Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 183: Blue Red in Bloomburrow
Sam breaks down UR in BLB Draft
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- Duration:
- 30m
- Broadcast on:
- 31 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And today, I'm going to be discussing Blue Red in Bloomberg. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/draftingarcotypes. Blue Red is the worst performing color pair in Bloomberg and the third, at least drafted pair, but it's, you know, pretty similar to the other not very popular decks. And there's not a clean solution to this. There aren't as many cheap creatures that you'd like to play as the deck wants and you want a high spell count. But I think the nature of the format is such that most of the spells that are available have somewhat polarized match-ups. It's not terrible, but there are certainly some cards that are much better against some of the faster decks with small creatures or some of the slower decks. And it can be difficult to find the exact direct balance. And if you have like too much removal, you can struggle against the decks that make a lot of tokens or have a lot of good enter the battlefield abilities. So Blue Red is in a bit of a tough spot. I don't think the deck is unplayable. This isn't a case of a strictly failed archetype or anything. And I do think the deck is largely supposed to do what it tells you to with the note that otters are less essential than the spells. Like this is a spell slinger archetype, like one where you want a high spell count. And most of the cards that fit in that are most of the creatures that fit in that do happen to be otters, I suppose. But a lot of the otters aren't that good anyway. And the creature's support is not as good, especially at common as one might want. To that end, I think the most important thing when drafting Blue Red is actually just to minimize the number of common creatures in your deck. Light Shell Duo, the Blue 334 with prowess that surveils two on ETB. Elania's Pathmaker, the three and a red 42 that exiles the top part of your library and you can play it until the end of your next turn. And Tempest Angler, the Blue Red, Blue Red, one hybrid 2-2 that gets a plus one plus one count on it when you cast an instant or sorcery. All performed decently, none of them are exceptional. They're basically all works than most of the uncommon creatures. But all of those three are playable and you basically want to avoid anything else. It's not a disaster if you have to play a couple of common creatures, but for the most part, you would always rather have like an interactive spell at common, like a common interactive spell or an uncommon creature than any of the common creatures, either the three listed or any of the others. There are a lot of just Blue Red creatures that are just kind of very slightly below rates and seem like, I guess the kind of thing that reads to me as a core set creature. Like a creature that's not gonna have any particular synergies in your deck, it's just gonna be like about a three, four or a three, three with an ability or a three, four with an ability or just like, I don't know. There are a lot of just generic three and four mana creatures that you could put in your deck that you probably shouldn't. And then there are a lot of two mana creatures that you would like to be able to put in your deck, but they're just not really quite good enough. I think the Whisker Quill scribe or whatever Whisker Quill scribe, the tutu for one in a red, that rummages when you target it, is the kind of card that would be a better fit than most, like you want two drops and rummaging is very good, but you don't really wanna play very many things that target your own creatures. So it's, that would be the sort of thing where I would try not to play it, but if I end up needing to, I wouldn't be terribly unhappy about it. There are a lot of higher rarity cards that perform quite well. So as long as you're avoiding the commons and finding uncommon and rare creatures, you should be fine to be able to like finish a game. Most blue-red decks that trophy, like a vast majority play between eight and 12 creatures, I think that that's a reasonable number to expect to be able to find from just among the best common creatures and uncommon and rare creatures. Sometimes you'll be able to do it entirely with uncommon and rare creatures. I think if you have fewer than that, you really risk not being able to kill your opponent before you deck yourself. And if you have more than that, you're not gonna get a lot of your like spells energy and stuff like that. So I would say, like it's also just hard to get to more than 12 creatures without playing a lot of the creatures that you probably shouldn't be playing. The best uncommon creatures, well, a lot of the best uncommon creatures, creatures like Shoreline Looter, the one and a blue one one is that is unblockable and loots when it damages your opponent. And then if you have Threshold, you don't need to discard a card, it just draws a card. During Wave Rider, the four blue, blue, four, four that casts an instant resource rate of mana value, four less from your graveyard when it enters the battlefield. And Edimirk Crab, the seven mana five, five, so that you can flash and tap two creatures. And if you play it not during your main phase, then it enters tapped. All of those care about your graveyard. So consider leaning into that. You don't really need to 'cause the thing about playing like removal and card draw spells is that they just naturally extend the game and go to the graveyard. And so you don't need to work a lot to enable your graveyard, but I think it's part of why Light Shell Duo, for example, performs well. And the more that stuff you have, the more you might wanna start playing stuff like as it caps through the tormenting voice variants. As an example of like what I'm saying in terms of prioritizing instant and sorcery commons over creature commons, conduct electricity is a card that I've largely avoided, but it's actually playable in blue red and performs better than any common creature. So that's the five mana deal six and deal two to a token creature. Again, that has better stats, like a better win rate than every single common creature. And I think it's like a borderline instant and sorcery. I believe that there is, there are kind of like two different approaches to blue red. There's an aggressive prowess heavy build that I think uses Tempest Angler well and pairs that well with cards like Shore Up and Might of the Meek and as a caps brew. And then that really likes if you can get some of the higher rarity cheaper prowess otter cards like Storm Chasers Talent. That's the rare that makes prowess otter for blue and then levels up. Also the one mana one one haste uncommon prowess otter that makes your spells cost less and Otterball antics, the sorcery with flashback that makes a one one prowess otter. All of those cards help with the aggressive builds. If you have more Shore Ups and Might of the Meek's, you can kind of transition into playing some more mouse stuff and getting some value out of Valiant. There you can start playing stuff like Hearthfire Hero. And then if you, as you start to play more of those, the Red 3-2 trample duo becomes a reasonable consideration to target your Valiant creatures. So that takes you in a bit of a different direction. I think that the most common blue red decks are more in the removal card draw and then creatures that are just like big and can kind of win a game if you trade off a bunch of resources and keep them. So creatures like Shoreline Luter, Daring Wave Rider, Eddie Mark Crabbe and Quake Tusk Boar, Quake Tusk Boar is the three red red 5-5 haste trample. And then also, I guess your Knight Fisher, the 5 mana 4-5 flyer that makes a one one fish when you play a bird, not that I would expect to cast a lot of birds, but the 5 mana for a 4-5 flyer is a reasonable top end for the kind of more controlling card draw and removal based blue red decks. Kindle Spark Duo, the Lizard Otter to in a red for a 1-3, the taps to do an damage to your opponent and on taps when you play an instant or sorcery is the most overplayed card in blue red. Like as far as, like it's very highly played and has very bad stats. I think that there are some times when it's playable, especially if you have Valley Flame Color, the rare 3-3 that makes your lizards, otters, raccoons, and mice do an extra damage so that it's doubling the damage you're getting from your Kindle Spark Duo, like that's a good combo. And it's reasonable in some of the aggressive decks, but I think that it doesn't have enough impact on the battlefield for the more controlling decks and I think it's a little on the slow side for the more aggressive decks. So I think it's just a little bit awkward all around. It can be decent. If your deck is pressuring your opponent and you think that it matters that it can win outside of combat, but for the most part, I don't think it's what most of the blue and red decks are looking for. Another example of a card that you want to avoid run away together, the one in a blue common that bounces one of your creatures and one of your opponent's creatures. I like this card a lot in some decks, especially frogs, but it's very hard to construct a blue red deck that wants it because your creature count is low, your creatures tend to cost more mana on average and your creatures are less likely to have ETB abilities unless they're creatures that cost a lot of mana. So you should really be just avoiding run away together. Cards that go late that you should look for, pearl of wisdom, the two in a blue draw two that costs one less if you have an otter, dire downdraft, the three in a blue, put a creature on top or bottom of its owner's library that costs one less if the creature is attacking or tapped or blocking. Calamitous tied, the six mana draw two discarded card bounce up to two creatures sorcery into the flood maw, the one mana bounce spell that you can give to fish to bounce a non-creature, but it only bounces your opponent's stuff, instant and daring wave rider. All of those perform pretty well and are taken like later than six pick on average. And that's most of what I have to talk about. With very, very large swaths of cards that you don't wanna play, it makes like the draft pretty straightforward just because you're choosing from a relatively small set of playable cards. I think that blue red, especially in this controlling space, can splash. I think that you're mostly looking to splash more instant sorceries and uncommon and more rare creatures. You're looking for kind of built in card advantage on your creatures and you're looking for just like more like good rate hard removal spells if you're splashing. And again, to reiterate, the biggest piece of advice is when in doubt, take a common instant or sorcery over a common creature. That's not to say that you should take literally all blue and red instant or sorcery commons over all blue and red creature commons, but it's really, really, really close to that. And if there's any doubt, it would be safest to air that way. One other note from my experience drafting, trying to follow this advice right before this podcast, I did have a deck that followed this, played very few creatures and had a lot of card draw, largely 'cause I ended up with three calamitous tides and I did deck myself. And after that happened, I added a barkform harvester and I won a game after drawing through my entire original library in which I didn't get to the full loop my deck stage where I have a harvester in an empty library, but I played a harvester, it was killed and in response, I put a bunch of good cards from my graveyard on the bottom of my deck and ended up winning with those cards. So there is some chance that you wanna consider a barkform harvester, but I would not prioritize it, I would not take it over any of the common creatures I talked about, I would generally not play it and I would generally hope to find enough high impact uncommon creatures that you don't need it. But if you do end up heavy on shoreline looter and other good card draw and light on crabs and boars and wave riders and nightfishers and stuff, consider barkform harvester as a way to avoid ducking yourself. If you are heavier on prowess or splashing, you consider highly prioritizing fountain portbell as a way to get a prowess trigger and fix your mana and also put a card in your graveyard for your shoreline looters. And that's most what I have to say about blue red. So going to turn it over to chat for questions. I want to thank the newest patrons, so Robert, thank you for your support. And if anyone else is interested in supporting the podcast, check out patreon.com/drafting archetypes to do that or evaluate the offerings for patrons to decide if you want to do it. I mentioned Valley Flame color with Kindle Spark Duo, Valley Flood color does essentially the same thing in a different way, that's true. Both of them result in an extra damage on each spell that you cast, Flame color by making it deal more damage when it taps and Flood color by letting it tap in extra time. That means if you have both of them, you're doing four times as much damage, whereas if you have two of either of them, you're doing three times as much damage. So if you are color flooded, that's a thing to think about. I'll be able to call out some off color comments or uncommons that you're often interested in splashing in blue red, which people might not be aware of. Not really, like I said, it's really just like the creatures that are like flashable and heavy TB abilities, like Down9 Damisher and then hard removal like foul and the repel the one in a white kill a big thing. That sort of card, nothing like too weird or surprising. Any thoughts to splashing green, black, in blue red and dropping the blue and red cards? I do think that that would work pretty well, though I wouldn't really consider it a splash if you've dropped all the blue and red cards. Some very good players are saying blue red is the best archetype. Do you think it's just very hard to draft? I will say that I was curious about that and checked the stats for top players to see if blue red had a better win rate among top players and it doesn't. It does move from the worst performing to barely better than blue white, the second worst performing, but still considerably behind all the other decks among top players. I think that blue red, like these are the least drafted colors. It is relatively safe to expect them to be open and I do think that there is certainly room to perform better than average by having a good sense of what you're looking for and I think that in particular, you want a lot of take out the trash and then some of these like good uncommon creatures. I still think that that gets it up to playable. I don't really believe that it's like... Best archetype is a strange claim to make for a deck that I think even the people who succeeded drafting it probably know that they're succeeding because it's under drafted and that if everyone else were also drafting it, they wouldn't do well with it or want to draft it. I think there are times when you can expect it to be well enough positioned that it would make sense for it to be something you're looking for, keeping an eye out for, maybe even your go-to, but it's a difficult archetype to claim in any real like coherent way is just like the best archetype in the set. In terms of archetypes within best of one or best of three, could this blue-red be better since you have a toolbox sideboard? Yeah, I do. I didn't look at the stats unlike blue-red and traditional versus best of one and honestly, I don't know how much that would matter. I know that like, for example, when I'm playing traditional drafts on arena, I'm often pretty lazy about sideboarding, not always, but often. So I do think that there's a very real chance that blue-red could perform better in best of three both because of access to the sideboard and also I think that like the hand smoother is not doing any blue-red any favors relative to other decks. So, I think that, yeah, there are certainly reasonable reasons to consider the possibility that blue-red could perform better in best of three. If you prefer playing best of three, you're playing a magic online or you're playing in paper events. I would be a little bit more willing to draft blue-red, but it wouldn't change how I'm prioritizing things. You mentioned staying away from runaway together, I've actually liked it a decent amount when I have an Eddie Mark crab or two. Yeah, I understand the interaction you're looking for where you get to like crab a whole bunch of creatures. That doesn't sound like a thing that I would want to draft expecting to happen. Like your blue-red deck is usually looking to have a lot of spells, especially if you have Eddie Mark crab, which means that you're often just going to be like trading your removal spells for your opponent's creatures. So like it's weird to imagine this spot where your opponent has like a lot of creatures and you want to like tap them all down with an Eddie Mark crab and then that's going to let you get a bunch of creatures through. And like in that spot, it sounds like you probably got there because you have like Tempest Angler and some other big creatures that are holding your opponent off, which is to say that it doesn't really sound like there are any creatures in your deck that you really want to cast runaway together targeting other than the crab. So like this sounds like it's trying to optimize for the games where you've already successfully cast Eddie Mark crab. And I just feel like those are the games that are going well anyway and a card that could be cast before the crab would generally serve the deck better overall. What are your thoughts on gossip's talent in blue red? I would not want to play gossip's talent in blue red. Again, I think that you want a pretty low creature count, which means that the first mode of it isn't going to trigger all that many times. You're playing a lot of removal, which means that the evasion mode isn't doing that much because your opponent is less likely to have as many creatures and you shouldn't really be prioritizing the creatures that would go in frogs, like that kind of ETB creature very highly. You're really like your ETB creatures are really just like your big creatures that if you've cast them and they're staying around, you're in pretty good shape. I'm not going to claim that it's impossible to ever have blue and red cards in your deck and want gossip's talent, but I would suspect a vast majority of blue red decks should avoid gossip's talent. I think if you're playing it just to surveil a few times, you would be better off playing basically any other card instead. How do you think about the right amount of lands to play in blue red decks? That's a reasonable question. These are decks that are trading resources a lot and so they could certainly flood out or they could certainly benefit from like drawing fewer lands later. So I think it's reasonable to consider trying to like decrease your land count. On the one hand, on the other hand, you're trying to play a lot of like expensive finishers like Quake Tusk 4 and Daring Wave Rider that really like want you to hit your fifth and sixth land on time. So I think that my preferred approach is to play like 17 lands plus bells and then just have some way to like draw enough extra cards or rummage to like make up for like drawing lands in the mid to late game. But if you're heavy on sheep removal and a little bit later on top end, I think it's very reasonable to cut a land or two. Also, honestly, I keep finding that in this format in general, I kind of like to air a little bit lower on lands. Like I've started to, you know, trim some number of lands when I have cash grab in my dock and I find that flooding out can be a pretty serious issue with a lot of my docks. So I wouldn't mind leaning further into experimenting with slightly lower land counts provided. I have a good amount of like two and three men are removal spells. Especially, you know, the like blue red deck is not, it's not important to curve out. It's only important not to fall behind. So as long as you have enough answers that like it's not important that you cast a Quake Tusk 4 on turn five if the board is empty. Like if you just have a bunch of removal spells and you need to catch this eventually to kill your opponent before you deck yourself, it really doesn't matter which turn that's happening on. So the more like one for one removal you have, the more it makes sense to like cut your land count as long as all of your one for one removal is cheap enough that you can reliably cast it. And it helps to also have some card draw to help make your land drops. But then again, you know, it gets like there's a big difference between pearl of wisdom and the five fan of draw three in terms of how much they make me want to think about decreasing my land count. Like pearl of wisdom I can plan to use to hit my fourth and fifth land drops. Whereas I need to play enough lands to naturally hit my fifth land drop to play a five fan of draw three. And in that case, I wouldn't want to play fewer lands. So it's going to depend a lot on your specific spell composition. But I think that you should certainly consider change like you should not always play 17 lands in blue red. And there are versions of blue red that can have expensive spells and want lower land counts and versions that can have cheap spells and want higher land counts. It really depends on how much removal you have and even more than that, how much mana your card draw spells cast cost. If your card draw spells cost three or fewer, you can cut lands if they cost five or more. You want to add lands. If they cost four, maybe stay at around 17. All right, so I'm going to wrap it up there. The important notes are again, there are multiple different approaches to blue red, but I think they kind of all or most want to prominently feature spells. And then it's kind of just like what support you have for those spells and which spells you have that can dictate whether your more like play spells first, then play creatures is kind of the control deck model where you have cheap removal and big finishers or play creatures first, then play spells is kind of the like prowess tempo model. So you want to figure out like, if you're firmly one or the other of those and modify your hard choices appropriately. And outside of that, I think that blue red is playable as kind of a way to exploit how underplayed each of these colors and the colors together are. And it's also noteworthy that when blue and red are played individually, I think both of them want significantly different blue and red cards most of the time than the blue red deck where you're playing blue and red together want. So I think that this is going to be an open color combination more often than most other color combinations. And from everything I've heard, there are players who have gravitated toward looking to end up here and been relatively happy with it. So this is an interesting space for kind of a worst deck to be where it doesn't perform well in aggregate. And I do think it's, the cards are relatively weak and under supported, but there is some room to take advantage of how open it is and to have success if you draft it well and get the right stuff reportedly. So an interesting archetype, even if it's a little bit difficult, I've been having some fun exploring it today, even if I don't feel like I have it white to the point where I think it would be one of my best performing archetypes personally. So definitely something that I'm looking to experiment with a little bit more still and that's it. So thanks for listening, have a good week and I will be back next week as usual. Bye for now. Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]