x large set and no matter how they add in the other later sets the small sets have made them worse. Innistrad with dark ascension, return to ravnica compared to RTR/GTC/DGM, khans with fate reforged. The only block that's been improved by its subsequent releases in my history with the game was theros but only as a full block THS/BNG/JOU and even then only very slightly and possibly only because i wanted anything that could break the monotony of heroic beat downs and battlecruiser creatures.
To the point of the thread, BFZ has been pretty awesome but it definitely has some room for improvement. Could Oath of the Gatewatch improve this format instead of ruin it, and if so how do you want it to change? I know that the way the math works out so many of the cards in decks in the new format will be oath cards, and that it being a small set means there will be less diversity in the pools overall, which means it will probably be more like an entirely new format with a lot of returning cards rather the BFZ format with modifications, but I'd sure like to see mixed sets limited done right for once and BFZ as it is has been the rightest they've gotten it in a long while.
I'd personally like to see allies get a significant improvement, but it absolutely can't damage the existing archetypes which means it would need a moderate amount of support for those on par with the packs of BFZ we're losing. A little more redundancy in landfall as an aggressive archetype would be nice too but I don't think it really needs to be pushed in terms of power just made to come together a little more consistently. I kind of hope they just drop converge as anything but a sometimes splashed for value thing, green doesn't feel like it can sustain anymore cutesy fixing/land fetching stuff when what it really needs is just some more simple meat and potatoes 3/3 for 3 style bodies.
Scores are always going to be subjective opinion based things, it's fine if there's occasional outliers or differing ideas of what a 10 is exactly. Triple innistrad is remembered fondly for a lot of reasons but an often overlooked one is the flavor/fun. Cursing other players, stitching together a zombie horde, equipping an artifact modeled after a chainsaw, the fact that card games call the pile of used cards a 'graveyard' has never been more resonant and flavorful than during innistrad with undying and flashback and things like splinterfright running around. It also helped that its main mechanical weakness of having some archetype disparity is curbed a little by the self correcting nature of limited, as in the more people drafting the powerful archetypes the more open and powerful the under drafted archetypes became. The double decker double becker aka the spider spawning deck also really helped the format's longevity because it wasn't really popularized until several weeks after release and it made a lot of the lower picks and even some graveyard hate cards shift drastically in power which kind of reset the way people had to think about their picks and the format as a whole. It does feel much less fun to go back to when it shows up on MTGO now that everyone knows all its ins and outs but it's more or less the same story for every format.
Early impression is that this format seems rad. Don't want to jinx it but like maybe innistrad good, although i think in the long term it needs a spider spawning surprise maverick deck that keeps picks more dynamic and less ordered list. Was hoping the converge deck would be that but haven't seen it really work yet. Still really fun overall, great interactions in every game from every color.
Did 3 drafts so far, BG RG and BW. BG was just what i wanted it to be but I did wind up with 3 bone splinters and i think people will learn not let that one go by too often in future drafts because you don't really need a blisterpod to make that thing premium removal, any 2 drop is fine sac fodder in exchange for an eldrazi or a big flyer. RG was the strongest by far and my draft of it even sort of fell apart. I started out with a landfall focus and had a decent amount of landfall stuff in the end but not really a critical amount, and nothing like evolving wilds to really go off with it. The all stars in that deck turned out to be 2 vile aggregate and 3 eyeless watcher as an incredible curve out for a 3 mana 4/5 trampler. The BW deck was the weakest but it was basically a lifegain deck with no pay offs, had to run 2 stone haven medic just to fill in some 2 drops and give me something to sac to my only power card, smothering abomination, which i only wound up casting once and had to sac it to itself. The thing is that deck was still pretty good or at least felt good, all the incidental lifegain from the medics and my clutch of courier griffins bought a ton of time for me to cast the mind rot thing and ondu rising for their awaken cost which always felt amazing even if i didn't wind up getting there with it.
There was almost no ramp in khans (other than banners which no one used if they could help it) and it was more normal to see woolly loxodon face up than for the game to end before that. If this format is at a similar speed but is also full of a ton of incidental scion generation even in decks that are in no other way ramp focused then I don't think a couple 7s or a 9/10 is going to be that odd.
WU Skies/Awaken - I don't like that there are no cards specifically for this archetype other than the gold cards, every deck in white and blue wants all the same good common flyers and awaken cards as you do and blue having a heavy ingest/process theme while white has a big ally theme means you aren't going to pick up a lot of tangentially beneficial synergies like other colors can. Pass
WB Life gain/Allies - Always hesitant to endorse a life gain deck but i think you'll more just build a basic allies beat down shell and get more benefit from your courier griffins and tandem tactics than other decks. Black will definitely be the secondary color here since black is pretty schizophrenic this set, splitting its focus between sac and life gain and ingest/process, but the upside of that is that no one else wants a lot of the black life synergy cards but you. Fair
WR Ally Aggro - There's not a ton of synergy here beyond burn spells and combat tricks being a good way to push through weenies but the set is on the slower side overall so a critical mass of low drops is going to be key to making aggro work. Reckless cohort is a nice plant for the archetype as no one else wants to risk running it with the drawback but it will pretty much always be either paired with another ally or backed up by the threat of a combat trick in WR. Good
WG Ally Combo - Rather than attacking every turn like red or bleeding them out like black, green allies wants to build up a critical mass of bodies and tokens and then smash out with a big anthem play using stuff like tajuru beastmaster, tajuru warcaller, and inspired charge. This is no M15 triplicate spirits, but there's also a few nice incidental synergies like the good white landfall cards and green life gain cards being better here than anywhere else. Fair
UB Ingest Control - A little hard to rate until we get real play time in, much like delve in khans was kind of a mystery until we got to play with it and figure out what kind of support it needed in terms of enablers. I think it will be fine, things like mind raker and murk strider are both fine cards that will get to turn on their process effect much more often here, I don't think you need to run a lot of sub par ingest guys like mist intruder you'll just pick up incidental exile effects on a lot of your removal and discard and counter spells. Fair
UG Converge Ramp - i think it's a given that converge is best as a Gxxx deck with as much fixing as you can find in a set that's fairly stingy on fixing and one of your other colors will almost always be blue because it has more converge cards, but I think people are overlooking that blue is only really second to green in producing eldrazi scions and that together it may be the only color combo that wants to truly glut out on the extremely high end colorless eldrazi. The only question in my mind is how vulnerable such a color and cost greedy archetype is to being beaten down before it hits its stride. pass-great depending on how prevalent beat down is and how much fixing is going around, may be a shifting meta deck like how spider spawning or 5cc gets better or worse depending on how popular it is or how fast other people at the table are building.
BR Removal - The gold cards for this color pair imply that it's a beat down deck, and any variant of red always can be, but honestly i don't see a lot of early aggression out of black except dominator drone which everyone will want. I think the real focus of a successful black red deck will have to be a low curve red creature base backed up by quality removal from both colors to keep forcing the weenies through, but i really don't like the look of the combo overall. Pass
BG Sacrifice - This is the archetype i am most excited for. It looks like all the pieces are there, tons of strong cards no one else is taking highly and it can make use of almost any cards in both colors by virtue of being able to trade in low cost cards with sac effects once they outlive their usefulness or ramp into expensive cards faster than the archetype that makes better use of them can. Like sludge crawler is a threat of activation ingest enabler on its surface but it's also a serviceable shade that can make more use of its pump when its paired with ramp effects and it's a 1 cost creature that you can sac with little loss of value. The same really can't be said of other archetypes and a voracious null or a blisterpod. Great
RG Landfall - This is the deck that scares me the most, and the one I expect to keep the speed of the format honest. scythe leopardmakindi sliderunnervalakut predatorevolving wilds crack unnatural aggression is an unlikely christmasland curve out but if you take like any 3 of those commons or the dozen other great landfall or landfall enabling cards i didn't mention and chain those together, isn't that still incredibly dangerous and incredibly likely? Great
I would think because scions are at least moderately about ramping since a gray ogre and a hill giant's worth of stats isn't super exciting, especially in green. Fodder and outburst are a diversified bear and centaur courser respectively which are both great but a courser's worth of stats in red is pretty rare. Call and watcher both give you 2 scions to ramp with, watcher's spare 1/1 doesn't mean much outside gb sac and you're much more likely to hit your 4th land after call to hit 6 mana on turn 4 than you are to hit a 5th land after watcher to ramp right into 7. If there's any difference in their rating i might even give the advantage to call but as far as I know they're close enough that you don't really need to.
turn to frog, unholy hunger, and ringwarden owl are all strong but not exciting enough to keep me from staying open with a safe first pick i can slip into any deck.
He's fine but comes in 4th when it comes to green high cost creatures behind skysnare spider, rhox maulers, and conclave naturalists which isn't even getting into your other color's high drops. So normally you'll get a few in the dregs of packs and not play them but if i early picked a leaf gilder or 2 and now it's pack 3 and i still only have like 1 maulers to ramp into i'll try to actively grab one if the other pick isn't stellar.
I always thought of garruk's packleader as a bit of a bomb but an enchantment isn't a 4/4 body and green is not really as meaty in origins as it usually is, i mean it has a fine top end of 5 and 6 drops that have more than 3 power but almost nothing for 4 or less does because it's either a tiny elf with some extra effect in place of raw stats or it's a renown creature that starts too small to trigger this and you can't load out on all 5+ drops. This can still be good especially if your other color helps the 3 power creature count but it's not something i take highly.
So during the downtime in draft at the pro tour the coverage team has been presenting the top 5 commons and uncommons of each color pair as they appear as picks 1-5 for draft winners on magic online, and i decided to write this stuff down because i found some of it very interesting. Lists are from most winning to least.
Important to remember this is first 5 picks of winning decks not like in mtgoldfish data where it's counting when a card is played in a game, so no inflated position for expensive cards that almost always win instantly or dominate once down. A lot of stuff was expected like freeblade and sentinel appearing in almost every white list, but some of the quirkier stuff is that the gold cards are almost universally the best uncommons in their archetypes (or maybe just indicitive that people who focused in on a color pair early got rewarded for it), or how certain pairs win without their synergy (like blue red has a lot of thopter producers but not something like chief of the foundry and their gold card is one of the few that isnt listed at the top) or only with their synergy (red black you see husk and victor and fleshbag but those don't appear anywhere else so it seems that only act sac really goes the distance).
It's just very versatile. It's 3/2 combined stats for 3 which is what you'd expect to get for 3 but then it's split up in such a way that you can often trade half of it for a real card while keeping something around, some of it flies which means it's not dead in a ground stalled board, it curbs the effect of single target removal like if the opponent is relying on a reave soul to carry them to the late game, it's safer to throw equipment or enchantments or a trick on something like a token so if they respond with an instant you aren't losing everything, and yeah it synergizes with anthems and things that care if you have an artifact. What more do you want for 3 mana in a fast format?
It may be a mistake to keep trying to rate the colors as if people were making mono color decks with them. For instance i'd probably put red just behind white in terms of overall power among commons and uncommons but i really don't like red black or red blue; the act sac plan never seems to come together and way too many of the quality cards in both pools come in around 3 cmc so I don't feel fast early and i don't feel powerful late, and pretty much every deck wants every piece of the artifact deck so you're incredibly unlikely to actually link up synergies. But on the other hand green, while only having a handful of exciting cards, is deep on playables all over the curve and seems to pair up with every other color at least marginally well.
I haven't gotten near enough play time to start rating the pairs concretely or even defining what i should be aiming for in a pair yet, like i don't think green black even has a ton to do with elves it's just good at being grindy and dodging its own eyeblight massacres.
This might be even better here than it was in ravnica since it not only grows most creatures out of common burn range but protects from reave soul and swift reckoning as well.
How highly do you take this? You probably only want one maybe 2 and at uncommon in green which seems to be somewhere in the middle of people's list of color power rankings so i keep seeing this in the first ~4 picks of a pack next to a high quality creature/removal during practice drafts and i often go for the other card. Also kytheon's tactics or even seismic elemental feel like kinda similar effects if you're in those colors insofar as they're blowouts when you have a lot of creatures in your deck and on your board so i never feel like i'm hurting for this effect even if i don't wind up with an invocation specifically.
Eyeblight is one of the few good black common creatures, it's not amazing or a reason to get into black and on many boards it will just be a grey ogre but it's very good at punishing the best openers in the format like leaf gilder and consul's lieutenant and it doesn't die to eyeblight massacre.
For the drake discussion i feel like while renown is something you need to respect by drafting a decent amount of low drops i don't think you should automatically assume you are not the beat down just because you aren't in white or that every card that doesn't stop a topan freeblade shouldn't be run. Scrapskin is evasive and outsizes about everything in the air prior to 5 mana, and it can crucially block stalwart aven which is arguably more dangerous than the freeblade.
To the point of the thread, BFZ has been pretty awesome but it definitely has some room for improvement. Could Oath of the Gatewatch improve this format instead of ruin it, and if so how do you want it to change? I know that the way the math works out so many of the cards in decks in the new format will be oath cards, and that it being a small set means there will be less diversity in the pools overall, which means it will probably be more like an entirely new format with a lot of returning cards rather the BFZ format with modifications, but I'd sure like to see mixed sets limited done right for once and BFZ as it is has been the rightest they've gotten it in a long while.
I'd personally like to see allies get a significant improvement, but it absolutely can't damage the existing archetypes which means it would need a moderate amount of support for those on par with the packs of BFZ we're losing. A little more redundancy in landfall as an aggressive archetype would be nice too but I don't think it really needs to be pushed in terms of power just made to come together a little more consistently. I kind of hope they just drop converge as anything but a sometimes splashed for value thing, green doesn't feel like it can sustain anymore cutesy fixing/land fetching stuff when what it really needs is just some more simple meat and potatoes 3/3 for 3 style bodies.
Did 3 drafts so far, BG RG and BW. BG was just what i wanted it to be but I did wind up with 3 bone splinters and i think people will learn not let that one go by too often in future drafts because you don't really need a blisterpod to make that thing premium removal, any 2 drop is fine sac fodder in exchange for an eldrazi or a big flyer. RG was the strongest by far and my draft of it even sort of fell apart. I started out with a landfall focus and had a decent amount of landfall stuff in the end but not really a critical amount, and nothing like evolving wilds to really go off with it. The all stars in that deck turned out to be 2 vile aggregate and 3 eyeless watcher as an incredible curve out for a 3 mana 4/5 trampler. The BW deck was the weakest but it was basically a lifegain deck with no pay offs, had to run 2 stone haven medic just to fill in some 2 drops and give me something to sac to my only power card, smothering abomination, which i only wound up casting once and had to sac it to itself. The thing is that deck was still pretty good or at least felt good, all the incidental lifegain from the medics and my clutch of courier griffins bought a ton of time for me to cast the mind rot thing and ondu rising for their awaken cost which always felt amazing even if i didn't wind up getting there with it.
WB Life gain/Allies - Always hesitant to endorse a life gain deck but i think you'll more just build a basic allies beat down shell and get more benefit from your courier griffins and tandem tactics than other decks. Black will definitely be the secondary color here since black is pretty schizophrenic this set, splitting its focus between sac and life gain and ingest/process, but the upside of that is that no one else wants a lot of the black life synergy cards but you. Fair
WR Ally Aggro - There's not a ton of synergy here beyond burn spells and combat tricks being a good way to push through weenies but the set is on the slower side overall so a critical mass of low drops is going to be key to making aggro work. Reckless cohort is a nice plant for the archetype as no one else wants to risk running it with the drawback but it will pretty much always be either paired with another ally or backed up by the threat of a combat trick in WR. Good
WG Ally Combo - Rather than attacking every turn like red or bleeding them out like black, green allies wants to build up a critical mass of bodies and tokens and then smash out with a big anthem play using stuff like tajuru beastmaster, tajuru warcaller, and inspired charge. This is no M15 triplicate spirits, but there's also a few nice incidental synergies like the good white landfall cards and green life gain cards being better here than anywhere else. Fair
UB Ingest Control - A little hard to rate until we get real play time in, much like delve in khans was kind of a mystery until we got to play with it and figure out what kind of support it needed in terms of enablers. I think it will be fine, things like mind raker and murk strider are both fine cards that will get to turn on their process effect much more often here, I don't think you need to run a lot of sub par ingest guys like mist intruder you'll just pick up incidental exile effects on a lot of your removal and discard and counter spells. Fair
UR Eldrazi Good Stuff - I could basically just list the best commons in the set like eldrazi skyspawner and touch of the void and stop there but UR is also a great fit for the otherwise low impact colorless lords in blue as well as nettle drone, kozilek's sentinel and molten nursery in red. Great
UG Converge Ramp - i think it's a given that converge is best as a Gxxx deck with as much fixing as you can find in a set that's fairly stingy on fixing and one of your other colors will almost always be blue because it has more converge cards, but I think people are overlooking that blue is only really second to green in producing eldrazi scions and that together it may be the only color combo that wants to truly glut out on the extremely high end colorless eldrazi. The only question in my mind is how vulnerable such a color and cost greedy archetype is to being beaten down before it hits its stride. pass-great depending on how prevalent beat down is and how much fixing is going around, may be a shifting meta deck like how spider spawning or 5cc gets better or worse depending on how popular it is or how fast other people at the table are building.
BR Removal - The gold cards for this color pair imply that it's a beat down deck, and any variant of red always can be, but honestly i don't see a lot of early aggression out of black except dominator drone which everyone will want. I think the real focus of a successful black red deck will have to be a low curve red creature base backed up by quality removal from both colors to keep forcing the weenies through, but i really don't like the look of the combo overall. Pass
BG Sacrifice - This is the archetype i am most excited for. It looks like all the pieces are there, tons of strong cards no one else is taking highly and it can make use of almost any cards in both colors by virtue of being able to trade in low cost cards with sac effects once they outlive their usefulness or ramp into expensive cards faster than the archetype that makes better use of them can. Like sludge crawler is a threat of activation ingest enabler on its surface but it's also a serviceable shade that can make more use of its pump when its paired with ramp effects and it's a 1 cost creature that you can sac with little loss of value. The same really can't be said of other archetypes and a voracious null or a blisterpod. Great
RG Landfall - This is the deck that scares me the most, and the one I expect to keep the speed of the format honest. scythe leopard makindi sliderunner valakut predator evolving wilds crack unnatural aggression is an unlikely christmasland curve out but if you take like any 3 of those commons or the dozen other great landfall or landfall enabling cards i didn't mention and chain those together, isn't that still incredibly dangerous and incredibly likely? Great
turn to frog, unholy hunger, and ringwarden owl are all strong but not exciting enough to keep me from staying open with a safe first pick i can slip into any deck.
White/Blue
C: separatist voidmage, suppression bonds, stalwart aven, claustrophobia, topan freeblade
U: thunderclap wyvern, whirler rogue, jhessian thief, sentinel of the eternal watch, swift reckoning
White/Black
C: topan freeblade, suppression bonds, reave soul, unholy hunger, stalwart aven
U: blood-cursed knight, sentinel of the eternal watch, knightly valor, cruel revival, blessed spirits
White/Red
C: topan freeblade, ghirapur gearcrafter, lightning javelin, fiery impulse, supression bonds
U: iroas's champion, consul's lieutenant, acolyte of the inferno, patron of the valiant, thopter engineer
White/Green
C: supression bonds, topan freeblade, wild instincts, leaf gilder, rhox maulers
U: citadel castellan, undercity troll, valeron wardens, sentinel of the eternal watch, patron of the valiant
Blue/Black
C: reave soul, unholy hunger, seperatist voidmage, claustrophobia, read the bones
U: whirler rogue, cruel revival, possessed skaab, tower geist, jhessian thief
Blue/Red
C: ghirapur gearcrafter, fiery impulse, lightning javelin, seperatist voidmage, claustrophobia
U: whirler rogue, thopter engineer, jhessian thief, reclusive artificer, ravaging blaze
Blue/Green
C: separatist voidmage, leaf gilder, claustrophobia, rhox maulers, wild instincts
U: bounding krasis, whirler rogue, skysnare spider, undercity troll, tower geist
Black/Red
C: fiery impulse, reave soul, ghirapur gearcrafter, lightning javelin, nantuko husk
U: blazing hellhound, ravaging blaze, cruel revival, enthralling victor, fleshbag marauder
Black/Green
C: leaf gilder, unholy hunger, reave soul, wild instincts, elvish visionary
U: shaman of the pack, dwynen's elite, skysnare spider, undercity troll, cruel revival
Red/Green
C: fiery impulse, leaf gilder, ghirapur gearcrafter, lightning javelin, wild instincts
U: zendikar incarnate, undercity troll, ravaging blaze, seismic elemental, thopter engineer
Important to remember this is first 5 picks of winning decks not like in mtgoldfish data where it's counting when a card is played in a game, so no inflated position for expensive cards that almost always win instantly or dominate once down. A lot of stuff was expected like freeblade and sentinel appearing in almost every white list, but some of the quirkier stuff is that the gold cards are almost universally the best uncommons in their archetypes (or maybe just indicitive that people who focused in on a color pair early got rewarded for it), or how certain pairs win without their synergy (like blue red has a lot of thopter producers but not something like chief of the foundry and their gold card is one of the few that isnt listed at the top) or only with their synergy (red black you see husk and victor and fleshbag but those don't appear anywhere else so it seems that only act sac really goes the distance).
I haven't gotten near enough play time to start rating the pairs concretely or even defining what i should be aiming for in a pair yet, like i don't think green black even has a ton to do with elves it's just good at being grindy and dodging its own eyeblight massacres.
For the drake discussion i feel like while renown is something you need to respect by drafting a decent amount of low drops i don't think you should automatically assume you are not the beat down just because you aren't in white or that every card that doesn't stop a topan freeblade shouldn't be run. Scrapskin is evasive and outsizes about everything in the air prior to 5 mana, and it can crucially block stalwart aven which is arguably more dangerous than the freeblade.