(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And today I'm going to be discussing Bant in MH3 Draft. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/draftingarcotypes. Ordinarily, I would try not to talk about something like Bant immediately after talking about blue-white, but I actually skipped putting up a poll for this one 'cause I just wanted to talk about this deck and this is the last episode about MH3 and it seems like in general, people like when, if I have something I feel like I have something to say about, I talk about that so I just made an executive decision to do that with this last episode about MH3 before we move into Bloomboro first look next week. So that's kind of the metal level, what's going on here in terms of this podcast talking about this deck. I think Bant decks are really weird and overall they're not very successful even compared to other three colored decks. Like when you look at the stats on 17 lands or whatever, but I think they have a lot to offer but I think that they're particularly difficult to draft. So it doesn't surprise me in any way that they don't have great win rates. The strategy that the deck wants isn't super clear. There are a lot of like aggressive cards of like, you're the three color combinations that the three that are composed in all the connections between each of the colors. So you have like green, white is like supposed to be an aggressive modified deck. Green, blue is like a big ramp deck and blue, white is like kind of a like mid range linear energy deck that trends toward more aggressive even if as I talked about last week it can be controlling. And so mixing those is a bit strange on a like macro level. So I think it's easy to answer the question like what turn is your deck looking to end the game on incorrectly? There are a lot of like micro synergies available. Like cards that play well with specific other cards but it's not necessarily all that easy to extrapolate that into having a cohesive idea about what your decks like overall game plan is and what kind of like pace you're trying to play on and what role you want your cards to be filling in your deck and stuff like that. Which is where I think a lot of people can fall into a lot of traps in bands. Like how much do you care about the aggressive flyers and stuff like that? The best versions of band from what I've gathered from my own experiences and looking at public trophy decks of band. I think the best versions are basically ramp decks that have like the big El Drozzy stuff. So they're like kind of at least ideologically based in the blue-green part of the possibility space in these colors with white as your splash for cheap removal as you would do in a blue-green deck that's like splashing red and including galvanic or splashing black and including wither, you can splash whites and include like Dog Umbra and Thrab and Charm and even expel the unworthy. But then you also get access to white top end specifically Decree of Justice and Angel of the Ruins, the big flyer that exiles artifacts and enchantments when you play it in plain cycles. Bandt is by far the best Decree of Justice deck. Decree of Justice is generally pretty difficult to use in this format, but when paired with green, especially with cards that make El Drozzy signs, maybe Kozlix unsealing in blue. You have your Void Kross in blue-green. Like you end up making a ton of mana in some of the blue-green based decks. I've made seven angels, which is a lot of angels. Like it's basically a win any game where the opponent doesn't have a sweeper or can't burn you out number of angels. So getting Decree of Justice as like another kind of just like El Drozzy Titan style effect, but at uncommon that no one really drafts is very nice for like the path of annihilation decks. You can even do that with like very little, like you could, if you have like two path of annihilation, you might not even need to play a Plains. You could just be like, at some point in the game, I'm gonna be able to tap spawns for white mana. When I do, I'll be able to make like five angels or so and that's gonna be my plan to win the game. The other thing, the way that I personally am approaching Bant is I'm focusing on having inevitability at all stages in the draft and gameplay. I'm trying to build a deck that is going to be able to compete in an early game so that I don't fall too far behind and be able to answer whatever kinds of things I might need to answer and be able to develop an overwhelmingly game and have inevitability against basically anything. Ramping into huge stuff is an easy way to accomplish that, but you can also do it by assembling engines that are available here. One such engine is Essence Reliquary as I discussed in Blue White last week. You can do basically the same stuff here, but with the addition of green, which both gives you extra mana to make it a lot easier to be able to like reach the stage in the game where you can pick up and replay stuff, but it also gives you like evolution witness as something that you can pick up, adapt, like play, adapt, pick up, replay, adapt again if you don't have another way to like reuse its regrowth ability. I also talked about how like proliferate was very good in Blue White. If you add green to that, you can get some of the plus, like when this gets a counter, do a thing, specifically evolution witness and basking brood scale that really kind of go off with proliferate. Another nice thing in that space is if you have propagator drone, the tutu that gives your tokens evolve and you combine that with the four or four white vigilance that when a modified creature dies, you manifest the top card of your library. And then if you also have cozlic sun sealing to make more spawns, it's even better, but basically with this setup, anytime you make a spawn, if any creature comes into play, it gets a counter, then if it dies, you manifest. So, and then when you manifest, any spawns that you have that are smaller than two threes will get plus one plus one. And then if you have the proliferate evangel in there also and a brood scale, then you go off because the manifest triggers the evangel, which puts a counter on the brood scale, which makes a one one. And then like when another one one dies, a manifest comes in that evolves that one. So, you don't need all of these pieces for strong things to happen, but basically in Bant, there are some weird, very niche infinites. This also comes up with shrieking drake and the alluring green rare and guide of souls. This is a too rare and an uncommon combo, so extremely difficult to get together. But if you have it, you make infinite, you get infinite life by bouncing shrieking drake to itself and making an energy from guide of souls and replaying it with the alluring, using the energy that you got from guide of souls. You also don't actually need guide of souls for this. You can also do it with a vangel. And then instead of getting infinite life, you get infinite proliferate. So then if you have a counter somewhere, you get an infinitely large creature. So, this is what I'm saying about like, there are just a bunch of like weird combos that are unlocked in Bant with like specific cards that interact with each other. And these are hard to assemble conceptually, like it's both hard to find, to get all these cards in your deck and get them all together in a game, but you can draft your Bant decks in such a way that assembling these combos is actually pretty realistic. The easy way to do that is by using your graveyard the Bant shell is a really good place for like graveyard recursion type strategies because you get malevolent rumble, the two mana mill four put a permanent from among them in your hand to make an all jazzy spawn green sorcery common. And that helps like mill you a bunch. And then you can also play that with like blue card draw and the blue energy creature that can tap and spend an energy to loot. And you can mix that with like, Tammy meets the story circle and evolution witness to get stuff back from your graveyard. You can combine any of this stuff with essence reliquary and six are additional ways to like get more access to all of these things. And then you can like see a bunch of cards. And then once the cards you're looking for are like in a public zone, like your graveyard or whatever, you can get them back with a card like six or evolution witness or just like milliardex so that it's small shuffle and stuff that you need with Tammy meets the story circle and then draw it. And if you're just kind of planning to play a game where you have inevitability, you're focused on staying alive and not really focused on killing your opponent, you can draft a deck where you'll regularly reach the last stage in the game where you've assembled whichever ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine you're trying to get together for your like infinite combo that wins the game. I know this doesn't sound very realistic, but it does work. This is also a really good shell for Nado. Bant gives you the reason is that like white, like Nado obviously puts you in blue and green and then white gives you a lot of ways to target your own creatures. Both blue white gold cards do that. Essence reliquary, mandibular tights, any of the white bestow creatures, all of those things target your own guys. So a lot of the like Bant decks that trophy have Nado, Nado's like a good reason to move into Bant so that you can like take advantage of that stuff and you know, it's a card that works very well when you're trying to like go through your deck and find different pieces and stuff that also blocks early and keeps you alive well and stuff. As far as blocking early and keeping you alive go, faithful watchdog and riddle gate gargoyle, the green white and blue white common creatures are both reasonably good in this deck as like cheap defensive plays that keep you alive. You'd definitely rather have like a night shade dried, but these things are pretty good life cushions and sometimes you use the energy or being able to gain life is good. Your mana is generally because you're prioritizing ramp, a lot of the ramp is also fixing and you also want to prioritize fixing pretty highly fetchlands play well in the deck. So you can generally support like playing these gold two drops even in your sometimes like balanced three colored decks and then void craw, the other common gold card in these colors is also really good here. You're like a ramp deck that has a lot of ways to like spend a lot of mana and it's good. You know, it just gives you a bunch of mana. This deck also uses mediocre removal spells really well, like expel the unworthy and utter insignificance and stuff. Utter insignificance plays really well with like evolution witness in general because it gives you the ability to get a removal spell back, especially if you have a way to use your evolution witness a lot, like a way to proliferate on to it or something, then you can like keep rebying your utter insignificance and kill other stuff. You can also do the thing that I talked about in blue white with essence reliquary and utter insignificance. So some of these kind of like lower priority removal spells make a lot of sense here. Like expel the unworthy generally isn't very good because it's, you know, a little bit clunky sorcery gives your opponent life but if you're just looking for a removal, looking to play a long game, don't I? So mind spending five mana, really don't care about giving your opponent life. Then this card that like goes very late has lowest win rate among white commons in the set becomes a playable card for you. There's a lot going on and it's all very complicated because you need to like make sure that you have answers to stuff, you have early defense so you don't fall behind that you have like top end inevitability while trying to look for like specific combos that you're putting together, figuring out like, okay, is proliferate a thing that I'm doing? Where am I getting like what am I proliferating onto? How highly am I prioritizing stuff like makes counters verse like stuff that keeps me alive? And it's all like very kind of difficult to manage and very fluid, especially because when you are playing a deck that's gonna have access to all of its cards somewhat reliably, then you're less likely to just want a lot of the same thing where it's very easy to prioritize, right? Like if your deck is just like, oh, I'm an aggressive energy deck. I want as many aggressive cards that make energy as possible. Please give me every possible conduit goblin. It's very easy to prioritize stuff because your prioritization is static throughout the draft. Whereas with a deck that's trying to cover a lot of different bases to play like a more flexible strategy, then it's more, okay, I have these like this mental checklist of different boxes I'm trying to check off. And once I get a card that checks a box, I don't need other cards that fill the same role as much. So I decrease my prioritization there and I increase my prioritization of stuff I haven't already found yet. And so you might see the same two cards in two different packs and take a different, one of the cards in each of the packs, which obviously is going to lead to a more complicated drafting process. So when I'm drafting cards like this, I realize that this is actually very similar in terms of my thought process to like the stream of thought decks that I drafted in Modern Horizons One that I wrote an article about that I think that archetype is very cool if you're not familiar with it. When discussing this deck that I'm no longer talking about, I talked about how I was looking for all these different parts and I'd have this checklist and the stuff I was already saying. That happens when I'm drafting Bant here. I'm looking for like, I want a way to catch up. I want answers to any kind of permanent. So like, if I don't have a disenchant, then I need to find like a disenchant. I want something that can trump a battlefield. That could be like a decree. It could be like a six, eight reach. It could be like a four or five tap a creature reach. Something that's going to give like virtual card advantage by being able to block well. I want actual card advantage, like some draw spells, pretty flexible there. Stuff to make sure I don't fall behind early. So like a good curve of creatures that are maybe a little overstated if possible. I want things that let me like reuse my tools. If I'm trying to like loop my deck, then I need like a story circle and some other card that gives me access to a story circle that's in the graveyard. Just, you know, whatever stuff it feels like you need, you need to like be very cognizant of any holes that the deck has. So that it's a process that would like learning to do it. It's can take a lot of trial and error in terms of just like draft a deck that's in the space figure out what you lose to, be aware that you need more of that in the future. And it's a little bit difficult to spell it all out because the decks end up being like differently good at different stages in the game and then need to prioritize different stuff to make up for their weaknesses. So I'm going to move on to cards that like excite me in this strategy or like if I see them, make me want to kind of move further into this direction in a draft. So this is just like a list of cards. I just looked at the commons and uncommon to these colors and was like, which of these ping as cards that I like in band decks more than in other places? Again, this is an essay list of the best cards in these colors, just ones that are both kind of like, just ones that ping as associated with playing band to me in some way, I guess. Ajani fells the God-sire, the five mana white saga that exiles a big creature. Angel of the Ruins, the big angel of the double disenchantes, decree of justice, essence reliquary, metastatic of Angel, the delivery guy, static prison, the one mana oblivion ring type of fact, which enchantor, the disenchant creature, Tammy meets the story circle, the deck looping saga, depth of filer, the three five Eldrazi that can draw to discard one and/or bounce something, Kozlax on ceiling, the enchantment that makes spawns or draws cards when you cast big creatures, petrifying medallor, the four or five reach, ETB stun something, utter insignificance, the enchantment that makes something a one one, and you can spend three minutes to exile the enchanted creature, Anoid Altasaur, the cascade six five reach green creature, evolution witness, the adapt, get a thing back from your graveyard, two one, horrific assault, the green punch spell that gains life if you have an Eldrazi, no level in tromble, the mill four that gets permanent and makes a spawn, nightshade dried, the mana creature, path of annihilation, the four mana enchantment that makes two spawns and lets your Eldrazi tap for mana, drawn her of truth, the blue green DFC that's a giant creature or a land, snapping void craw, the one three that taps for two koalas, blue green common, wastescape battle mage, the koalas battle mage that can disenchant or bounce, and solar transformer, the koalas mana rock that gives you energy. While I think the ramp version is best, as I talked about, I tried drafting this with like minimal ramp and not a lot of top end and more just like cheap removal and card draw and that didn't go well, but my opponent's draws happened to be very, very strong in that draft. So I don't know if that deck was bad and like if the smaller version of that can't work or if there's something there tentatively, I would recommend that like, I think the ramp version is stronger, but I'm not sure that you can't do something that's like a little bit lower to the ground and like really leans into just like the more like the blue red space where you just have like cheap removal card draw and then you have like the deck looping type stuff and you just kind of like keep playing removal and drawing cards to be determined there. I might not ever actually solve that question since we're at the end of the format. Try to ramp if you can if you're in this space, but if you happen to not find the good ramp stuff, I don't think I'll hope is lost or anything. I think you can still kind of do a smaller version of it, acceptably. And that's what I have. Again, this is the last time I'm gonna be talking about MH3 moving on to Bloomberg next week. So I'm gonna turn this over to chat for both questions about Bant and I suppose I'd also be willing to discuss kind of like closing or overall thoughts on MH3 or talk about like a little bit about archetypes that I maybe haven't covered but not, you know, spin off into a whole bonus podcast in the middle of this podcast. So while I'm letting chat come up with questions, as always, check out patreon.com/draftingarchitects if you think that you might be interested in supporting the podcast. What does it take for the Alluring combo to be good enough to put the cards in your deck? That's a good question, right? 'Cause like the Alluring is clearly pretty bad by itself. So I have not played it, but I can imagine playing it. To play it, I think you would want a decent amount of energy 'cause like you specifically, I think want some of the creatures that make three energy like the Gargoyle and the Tutu that lets you choose one of make three energy, put a plus and plus one counter and something or make a servo. And then you're also going to want some like card advantage type creatures like Sierra and Visionary and Evolution Witness and Shrieking Drake is going to be like pretty good there 'cause it's going to let you reuse any of your ETV abilities. If you have like big card draw, like especially rogue cartographer, that would help a lot. 'Cause like you need to have so many creatures that it would be inefficient to cast them all. And it's like worth casting a form and a spell that lets you cast them, which is pretty difficult under normal circumstances. But if your things like let you change somehow, then it could happen. It's very, very, very difficult to do it just based on something fair, like drawing cards and casting more three threes or whatever, more three drops or whatever. But if you have like Drake and some kind of payout, like you need to have the combo in there and then also have a deck where it's kind of functional by itself. So the combo is going to be Shrieking Drake with either Evangel or Guide of Souls. And then I guess that's it. So I think the best kind of fair creatures to play with it are Sierra and Visionary and Evolution Witness. And both of those help with assembling the combo 'cause like they let you dig for the pieces and get back things that die or whatever to make it happen. So if I were to try to draft around the combo, that's what I would look for. But I think it's like fairly difficult to like get it tapping because the power level of an H3 cards, I feel like I always end up with too many playables. How do you decide what to cut? Well, for one thing, I prioritize lands very highly because that's true. And so if you prioritize lands very highly, you're less likely to have an abundance of kind of like, like you can safely spend high picks on lands without not having enough playables. And then it's a lot easier to make the decision. But as far as how do you decide what to cut, real answer is play your best cards. And I don't know how to get more detailed than that in a general sense. Like it's play the strongest cards or the cards that like let your deck do what it needs to do. Have I ever gotten a lad made to work? I haven't tried. It's a weird one, right? Where like it looks really powerful but its stats are really bad. And it's stats are bad in a way that suggests to me that the problem with it is that it's like a little bit hard to cast and a little bit easy to kill. Like it just lines up really badly against like galvanic and wither. And so it's just kind of like trading down on mana or running away with the game. And when the stats suggest that a card that like either trades down or runs away doesn't perform well on average, that's not a card that I generally wanna like try to figure out how to get more out of because it basically suggests like sometimes you'll get lucky and win by a lot. But it's like a high variance card, right? Where like the normal case is bad for you. And then the good case is like more good than you need for you. This is true. This came up with like several like strict haven rares I guess is like where I really started noticing it where there were like four and five mana rares that could like win a game in pretty overwhelming fashion but they had like really bad win rates because it wasn't hard to kill them and it's like really bad if you like they didn't give you anything immediate. And so if your opponent had me answer you were like pretty far behind. And I'm not generally looking to increase my like exposure to like getting blown out by removal. I'm looking for like lower variance rather than higher variance cards in that way. And so it's just not the kind of card that I'm interested in really trying to explore, I guess. I mentioned static prison. I viewed that card as either I-gridex or dedicated energy decks. How good is band at keeping it around? The way that you're looking at it is totally reasonable. The reason that I like it in band is first I think it's incredible with Essence Reliquary. Second, it's pretty nice with evolution witness. Like if you let it go and then pick it up it's like really efficient. If your deck has an overwhelming top end then like spending one mana to set to deal with things for a while until you've like taken control is pretty big. Also like you could end up in the rose cat night space where it's really good. I think I talked about some of that last week in the blue white deck. Mostly it's just like an efficient removal spell that's very strong. So you want it in your deck that's just kind of like looking for any sort of like cheap removal. For the set-up as a whole was the quantity and non-narrowness of the Distant shant cards, which Enchanter, Battle Mage, Green Escalate card, Angel, et cetera, too much for the red-black archetype. I always felt like you'd run into this deal with path, prison, et cetera and just get free rolls for a shred-black. I think red-black had a lot of problems. I think that Meltdown is like kind of the biggest defender in best of three, but also the like, so in best of three, like Meltdown was just totally unreasonable against red-black. And then also all of the like random cards that have Distant shant effects stapled onto them are brutal against red-black and good enough to like always see play. And then also like red-black was like trying to do a like affinity, like have a lot of artifacts thing, but there just aren't enough artifacts for that in the set. Like there aren't really colorless artifacts. There are no artifact lands like trying to do affinity stuff without artifact lands. It's like pretty hard to begin with. And then some of the, and then also like a lot of the red and black cards weren't artifacts. And some of the artifacts that were just weren't very good. The affinity thing I think was basically just a huge miss. It was functional. If you were the only person drafting it and a lot of rams were open, played against someone once who like did something pretty cute with it, with like some of the axes and transmogrants and like being able to keep making just like big threats that like started being threatening early pretty well. But overall like the set just doesn't like it just, there's not enough support for affinity to work. It's just like it wasn't really like a reasonable shot at like that being a theme. So yes, like the disenchantes make it kind of like even, they make a like tough situation like even worse, but it's just like not a good place to be regardless. What are bands, big weaknesses or holes? So like the color combination gives you access to the things that you would want. So it's not like there's just like a general thing it can't do. It's more any given deck is going to have some like, it's one of the situations where your deck is probably going to have some kind of weakness, but which what that weakness is is going to vary from draft to draft. Like maybe your mana won't quite be good enough. Maybe you'll come up short on like a recursion thing you're trying to do. Maybe you'll have like one less top end card than you kind of needed. And you'll have to like get lucky to draw the top end thing. Or maybe you'll only have like two, two mana ramp spells where you wanted three or four. And when you draw them, your draw is great. And when you don't, it isn't. Maybe you'll be like short on a certain kind of removal spell. Maybe like you'll have removal, but it's like dog umbra's and you'll be vulnerable to disenchantes. In general, like what's the weakness of an archetype is kind of hard. And I think it's even harder with one where like the exact implementation changes like quite a bit from draft to draft. I'm going to wrap it up here. So that's going to conclude my coverage of MH3. So looking forward to moving on to some small animals next week and figuring out what's going on in Bloomberg. I haven't started like looking at the set for limited yet. So I'm excited to do that for next week and it's all for now. So have a good week and I'll be back next week for a first look at Bloomberg. Bye everyone. - Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
