Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 185: Green Red in Bloomburrow
Sam teaches you everything you need to know about Gruul in Bloomburrow draft
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- Duration:
- 32m
- Broadcast on:
- 16 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Hi everyone. This is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And this will be the last episode for real covering Bloomberg. Next week we will be on first look at Duskmorn. Today I will be talking about Red Green in Bloomberg. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/draftingarchitites. Red Green is the least drafted and least successful non-blue archetype. Ahead of Is it Demir and Zorius? Simic is actually the third most successful and fourth most drafted archetype. Despite being blue, the top archetypes are all green. Simic is green. Red Green is the worst green archetype. And the second worst red archetype, which is interesting, like, it's interesting that it's the second worst red archetype given that green is the best color. Clearly the synergies here are coming together a little bit less than the synergies with some of the other colors. In my, I suppose, a two drafts now, I have drafted Red Green zero times. You'll note that I'm recording a podcast about it despite the fact that I've recorded it no times. This is what happens when I choose what to talk about based on patreon poll. I think people are maybe interested in hearing about what I have to say about it. Given that I haven't drafted it, maybe thoughts on why I haven't or what's going on here. It's not that I think that Red Green is bad exactly. Like, it's fine. I've gotten run over by it. It's that I think it's not fun or interesting. I'm basically fully antagonistic to this archetype, largely from a design perspective. I think Expend is a really bad mechanic. There's very little you can do in a draft to make it happen, especially in an archetype that basically just wants to play large creatures on curve and especially when the payoff for Expend is kind of just like your creatures are bigger on your turn. So you really have to be aggressive with it. Like, conceptually, it rewards you for drawing more cards so that you can spend more on a casting spells. But in practice, that's not what's going on with Red Green here. If the mechanic cared about what you were spending your mana on or if like some non spell things that you could spend mana on, some are all like counted toward Expend, then it would be a lot more interesting to draft. As is, it just has no texture whatsoever. There's nothing you can do in a draft to be better or worse at Expending. Especially when it's in an archetype that's just trying to like curve out creatures and removal spells and like cast your spells on curve. So it basically just rewards drawing well rather than any sort of actual like planning or consideration in the draft. So there's really like nothing related to the Expend mechanic specifically that you can meaningfully do in a draft to like draft for it. So I don't really understand like what I'm supposed to find interesting about it from a drafting perspective. So I don't like it. I think it's just a bad mechanic. Like what's the point of having a mechanic that doesn't provide any like direction or like nuance to decision making during a draft when it's like clearly a mechanic that's targeted at limited. I just, I feel like there are a lot of things that could have been done slightly differently with it to give it some amount of play. And like I frequently talk about how I think that like the red green set mechanic in a lot of sets has been pretty bad and it results in like red green not being like a fun or interesting or powerful archetype to draft. And I think there were a few sets that made some progress on that and did some like better things with it. And I think that Expend is a pretty big step backwards. There's like just nothing I like about this. The primary reason to draft red green is that the red green gold cards are strong. Specifically, Wanda Tail Mentor, the red green uncommon tutu, the taps for red or green mana and gets a plus one plus one count on it when you expend is very strong and not really splashable. So all of the copies that are open just end up in red green decks. Given that the only real reason I could see to draft red green was, well, at least you get to use the Wanda Tail Mentors. I decided to do a little bit of research. On Untapped, 63% of red green decks that trophy have Wanda Tail Mentor. Now, obviously just saying 63% probably doesn't mean a lot. So for context, I compared it to some of the other good mentors. For example, Lily Splash Mentor is a card that similarly basically all blue green decks want and blue green decks are going to win more when they have it. And 56% of blue green decks that trophy have Lily Splash Mentor. Similar point of comparison is Vine Reap Mentor, which obviously all green black decks want. It's the top performing uncommon. So having it's going to correlate strongly with winning, 58% of green black decks that trophy have Vine Reap Mentor. So five and seven percent more of the red green decks that trophy have their mentor than the like Simic or Golgari decks. And so like I'm saying, it's not just that like Wanda Tail Mentor is better, like it's not. It's just that I think the other color combinations have more going on, more other reasons to draft them and more other reasons that they would be successful. Whereas a larger portion of the success and reason to draft red green is coming from Wanda Tail Mentor specifically. Also, the red green rares/mythics are also good and reasons to be red green. They're like strong rares. Like it makes sense to me that not all red green decks that trophy have Wanda Tail Mentor or something, but is a huge part of what's happening here. As for other individual cards, the common red and green removal spells all perform well, well enough. Well enough that you'd want to consider playing them. Every single red or green common that can kill a creature. All of them, for example, perform better than three tree root weaver, the one three that taps for a man of any color, which I mentioned because the root weaver is somewhat overplayed and really not what this deck is trying to do, even though you might want to play an above normal density of four mana cards and so being able to cast a four starting on turn three and then cast more fours seems kind of appealing. That's just like, you want a more normal aggro curve than that. Like it's better to just play a two drop. It has like an aggressively stated two drop, then an aggressively stated three drop, then start playing your four drops and root weaver is just going to be a terrible draw anytime other than exactly turn two and you're going to want to play like root weaver, like if you're playing root weaver, you're still going to want aggressive twos. So you have to figure out like is it better to, like if your hand has both root weaver and an aggressive two, like which one of those do you cast on turn two and it kind of has to be the root weaver, but it's like really not helping that hand very much to do that. So avoid that one. The top common creatures are tree guard duo, the frog rabbit four mana three four that when it enters gives something plus X plus seven vigilance wrecks the number of creatures you control, bakers bane duo, the two two that makes a food for two and when you expand gets plus one plus one, root shield rampager, the four mana four four with offspring, that can't be blocked by small creatures, junk blade bruiser, the five mana four five that when you expand gets plus two plus one and trample, Elena's path maker or Alania's path maker, the four mana four two that like bottles the top card of your deck and rough shot duo, the three mana three two trample that when you expand gives something plus one plus seven trample. Those are mostly like common creatures that you want to play. You're basically to the extent that you're playing commons, you want to play like those creatures and all of the removal and high stride, the one green plus one plus three untap and give reach trick. This is, I think the color combination that's most interested in high stride and it's pretty good here. Notably, you play the kind of creatures that play well with the kind of trick that high stride is. The bigger your creature is, the more you want your trick to give toughness relative to power. And the bigger your creature is, the more stuff like untapping and getting reach matters. And the clunkier your deck is, the more like the one mana play is important and the more like untapping and ambushing a flyer is gonna be important to swinging a race. Also, it's nice to have someone mana tricks in this archetype for spots where you like play a rough shot duo on three and then play another three drop on four and then you have a one mana trick so that you can trigger expanded instant speed to kind of turn your one trick into two tricks. That's kind of like the most interesting thing you can do with expand is trigger at instant speed, ideally for less than four mana because you've already spent some of the mana and most likely on your turn. Though that's really like a complete list of comments that you wanna be playing. You know, you can play some of the other creatures if you came up short on the ideal ones. You generally want the ones that are more aggressive in some way. Due to the more or less complete lack of any relevance synergy in this archetype and the fact that expend largely forgives bad curves, I think that this is the archetype where I would, this is the kind of archetype where I would feel most comfortable basically just like pulling up the, performing like the game and hand win rate stats and just taking the highest win rate card in your colors every pick. It might be like there will be times when you'll make a sub optimal pick if you do that, but I think on average they'll be pretty rare and I think that drafting strictly by stats would outperform most drafters drafting, just based on like not knowing the stats and taking cards that look good or whatever. Trophy decks in this archetype or color combination typically seem to have like between 15 and 19 creatures makes sense that you want a high density of creatures given, or like, yeah, you want a lot of creatures because there are a lot of strong fight spells in green like you want your brawls and your poly wallops and those need you to have creatures in play, you also have the rabid gnaw and red. So you want to play a bunch of cards and hunters talent, like there are a lot of cards you want to play that only work if you have a creature. Also, you don't really have like card advantage. So, and you don't have a lot of synergy. So this is an act that like really wants to be ending the game. Also like once you've used cards in your hand, then your expend becomes much less reliable and your deck just like works less well in the late game. So you really want to be ending the games. You want to make sure that you have like a large number of aggressively stated creatures, but removal is also very good because your low synergy and your creatures are independently high impact. So like removal lets you break up your opponent's synergies so that your larger creatures just kind of beat up on their smaller creatures and that's sort of the end of the story. So you want a high creature count, but also a high removal count, which is to say you don't want much other stuff. And yeah, basically you don't want anything, fancy or tricky, you don't want to spend mana, something that isn't like a creature or removal spell 'cause your goal ultimately is to connect with creatures and you want to like do that in the timeliest fashion, put the most pressure on your opponents. So something like a cash grab that could potentially slow your development down, even though it's a way to spend more mana to trigger expend is not actually worth it. Same thing with like Sazacap's brawl, the tormenting voice variant. All of that stuff would be like fancy stuff that it would be cool if this deck wanted to give some like texture to expend, but the reality of like the cards involved in the other incentives is that you just don't want to mess around if any of that stuff. So that's kind of what I have to say about red, green, mostly why I don't like it, but also like from a design standpoint, not a parallel standpoint, but also a little bit about how to draft it and why. So anyway, that's what I have. I'm mostly just antagonistic toward this archetype, but I do want to make sure to give the applicable strategy advice to people who are interested in that, although I suppose it's convenient that this is approaching the end of the format. So a time when it makes more sense to I guess focus more on like design considerations and stuff to think about in a broader context and where like strategy advice for this particular set may not matter quite as much. With that said, going to turn it over to Twitch chat for additional questions while I'm waiting for people to submit some of those, I do want to thank the newest patrons. So thank you, Ryan and Vexisto, really appreciate support for anyone else who is interested in joining the Patreon and supporting the podcast. Be sure to check out patreon.com/drraftingarcotypes. All right, so questions from chat. Do you not like Red Green because it doesn't use Barkform Harvester? No, I don't like Red Green for the reasons that I said, but it is true that Red Green is a absolutely terrible Barkform Harvester. Deck, in fact, the stats on untapped that kind of break things into tears, have Barkform Harvester as the sole F tier performing card in Red Green, the single worst performing card by enough that it got its own category. And I, as a general like Barkform Harvester, apologist and someone who's inclined to explain why it might make sense in some places where the stats aren't good would agree. Red Green has no interest in Barkform Harvester. Can I say more about why the bigger your creatures are, the more you want combat tricks to give toughness relative to power? Yes. If you have a 1-1 and your opponent has a 3-3 or a 4-4, you want a combat trick that's gonna give you like two or three extra power so that you can trade your 1-1 for their bigger creature. You don't really care very much if the trick also gives you enough toughness to keep your 1-1 because it was a 1-1. And you're at the stage in the game where your opponent has much larger creatures than that. If conversely, I have a 4-4 and you have a 1-1 and you use a trick to get your creature to be bigger than mine, then all I need is a trick that's gonna give me enough toughness to save my creature. More likely what's gonna be happening is you're going to be double-blocking. And in that context, I'm likely to be able to kill both your creatures with any sort of pump. But if I only kill one creature, that's fine too. The thing I really care about is saving my big creature. Like, it's a big creature I've spent a lot of mana on it. I don't want it to go away. And toughness is what's going to let me keep that creature when it gets like double-blocked. Also, tricks that give toughness functionally counter removal spells that attack toughness. That being both minus X minus X and damage-based removal. With small creatures, you don't care very much about saving it. So you don't really care about your tricks being able to save your small creatures from removal spells. But with your big creatures, it's more important that your trick can be used as a counter spell for removal spell. So toughness weighted tricks double down on virtual card advantage. I'd say more they protect your investment, but you can think of that as doubling down on virtual card advantage. Could I talk about agate assaults underperformance in red-green relative to other archetypes? Is it just difficult to expend four with three mana spell? Or is the effect also less interesting in red-green? I think it's mostly that red-green's worse. I don't think assault does. I don't think that assault is significantly lower on the list of successful red commons. I think if you're looking at it and a salt wins 1% less in red-green than it does in red-black or something, I would want to see how much of that is a function of red-green winning 1% fewer of its matches than red-black. I didn't notice assault as a card that was low on the list of red commons that you want. It's assault is giving him that. It's when rates are a little bit worse than conductors, electricity and red-green, interesting. Yeah, I think that's more about conductor electricity getting a buff from being an instant speedway to expend four. But I talk about the agro-dex wanting big hard removal spells and controlled acts wanting cheap, efficient removal spells. So this kind of ties back into the agro-dex being play creatures, then play spells, controlled acts being play spells, then play creatures. So given that red-green is an agro-dex, and that red-green is going to struggle with big creatures, it makes sense that the hard removal that's like a little bit like clunkier, even aside from the expend, is going to be more of a priority in red-green than it would be in some of the other archetypes that are more capable of playing red as support for a longer game. So I think mostly what you're seeing is conductor electricity over-performing in red-green, but also, yes, to some extent, assault. Like three mana, exactly, is a bit worse than more than three mana or less than three. Like the just-doesn't-trigger-expend is certainly a bit of a downside. It matters less on creatures that you're carving out with 'cause like you'd want to be able to play a three drop on turn three, but like assault's not a card that you're hoping to cast on turn three, 'cause you're going to be casting it later in the game where you would rather it cost a different amount of mana. Do you draft the deck differently when you have more of a trash tactician? The rare that has the expend eight claws, like do you want to build toward the expend eight using card draw slash cantrips? I don't think so. I think that like, if I were doing that, it would be in a three-color deck that was like playing this card and playing cards from other colors that let me play a different game plan with like actual card advantage to be hitting my land drops. And most of the time that you're like actually red-green with the trash tactician, I think you just want to be a normal deck that might happen to like hit the expend eight in the late game, but that's like incidental and not like a big part of your strategy. If they didn't have the mana to cast spells restrictions, do you think expend would be a better slash more interesting mechanic? Yeah, I do. I originally thought like, I originally misread it and thought that it worked when you just spent mana on anything and I thought that it was like cool 'cause it gave context to like wanting to look for like talents and equipment and other mana sinks to like have something to spend mana on to trigger expend. And when it's just spells, I just feel like you can't do anything with it. You can't draft around it. Obviously, you know, maybe it would need to be balanced a little bit differently if there were like more inputs that triggered it. But I think that basically any variant on what it is would be better than what came out 'cause there's just nothing do with this. You can't draft around it. It's just literally take any card. So I would have liked any amount of, you know, it only works for certain kinds of spells. It also works for certain kinds of abilities. You know, even something as simple as, oh, it only works for like red or green spells. So you like, it really can't splash or whatever. Just like anything to give it some context would have helped. In this sort of situation where the payoffs for an archetype aren't really worth pursuing, should I try to make something generic, like red, green combat tricks to see if some, there's some alternate way to play the deck. So the problem is there just aren't very many red or green combat tricks and the like, the might of the meek doesn't like play well here. Like giving tramples cool, but you have other ways to give trample and without caring about valiant and without getting an extra power from having a mouse, it's just not a good card. And so in general, I do like my like red, green, aggressive decks to have a lot of combat tricks. But I just, those cards aren't there. So you have to play removal instead. And again, because your creatures are generally like bigger than other colors creatures and less synergistic, it just makes sense to like have removal to break up their synergies and make sure that you can attack like to clear double blocks and stuff. You should pursue something generic, but it's kind of like just mandated that it has to be maximally generic. It has to just be creatures and removal spells. And I mean talents, like obviously the talents are just good cards and you can play them too. Like Blacksmith's talent works fine here. You have a lot of trample creatures that are big, so giving them double strike is powerful. Never drafting an 80 draft. Is there anything that could put you into red green? Yeah, I think hugs is really good and all first pick hugs. And then if there's not something that pulls me into like a different color where I'm splashing, like I'm some kind of three color hug stack, which is my expectation when I take hugs. And then if I like get some Wandertail mentors that like really don't want me to be splashing, I would kind of like lean into that. Or if there's just like a weak pack with Wandertail mentor and then I get some other like cards that don't lend themselves to splashing and do lend themselves to attacking. Like those are the kinds of things that would get me to draft it. But everything it's trying to do is just very much not what I'm interested in doing generally or looking to do in this set. So it would certainly require some pretty extreme packs. Overall thoughts on Bloomberg as I wrap up. That's a fair question, given that this is the closing episode on the topic. X out of 10, I'm not going to give it a score out of 10. I don't really like trying to rank sets for a lot of reasons. But I have enjoyed it. I like the depth in this set. I feel like there's both a lot of ability for me to explore like wacky multi-color control nonsense. That doesn't really care about a lot of the like explicit set themes and like types energies. And also for someone who's like looking for a like simpler experience with like more hand holding, you can just like choose a type and draft round it and end up with like playable deck. And depending on which like type you choose, it might have like some pretty fun and interesting synergies. I think it has a nice spread of like interesting build-arounds that take you outside of some of the like core mechanics with enough like depth and power and synergy in the kind of like core mechanics and scripted archetypes that I think it has like obvious entry points plus room to explore plus room for like fringe decks with like kind of unexpected overlaps and neat like discoverable synergies. And I've found the gameplay like pretty fun and interesting. And I think like the position of blue is pretty good where it's not performing well in aggregate, but I know a lot of strong players like it, but still are kind of doing different things with it. So all of that seems pretty nice to me. Yeah, so I think that I like the set overall. I think that some of the types are like much better supported and much more interesting than others. I think expand is really bad. I think the birds are basically a mess. Like they're low power level, low synergy, low density, like nothing really appealing about them. I think we're like a cheap common otter short of otters being in a place I'd be happy with. Birds are birds and misbalanced wise design wise are both kind of both. Like they're like central conceit being like birds plus nonbirds is like weird and doesn't really make a ton of sense with the rest of the set and isn't very appealing. It's like, hey, you like birds? What have you played not birds instead? Like who is that for? And then also, it's just a lot of like windbreaks, not that bad, right guys? No, windbreaks really that bad. So I don't know. I think birds are just kind of a mess all around. Anyway, yeah, I think that's basically my thoughts on Bloomberg was a set and that seems like a pretty reasonable place to wrap up my coverage of Bloomberg. So thanks everyone for listening and I will be back next week to take an early look at Dusport. Bye for now. Prepare for light speed. [Music]