Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 186: Duskmourn Set Preview
Sam Black sits down to discuss his initial thoughts on Duskmourn limited
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- Broadcast on:
- 21 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And today I'm going to be taking a first look at Duskmorn. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/draftingarchitites. So with a new set, I think it's best to start with the official descriptions of what the archetypes are. So we know what the designers were targeting. Those don't necessarily end up all being equal or even necessarily being the best things to do in the color combinations. But it's good to know what the target is. So, her wizards, Blue White is Eerie Tempo. Eerie being a modified version of Constellation, which does not appear primarily if at all on enchantments, triggers when an enchantment enters or when a room is unlocked. I'm a little skeptical of the tempo part. I think that with several of these names that they give to archetypes, they'll often have multiple archetypes with overlapping mechanics. And then they just kind of ascribe a word that describes a like passive player strategy to the mechanic where it's like, this color combination has this mechanic. Okay, how is it different from this other color combination that also has this mechanic? Well, I guess this one's like a little faster, so we'll call it Tempo. So what I'm getting at here is that Blue Black is officially listed as Eerie Control. There's going to be a lot of overlap in the cards that Blue White and Blue Black are looking for. Certainly I assume Blue White will have more tools to be drafted as a Tempo deck, Blue Black will have more tools to be drafted as a control deck. I doubt either one strictly has to do either of those things. And I take those words as existing like more for differentiating like, you know, making it look like they're more different than necessarily strongly prescriptive of what you should be aiming for in a draft. Though of course, you know, I'm sure some amount of thought was given to like white being more aggressive than black here or whatever. But mostly what I'm seeing is that Blue White and Blue Black are intended to care about enchantments and rooms and stuff. Red Black is just called Sacrifice, as it very often is, sometimes with some other word like Sacrifice Agro or whatever. It's actually doing something kind of new and interesting here despite not getting a new and interesting title. The new twist is that Red has the ability to sacrifice enchantments, which is a color pie shift. Red hasn't been able to do that before. There are a lot of red cards that make you sacrifice stuff. And it's pretty rare for a red card to be able to get rid of even an enchantment that you control. So a little bit of a like color pie shift, which has some significance for other formats potentially, but also just new twists in terms of like what cards are available. And, you know, it means that there are a bunch of red cards that you sacrifice enchantments, which lets you use rooms that had an ability only when they become unlocked rather than a static ability or just maybe a room that one side is like an immediate ability and the other side is a static, but maybe you never bother unlocking that. You don't care, you just sacrifice it. So that's the new thing that's going on with Red Black. Red Green is delirium stompy. This is as contrasted with black green, which is delirium grind. Again, I think there's some flexibility here, but it is true that most specifically because of the red green, uncommon two mana, three, two haste with delirium plus one plus one and trample, that card by itself is very strong and very aggressive and does meaningfully push you toward wanting your delirium deck to be aggressive. And, you know, there's a decent amount of support in terms of like red and green creatures that are also artifacts or enchantments that are also pretty aggressive. It's a bit weird because delirium usually, like by default is better and longer games because in the early game, your delirium stuff's not on. And if you like play a longer game or trade more or whatever, then like, you know, delirium naturally has a strong late game. So declaring an archetype delirium stompy is making a statement about how much you're able to like subvert that with like just aggressive cards. And the answer is somewhat, but also, I think just kind of the natural forces of delirium are gonna push this deck to be a little bit more mid-range than it might imply. So that's what's going on there. I do think that this is more interesting than the aggregate red green archetype. Am I like red green being up to something that's not just like creature sizing or whatever? And so delirium is a welcome addition here. Green-white survival. So there is a survival ability word, I guess. Like it doesn't inherently do anything, but it tells you what to be looking for. And that's if this creature is tapped at the beginning of your second main phase, it does something. There's a lot of support here. There are a bunch of cards that have this word. There are a bunch of ways to tap your own things outside of combat. There are a bunch of ways to protect your attackers. So this is like sometimes themes will be like underserved where there just aren't that many cards in the set that really do the thing. This looks like it has enough cards that do the thing. I'm not sure how good the thing is. It'll be interesting to see if this deck like really comes together. But I like that it's a pretty new stab. Like this hasn't existed before and play is meaningfully differently than other green-white mechanics. So I'm cautiously optimistic about this, but I could see it being just a complete miss. White-black is a reanimator. And yes, that seems to be what's going on. There are a few different ways to return creatures from the graveyard to the battlefield at different commonalities. There are decent number of ways to get big creatures into your graveyard from various zones. There are a decent number of creatures that are very big that would be good to reanimate sometimes specifically better to reanimate sometimes not. So that's what's going on with white-black. Blue-red is rooms. I've seen people express skepticism for blue-red rooms, but I'm kind of a believer. A lot of the rooms are basically just creatures or removal spells with added value attached and creatures and removal spells with added value attached and then also getting some synergy for like playing a bunch of them. Sounds like a pretty good place to be and blue-red sounds like a pretty good home for that in terms of playing kind of the blue style rather than the red style where blue and red are always kind of like at odds there. Like rooms generally suggest that you want to be playing a longer game, buying time to unlock both sides of the room to get full value out of it. So I think that this is going to be the like red removal to kill your opponent's creatures while you're playing like more of a, you know, draw a bunch of cards win late game style game. So I see blue-red rooms as like viable and not aggressive. Worth noting if you're like a red aggressive player that red has support for blue-red rooms. So maybe more of the cards will be a little bit less aggressive but there's a lot of red-aggressed stuff. So I wouldn't really worry about that. Black green as I alluded to earlier is delirium grind. Again, grind versus stompy seems pretty whatever to me. They're both basically just general delirium but I think that, you know, there are definitely delirium cards that are much more set up for grinding and somewhat more set up for being aggressive. I wouldn't say that all of the good grindy cards are specifically in green black. I think that like impossible inferno, the red five mana instant that deals six damage to a creature. And if you have delirium exiles a card on a two-plate next turn is a very good grindy card that is green red or that is red rather, but yeah. So green black is grind is basically just green black. Like that's not adding anything to what anyone would assume green black is ever and delirium, you know, mostly, okay. It's a green black graveyard deck. It's the same as every other green black graveyard deck except yes, there is this mechanic that cares about different types. So watch having some type diversity in your deck. Red white is literally just listed as aggro which really undersells how much of a coherent mechanic has red white is actually two power or less matters but for whatever reason, the like official list just says aggro. But yeah, there is actually like a creatures that care about power two or less and ways to like go wide with a bunch of creatures with power two or less. So it's doing a thing, it's about as deep as red white usually is but, you know, that there's something there. I think both the red white sign post on commons are extremely strong. The two mana one three that when it attacks drains your opponent for each creature with power two or less that you have and the four mana make three one ones, give them haste, menace, and lifelink. Both those are really strong cards. There are a lot of like good one and two mana creatures. I think that the red percussionist, something percussionist, red one one, haste artifact creature when it dies. You can exile the top card of your library and you can play it until the end of your next turn. I think that card is very, very strong. I also really liked the turn inside out one mana instant that gives us plus three plus zero and when the creature dies this turn manifest dread, really helps with trying to attack with all of your little creatures. So red white aggro has looked pretty strong. Red white aggro basically always looks pretty strong on day one, but yeah. I'm a believer not that I expect that I personally will draft it a lot that should be no surprise. Blue green is listed as manifested red. The archetype has the same name as a card that has the same name as its text. That sounds true. That sounds like what the archetype is about. There are a lot of very strong uncommons that reward you for manifesting dread and also like blue and green each has a three mana uncommon sorcery that manifests dread that are great. The blue one is basically a mana war, except it actually, I think bounces any down land permanent. Maybe only your opponents, I don't remember for sure. And then you manifest dread and the green one is manifest dread, then you can return a permanent from your graveyard to your hand. I think both of those cards are fantastic. I think that sign posts are really good. I think that this space looks pretty strong. If you can get the uncommons for it. I think that this is a very uncommon reliant archetype, basically. The other thing that I always want to look at is the overlaps and which multicolor pair is just automatically makes sense given the like overlaps in the mechanics and the general set structure. So for example, Esper and Chantmans basically, you know, the overlap between blue white as eerie tempo and blue black as eerie control. Of course, when you're adding more colors, your deck should generally be more controlling. So really this is like Esper eerie control is I think often the way that that's going to want to play out. Jund delirium is another very natural one, especially because green has a three mana two one ETB search for a basic put it in your hand. If you have delirium that has plus one plus two and vigilance, which is a delirium card that enables multicolor. So it makes a lot of sense that you would want to play all the delirium stuff together. So Jund grindy graveyard delirium stuff seems like a very natural deck to me. I think there's also four color, non green, blue based enchantment slash rooms, basically, if you look at all of the non green archetypes, you have eerie control, eerie tempo and rooms. All of those are enchantment based decks. So you can just combine all of it into base blue with a whole bunch of enchantments stuff, doing a control thing that has like a lot of value from rooms and whatever else these things are getting up to. I'll get into fixing for how you would manage to do that kind of thing in a little bit, but I think that that is a coherent ducted draft. Four color non white manifest slash delirium. So this is basically acknowledging that all of greens archetypes that aren't white, like you're at the Jund delirium space and you already have fixing, you're already green, blue gives you the manifest red stuff, the manifest red stuff is really good at enabling delirium 'cause it puts a bunch of types in the graveyard. So if you add another color, you get to make your cards that are in your existing colors work better because you get better enablers for delirium. And so I think four color non white as a graveyard deck makes a lot of sense. Then I think there's also abzan, delirium slash manifest slash reanimator abzan graveyard. Now we're tying the white back in for the reanimator stuff but we're maybe less worried about the delirium stuff potentially or maybe not. And here you can use manifest with big creatures to either just straight up mill the big creature or maybe manifest the big creature and then you can flip it over or maybe it ends up trading off and then you reanimate it. Basically adding green to the reanimator thing probably doesn't hurt the mana very much 'cause it's green so you get more fixing and lets you get some ramp in for your big creatures and lets you get the green black delirium stuff that makes sense when you're trying to enable your graveyard for the reanimator stuff anyway. Those are some of the multicolor spaces that made sense to me. I'm sure others are possible but those stand out as likely multicolor decks. So fixing green has a good amount of fixing. If you're not green, you're looking at teramorphic expanse and 10 common tap lands. Note that common is not exactly right. They're in a common slot but actually they're in a land slot that means that their number per pack or per draft or per anything, their actual frequency of appearing is significantly less than other commons. So they're more common than uncommons, less common than commons. So there are fewer than the set implies if you just look at the like commonality symbols or whatever, but still 10 tap lands that other people might not be prioritizing very highly that you can prioritize if you're trying to play a lot of colors. And then I also like found footage, the one mana artifact that lets you look at face down creatures and then you can spend two and sack it to surveil two and draw a card as a colorless way to see a bunch of cards to make your mana work. I think that that's like pretty good as soft fixing. It'll help your mana out a lot if it's a little bit sketchy and it also incidentally helps with delirium and stuff like that. And then I also think if you're trying to do the base blue thing with the rooms that I was talking about, underwater tunnel which is the blue single blue mana room that surveils to when you unlock it that is attached to another room that is three in a blue to manifest dread with a plus one plus one counter when you unlock it is a pretty good way to help with your smoothing in your early game. And then there are also land cyclers which aren't exactly fixing that they can basically like let you get away with functionally playing more lands than you otherwise would. And then you can use them for delirium enabling or reanimating or just casting 'cause you have extra mana sources in your deck. So the fixing is we don't have like the campus guide type thing. We don't have the mana worker type thing. We don't have a mana lift. We don't have a perfect prism. So there's a lot of missing support for multicolor that I guess is basically like redirected to the common tap lands which incidentally means like with teramorphic expanse and common tap lands as the fixing that we have, it's going to be a lot easier. Each additional color is significantly harder. Like sometimes adding the fifth color is basically free once you've added the fourth color. If you have a lot of like shimmering or hidden grotto type cards and mana lifts or prophetic prisms, then if you're fixing with those cards, one of them gives you every color. You can do whatever you want. So if you're four color, you might as well be five. With this, you need to find the correct dual lands or you need to like use teramorphic or like the green lamb searcher or whatever to find the actual color that you're missing. So the fifth color for example is appreciably harder than the fourth color which is why I suggested some four color archetypes that might make sense rather than just saying, "Hey, what if you're just five color graveyard?" 'Cause white gives you the animator and all the other stuff uses graveyard the way the four color deck does. So I think true five color is potentially possible but I'm likely gonna try to be in a more three or four color space most of the time that I'm doing a multicolor thing. Random first impressions, a red eyebrow looks scary, hard to block, a lot of reach. Given that life gain seems pretty valuable. I think that the defensive cards that incidentally gain life are better than they might look. I think that you really need to respect the aggregate X. There are tools for doing that, but yeah. Strategic reach, red and keyword reach, yes. When I say red has a lot of reach, I don't mean now every set has some random big red common that has reach this does. It's a five man, a four man, a five, three with reach and you can spend three in second-handed rock card but I'm talking about red's ability to kill you when you're trying to block and have stabilized but your life totals low. And those are my first impressions before playing. Having played for about five hours, I don't think I would change much of that. Red aggro did feel very strong when I played with and against it. Mana that gets too ambitious has felt tricky. Density of enchantment synergies in a small number of colors has felt a little bit light compared to what I might want, which is a reason to branch into more color if you're going deep on removal or deep on enchantments. So yeah, mostly stand by my impressions from looking at the set list but I haven't had a lot of time to really challenge them. So of course, still take it with a grain of salt. We're very, very, very early in this and I'm going entirely based on my own experiences which are going to be colored by my biases and there's no like data or anything here yet. So all of that said, I'm going to turn it over to chat for questions and other things that I should be sure to cover and comment on. So I will now be answering questions and chats if you have any questions, make sure to put them in chats that I know to still address them. How did the removal feel? The removal's pretty good. Black removal, for example, I think the two mana deal two to a creature again, two life. I think that's my first impression is that that's better than murder, black, black, one, destroy a creature, which is also a common. But I think both of those are very strong and I think that basically, you know, like I said, I respect the Agriodact, so I think the life game's important but both of those are good removal spells. Red at common has scorching dragon fire, which is fantastic. One in red, teal three damage to a creature, exile it if it's killed. But I also think that impossible Inferno, the five mana instant that deals six and bottles of card if you have delirium is like the strongest expensive removal spell in red that I can remember really. Like I think it's a five mana red removal spell that I actually want to play at common, which basically never happens. White's removal's very good. Five mana to exile a creature that costs only two mana if it's tapped. It's very strong. And then there's like an oblivion ring type card. So I think the removal overall is pretty good. Do I feel like any color is significantly weaker than others, hem black? I didn't notice that. Like I said, I think that black's two removal spells are very good. I also think that like I think blue kind of struggles from not having like a standout common. I don't know how much that matters, but I don't feel like there's a blue common that I think is like very obviously better than the others or great, they're simply commons that I like. I don't think, I mean, I don't know. I'm not great at like out of the gate, which color is worst. And I'm not like a, usually when there is a worst color, I'm like pretty happy to draft it. Like worst in terms of like its stats or whatever. So not a thing that I really worry about a lot. Thread green going to be interested in trading creatures on its hack to hit the layer, our combat tricks less important than usual, more important about the same. So if we assume that red is interested in trading creatures when it attacks, that doesn't necessarily invalidate combat tricks because I think the best red combat trick is turn inside out, which lets you trade your creature and then replace it and put a bunch of cards in the graveyard and I think that cards really good. And like solves the I failed to trade problem, although just using a combat trick and putting an instant in the graveyard is often going to be like what you were looking for. It's pretty easy to get a single creature in the graveyard regardless. Lot of rooms have a small effect each turn that adds up over time. The way I'd sign posts once sacrifice rooms is the conflict there a problem. The conflict is something to pay attention to. Like if you are planning to sacrifice your rooms, you want to make sure that you have rooms that you want to sacrifice. But I think that like blue red is not really planning to be looking to sacrifice rooms. That stuff is more for red black theoretically. So yeah, just pay attention to how you're planning to use your rooms and how you're planning to fuel your sacrifice stuff if you're playing sacrifice stuff. How often will we have drawn out games that end with somebody milling out. Manifestrade makes it so people go through their libraries faster than usual. Well, I had a game that ended with someone milling out, but it wasn't a drawn out game. It was because they played the six mana demon that basically guarantees that that happened. I think it will still be pretty rare. I think that this has a lot of aggressive decks that will end games quickly and a lot of decks that like generate a lot of value in the mid play game. And I think that the slow decks are snowball enough and have enough like big stuff that they can end games pretty reliably. And especially if slow decks are usually playing against fast decks and the fast decks aren't gonna be capable of putting up a lot of resistance against that. So it's only gonna be if like two grindy decks that are not prepared to play against other grindy decks and like don't have ways to avoid milling out or whatever or like good like hard finishers. Play against each other that like you'd end up going to milling. I don't know. It doesn't, oh, I guess I did also get milled by a dedicated blue milled deck that had two of the like 10, one guys that mill you. But again, I don't think that's really a result of a drawn out game. So I've played two games that ended by milling, but it was because of rares that make the game end by milling. So I feel the urge to go and watch some 90s horror movies now that you've tried dust component. Well, it would be 80s horror movies theoretically in terms of what the sets targeting. And I have never felt an urge to watch any of those movies and still don't. The flavor doesn't really do it for me personally, but that's fine. Can I say more about how 13 land, the 13 lifelands boost the deck being attacked? Yeah. If you're being attacked, your life total might get below 13 at a time when you want your land to be untapped. If I'm not attacking you, then your life total will be above 13 and your lands will be tapped. So the person being attacked is more likely to get their lands untapped, whereas the person attacking is more than the deck tap lands. Are the blue milling cards better because people are self milling or worse because people want self mill? Better because the primary payoffs are delirium and you like a little bit gets you what you need and the delirium decks are generally going to be set up to do it. And so they're just kind of giving you a headstart on the milling and it's not going to scale up their cards very much. But I think of the aura style removal spells in the set, the common O-ring, the one mana blue aura that sets baron toughness to zero two and the common sleep paralysis. I think of O-ring as very different than an aura and I'm generally skeptical of auras. The blue auras do seem like fairly pushed like their rates very good for what they're offering and I could see trying them out. But in general, I prefer to try to look to other answers to things so that I'm not giving my opponent a creature that they can in the case of the set to O-2, equip or use combat tricks on or sacrifice to stuff in either case or this free with enchantment removal since enchantment removal is basically mandocable here because there are a lot of enchantments. They're like enchantment creatures and rooms and these enchantments. So like I'm still going to try to avoid them but the rate is good enough that they don't seem clearly unplayable. Oh, they're untapped. If anyone's below 13, not just you. I did not realize that. Okay, the lands work differently than I thought. My opponent's basically never going to be below 13 before I am anyway so it doesn't really change much for them being untapped for me. Interesting. So that means if you're an aggressive deck and you're reliably getting your opponent to 13, you can count on them being untapped like you have more agency about it. Okay, in that case, I'm not really sure who they favor and I don't think they're all that streets you at least significant. Any cards that have the bark form harvester effect on your gameplay? I mean, the chandelier is this sets version of bark form harvester. I think it's quite a bit weaker and I think that, so there's also an uncommon that is like a de-glammer at sorcery speed shuffle an artifact or enchantment into its controller's library or owner's library and then you can also shuffle up to four cards from your graveyard into your library. I think that that's a much better way to loop your deck if you're trying to loop your deck, but I don't know if there's anything that returns that to your hand. So I think you might need exactly two of them to be able to loop your deck. I haven't double checked like the entire set to make sure there's no way to do it, but I think there isn't. But my preferred way to loop would be to get to it. That was currently. I have not played with or against Say Its Name, the common Mills 3 and returns things to your hand and the uncommon that you can find if you get a bunch of them. I think I saw like one Say Its Name and a draft, like at some point it didn't, it looked like it would be harder to assemble all of it than I might have guessed. That might be a function of fewer commons per pack than like the pre-play booster era. I think that the cards seem reasonable to play with if you get it all, but it looked like it would be difficult to get a large number of Say Its Names and then also to get the uncommon. Even if you like start with the uncommon, it seemed like more often than not, you wouldn't see three Say Its Names in a draft, even if you were willing to take them over or whatever. Would you want your Ebsan Reanimator decks to be base Orzov due to the double-pipped Orzov cards? It just depends on, I mean, no, 'cause you probably want green for fixing and then if you have green for fixing, you can probably manage your like double-pips eventually 'cause the double-pip stuff is pretty expensive. It's gonna vary from deck to deck. I'm sure you can do it with like whatever base colors you want, but I wouldn't necessarily, I don't think that green naturally makes sense as a splash in like Reanimator. So I see it more as base green, you know, and/or one of the others or solid three or whatever. What do I think of the common landcyclers? In general, I think landcyclers that cycle for two mana are not very strong. I think that they're okay as like delay random enablers and draw smoothers or whatever you want to think of just like the natural effect of having those near deck as and reanimation targets. If you're in the Reanimator space, I did have someone reanimate one against me. It wasn't very impressive. I just like double-blocked it and it was fine. I don't think that you should take them highly or prioritize them, but I think that they're playable cards. All right, I think that that's gonna wrap us up. So thanks everyone for listening. Thank you, chat for questions. For people who are viewers of my stream, I'm going to be out of town for the next week. Basically, I'll be back on Wednesday. I think that that means that I'm going to record my next podcast one day later than usual. So I'll be recording on Thursday next week. And I hope to just talk about an archetype then. I hope that I will be ready to do that. So that's where I'm at. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next, not exactly next week, but basically next week. Bye for now. Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)