Hi everyone. This is Sam Black with drafting archetypes, and today I'm going to be discussing blue-green frogs in Bloomberg. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/traption archetypes. And today, before I get into it, I want to mention that this episode of the podcast is sponsored by Untapped. Untapped recently did some consulting with me, or I did some consulting for them, to help figure out exactly how best to present their limited data. So Untapped is getting into the sharing aggregated limited data market with information that's very similar to the stats I regularly referenced and talk about from Seventeen Lands. The biggest difference is that Untapped offers pretty robust visual views, so they've just launched their limited data section, which has tier lists and trophy decks, and you can view it either in like the Seventeen Lands style spreadsheet mode with all the data, or you can just view it as kind of a grouped tier list where it figures out. You can actually have it tier by whatever kind of data you want, and then it'll just sort it based on categories and big gaps, and makes it very easy to kind of parse all of it at once. So it's very good for just kind of studying the format as a whole, getting a nice simple snapshot of that, and then in the trophy decks feature, one thing that I worked with them on is you can search for trophy decks that contain certain cards or groups of cards, and you can look for trophy decks that contain multiple copies of the same card. So there's a lot to play around with in terms of the different stats that shows, so kind of a nice new tool to have available to limited players who are interested in data, and I think that the visual view for just getting a big overview of which cards are succeeding in the set, in particular is a nice new tool to have in the space. So mtga.untept.gg/limited will take you to that set of stuff, and then you can play around with it from there. So I used that myself in preparing for this episode, and yeah, let's get to it. So blue-green is the fifth best performing archetype, and the third most drafted archetype. Blue performance poorly overall. This is the best performing blue archetype. The top three archetypes are just the three color combinations of Abzan, and then the one other deck that perform is better than blue-green is black-red, though it's drafted significantly less than blue-green. The most important and best commons for blue-green are pond-profit and sun-shower druid. That's the blue-green, hybrid-blue-green, hybrid-1-1 that draws a card when it enters, and the green-0-2 that puts it plus one plus one counter on something and gains a life when it enters. These two are kind of the glue that makes everything else work. You really need a number of frogs. You need cheap creatures, you need abilities, and the deck is kind of good at building engines and having stuff to spend its mana on. So it's nice to have a lot of cheap creatures to kind of fill in the gaps in your mana usage and to make all of your other cards work better. This was certainly my experience early on playing with the deck. I felt like my blue-green decks succeeded or failed based on how many of those things you had, and then the stats support that those are the top two performing commons, which I was not surprised by. So that's like there are a few different approaches you can take to like what you're doing with your blue-green deck, but all of them really want you to have that infrastructure, which you frogs to make everything else work properly. After you have that or the other cards to be looking for are polywallup, the instant that costs four mana minus one for each frog you can call and does damage to a creature equal to twice the power of one of your creatures, and tree guard duo. This is a four mana three four that gives a picture plus x plus x for access to the number of creatures you control and vigilance. Really good at just pushing a ton of damage. Notably, this is a card that I personally undervalue a little bit and honestly intend to continue undervaluing a little bit just based on kind of my play style and what I'm looking to accomplish in the games. Touch on that a little bit more later, but if you're playing blue-green anything like as an aggressive tempo deck, then the tree guard duos are going to play really well and that's going to be a very safe and reasonable approach to building your blue-green decks. If you manage to get a lot of pawn profits and sun-shower druids, which you should be, like if you're not getting those, you should probably be pivoting into a different deck. If you do have those or expect to have those, then you can start prioritizing cards that work with them like sticky-tongue sentinel, the three mana three three reach that picks up a permanent when it enters, run away together, the one in a blue bounce spell that bounces one of your creatures and one of your opponents, lily splash mentor, the uncommon four four reach that you can spend three mana to flicker something and put a plus one plus one counter on it at sorcery speed, long river lurker, the two three frog that makes when your creature is unblockable and then flickers it when it connects and gives all of your frogs word one, splash portal the sorcery for a blue that flickers a creature and if it was one of the blue types draws a card and then if you want to get really fancy, you can get into stuff like gossip's talent and honored heirloom, gossip's talent is the blue talent that makes your creatures surveil, then makes your creatures, lets you make one of them unblockable and then lets you flicker a thing, the damage to your opponent as you level it up and honored heirloom is the one mana artifact that you can tap four mana to draw a card at sorcery speed but you can decrease the amount of mana you need to spend by tapping creatures instead, that plays pretty well if you have a bunch of pawn profits and sunsharadroids that can contribute to the mana there, this archetype as I mentioned plays pretty well as an aggressive or tempo deck which is where you know if I think the aggregate stats points to players drafting it that way and I think that's a valid approach, however I personally prefer to play it as more of a control deck this should be totally unsurprising if you've ever seen me draft anything the data would suggest that you should do this but I like including cards like long rivers pull and spell gyr to uncounted counter spells, long rivers pull is blue blue counter creature or you can gift a card to counter anything and spell gyr is too blue counter anything or surveil to draw to, I like both of those as control cards and then I like to play bark form harvester, the two three reach changeling, let's use pen two mana to put a card from your graveyard on the bottom of your library, I only like to play this if I'm planning to have the ability to play games where I draw more cards than my library includes, this is best if you're splashing black and doing more self-mill type stuff and then if I'm playing it I like to have cards that let me get it back from my graveyard to my hand like peerless recycling so that I can loop it and the recycling to make sure that like I don't lose my harvester to a removal spell and then I can plan to win a super long attrition game, building the deck this way works if you focus entirely on playing defensively and then if you play defensively and have some of these like better control tools toward having inevitability so you have some rules and counter spells so that you're not going to lose to your opponent drawing their bombs then you can start to think about playing cards like gossips talent or stocking the pantry, stocking the pantry being the green enchantment that gets a counter whenever you put a plus and plus one counter on a creature you control and then must use pen two mana and remove a counter to draw a card if you have these sorts of super long game engines then you can turn your interactive spells and library into eventually winning the game by bearing your opponent card advantage without needing to attack. All of these cards independently have pretty bad win rates but to me that just suggests that you should play them judiciously when you have a clear plan about how you're going to use them and that you shouldn't generically put them into any given like aggressive blue-green deck. This lower versions of blue-green can splash pretty well the faster versions of course don't want to splash too much sea splashing in any archetype in any format and if you are splashing black is this splash you'd most likely want that lets you kind of pivot smoothly into a broader sultide graveyard archetype that I suspect will end up devoting a future episode to that can really use any combination of frog squirrel and rat synergies pretty well and a lot of those things play well with each other. A notable thing about this archetype when it comes to reasons to draft this deck it's worth noting that the top uncommons for both of these colors are not specifically frog related so those aren't really going to just like put you in frogs and the top comments as I mentioned are like pond profit and sun shower druid which aren't really things you want to like first pick and then draft round which means that as far as like cards that you're going to see at the beginning of a draft that'll get you to specifically try to draft this archetype I think the most likely cards to put you in frogs specifically are dream do and transfer the four mana three four reach that one in an interest battle field taps a creature and puts stun three stun counters on it and dour port mage the one in a blue one three frog lets you tap it and two mana to return a creature you troll through tenors hand and then whenever a creature leaves play without dying you draw a card so kind of noteworthy that like there are only rares that are really putting people into this archetype which means that if it's an architect you want to draft for whatever reason either just you generally like it or you're seeing some cards that suggest that it's open I think that if you kind of like cut cards that might lead someone to want to go into it then it's somewhat likely that no one at your table will be drafting it because there's aren't that many cards that they could take that would make them commit to it early so little food for thought there and that's that's it really I think the archetypes you know pretty simple you have your ETB frogs synergies and your pickup your frogs synergies to work with those pick up or flicker and you know you're mostly just trying to build your deck in such a way that you don't fall too far behind when you're you know picking up your own stuff which means prioritizing having cheap plays that keep you ahead and having some cheap interaction like ideally polywall up but in some cases run away together can get you there instead and then you know the biggest question while you're drafting it is whether you want to get into some of these like grindier engine cards whether you want to try to enable that stuff that's going to take a lot of time to like even if you have ways to get counters on stocking the pantry or if you have gossip talent these require a large investment to start drawing extra cards so you really need to make sure if you're trying to use any of these engines you're going to need to make sure that you prioritize first getting into some kind of like locked up board in fact that most of the frogs have reach helps a lot with that but you really need to first and foremost focus on drafting your deck in such a way that you're getting to a board stall and your opponent is not killing you and then from there you can focus on figuring out what you're going to do to like break that stall and win the game and that could be looping your deck or it could just be playing some larger creatures and or tree guard duos so i think that there are rooms room for some like branching paths around how you're ending the game but it kind of all comes back to wanting the same kind of like set up cards to get into a like late game in a space where you have a good amount of life and reasonably wide battlefield the good amount of life part is really important to make sure you kind of get like burned out by the red decks like lizards and otters and then reach like in general blue green is on the slow side which means that you kind of need to be prepared for all the different ways that the faster data attacking you so you need to be prepared for the decks that are going wide the decks that are flying the decks that are burning you out and then once you have that covered figure out whatever way you want to like end the game in your favor from there so that's kind of my opening treatise on frogs so now i'm going to turn it over to twitch chat for questions so first up our combat tricks useful in this deck i wouldn't highly prioritize combat tricks because i want to be prioritizing my creature synergies but because i am looking for cheap plays because you do have the ability to spend a lot of mana pretty reliably i think it's okay to play like the plus like the one mana green trick that gives a guy reach and untet i don't remember exactly what it does i but yes a few cheap tricks make some sense to use as tempo plays and also if you're going more aggressive they could also make sense there sure up and over protect are also acceptable i like the answer is i think it's fine to have like one to two tricks but i probably don't want a lot of them bouncing around creatures seems slow especially in a format that seems to value two minutes to two is the payoff really that good and blue green to just flicker upon profit the whole time if i kill your three drop sentinel that you just bounce your profit you have no board yeah so you have no board if like you curve pond profit into a sticky tongue but the alternative where you played a three three that didn't pick up the pond profit is that you have like a one one instead of nothing and those aren't really all that different so like yes if you're on the draw and your two mana play was at one one and your three mana play didn't contribute to the board or like your three mana play didn't like if you answer your three mana play and they curved out and you were on the draw then it could be too slow which is why you know it's nice to like also have sun shower dreads so that you're kind of like covered a little bit from these aggressive starts but only sticky tongue requires actually picking up your card right like if you curve pond profit into little splash mentor then like you're not at risk of that like your guys don't play you still drew the extra card and now the three drop that you played has ward this is why sticky tongue sentinel isn't like the highest priority common even though it does have these energies and the three through each body for three is pretty good it it can be slow to pick up your own stuff and you really do want to like draft your entire deck around accounting for the fact that it can be slow you might not want to start the game by curving pond profit into sticky tongue sentinel you might want to play a different two drop that has like higher stats and then play the pond profit on turn four or something so yeah there are weaknesses to going too far into this stuff without having enough like she plays to cover you but again as long as you prioritize your really cheap defense and being covered on the first few turns then you can start you know turning these things into like reasonable blockers that also give you card advantage or whatever how highly devalue cash grab with just a couple squirrels that often digs for a high value permanent I value cash grab extremely highly in actual squirrel decks where I'm using the where I'm foraging if I'm playing frogs I'm probably going to be very very bad at foraging and so I'm not going to try to have cards that forage and I'm also not going to try to have cash grabs if I'm in frogs and squirrels as do a dual supported types which I have done and would enjoy doing it again especially if I'm getting into like a full sultide deck then I would start to value the cash grabs but only if I had you know enough squirrel stuff to the squirrels stuff or just a huge amount of like graveyard stuff without squirrels somehow but that's pretty hard most frog decks I think should functionally never pick a cash grab because cash grabs should be taken pretty highly by the decks that want it and so while you might play one if it didn't cost you a pick it's unlikely that you should really have the option use this sort of bunch engine engine space doable in other green axe color pairs I've had some success picking the three three alongside a couple of carrot cakes is a way to buy time yeah I think that you can certainly pair light touches of these things with cards outside of just blue green I think you know if you have like I've seen decks with like five carrot cakes or whatever and I think carrot cake is a totally reasonable card to plan to pick up with sticky tongue sentinel picking it up is probably not as good as picking up on profit but it's not a lot worse and it kind of helps with your blue green go wide stuff to have that as long as you have sufficient support how do you balance the slowly splash mentor and heirloom epic sorcery speed activations with the counter those you mentioned I mean it's the answer is basically contextually in the game and you know if you're drafting in such a way that you have a lot of like sorcery speed stuff that you're planning to sink all of your mana into then you would probably want to lean less on the counter spells like the thing about using these low win rate cards is you really have to use them all correctly and that's more than just only use any of them if you are playing a defensive deck and then use all of them unsurprisingly simply combining a whole bunch of low win rate cards doesn't necessarily result in a good deck so you need to like think out exactly how all of it's fitting together and there are decks I can imagine where I am trying to fit lily splash mentor or heirloom epic with a few counter spells but it's not like obviously there is some tension there and you'd only want to do it in the right way um it's weird because like you know you're basically always going to want to play lily splash mentor if you're getting it and then it's just going to be like you'll get to you'll probably be trying to get to a game state where you can both use your lily splash mentor to get some amount of value of return and also hold up interaction and if you have to give up some amount of value you can generate with your mentor but you're still incrementally generating value with the mentor then you should still be in a game state where you've like already won right like if you have mentor going and you can leave up a counter spell the game is functionally over so you're just kind of like trying to grab the rest of the deck to make that happen at that point I think regarding spell jire for for counter spell seems like a bad rate I remember one there there was one in lci that no one ever played or the condition is different enough in bloomborough the jire is good actually it's not about the conditions being different enough it's about the counter spell not being a primary mode on spell jire so formana surveil to draw to is actually a pretty good card like there have been a variety like glimmer of genius I guess was maybe the last most similar card to that but it's a rate that like c4 cards for formana keep two of them exists in a bunch of different forms and he is just pretty strong and the ability to do at an instant speed and to be guaranteed to have mana up well to be guaranteed to have the ability to counter something the opponent does if it has to be countered instead is huge upside so you're not like it's less here's a counter spell is it good it's more here's a card draw spell that is much better because when you don't get your under too much pressure or when your opponent does something you have to answer or whatever you can counter instead so like the problem with counter spells is that you have to hold up mana and you may or may not want to use them and then your mana may or may not be wasted so spell jire is like my plan is no matter what at the end of my opponent's turn i'm casting this when they cast a spell i will decide if countering it or surveil to draw to is better for me and then i will do one of those things and viewed that way i think the card's really good i do have to contend with the fact that its stats aren't that great but also the stats on all blue cards aren't great and the stats on any sort of like card advantage isn't great and it has not been my experience that blue or card advantage are like structurally bad in this format so i'm just going to continue generally liking spell jire and playing it that way and i personally am not really concerned about the numbers on it if you prioritize recursion and shore up once you know you're in the controlling space and end up with not too many engines to help with inevitability with some random flyers be a fine way to add inevitability to a deck in the space i don't love some random flyers as a like plan to believe that you have inevitability there are a lot of reach creatures so your flyers aren't necessarily getting through and i don't really want to just be like well i have this creature i guess that's inevitability oh what a removal spell so i mean at least for me when i think about tools that are giving me inevitability in a long game i want things that are like more serious about it like things that are giving me repeated card advantage or something which isn't say that you don't want any flyers in your deck just that i would conceptualize what they're doing a little bit differently as far as prioritizing i'd say you know if your kind of long game plan revolves around lily splash mentor or similar than it might make a little bit more sense to prioritize shore up to protect it but for the most part i'm not that invested in protecting my frogs because most of them give me value when i play them and if my opponent kills one of them i can just kind of plan to play another one and a shore up is a little bit narrow in what it's doing so while i like it some as a tempo play i don't think that i consider it an important piece of like building toward inevitability what are good decks to pivot into from a blue green start sulti i think is kind of the best natural fit other than that i mean squirrels is very similar to sulti outside of that just you know if you have a bunch of green cards and you're looking to maybe go into blue or a bunch of blue cards and you're looking to maybe go into green then you could go into whatever you know other color combination that it happens to be open with the cards that you have is decking and concerned with this archetype not for me in that if i am drafting a deck where i feel like it might be then i'm probably going to make sure that i have a bark form harvester but for the most part i don't think that you're super likely to end up in a spot where you're going to like run out of cards in your library in this archetype because your creatures end up being like reasonably big of some ways to like push them through and you're not like milling yourself a lot or like drawing huge numbers of extra cards like basically just the fact that like most of your card advantage is attached attached to creatures means that you're just going to end up with a wide enough board that you should be able to win through combat before you deck yourself as opposed to like a deck where you just have a whole bunch of divinations or whatever and you might run out of stuff what percent of blue green decks want bark form harvester pretty low i think a pretty high percentage of blue of like blue green black decks want it and a pretty low percentage of straight blue green decks want it is inaccurate the most blue green decks don't want divination or the draw three so that's the pearl of wisdom the divination that costs one less of you control and otter or the draw three that lets you gift a fish i think that it is accurate that most blue green decks probably don't want to play those cards i think that you have enough other ways to draw cards or spend your mana and then if i'm playing a couple of cards that are like dedicated card advantage cards i would probably rather find a way to get like an actual engine card in my dock rather than a card that's just going to put me up a couple of cards once and yeah i think that's a better approach is daring wave rider a good inclusion in this deck so you can bounce it and have that in a bit of the inevitability you were discussing earlier yeah i mean it's during wave riders a pretty strong card it depends a little bit on what kind of spells you have to cast with it and again daring wave riders like a two for one which is a good card and then like it's a two for one that you can potentially pick up and use again somewhat less of like hard inability type card then the like repeated draw cards are but still a card that i think can make sense as a top end play i do think you want to be careful in blue green about how many like six mana cards you play i think you don't want more than you know like two or three of them at most but there are a lot of like good six mana cards like wave rider and wave rider and climate is tied and the moose and assorted rares like the seasons so yeah i mean all that all that stuff is good you just want to be careful about how much of it you have is patchwork banner ever worth playing in blue green yes patchwork banner is great i would say patchwork banner is usually worth playing in blue green even if you're not splashing since you have like the pond profits that are kind of cantripping into play you're kind of a little bit more of a go wide deck than it looks like and you're pretty good at spending the extra mana and if you draft patchwork banner early then it helps you potentially splash some other cards but yeah you should basically always play patchwork banner if you have it in blue green and you should prioritize it reasonably highly it's a very strong card prepare for light speed [BLANK_AUDIO]
