On the subject of red, its common creatures do seem a little better than usual, especially the 3-drops. It's not too out of the ordinary for red to get stuck with a bunch of stinkers at common, but Boggart Brute and Ghirapur Gearcrafter both seem excellent, Akroan Sergeant seems fine, and it's got some playables at other points on the curve.
I haven't tallied the enchantments yet to form an opinion on whether that's going to be a thing, but I did notice at least one cantrip aura and Knightly Valor (which I don't think needs the populate mechanic to be decent), so maybe.
Green's got a playable common fight spell; I don't mind paying 4 for an always-ferocious Bear Punch, even if I won't play as many copies as I would of the cheaper fight spells. Better than Hunt the Weak? I think so, because it's more reliable and flexible as removal, which is what you put it in your deck to do.
Both green and blue having playable common removal is a good sign for the format IMO. There tends to be more flexibility in which archetypes you can actually draft when there are no color combinations that just can't ever kill something, and those two are the most frequent offenders.
How do we feel about Healing Hands? We're always saying that what lifegain would usually need to be playable is "draw a card" (well, that and not costing six mana). Obviously this would be a decent sideboard card if your opponent's deck is trading cards for damage (Act of Treason, etc), but maybe it's okay in some maindecks? I'm inclined to be conservative about playing traditionally bad effects, but Prowess and Spell Mastery do both want us to play our cantrips.
i am so~~ scared of white right now. its creatures just seem undercosted and super aggressive.
i think i'm going to be picking up my 1/3 1U and my 0/6 for 3 creatures highly to stop from being run over.
i like this set, i think, even though it looks agressive. there are a lot of Johnny-Timmy ish build-around-me stuff. Elves! self-mill with spell mastery and black collect-me 4/2s! Thopters! Enchantments!
So this is mostly related to the topic, so I figure posting here would be better than starting a whole new thread. The thing I am wondering is if I am off with regards to how I evaluate Auras with regards to limited. I am wondering about it because of Call of the Full Moon. Almost every time I've seen it mentioned, people are down on it because the two spell thing means you will rarely get more than one turn with it. However, I quite like it. I wouldn't pick it especially high, but I'd be comfortable picking it around card 5 in a pack.
The reasoning I use when looking at an Aura is basically, "If I only get one swing/turn with the aura on the creature would it be worth it?" or basically, "Would it be good if it was a sorcery?" For the most part I think that is equitable. Basically any downside of an aura (killing in response, killing when you swing with the creature, etc) also apply to sorceries. The main difference is that the Aura can be destroyed itself, while the effects of a cast sorcery can't barring some sort of spell that removes abilities from a creature, but I think that is balanced by the fact that you can potentially have the Aura active for more than one turn.
So in the case of Call of the Full Moon, the question I ask myself is if I would take it if it was a Sorcery that gave +3/+2 and trample to end of turn, and my answer is that in many cases I would.
Nobody would play a sorcery that gave +3/+2 and trample for one turn. Don't be silly.
This aura is obviously very good if you can get it to stick AND they don't have removal.
I think red's creatures are good enough on their own that you don't need to waste a slot on a card like this. It's not an embarrassing card to run but hard removal will still be better.
Black is meh. It has 2 pieces of decent common removal in Reave Soul and Unholy Hunger, but the creatures and the rest of the removal stink IMO. That said, I think UB mill might stand a chance, what with the blue mill sorcery (Dreadwaters), Returned Centaur, and the tons of blue tempo spells. There's also Guardians of Meletis at common.
Red is bad. It does have quite a number of removal spells at (un)common, even if they all stink in a vacuum, but they should be able to collectively patch up a lot of holes for each other. That said, it has nothing going for it except Prickleboar which is good, but it's hard to put all your eggs in a basket that costs 5 mana. Also, Demolish is good in Origins, as there are quite a lot of quality artifacts, and it also won't hurt if your opponent has a Rogue's Passage.
Green is fine. Conclave Naturalists is amazing vis a vis the good artifacts in the set, and with enchantments being pushed too you'll always get a 2-for-1 here. Green's cheap creatures are good, with 2 bears-with-upside, and Valeron Wardens is pretty pushed. Would happily pair with white and roll through limited events.
I think enchantments will NOT be a thing. There are a lot of cards being like "play enchantments!", but they're just not worth the effort in limited.
Artifacts will be a thing, with the lord Chief of the Foundry at uncommon and many other good cheap artifact creatures AND equipment. Probably wants to pair with UR for the gold uncommon. I bet the reason red is so weak is so that a red artifacts deck isn't insane.
I know you played for the West in the College Bowl and your team was blue against red, but I think you're being way too harsh on red. Akroan Sergeant, Boggart Brute, Acolyte of the Inferno, and Ghirapur Gearcrafter are all sweet aggressive drops that are well positioned to do some damage. I actually think that red's suite of common and uncommon creatures is quite good compared to its usual state of poo.
I also don't think there are a bunch of quality artifacts are that you wouldn't mind killing with Demolish. There are actually a bunch of on-curve artifacts (which are usually below curve), but none of them are particularly special. It would be nice to Demolish a Gold-Forged Sentinel, but all of the other creatures are 4 or less anyway and not particularly threatening. For equipment, Sigil of Valor and Veteran's Sidearm are decent, but that's about all of the decent equipment below rare. Sigil is kind of narrow to boot as not every deck is really poised to take full advantage of one random exalted card, especially when it doesn't provide its own body.
I think Chief of the Foundry really does his work in Thopters.dec. He does make all of those other little weirdos like Runed Servitor and Ramroller marginally better, but spitting out 2/2 fliers for free instead of 1/1s with a bunch of red and blue commons sounds way better than making those other artifact creatures a little bigger.
A defensive removal spell, an offensive 6-drop, an aggressive 2-drop, and a couple of well-costed fliers. The existence of Blessed Spirits means that white enchantments have the potential to be better than usual, and the same is true for +1/+1 counters (i.e. Renown) with Patron of the Valiant, but in neither case do they make any particular bad cards good, unless you manage to grab multiples. All of these cards are uncommon, so that's not likely.
So you've got two enablers for an enchantment theme, you've got two for a "go wide" strategy, and then there's the Cleric that only wants you to draft more Clerics. Laying aside the Cleric as being a gimmick, I can see enchantments being a pretty reasonable thing to see one of at maybe half of all tables? With a Hartebeest and a Blessed Spirits, Auramancer goes up tremendously in value, and you don't need to draft a ton of enchantments at that point. You're generating significant card advantage and Spirits is a great big evasive early threat. The go wide strategy is probably dependent on other colors to actually flood the board: there are no sub-rare playable white cards that put multiple bodies on the board at all.
I'm not sure how much Jhessian Thief and the Owl deserve to be on this list, but they're both strict upgrades to always-playable limited cards so I figured they'd probably go fairly highly. Again, nothing here is too inspiring as far as archetypes go. Good fliers, good tempo and removal. Aeronaut and Rogue are nice ways to get into an artifacts deck, and Thief and Owl want you to go spell-heavy.
Dreadwaters and Tutelage are the mill cards of the format. Tutelage on its own is almost good enough to win if you draw it early, and if you get it late then it's sorta useful as a way of grinding out a long game. In neither case do you really want Dreadwaters, so I don't see that dedicated mill is really going to be a thing. Skaab is for self-milling (along with Tower Geist above, I guess); but I don't really see how the rewards are there for that, at least in blue. Skaab Goliath is the only card that seems to care, and it was always way worse than it looked. Faerie Miscreant is just never going to be good enough until long after you've gotten a plausible number of copies of it. Another thing to note is that there are *five* sub-rare counterspells in the set. I wouldn't have said any of them look actually great, but it's possible that there's a draw-go archetype waiting in the wings for someone to force it and run away with a draft. I dunno. Epiphany is probably only playable in an artifacts deck but maybe draw-go will like it too some of the time.
Fewer cards here than the other colors, and I feel like I'm being pretty generous. Cruel Revival and Nantuko Husk are not much above the curve. That said, Reave Soul is one of the best commons at all, and between it and Eyeblight Massacre, black has some really good tools for just shutting down aggro decks completely. Husk is a bit situational but it's hard enough to play against often enough that I think it's fine here.
Blightcaster is a nice pickup after you've gotten some Auramancers/Hartebeests in white, but probably never until then. Returned Centaur, Necromantic Summons, Revenant, Shadows of the Past, and even Undead Servant are all for the self-mill deck, so that deck is probably going to be B/u a lot more often than truly two colors. But the support for that archetype is real. This seems like a reliable deck that will always be available for someone at every table. The other black archetype is Elves. Gnarlroot Trapper and Eyeblight Massacre are real cards if you can get enough of them to support black being a main color in your elf deck; the challenge will be finding enough other black cards you actually want to play to make it worth it.
I could be overestimating some things here. Prickleboar and Acolyte could end up being mediocre, but it looks an awful lot to me like they'll end up Abyss-ing the opponent a good chunk of the time. Similarly, with Seismic Elemental, it could be expensive and hard to use, or it could be a reliable finisher. And Boggart Brute is potentially a ridiculously fast evasive creature. All three of them have the same weakness: Thopter tokens. Of course, that's where Chandra's Fury comes in, soooo...
Archetypes here are Spell Mastery and I guess racing could be sort of like an archetype? A ton of the stuff here is only any good on offense and so you just kinda have to attack and hope it works out.
There's some stuff here for a sacrifice deck, particularly in concert with Nantuko Husk in black, so Fiery Conclusion actually has a shot at being a playable card sometimes. There's also another handful of Thopter makers which all get pretty unreasonable with Aether Grid in play. Volcanic Rambler seems like a plausible finisher in a draw-go style deck.
I'll just randomly note that Conclave Naturalists plus Caustic Caterpillar is probably enough to reliably run Demonic Pact in limited G/B.
Most of green's best stuff is fairly late game. Cards like Alpha and Skysnare Spider and Roil are all really good finishers (and incidentally Roil is easily the best enchantment you could want in a deck with Blessed Spirits/Auramancer). There are a couple elves here but no cheap ones, and no token makers, either (other than Roil which totally doesn't need them). The go-wide colors that white will want to pair with will have to be either blue or red, which is a bit weird.
Elite is probably the main card you're going to want for the Elves strategy, but I'm not especially convinced it's a thing. There's just not enough early ones and the only payoff for running expensive ones is Sylvan Messenger, which seems clunky. You probably need a Massacre before you really start to seriously consider going down this path. Elemental Bond is probably not good enough to enable anything: as a do-nothing enchantment you need to follow it up with a lot of cards that are probably either too expensive to run a lot of, or else too good to have access to a lot of, and either way the odds of being able fill your deck with them is not high. Might could have been okay if there were more token producers, but there aren't. Pilgrimage is a scary amount of ramp if you're going mono-green, and green definitely has stuff worth ramping into; in fact Ramp based on this card is probably a very real plan, even if it does nothing to enable playing off-color bombs. Timberpack Wolf has always been a bit weird and dependent on who you're drafting with, but it'll work out once in a while. Valeron Wardens is another weird one: it's unplayable on its own, but people will go out of their way to kill it anyway, just in case it isn't on its own, which kinda makes it more playable on its own. And if you do get a double handful of Renown guys, then it's a terror. Kind of the Thrummingbird of the format, is my guess.
Green seems like it wants to ramp more than it wants to do much of anything else.
For green you missed Pharika's Disciple and Orchard Spirit as high picks. Both are hard to block and the first is great on defense or offense. These two cards are higher picks than something like Conclave Naturalists or Llanowar Empath.
For red I wouldn't pick Chandra's Fury highly and would rather have any other removal spell or low curve creature.
I would agree with the white, black and blue lists. Black has a few powerful stand alone cards but a lot of archetypal support.
Blue has a lot of tempo cards, decently sized fliers and even gets a powerful removal spell but watch out for green decks with enchantment hate.
White feels like the strongest color with its powerful uncommons and aggressively costed low drops. Black looks to have the weakest creatures.
I'm unconvinced that Pharika's Disciple is a high pick. I mean, yeah, it's obviously a fine card, but it isn't like it trades well the way a Typhoid Rats does. It's a 4-drop that you expect to trade with other 4-drops most of the time. Orchard Spirit is also fine but strictly not above the curve. It's a worse version of Wind Drake in a color that cares less about having evasion. Neither card seems like a high pick to me.
Chandra's Fury is a card that overperformed in M13. People thought it looked like junk and then it turned out to be one of the better cards in the set, because it plays an awful lot like a combat trick. *This* set looks to play up its advantages even more: not only does it kill really a whole lot of things, but it's one of the only red cards, or indeed cards at all, that does. This card will be an important role-player in red decks, count on it.
Leaf glider and elvish visionary seem like pretty good cheap elves in green.
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To add on to that, I would say pretty much every one of the multicolored uncommons are high picks, obviously a little shakey since they require 2 colors, but most of them are powerful enough on their own to justify it. The shakiest would be Reclusive Artificer but it also has probably the biggest upside.
After that, for artifacts, I would say Throwing Knife will be a high pick. Its a bit worse than Bonesplitter but not by much and the ability to pick off a smaller target is definitely useful. After that maybe Angel's Tomb, or Sigil of valor but I'm not 100% on them yet.
I would disagree that Valeron Wardens is unplayable alone. Completely alone it's a Scroll Thief that trades the ability to draw a bunch more cards for the ability to become a 3/5 instead. I don't think that qualifies as unplayable. As you noted, it's bonkers with other renown creatures.
Like Phasmy, I would disagree on Chandra's Fury. I think there will be more play to it in this set than in most others because of all of the thopters, but I haven't picked it all that highly in past sets.
If Sandsteppe Outcast was indeed one of Fate's best commons, then Ghirapur Gearcrafter has to move into high-pick territory as well. He is an enabler for thopters, but is quite good alone as well. Poached, poached, poached...
Anointer of Champions is also good. It's a narrow Ghost Warden, but Ghost Warden was pretty sweet, so a narrower version is by no means bad. I don't think there's going to be many white decks in this format that aren't attacking relentlessly anyway. If nothing else, it goes quite well with renown, so it could at least be in enabler status.
My first impression is that white and red look pretty strong to me. As mentioned Red has some above-average creatures compared to what it usually gets (perhaps the highest creature quality it has had at common/uncommon since the nutty Bloodthirst creatures of M12?) and seems like it will be very good at forcing the aggression. Also I (and probably a lot of others) really underestimated Chandra's Fury when M13 first released but the card far exceeded my expectations. Think of it as less of a Lava Axe and instead as a sweeper/combat trick with upside. In a format with Thopters and Elf tokens among other things I think it will once again prove to be a good card.
White just has some really solid cards overall, Puddlejumper touched on a lot of them but I think Blessed Spirits in particular will be a high pick.
How do we feel about Healing Hands? We're always saying that what lifegain would usually need to be playable is "draw a card" (well, that and not costing six mana). Obviously this would be a decent sideboard card if your opponent's deck is trading cards for damage (Act of Treason, etc), but maybe it's okay in some maindecks? I'm inclined to be conservative about playing traditionally bad effects, but Prowess and Spell Mastery do both want us to play our cantrips.
I think for a card like this it will really be a format dependent thing whether it's good or not. Leaning towards it being mediocre. 3 mana is a lot for a cantrip with no effect on the board and while 4 life can help it's not game breaking by any stretch. I would strongly consider boarding it in against really aggressive decks as you mention but I think I'd be disappointed if I had to maindeck it outside of a really grindy control strategy. Of course I could end up being completely wrong and it ends up being quite good.
well, i know Cockatrice isn't very reliable for real drafts, but after forcing mill twice, it turns out that Dreadwaters actually does stuff. they were exciting games -- very close!
i stalled with 0/6 Guardians of Melitis, Send to Sleep, and a bunch of countermagic and claustrophobia. scrying 2 with that 3 CMC Mana Leak also helped me get live cards to stall with, as did the instant speed Divination. One math i did have that blue-black card that gets a card back from the graveyard.
not competitive but i'm very happy to say it's viable enough to be fun -- that is, i'll win maybe a quarter to a third of the games with it.
Spell Mastery performed better than i had thought. it felt a lot stronger than i was expecting -- Scry 2, and Frost Breath. it turns out that blue has a lot of ways to stall using instants and sorceries.
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some of my favourite flavour text:
Wayward Soul "no home no heart no hope"
—Stronghold graffito
Raging Goblin He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged.
I'm a little disappointed that green seems so weak! It has some really good uncommons, but in terms of commons, outside of [[Llanowar Empath]] and the new Savage Punch I'm not very impressed.
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Anyone noticed that Menace is so "primary in black and secondary in red" that it shows up on a black rare, a red uncommon, and a red common? We strangely see Touch of Moonglove that combos with menace, but we don't have any actual black menace creatures we can touch with moonglove. Not tons of menace overall! 1 common, a -conditional- uncommon, and a rare.
Conspiracy theory, earlier drafts of this set had a lot more menace, but the draft format was too turn-dudes-sideways, so they gutted lots of menace creatures, then replaced black's missing stuff with things that felt safe to run with with less playtesting, resulting in the underwhelming black lineup with the strange feel of "it's ok that the removal is weak, because the creatures are weak, but that's ok, because the removal is weak, wait.."
Knightly Valor should end up being a really high pick in white. Renown rewards pushing attackers through, and the relative lack of high quality removal makes the card a lot better. I have very fond memories of the card in RtR block, and the renown / enchantment / dudes subthemes should make valor great.
Suppression Bonds should also be a high pick. I don't think 4 mana arrest is that much worse than 3 mana arrest (which was a high pick in most formats that it was in), and given renown and whites otherwise lackluster ways to push through damage, this card should be one of the best ways for white to push through damage the turn the card is cast. I don't see a single other white removal-type of card below 5 that can do this except mediocre/risky ones such as akroan jailer and grasp of the hieromancer.
I am somewhat worried that this format will devolve zendikar levels of all-in aggression due to renown. topan freeblade in particular seems worrisome since a 3/3 vigilance acts double duty on both getting through or trading with most early drops in the format as well as blocking opposing renown creatures from getting in, but hopefully there are enough tools to deal with them.
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Well i would think eyeblight massacre hits more than just the 1 thing, meteor certainly continues to function after it enters play, the throwing knife probably got at least 1 turn of use attacking before it would be thrown maybe forcing a renown creature or jhessian thief or something through for value, the aerial volley is both a tempo gain and has a point of damage left over for a thopter or something if one is around. None of these need to be spectacular answers just the fact that they are floating around all over the curve makes it an environment where you want 3 or 4 toughness more than usual, just like you want 4 power to avoid reave soul or vigilance to avoid swift reckoning except it applies to like 9 different effects across the format.
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Err, yeah, I skipped aerial volley just because it's not a maindeck thing, for sure side out your griffins when your opponent shows you a forest, I'm all for that.
For the most part though, the 2 for 1's on a Griffin seem conditional and not that scary. I still feel like you maindeck it hard.
Actinum, most of the spells that you listed are at uncommon though, and do not give a tempo advantage as pops said. Fiery Impulse is the only efficient, maindeckable answer at common for griffin that actually makes you feel bad for playing the griffin. I remember it being an average to good card in the core set where it was featured (more aggressive the deck, the better it is), so its upside of giving white a common 4 mana 3 power flier as a midgame drop outweighs the downside of it only having two toughness. This should be an autoinclude in any aggressive deck, and a fringe include in more controlling decks.
I'm just planning on being more cautious of using such low toughness creatures, many are still playable and some are even good. Half the stuff that I listed that punishes 2 toughness might not be good or even playable, it just throws up a red flag in my mind when i see that many occurrences of the same number on removal. Every format tends to have a sweet spot of power and toughness that relates to the available removal suite and the average stat spreads on creatures and if you list out the common and uncommon cards that trade with or outclass a card you basically cut out nearly half of that pool in this format when you go from 2 toughness to 3. And another decent chunk going from 3 to 4, but then almost everything the gets 4 can also get 5 or 6 or so on, and similarly there's very little that punishes 1 toughness above 2 toughness with a couple notable exceptions like eyeblight assassin and chandra's fury. My grossly premature speculation is that it might be the kind of format where a 3 mana 2/3 is a smidge better than a 3 mana 3/2.
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Charging Griffin seems a good bit like Air Servant in MM2. A good card that plays a lot less well than it seems like it ought to just because the environment it's in happens to be particularly hostile to it.
What do you guys think about the UR Thopterspam deck? It's the main reason I'm going to the prerelease since I think it will be a fun archetype to play, but will it be powerful? It has pretty good commons in Ghirapur Gearcrafter, Aspiring Aeronaut, Artificer's Epiphany, and top tier uncommons in Reclusive Artificer and Chief of the Foundry. Plus Red (which I picked) is easily the strongest color.
I haven't tallied the enchantments yet to form an opinion on whether that's going to be a thing, but I did notice at least one cantrip aura and Knightly Valor (which I don't think needs the populate mechanic to be decent), so maybe.
Green's got a playable common fight spell; I don't mind paying 4 for an always-ferocious Bear Punch, even if I won't play as many copies as I would of the cheaper fight spells. Better than Hunt the Weak? I think so, because it's more reliable and flexible as removal, which is what you put it in your deck to do.
Both green and blue having playable common removal is a good sign for the format IMO. There tends to be more flexibility in which archetypes you can actually draft when there are no color combinations that just can't ever kill something, and those two are the most frequent offenders.
How do we feel about Healing Hands? We're always saying that what lifegain would usually need to be playable is "draw a card" (well, that and not costing six mana). Obviously this would be a decent sideboard card if your opponent's deck is trading cards for damage (Act of Treason, etc), but maybe it's okay in some maindecks? I'm inclined to be conservative about playing traditionally bad effects, but Prowess and Spell Mastery do both want us to play our cantrips.
i think i'm going to be picking up my 1/3 1U and my 0/6 for 3 creatures highly to stop from being run over.
i like this set, i think, even though it looks agressive. there are a lot of Johnny-Timmy ish build-around-me stuff. Elves! self-mill with spell mastery and black collect-me 4/2s! Thopters! Enchantments!
i don't know if it's good but i hope to at least once sacrifice my Deadbridge Shaman to a Tormented Thoughts
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Raging Goblin
He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged.
The reasoning I use when looking at an Aura is basically, "If I only get one swing/turn with the aura on the creature would it be worth it?" or basically, "Would it be good if it was a sorcery?" For the most part I think that is equitable. Basically any downside of an aura (killing in response, killing when you swing with the creature, etc) also apply to sorceries. The main difference is that the Aura can be destroyed itself, while the effects of a cast sorcery can't barring some sort of spell that removes abilities from a creature, but I think that is balanced by the fact that you can potentially have the Aura active for more than one turn.
So in the case of Call of the Full Moon, the question I ask myself is if I would take it if it was a Sorcery that gave +3/+2 and trample to end of turn, and my answer is that in many cases I would.
So am I totally off with that line of reasoning?
This aura is obviously very good if you can get it to stick AND they don't have removal.
I think red's creatures are good enough on their own that you don't need to waste a slot on a card like this. It's not an embarrassing card to run but hard removal will still be better.
I know you played for the West in the College Bowl and your team was blue against red, but I think you're being way too harsh on red. Akroan Sergeant, Boggart Brute, Acolyte of the Inferno, and Ghirapur Gearcrafter are all sweet aggressive drops that are well positioned to do some damage. I actually think that red's suite of common and uncommon creatures is quite good compared to its usual state of poo.
I also don't think there are a bunch of quality artifacts are that you wouldn't mind killing with Demolish. There are actually a bunch of on-curve artifacts (which are usually below curve), but none of them are particularly special. It would be nice to Demolish a Gold-Forged Sentinel, but all of the other creatures are 4 or less anyway and not particularly threatening. For equipment, Sigil of Valor and Veteran's Sidearm are decent, but that's about all of the decent equipment below rare. Sigil is kind of narrow to boot as not every deck is really poised to take full advantage of one random exalted card, especially when it doesn't provide its own body.
I think Chief of the Foundry really does his work in Thopters.dec. He does make all of those other little weirdos like Runed Servitor and Ramroller marginally better, but spitting out 2/2 fliers for free instead of 1/1s with a bunch of red and blue commons sounds way better than making those other artifact creatures a little bigger.
White (above the curve/generic high picks):
Blessed Spirits
Consul's Lieutenant
Patron of the Valiant
Sentinel of the Eternal Watch
Swift Reckoning
A defensive removal spell, an offensive 6-drop, an aggressive 2-drop, and a couple of well-costed fliers. The existence of Blessed Spirits means that white enchantments have the potential to be better than usual, and the same is true for +1/+1 counters (i.e. Renown) with Patron of the Valiant, but in neither case do they make any particular bad cards good, unless you manage to grab multiples. All of these cards are uncommon, so that's not likely.
White (possible lower-pick enablers):
Ampryn Tactician
Auramancer
Cleric of the Forward Order
Totem-Guide Hartebeest
Valor in Akros
So you've got two enablers for an enchantment theme, you've got two for a "go wide" strategy, and then there's the Cleric that only wants you to draft more Clerics. Laying aside the Cleric as being a gimmick, I can see enchantments being a pretty reasonable thing to see one of at maybe half of all tables? With a Hartebeest and a Blessed Spirits, Auramancer goes up tremendously in value, and you don't need to draft a ton of enchantments at that point. You're generating significant card advantage and Spirits is a great big evasive early threat. The go wide strategy is probably dependent on other colors to actually flood the board: there are no sub-rare playable white cards that put multiple bodies on the board at all.
Blue (above the curve/generic high picks):
Aspiring Aeronaut
Claustrophobia
Jhessian Thief
Ringwarden Owl
Separatist Voidmage
Tower Geist
Whirler Rogue
I'm not sure how much Jhessian Thief and the Owl deserve to be on this list, but they're both strict upgrades to always-playable limited cards so I figured they'd probably go fairly highly. Again, nothing here is too inspiring as far as archetypes go. Good fliers, good tempo and removal. Aeronaut and Rogue are nice ways to get into an artifacts deck, and Thief and Owl want you to go spell-heavy.
Blue (possible lower-pick enablers):
Artificer's Epiphany
Dreadwaters
Faerie Miscreant
Screeching Skaab
Sphinx's Tutelage
Dreadwaters and Tutelage are the mill cards of the format. Tutelage on its own is almost good enough to win if you draw it early, and if you get it late then it's sorta useful as a way of grinding out a long game. In neither case do you really want Dreadwaters, so I don't see that dedicated mill is really going to be a thing. Skaab is for self-milling (along with Tower Geist above, I guess); but I don't really see how the rewards are there for that, at least in blue. Skaab Goliath is the only card that seems to care, and it was always way worse than it looked. Faerie Miscreant is just never going to be good enough until long after you've gotten a plausible number of copies of it. Another thing to note is that there are *five* sub-rare counterspells in the set. I wouldn't have said any of them look actually great, but it's possible that there's a draw-go archetype waiting in the wings for someone to force it and run away with a draft. I dunno. Epiphany is probably only playable in an artifacts deck but maybe draw-go will like it too some of the time.
Black (above the curve/generic high picks):
Cruel Revival
Eyeblight Massacre
Nantuko Husk
Reave Soul
Fewer cards here than the other colors, and I feel like I'm being pretty generous. Cruel Revival and Nantuko Husk are not much above the curve. That said, Reave Soul is one of the best commons at all, and between it and Eyeblight Massacre, black has some really good tools for just shutting down aggro decks completely. Husk is a bit situational but it's hard enough to play against often enough that I think it's fine here.
Black (possible lower-pick enablers):
Blightcaster
Necromantic Summons
Gnarlroot Trapper
Returned Centaur
Revenant
Shadows of the Past
Undead Servant
Blightcaster is a nice pickup after you've gotten some Auramancers/Hartebeests in white, but probably never until then. Returned Centaur, Necromantic Summons, Revenant, Shadows of the Past, and even Undead Servant are all for the self-mill deck, so that deck is probably going to be B/u a lot more often than truly two colors. But the support for that archetype is real. This seems like a reliable deck that will always be available for someone at every table. The other black archetype is Elves. Gnarlroot Trapper and Eyeblight Massacre are real cards if you can get enough of them to support black being a main color in your elf deck; the challenge will be finding enough other black cards you actually want to play to make it worth it.
Red (above the curve/generic high picks):
Acolyte of the Inferno
Boggart Brute
Chandra's Fury
Fiery Impulse
Prickleboar
Ravaging Blaze
Seismic Elemental
I could be overestimating some things here. Prickleboar and Acolyte could end up being mediocre, but it looks an awful lot to me like they'll end up Abyss-ing the opponent a good chunk of the time. Similarly, with Seismic Elemental, it could be expensive and hard to use, or it could be a reliable finisher. And Boggart Brute is potentially a ridiculously fast evasive creature. All three of them have the same weakness: Thopter tokens. Of course, that's where Chandra's Fury comes in, soooo...
Archetypes here are Spell Mastery and I guess racing could be sort of like an archetype? A ton of the stuff here is only any good on offense and so you just kinda have to attack and hope it works out.
Red (possible lower-pick enablers):
Act of Treason
Enthralling Victor
Fiery Conclusion
Ghirapur Aether Grid
Ghirapur Gearcrafter
Infectious Bloodlust
Thopter Engineer
Volcanic Rambler
There's some stuff here for a sacrifice deck, particularly in concert with Nantuko Husk in black, so Fiery Conclusion actually has a shot at being a playable card sometimes. There's also another handful of Thopter makers which all get pretty unreasonable with Aether Grid in play. Volcanic Rambler seems like a plausible finisher in a draw-go style deck.
Green (above the curve/generic high picks):
Conclave Naturalists
Llanowar Empath
Rhox Maulers
Skysnare Spider
Somberwald Alpha
Undercity Troll
Zendikar's Roil
I'll just randomly note that Conclave Naturalists plus Caustic Caterpillar is probably enough to reliably run Demonic Pact in limited G/B.
Most of green's best stuff is fairly late game. Cards like Alpha and Skysnare Spider and Roil are all really good finishers (and incidentally Roil is easily the best enchantment you could want in a deck with Blessed Spirits/Auramancer). There are a couple elves here but no cheap ones, and no token makers, either (other than Roil which totally doesn't need them). The go-wide colors that white will want to pair with will have to be either blue or red, which is a bit weird.
Green (possible lower-pick enablers):
Dwynen's Elite
Elemental Bond
Might of the Masses
Nissa's Pilgrimage
Sylvan Messenger
Timberpack Wolf
Valeron Wardens
Elite is probably the main card you're going to want for the Elves strategy, but I'm not especially convinced it's a thing. There's just not enough early ones and the only payoff for running expensive ones is Sylvan Messenger, which seems clunky. You probably need a Massacre before you really start to seriously consider going down this path. Elemental Bond is probably not good enough to enable anything: as a do-nothing enchantment you need to follow it up with a lot of cards that are probably either too expensive to run a lot of, or else too good to have access to a lot of, and either way the odds of being able fill your deck with them is not high. Might could have been okay if there were more token producers, but there aren't. Pilgrimage is a scary amount of ramp if you're going mono-green, and green definitely has stuff worth ramping into; in fact Ramp based on this card is probably a very real plan, even if it does nothing to enable playing off-color bombs. Timberpack Wolf has always been a bit weird and dependent on who you're drafting with, but it'll work out once in a while. Valeron Wardens is another weird one: it's unplayable on its own, but people will go out of their way to kill it anyway, just in case it isn't on its own, which kinda makes it more playable on its own. And if you do get a double handful of Renown guys, then it's a terror. Kind of the Thrummingbird of the format, is my guess.
Green seems like it wants to ramp more than it wants to do much of anything else.
For red I wouldn't pick Chandra's Fury highly and would rather have any other removal spell or low curve creature.
I would agree with the white, black and blue lists. Black has a few powerful stand alone cards but a lot of archetypal support.
Blue has a lot of tempo cards, decently sized fliers and even gets a powerful removal spell but watch out for green decks with enchantment hate.
White feels like the strongest color with its powerful uncommons and aggressively costed low drops. Black looks to have the weakest creatures.
Chandra's Fury is a card that overperformed in M13. People thought it looked like junk and then it turned out to be one of the better cards in the set, because it plays an awful lot like a combat trick. *This* set looks to play up its advantages even more: not only does it kill really a whole lot of things, but it's one of the only red cards, or indeed cards at all, that does. This card will be an important role-player in red decks, count on it.
After that, for artifacts, I would say Throwing Knife will be a high pick. Its a bit worse than Bonesplitter but not by much and the ability to pick off a smaller target is definitely useful. After that maybe Angel's Tomb, or Sigil of valor but I'm not 100% on them yet.
Like Phasmy, I would disagree on Chandra's Fury. I think there will be more play to it in this set than in most others because of all of the thopters, but I haven't picked it all that highly in past sets.
If Sandsteppe Outcast was indeed one of Fate's best commons, then Ghirapur Gearcrafter has to move into high-pick territory as well. He is an enabler for thopters, but is quite good alone as well. Poached, poached, poached...
Anointer of Champions is also good. It's a narrow Ghost Warden, but Ghost Warden was pretty sweet, so a narrower version is by no means bad. I don't think there's going to be many white decks in this format that aren't attacking relentlessly anyway. If nothing else, it goes quite well with renown, so it could at least be in enabler status.
White just has some really solid cards overall, Puddlejumper touched on a lot of them but I think Blessed Spirits in particular will be a high pick.
I think for a card like this it will really be a format dependent thing whether it's good or not. Leaning towards it being mediocre. 3 mana is a lot for a cantrip with no effect on the board and while 4 life can help it's not game breaking by any stretch. I would strongly consider boarding it in against really aggressive decks as you mention but I think I'd be disappointed if I had to maindeck it outside of a really grindy control strategy. Of course I could end up being completely wrong and it ends up being quite good.
i stalled with 0/6 Guardians of Melitis, Send to Sleep, and a bunch of countermagic and claustrophobia. scrying 2 with that 3 CMC Mana Leak also helped me get live cards to stall with, as did the instant speed Divination. One math i did have that blue-black card that gets a card back from the graveyard.
not competitive but i'm very happy to say it's viable enough to be fun -- that is, i'll win maybe a quarter to a third of the games with it.
Spell Mastery performed better than i had thought. it felt a lot stronger than i was expecting -- Scry 2, and Frost Breath. it turns out that blue has a lot of ways to stall using instants and sorceries.
Goblins have poor impulse control. Don't click this link!!
some of my favourite flavour text:
Wayward Soul
"no home no heart no hope"
—Stronghold graffito
Raging Goblin
He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged.
Conspiracy theory, earlier drafts of this set had a lot more menace, but the draft format was too turn-dudes-sideways, so they gutted lots of menace creatures, then replaced black's missing stuff with things that felt safe to run with with less playtesting, resulting in the underwhelming black lineup with the strange feel of "it's ok that the removal is weak, because the creatures are weak, but that's ok, because the removal is weak, wait.."
Suppression Bonds should also be a high pick. I don't think 4 mana arrest is that much worse than 3 mana arrest (which was a high pick in most formats that it was in), and given renown and whites otherwise lackluster ways to push through damage, this card should be one of the best ways for white to push through damage the turn the card is cast. I don't see a single other white removal-type of card below 5 that can do this except mediocre/risky ones such as akroan jailer and grasp of the hieromancer.
I am somewhat worried that this format will devolve zendikar levels of all-in aggression due to renown. topan freeblade in particular seems worrisome since a 3/3 vigilance acts double duty on both getting through or trading with most early drops in the format as well as blocking opposing renown creatures from getting in, but hopefully there are enough tools to deal with them.
For the most part though, the 2 for 1's on a Griffin seem conditional and not that scary. I still feel like you maindeck it hard.
Thanks to DNC from Heroes of the Plane Studios for the sig
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