Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 184: Esper in #MTGBLB
Sam teaches you everything you need to know about Esper in Bloomburrow draft
Check out our sponsor Untapped GG at our affiliate link:https://mtga.untapped.gg/companion?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=draftingarchetypes
Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/draftingarchetypesSwag Store:https://my-store-d775a7.creator-spring.com/
Follow Sam:Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamuelHBlackTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/samuelhblack
Join Sam’s Discord at:https://discord.gg/PKCZvatEFp
- Duration:
- 39m
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[Music] Hi everyone! This is Sam Black with Drafting Architects, and today I'm going to talk about Esper in Bloombro. As always, the notes are available at patreon.com/draftingarchitipes. This week, I conducted a poll about which two-color pair to cover. I didn't include anything fancy. I'm not actually sure about the exact timing with regard to when we'll have how much information about dust morn. I'm not sure if this is the last episode about Bloombro or if next week will also be about Bloombro, and dust morn will start after that. So, given that this was going to potentially be the last episode about Bloombro, I wanted to make sure to give the option to have me cover any of the two-color archetypes. The result of that poll was a three-way tie between blue-white, blue-black, and red-green. So, I figured I would do my best to cover as much of that as I realistically code in a single topic. So, I decided to combine blue-white and blue-black with notes on those two pairs together or separately. So, I'm discussing Esper, without focusing on the white-black part of that, because I have already covered that. Blue-black and blue-white are the worst-performing decks other than blue-red, and they're the two least-drafted pairs that are drafted even less often than blue-red. So, we're still in the decks that the public has not figured out space, we'll say. So, first looking at blue-black, Saver performs massively better, like, 3% on untapped, better than the next-best common, which is Glyve-dive duo. So, even more than blue-red, this deck really wants to avoid playing common rats, and really, it kind of wants to avoid playing commons at all. A light-shell duo and dagger-fang duo, in addition to Glyve-dive duo, are all like, those are the three top-performing blue-and-black creatures in this archetype. They're okay, nothing special. You can also play the random, you know, card draw, removal, and scales of shale-type commons, but what's really going on here is that there are 14 uncommons that perform better than the second-best common, and most of them are also better than Saver, and a lot of them are fantastic. You have stuff like Shoreline Looter, the 2-manna-1-1 Looter that draws a card and doesn't ask you to discard once you have Threshold and is Unblockable, Wix Patrol, the 6-manna-5-3, Mill-3, and then Target your future gets minus x, minus x, where x is the highest mana value of my cards in your graveyard, Fel, the 1-in-a-black sorcery that destroys target creature, and then you have stuff like the Skunk, the Ambusher, Downwind Ambusher, 3-in-a-black for a 4-2 ETB, target creature gets minus 1, minus 1, or destroyed target creature that has dealt damage this turn, Flash, the 6-manna- Otter, Wave Rider, the 6-manna-4-4 that casts the instant or sorcery with mana value for or lasts from your graveyard when it enters, just a lot of very high-impact premium uncommons. So, like, you're basically just, you know, your deck can be really good if it's open and you can get a lot of rares and uncommons, a lot of the blue-black attacks that trophy have run the blue-black gold rat legend, 3-4 Ward 2 that makes rats when you kill your opponent's creatures roughly. So, there's a lot there in blue-black in terms of power level if you can get higher rarity cards. What's not there is rats as like a particularly meaningful driving force in what's happening here. There are some thresholds, synergies, that's mostly powered by simply casting instant and sorceries. The common rats are not very good, even the uncommon rats aren't that good. Persistent Marsh Stalker is among the 14 uncommons that are better than Glyphdive Duo, but it's like the bottom of that list. Even Tide Collar Mentor, the blue-black, uncommon 3-3 menace that bounces something if you have threshold, is not among those 14, though it's fine. For the most part, this is not an aggressive deck and no one would try to draft it as an aggressive deck, though it does sometimes have very strong aggressive draws based on persistent Marsh Stalker and Tide Collar Mentor. Marsh Stalker, incidentally, if you have a lot of them, ends up being like very good with ways to manipulate yourself first to get a threshold and then unblockable rats play really well with it because then you have a rat that can attack them and they can't kill the other rat and they have to just keep blocking the Marsh Stalker and that's usually a really hard spot for your opponent. The best case there, of course, is that you have Shoreline Litter, but you can also accomplish the same thing with the one for that becomes unblockable if you have threshold that you probably shouldn't be playing otherwise. So play that if and only if you have either like ways to increase its power a lot or multiple Marsh Stalkers. So it's kind of weird to me given all that that blue-black isn't further ahead of blue-white than it is. Blue-white, I think, is in a much worse space. Blue-white, I think, presents a trap that people do fall for. It's not a very deep or elaborate trap. The trap is drafting birds and the reason I say it's not like deep or elaborate is it's hard to draft like a lot of birds. There just aren't that many and it's hard to like accidentally fill your deck with nothing but birds, but looking at played frequency from among the stats of blue-white decks, it seems like people sometimes put cards like Finch Formation, the Wind Drake that gives a thing flying when it enters and you can spend three mana to offspring it and Seed Pod Squire, the four mana three three flyer that pumps the thing when it attacks. I don't think either of those cards should basically ever end up in any deck. Seed Pod Squire, I could potentially see playing in a deck with a lot of valiant creatures, but I wouldn't be excited about it. But people play these cards in their blue-white decks sometimes because blue-white tells you that it wants birds, I guess. I don't think you should ever try to draft birds in a way that involves playing those kinds of cards. I think blue-black and blue-white want to play very similarly. They both just kind of want to be blue-based controlled acts with removal and card draw and some powerful creatures. Admittedly, played in that way, blue-white offers a lot less than blue-black does. It just doesn't have as many powerful cards, it has a lot of cards that are off, that are not in line with that plan. But if you are going to try to play it that way, the primary white cards that I'm interested in are Carrick Cake, the two mana artifact that describes one and makes a rabbit and is a food, and then when you sacrifice it, you scry one and make a rabbit again. Stoner Strike, the one in a white, deal forward to an attacking, blocking, or tapped creature, and gain three life if you have a bat, banishing light, the two in a white enchantment that exile something. Bright Blade Stote, the 2/2 for two with first strike and lifelink, Driftbloom Coyote, the five mana 3/4 that like fiend hunters a creature, exile it as long as you control coyote, and if it's a small creature a coyote gets a counter. Rupell Calamity, the one in a white instant that kills a creature with power or toughness for a greater, and builders talent to the talent that makes counters for non-creature permanence and makes a wall gets a non-creature permanent back. That list is not the same as the list of cards that perform well in blue white and aggregate, mostly the list that performs well in blue white and aggregate involves a lot more rabbits. If you just look at the top performing commons in blue white, it's basically just all the good white cards, which are mostly rabbits, like the good white commons, and then the only blue common in like the top 10 or something is dazzling denial, and it's not particularly high up in that list. Basically, it looks like the way that the community has the most success drafting blue white is while you're drafting rabbits, and then you have like a little bit of blue interaction and maybe a few flyers that maybe shouldn't be in your deck. I'm sure that it's possible to win that way. The white core is pretty strong. If you just have like 16 white cards and seven blue cards in your deck or whatever, I imagine it would be a fine deck. But I don't know that that strategy is not very interesting to me. It's pretty obvious how to do it. There is also a rabbit control build that I do like that uses a harvest rate host, the uncommon 33 that gives something plus one plus O when a rabbit enters, and when that triggers the second time in a turn draws a card, and heirloom epic, the one mana artifact lets you tap for mana and or creatures to draw a card at sorcery speed. You use host an epic in conjunction with rabbit tokens to generate a card advantage engine, then you just have a bunch of like random bodies coming up the board that make it hard for your opponent to attack, and you play a control game based on like this card advantage engine that you've set up with some random bodies and whatever other control tools you happen to have. Esper, the combination of these decks makes a lot of sense because blue-white and blue-black both have very loose typo identity. You don't care a lot about most of the synergies there, and they both want to be generically controlling, and they both kind of independently want fountain part battle. The one mana artifact this searches for a land, blue-white is interested in it because of its synergy with builders talent, black is interested in it because of its contribution to threshold, and really everyone should be interested in fountain part battle if they're not like super aggressive, and even then you still want it. It's just a very good card. So since we're looking at like blue-controlled acts with a bunch of card drawing and fountain part bells, it's very easy to play more than two colors. Esper then makes a lot of sense and plays pretty well. I have been drafting more and more solid three or more colored decks that are kind of in this space, generically controlling, and not very interested in leanings like heavily into any particular type or type-based synergy, and just kind of playing a lot of efficient answers and removal and mostly just a ton of rares. I have recently come back to a place that I end up in in a lot of formats, and that honestly took me too long to get to in this format, which is non-green-based multi-color. It took me a while this time because I like the green cards and I like the way that they play in controlled acts. I feel like I've had this experience a few times in the past also where there's something I find compelling about green, and it just straps me from how much I like multi-color not green and how much the thing that there is. This concept that splashing for fixing is kind of backwards. You can just not do that and have cleaner mana and it generally works well, and a lot of what I like in green in multi-colored acts in general and in this format in particular is fixing. On my previous episode, I mentioned this idea in the context of BlueRed, that aggressive BlueRed decks play creatures, then spells, and controlling decks play spells, then creatures. I think that's kind of largely true across decks, and that interacts in a very particular way with green removal, in that green removal is usually fight spells, and so green removal kind of needs your deck to intend to cast creatures, then removal, but if I want my controlled acts to be intending to cast removal spells in the early game to buy time to play like powerful, two-for-one style creatures, then I don't really want green removal very much, and that by itself does a lot to cut out what I'm getting from green, given how much like removal is often what I'm looking for there, so I often end up in the trap of splashing for fixing. I tried playing a lot of like blue-green controlled acts, and that didn't go very well, even though there were some synergies that I felt like I should be able to push and have success with. So now I've been pivoting more into playing more redder than green, mostly just for like a few efficient removal spells like take out the trash, and then good red gold cards or whatever that happened to go late, but the core of blue with white or black for removal splashing kind of whatever else I need to splash has felt really good to me. I think conceiving of this deck as fundamentally an asperdact but not being deeply committed to being exactly those colors works pretty well, and I think that the position in this deck in the format is pretty good in terms of you know like I said at the beginning, these are the least drafted color pairs, they're not very successful, people are not fighting over your cards, and to the extent that people have started blue as like a playable strategy, I think there's been a lot of focus on blue red. So there's still not a lot of competition for the fixing and like the controlling white and black cards and stuff like that, so this has been a very like comfortable and successful space to be operating in for me. I worry a little bit that my coverage of blue white in particular was too dismissive of the aggressive decks, but in my defense the public has not done well with these decks, they're just what the public drafts and the cards that they would want to play are really bad, so I don't think suggesting that you don't try to draft that way is overstepping, and like I said I've had a lot of success and feel like there's a lot of potential to the space I've been describing, so this is an archetype where you know sometimes when I cover these archetypes that are not very successful for the public, it's a lot of well this is a rough space, it's going to be hard to make it work, but if you have to draft this because of you know it being the open seat, these are the things you need to know to have a chance, that's not how I feel about aspirin is set. I actually think this is very close to what I want to be drafting at the moment, and I think this stuff's really good, so there you have it I guess, I'm happy to, I'm going to turn it over to chat for follow-up questions to get into some more details maybe, as always I want to thank the newest patron at patreon.com/draftingarchitipes, so thank you Stephen, if anyone else is interested in checking out the Patreon offerings and supporting the podcast be sure to head to patreon.com/draftingarchitipes and now chat questions, what do you normally look for as a mix of creatures and spells? all the uncommons you can find, that's like weirdly just close to the answer, part of the reason to draft multiple colors is that the uncommons are so good and the comments are generally not very exciting, there are some like generically good defensive common creature, like generically fine defensive common creatures that you can play to fill out your curve, but you're mostly just looking for all the good uncommon creatures, and then it's hard to actually have enough uncommons to play only, only uncommons, so you're mostly just trying to round out the comments with stuff that you know just kind of smooths and improves your like draws and gives you a bit of like early game board presence like carrot cake and removal like saver and nocturnal hunger though I would note that nocturnal hunger incidentally I happen to notice glancing at some stats, based on an average last scene compared to like performance metrics, nocturnal hunger is really overrated, similarly incidentally daring wave rider, the six-man otter super underrated, but you know so no strike banishing lights, all of that like removal at common is fine, I've even started playing winter's grasp I think is the name of it, the five mana exile spell, I have no problem with the share pot, you know if I can trade commons for rare sometimes that's fine, and then I like like random draw twos and stuff because I just want to draw my uncommons more often and then I want a lot of fountain portbells and also the common lands are good use of picks when there aren't good uncommons in the pack, does this deck want a barkform harvester or two, well yes sorry it would silly of me to think that I could go a podcast without mentioning barkform harvester, yes basically all of my decks want a barkform harvester and wait or return barkform harvester from my graveyard to a different zone, sometimes in a pinch that's another barkform harvester, sometimes that is a black village, sometimes that is any number there are a lot of different cards that you get barkform harvester from the graveyard into a different zone, have one of them have barkform harvester be comfortable hanging out forever, I recently I think that was this week maybe last week wrote a twitter thread about barkform harvester and some thoughts on why I do better with it than other people and a lot of that is that having barkform harvester in my deck changes the way that I play the game in a way that increases my win rate whether I draw the harvester or not and I don't think most people do that, I think this actually happens across games and is something that I largely learned from an unrelated game, I think most players are very inclined to push an advantage when they have one, to look for like attacks maybe you know see oh I can like push three damage here in the early game if I use this removal spell on my opponent's creature and then I'll be ahead on board and my opponent will be losing life that's probably better than just like sitting here and doing nothing and you can make those plays and it's like reasonable it leads to killing your opponent sometimes but if you don't try to make those plays and you're always content to make the game go longer and you don't worry about using removal to push damage and you only worry about using removal to keep yourself alive then you're more likely to have a removal spell for a creature that you really need to kill or to be able to use your removal in a more beneficial spot timing-wise maybe get a two for one or kill a larger creature or something and there's just a lot to be said for the kinds of advantages you can gain when you don't have to put any effort into figuring out how to attack you can just ignore every defensive card your opponent ever plays so in any of these controlling decks that's kind of what I'm doing and trying to do and barkform harvester is a not strictly necessary but very useful tool to safely being able to play that way you have to attack some time right kind of technically not really most of the time my opponent just concedes when I've played stuff and they've run out of stuff and like technically I could start attacking but that fact is irrelevant like I could attack or not I could mill them out if for some reason like if I just treat my opponents if they have infinite life I could mill them out but realistically I would end the game by attacking them first most of the time but like any damage I push early is meaningless because once I'm making my first attack I'm not doing that until like at the point where I'm just killing my opponent's creatures for fun because I have nothing else to do with my cards and no limit on the like access to cards or whatever like the game is already over by the time I make my first attack most of the time so like anything about like attacking or pushing damage isn't relevant to the outcome of the game does that strategy require a lot of card advantage or value engine synergy that depends on what you're playing against if your opponent doesn't have any card advantage or value engines then there's no reason that you necessarily have to either the thing about playing defensively is that you get to maximize your virtual card advantage which is the number of cards of your opponents that you get to ignore a classic example of this is if I have a single three three and my opponent has four two twos then neither one of us can attack and I've I have virtually traded my one card for my opponents four cards that three three is at the moment generating virtual card advantage if it ever dies and all of my opponents two twos are relevant I've lost that card advantage but as long as my opponent's cards don't matter they might as well not exist and if you never care about attacking that implies a lot of virtual card advantage in some slash many matchups sometimes it's important to be able to convert that into like real or hard card advantage sometimes it's not sometimes your you know version of card advantage could just be a sweeper and tools that make your opponent overextend and then you play your sweeper and you're up a lot of cards on that single card and that's enough to like carry the game but also I mean all the cards I'm trying to play basically are card advantage in one form or another like it's basically just I want to fill my deck with two for once and that's almost like the whole story how important is fixing and would you avoid Esper if you can't get fixing fixing is important and you can get it people are not taking bells and the lands highly enough that you literally can't get it in a draft I've also like I recently played a deck with four three tree mascots because I couldn't find other fixing when you need it you can make it happen if you're willing to and you anticipate needing it in time I don't want to go super deep on like how to build mana bases I've talked about that in the past and there are other archetypes where it's like more directly relevant I think the mana in like Esper in this format with a few like bells and stuff is pretty easy and simple but yes you should be prioritizing fixing if you're drafting this what is one category out of land and artifact fixing better does your fixing source change how you draft or play so I mean I don't know if this is a question about like categorically or in this set slash archetype in this case I think fountain portbell is basically a strictly stronger card than uncharted haven and I would always prefer any number of bells to any number of havens with technically a few exceptions maybe but they're not really worth like getting into and I also think of them as basically the same card like bell is it's one of those close but clear situations like bell is just better but it's not radically better they largely do the same thing so as far as like does the fixing source change how I draft or play in the context of bell versus haven no they're the same card in the context of like bell or haven verse grotto or banner that's a little bit more significant there is a meaningful difference between choose a single color this card provides you and this card gives you every color at the same time every color at the same time lets you be a lot more ambitious with your use of with your pips that's why I played mascot like the reason to play a bunch of mascots is because I have like you know five colors and double pips in three or four of them or whatever which like you don't want to try to rely on a couple of bells to pull that off so you're like you're fixing what you're fixing is matters but always the biggest difference is like is this like is between prophetic prism and evolving worlds like a single card that will always give you every color verse like every color verse any color is meaningfully different in terms of building a mana base ways to deal with enchantments and artifacts our priority question mark if yes which ones are you looking for it is nice to have but I don't think like strictly necessary I wouldn't mind having one of the three one mouse that can disenchant I don't want to prioritize having a bunch of them I like paw patch formation I like the green five four if you're you know in those colors I think it's like a slightly relevant but not very relevant part of early winter I think it's a nice ability on share pot like there there are a lot of cards that I'm reasonably happy to play for other reasons that incidentally can kill artifacts enchantments it's cool to be able to do it but usually not that big of a deal if you're already asked for going into pack one pick three what are some rares you'd be thrilled to see I would really like this is the kind of question that's easily answered by just going to 17 lands are untapped and looking at the best performing rares in any of those colors or all of them or just in the set I'm gonna be happy to see good rares I guess like the season of loss the season of the burrow like all of the seasons basically all of the like expensive rares that perform well in general perform better in this deck and the sweepers perform even more better in this deck but I'm gonna be happy to see any like good rare that's not like exactly an aggressive creature and even that would be fine when you're playing asper how do you prioritize car drivers removal versus the efficient creatures maybe they do both like loot or in patrol is there a ratio I look for I prioritize the broken creatures over a generic removal and card draw and removal over card draw you know barring card quality disparity but basically like you can kind of get whatever number of like dire sites and the like three mana or five mana draw threes that you want like no one is looking for those cards and you don't want very many of them so they're kind of just like available for free in the draft if you're like willing to play them so you don't need to prioritize card draw whereas like people are actually going to fight you for removal spells and then like the good like two for one type creatures are like the premium uncommons that like are you know the things you're hoping to take with your early picks so you know awesome uncommon creatures over removal over card draw is pretty simple answer to that question there's you know minor variation if you like look at the win rates and one card wins like a percent or more than a different one then you probably want it more than you want the other card but when it's close you're generally looking for removal over card draw because like the difference in quality in like different card draw spells is actually pretty minimal whereas like yeah that i guess that's another relevant point like the rate on a removal spell matters a lot more than the rate on a card drop spell because i think they're just bigger gaps and it's more important to be able to play the removal spell when you need to play the removal spell like it's cast and cost is a big deal whereas with the card draw stuff like you're generally trying to play everything else before you play your card draw unless you like need to use the card draw to look for lands and so it's just about well i don't want to like run out of gas when i'm done casting all my other spells and any card draw spell is going to accomplish that what's the relationship of this esper space to the blue black bat stack or the white black bat stack rather the reason to talk about the white black bat stack separately is that it actually cares about its like type synergies and the life gain synergies and those are actually supported and moderately powerful whereas the rat and bird synergies are not very supported and not very powerful so while white black can be drafted as intergenerically controlling deck and that can splash blue and can exist in the esper space most of the time white black is going to like actually be a you know mid-range synergy like type based deck which meaningfully distinguishes it from the other things in this space of course there's you know a scale here you can have an esper control deck with like a little bit of bat synergy gaining life is nice in a control deck whatever but you know i talked about how like i think that trying to meaningfully lean into any rat or bird type synergies is basically a mistake or a trap whereas leaning into the bat stuff like can actually work are there any cards that would make you go after a birds or rat deck maybe the gold rares so castrol and friend and the answer is neither of those cards would do that i might play a couple other birds or rats as it was convenient but i'm not going to play like the bad commons and either of those i'm not going to expect those particular synergies to be an important part of my deck and i'm not going to expect that having more birds or rats will fundamentally change the way that these rares play in either case the rare has the potential to dominate the game by itself and whether i'm getting additional value out of having more of the type that it wants or not is pretty meaningless like i'm going to be in a good spot when i draw cast resolve and my like rare is not answered that like whether the rat tokens i'm making off ran are a little bit bigger or whether i have like another bird to trigger castrol or put counters on or put into play or whatever is like not that meaningful because if i'm connecting with it and drawing cards that's going to be good enough most of the time a lot of the cards that really make me care about creature types as like something to have some of without being all in on are the cycle of cards that get a bonus if you control creature of the type so the sonar strikes the world and in this case the rat one psychic world that just carded to scry to if you control rat is like barely playable at best ever and so rats like functionally doesn't have a card in that space which is a big strike against like caring about rats and the bird one dazzling denial the counterspell the counters for two if you don't have a bat a bird and four if you do have a bird is kind of nice and it is a lot better if you have a bird but it's not enough to make me go out of my way for it at all right and there you have it i'm going to wrap this up again i think multi-color non-green controlled x could be asper or not are very good in this format at the moment i really like everything that's happening here i think that this space is underrated misunderstood and underexplored in general obviously it's like somewhat hard to draft and counterintuitive but worth learning in my opinion i am not sure again if this is going to be the last time i talk about bloomborough or if like i i don't know if i'm talking about dastmore next week or not that's going to depend on where we are in the information release on dastmore and i just don't know that yet it might be noval but it's not known by me so i'll be back next week same time same place but i'm not sure if i'm going to be talking about bloomborough or a first look at dastmore so have a good week i'll be back then and bye for now prepare for light speed