Draft Formats Through History – Part 2
by David Crewe
Last I left off chatting about draft formats and how additional boosters changed the format, I still had a few blocks to go to bring us up to date, so here I am finishing things off…
Of course, the next couple blocks are going to be hard to fully evaluate given there were only ever 2 different sets in the draft format, but there’s not a lot I can do about that…
Lorwyn Block
I feel like Lorwyn jumped the gun a little by bringing back the tribal theme so quickly – to me, Onslaught still felt kinda fresh, and the set didn’t really bring a whole lot of new ideas to tribal. Onslaught had mechanics like amplify alongside traditional tribal ideas – counting the number of a certain creature type in play, lords, etc. But Onslaught had been fresh, because tribal decks had rarely moved beyond the kitchen table at that stage. When Lorwyn hit, competitive tribal decks were old news.
They did do a good job of giving each tribe a distinct flavour though, and these flavours translated well to draft. Merfolk were slow and loved to tap to do things, and often would win grinding games that involved a whole lot of life gain and card advantage, with your opponent’s impressive board position simply unable to do anything relevant. Giants played big dudes. Goblins were fast and liked to go to the graveyard. Etcetera…all these ideas really worked well in draft.
Triple Lorwyn was an interesting format, and you could often get really powerful tribal decks out of it if you read your signals right early – whether they were based around Kithkin, Giants, Treefolk or whatever. The problem with the format, though, was that sometimes you would misread a signal (or simply be sent terrible signals), commit to a particular tribe and end up with a terrible deck when you realised, far too late, that it wasn’t actually open. Forcing decks was an impossibility.
This kind of annoyed me. Sure, you could recover from these mistakes and end up with a good deck, but if you had some newbie sitting next to you sending terrible signals, or you were simply having an off day reading signals, you’d end up with a deck that wasn’t just bad – they were often completely unplayable. I found it quite annoying that you could walk out a draft with a deck that would struggle to win a game purely because of signalling mistakes, while other times you would take the same early picks and end up with the nuts. Signalling should be important, but not the be-all and end-all.
That aside, Lorwyn introduced another concept – Planeswalkers. One of Wizards’ real home runs of the last few years of Magic designs, Planeswalkers were flavoursome, powerful and saw significant Constructed play. And, more importantly, they were interesting in Limited – sure, they could function as unbeatable bombs, but more regularly they required careful use. A better player could often beat a weak player piloting a Planeswalker simply because of the range of decisions involved, and that’s the kind of bomb I like to see.
Morningtide maintained the tribal theme, but did a really interesting thing that I think Wizards should try to do more often in draft formats – they shifted things up without fundamentally changing what the format was about. Morningtide ensured that you still cared about tribal cards, but suddenly Merfolk went from a powerhouse deck to a deck with a lot less support in the last pack.
And, on the other side of the coin, Kithkin, previously a borderline unplayable tribe, got a huge boost. In fact, it was very often correct to force Kithkin hard in packs one and two and reap the rewards of a sick aggro deck after infinite playables in pack three. Other tribes got mixed around too – unfortunately Treefolk went from okay to barely playable, but not every change is going to be positive.
It’s really good to see Wizards making an effort to “shake up” the draft format, in a similar way to how they can achieve this in Constructed formats with powerful new cards and/or hosers. Obviously it’s a more difficult design task to do it in a format based around commons, but it’s good when it pays off.
Despite all that, I don’t think I would rush to draft either triple Lorwyn or LLM again anytime soon. The tribal mechanic was just too frustrating – all the times you ended up with an insane deck were counteracted by the times that your neighbour jumped into your tribe and you ended up with an unplayable pile through no fault of your own. This is why set themes should be gently executed rather than shoved into your face…
Shadowmoor Block
Another two set block, the flavour of Lorwyn vs Shadowmoor was pretty neat, although the concept of a “corrupted, darker version of a world” is hardly original in fantasy/science fiction. The theme for Shadowmoor shifted from tribal to “hybrid cards.” That may not be quite as interesting, flavour wise, as the tribal theme, but it’s a much better mechanic for Limited.
Mana can be one of the worst parts of Limited – in Constructed you can make a concerted effort to avoid mana screw/flood with your number of lands, dual lands etc – or just take the risk, get a more powerful deck with a higher instance of mana troubles. It’s not so easy to fix mana in Limited – after all, you can’t just throw a handful of dual lands into your deck (well, not unless you’re playing Ravnica Block).
There’s plenty of good ways of resolving this problem: cycling lands is a good one, allowing you to run a few extra lands but not worry about flood. Both Urza’s Block and Onslaught Block tried this. And there are plenty of other ways of designing sets to avoid too much mana screw or flood by supporting it with common cycles. Shadowmoor really went all out, by letting you cast about half of the commons with one colour or another.
It made for a fairly powerful draft format, since your manabases were often very stable, and colour screw was rarely an issue. This could encourage people to draft slower multicoloured decks – which can be fun! – but Wizards went a completely different direction with Shadowmoor.
The first thing they did was to encourage you to stick within a “colour combination” of, say, U/W, even if you weren’t necessarily playing both colours. They achieved this through a host of cards that encouraged you to play hybrid spells in the one deck, the most significant the Aura cycle. Many, many games in Shadowmoor draft came down to cards like Shield of the Oversoul or Runes of the Deus. And then there were subtle ways of fighting these strategies, with cards like Aphotic Wisps turning out to be very tricky cards in the format – Scuttlemutt was another card with a lot more power in this format than it would have in many others.
That wasn’t all. There was a five card uncommon cycle that turned out to be hugely relevant to the format. I’m referring, of course, to Jaws of Stone, Armored Ascension, Corrupt etc… The presence of these cards meant that, for once, mono colour decks were more than just viable, they were good! It added an extra challenge to draft, since it was often a good idea to actually abandon your second colour and force a mono-coloured deck.
And in addition to all this – draft hybrid cards together! You can draft a mono-coloured deck! – there were also combos spotted together throughout the set, largely thanks to the new “untap” mechanic. Anyone who’s played more than a couple of Shadowmoor drafts has surely succumbed to the famous Pili-Pala/Power of Fire combo, and there were other little Limited combos dotted throughout the set.
Now, as fun as all this was, Shadowmoor was far from a perfect Limited set. Part of the problem was that the hybrid mechanic – particularly the auras – was possibly pushed too hard. Just as with Lorwyn, you really needed to be in a tribe to compete, things often turned out the same in Shadowmoor – it’s just that you needed to make sure you had Auras and the right hybrid creatures to support them, or lots of good answers, to compete. This didn’t destroy the format, certainly, but it could be annoying – especially when you got blown out match after match by the same combination of cards.
So, how did Eventide change things up? Well, the first thing Eventide did was to introduce enemy hybrid cards. A good idea in theory – see Apocalypse – it wasn’t quite executed perfectly in practice, because there was little to no support for the themes of Shadowmoor, while most of the cards in Eventide encouraged you to do something completely different – Mimics, the new Aura cycle etc all encouraged you to draft enemy coloured cards with no support in the first two packs.
It made for a fairly awkward XXY format, that fortunately was of little competitive relevance. One of the upsides of Eventide though, was the themes of enemy hybrid cards were pushed so heavily that it was actually an excellent small set for drafting by itself. I had a lot of fun with triple Eventide, and would more readily draft it again than Shadowmoor-Shadowmoor-Eventide.
Alara Block
Alara block is actually one of my least favourite Limited blocks overall. This might have something to do with the fact that I never really played the format at a competitive level – I did top eight a PTQ, but I never drafted the set at Nationals, and didn’t attend the Grand Prix (Auckland) where the set was played. So often my fond memories of a draft format come from a big event, whether it’s playing in it or preparing for it.
Anyway, Alara. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the block concept, which was basically a bastardization of the ideas used in Ravnica block – separate out colour combinations into “teams” with their own distinct flavours and mechanics, and let some of these bleed over into the mono-coloured cards. It worked very well in Ravnica, but I’m not convinced it was anywhere near as successful in Alara.
Partly the reason was that it was old news – we’d seen all this before. Sure, the mechanics and the flavour were new, but it was basically Ravnica 2: This Time It’s Tri-Coloured. As a Limited set, after some contemplation, I have some big problems with Alara, and they’re as follows:
- Making your best cards three colours is going to warp a format. Things like Woolly Thoctar, Tower Gargoyle, Broodmate Dragon, etc are simply way more powerful than their two-coloured or three-coloured counterparts. And these are generally not late game cards – they’re early game cards that require you to have the right mana to fast to dominate the game. A turn three Woolly Thoctar is a beating, but a turn seven Thoctar is much less impressive. Now, in theory this should mean that manafixing is a premium, where players have to take manafixing higher than many powerful spells, just to ensure they actually get to cast said spells. Well, this is true to some extent…
- But the manafixing just wasn’t good enough. Compare to Ravnica block, with probably the best Limited manafixing of all time. Karoos were both excellent mana fixing and card advantage, Signets were the same, but replacing card advantage with acceleration. Alara had tri colour duals which were excellent and a high pick…but they were also uncommon. The common mana fixers were far less impressive. Obelisks are sloooow, and Panoramas are both slow and potentially unreliable if you need both your colours. What this meant is that it was often better to just take the Woolly Thoctar and a couple mana fixers, and hope things worked out, rather than prioritizing mana fixers.
Now, this didn’t work out too badly in triple Shards, to be honest. It wasn’t an optimal format, and often enough you’d get blown out by someone with zero fixers matching their turn three Woolly Thoctar with a turn four Sprouting Thrinax… but generally the format was okay. Nothing special, but not terrible.
Conflux brought with it a five-colour and domain theme that, unlike Fifth Dawn, actually matched the block’s themes. It made the slower mana fixers in Shards much more valuable, particularly the Obelixs, as it wasn’t such a big deal if you took a while to hit your mana if it let you do things like cast 5 mana 8/8s or pump your 2/2 dude into a lifelinking Angel. I had a soft spot for this format, because I simply loved to draft overpowered 5-color control decks playing every good card they could get their hands on and as many Kiss of the Ameshas as humanly possible.
Many of the “shards” themes were carried across into Conflux too, with Esper still getting artifacts, Naya still getting 5 power dudes, and so on. Importantly, the power level of the previously weak Esper went through the roof, giving players an incentive to – like Kithkin in LLM, or Black in Odyssey-Odyssey-Torment – a reason to force the colour combination hard in packs one and two and hopefully reap the rewards in the last pack.
Alara Reborn, the all multicoloured set (how exciting! Well, okay, not really) actually turned out to be a much more aggressive set than would have been expected from a set where you need two colours to cast any card. This was largely due to the “blades” – see Esper Stormblade – and a handful of other two colour aggressive creatures.
Unfortunately the support for three colour decks was dwindling. There was now only one pack of the slow-ish Obelisks and Panoramas, and the Armillary Spheres and Rupture Spires that had been so valuable in AAC were suddenly too slow as well. The increased speed of the format did a couple of things:
- It encouraged players to draft two colour aggro decks. This was a good thing – after nothing but awkward three colour decks, it was nice to see Steward of Valeron saving the day. On the other hand…
- It meant that if you were playing more than three colours, it was often better just to go for power rather than consistency, and ignore the Panorama/Rupture Spire picks for Good Cards. The mana fixing was often just too slow to compete with the faster decks, meaning it was better just to hope your mana worked and your harder-to-cast but more powerful cards saved the day.
This made for some annoying draft games. You would continually lose to three- or four-colour decks with zero mana fixers after either picking fixers highly or drafting what should be a vastly more consistent two colour deck. I was regularly frustrated at the frequency of my opponents to lay down domain by turn five with no attempt at land search or other fixing.
I think, overall, the push for aggressiveness made sense in the abstract but didn’t work in practice. Any format that encourages players to go for inconsistent mana bases to ensure they have the power level to compete is going to make for frustrating games from either side of the table. What Wizards should have done is ensured that, like Ravnica, the mana fixing was of a higher quality, and that this quality of mana fixing continued throughout the entire block.
Signets and Karoos were one of the best choices for Limited that Wizards have made, and it was sad to see them abandon such a good idea. I would not be in a hurry to draft any of these formats again…except possible AAC, to try and put together a sick five-colour deck.
Zendikar Block
Okay, I’m kind of getting ahead of myself here. After all, there’s no second or third set to talk about. But I’d like to consider how Zendikar looks so far, and what it would be nice to see in the next couple of smaller sets.
I’m a fan of Zendikar Limited so far. The format is easily the most aggressive format since Onslaught block – and possibly even faster than that tempo-oriented format. Creatures are universally bad at blocking but good on offense, which makes it difficult (but not impossible) to develop a control deck. What this means is that the early turns are critical: small decisions like correct mulligan choices, correct mana bases, correct blocks are much more important than in slower formats, where you can draw out of minor misplays. This rewards tight play, which I’m always in favour of.
The format also punishes poor draws severely, which is a shame. Getting mana screwed is a huge kick in the teeth when, not only can you not cast your five drop to claw your way back into the game, those two landfall cards you had in play were in desperate need of a land drop. I think this is okay though – any format is going to punish you for mana screw at some point, and it just rewards players who mulligan carefully and know when it’s right to play eighteen land (hint: almost all of the time).
The Allies subtheme is well done, by the way. It’s an important factor in the format, and if everybody just ignores it then it’s quite possible that someone will put together a ridiculous Ally deck. More often than not it’s like Spiritcraft – often important, and something you need to be thinking about while you’re drafting, but not the defining feature of the format.
So, what are we looking for out of the next couple of sets? I have no doubt Wizards will throw us some kind of a curveball in terms of the next sets’ themes, and I’m not even going to try and predict what they’ll do there. I would really like to see them support landfall with some more options for instant speed land drops – fetchlands are amazing in this format, often because they let you do things like effectively block with a Steppe Lynx if need be. It would be nice to see these kind of plays made available at a common level in the next set or two – and ensure that there’s enough landfall cards around to keep that theme strong.
A twist with the Allies theme would be nice. Obviously they need to continue to print Allies to ensure that the cards aren’t rendered irrelevant with a couple more sets, but it would be nice to see them play around with what Allies can do as a mechanic. Some sort of Allied-exclusive mana fixer in the second set would be a good way to encourage players to force the theme a little harder in the earlier packs and hope for support in the third pack.
I’m looking forward to the next couple of sets. Triple Zendikar Limited has been a really enjoyable, skill-testing format so far, and I hope Wizards manages not to screw it up.
Oh, and a bonus round…
Coldsnap “Block”
I drafted a lot of Coldsnap. I don’t really know why – I hate the format. It kind of encompasses everything that’s bad about triple small set drafts, and I hate the fact that it was a relevant format, however briefly, for a PTQ season. First of all, let’s talk about (however briefly), what was done right with Coldsnap:
- The Snow theme. The best Limited themes, as I’ve said many times already, are powerful but not dominating. Snow was a great example of this. It was often correct to pick Snow-Covered basic lands quite high, simply because they made a number of cards in your deck that much better, and overall it was a successful but subtly executed mechanic.
And that’s about it for good things. The problem with Coldsnap as a drafting format, I think, stemmed from Wizards thinking something like this:
- People like it when you can do silly (read: degenerate, broken) things in draft.
- The “advantage” of small set drafts is that it’s often easy to multiple copies of the same common.
Both the above statements are true. This means that you can often end up with silly little combo decks in small set drafts – see triple Betrayers of Kamigawa, where you could draft this silly deck with Petalmane Baku and stacks of one-drop Spirits. I can’t remember exactly how the deck functioned, but I recall it being pretty sick. Or the “Myr Servitor” deck in triple Fifth Dawn – I remember Matt Anthon drafting like 4 Trinket Mages, 6 Myr Servitors and a small handful of sacrifice mechanisms in that format, which tore up the draft.
This is fine if you have borderline cards that become much more powerful (or, at least, no longer unplayable), in multiples. An example of a card that would work pretty well like this in a small set draft:
Cathartic Adept. Mostly unplayable by itself, in a small set it wouldn’t be hard to imagine drafting eight or so of these and having them function as your win condition. This would be neat, but hardly unbeatable/broken, since your dudes still get taken down by removal – especially there’s a common Tremor effect in the set.
A bad example of a card for drafting triple small set:
Tome Scour. In M10 this is fine, because it’s so unlikely you can draft the deck and kind of hilarious if it actually happens. But imagine if it was easy to pick up 10 or so of these – hardly implausible in a small set format where no-one else ranks the card. You’d often see games over on turn 3, when someone slaps their sixth Tome Scour of the game onto the table. Bad times.
Wizards were even less subtle with their approach, printing cards that openly encouraged players to draft multiples of them. Cards like Kjeldoran War Cry encouraged you to draft multiple copies of one spell, taking them from “okay” cards to “look, 20 damage out of nowhere.” Aurochs encouraged you to play with as many Aurochs as possible, and often good Green decks needed to have a stack of Aurochs in their pile to compete.
Blue had its own tribal theme of Illusions – with only two Illusions in the set. And in addition to all this, there was the idiotic mechanic of ripple, where if you managed to draft a whole stack of one card and didn’t get too unlucky, you would just win the game. Or you would fail in your attempts to do so and end up with a bunch of terrible cards in your sideboard.
I mean, I see where they were going. In Limited you don’t have the “only 4 cards” restriction, so why not make it more interesting to break that rule? But in practice, it played terribly. The format basically broke down into:
“Fair” decks. Generally these were Snow-based, and generally they were some combination of Blue, Black or Red. Probably slightly more than half the decks at the table would look like this. Occasionally they’d embrace an Illusion subtheme.
“Combo” decks. There were a lot of these. Some were comparatively straightforward and hardly broken, just potentially annoying to play against. Green decks would dominate the late game with hordes of Aurochs. White decks would be throwing +3/+3 and +4/+4 pump spells at you once you got to the later turns. There was also the Martyr of Sands/Grim Harvest combo deck, that basically acted like Martyr Proclamation in Limited. None of these decks were truly ridiculous to play against, but I’ll expand on this point in a moment.
And then there were the stupid decks. Most of the time these were based around the Ripple mechanic, although occasionally someone would just end up with eight Illusions and kill you before you got your game plan on. Pack your deck with ten or so copies of Surging Dementia, or Surging Æther, and it didn’t matter a whole lot what the rest of your cards did – most of the time you’d just have to hope you didn’t get too unlucky on your Ripples.
Now, this is not to say that the format was unplayable. But too often you’d either try to draft a “combo” deck and get hated on both sides, or draft a normal, curve-based deck with removal and so on and get destroyed by a dumb Ripple deck. Not a format I want to play again anytime soon.
