Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 187: Red White in Duskmourn
This week Sam dives into Boros in the newest draft set
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- Broadcast on:
- 30 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes and today I'm going to be discussing White Red in Dusk Morn. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/drafting Archetypes. White Red is the most or second most drafted and winning deck, depending on who you ask. 17 lands and untapped disagree. They each have it, one has it winning more, but drafted less, the other has it drafted more and winning less with blue, white is the other. So kind of neck and neck between red, white and blue, white, but those are the top performing decks out of the gates and that's kind of why I'm talking about White Red. I feel like in a lot of ways, White Red is kind of setting the benchmark or baseline for the kind of pressure that you need to be ready for in this format. I would describe White Red in this format as Persistent Agro, which is different than how I would categorize White Red in most formats. In most formats, White Red is more just like raw speed or go wide or something like that. Here, I think you have a lot of different tools that you grind in different ways. So for example, cards like split skin doll, one and a light for a two one that draws a card and if you don't control creature with power two or less, you have to discard after that, but it's just a two man is who won the draws a card if you have another small creature. A reverent gremlin, one in a red for a two two menace that once per turn, when a creature with power two or less enters, you can rummage. Painters Studio, which is a room that when you unlock it, runs inside or whatever, exile two cards, you can play them until your next turn and that's attached to a room that gives all of your creatures plus one plus one attack. And then to a lesser extent, because they're weaker, but you also have cards like living a phone, the three man a two one that looks at the top like six cards of your library for a small creature when it dies and puts it in your hand. Rip chain razor can the four man a five three reach that you can spend two and a red and sack of line to draw a card and impossible inferno, the deal six to a creature. And if you have delirium, you can play the top card of your deck until next turn. So all of those kind of like keep cards flowing and give you some card advantage so you can grind a bit more than usual. You also have things like glimmer light, the two man a plus one plus one, equips for one equipment that makes a one one enchantment creature glimmer when it enters, as well as defaced gallery, which is one of the rooms that pumps your creatures. Optimistic scavenger, which is one one that when an enchantment enters, puts a plus one plus one counter on a creature you control that costs one white to play. And most valuable slayer, the four man a common two four that gives an attacking creature plus one plus out in first strike. All of these help keep your small creatures relevant in combat or make your medium creatures even bigger to let your creatures kind of trade up. It ends up feeling sort of similar to playing with the exalted mechanic. When a creature attacks alone, it gets bonuses for all of your exalted creatures. This is just a way to like suit up one creature, send it in, they have to like jump block it or trade with a larger creature than the base size of your creature. And then you can repeat with all of these things targeting a different creature. And then cards like jump, scare, and turn it inside out, which are both strong one mana tricks. Jump, scare is the white instant that gives a creature a plus two plus two and flying and turns it into an art enchantment or into a land of turn and inside out is plus three plus zero. And when the creature dies, you manifest dread. These make it easy to attack with all of your creatures, even into larger creatures, helps with kind of the go wide attack with everything strategy. Then you also have efficient removal like scorching dragon fire, one and red deal three exile creature that's damaged by it or trapped in the screen, the O ring variant in white to help play a fair mid-range game. And then you have cards like Arabella, abandoned doll, fear of burning, which is the one and red for a one three when it attacks. You drain your opponent for each creature with power to or less you control. Fear of burning alive is the six mana four four that deals four to your opponent and has some other text. And ragged playmate is the one and red two two. You can spend one and tap it to make a creature with power two or less unblockable this turn. All of those give the attack the ability to finish the game through blockers. You also have good tools to go wide with stuff like midnight mayhem, the four mana sorcery that makes three one one glimmers and gives them gremlins rather and gives them haste, lifelank and menace until end of turn as well as lion heart glimmer. The five mana to five ward two that pumps all your attackers and razor can hoard color. The five mana four four haste that makes one one when you attack and unsettling twins. The four mana to two manifest a tread. So a lot of good tools for going wide which is like another source of card advantage in those cases. Play is with like pumpier stuff or the attack with everything with combat tricks. So there are a lot of different ways that the red white deck can present pressure which makes it kind of hard to defend against all of these things. Sometimes creatures are attacking all at once or sometimes just one thing is going. The deck wants to apply early pressure but doesn't have to have a super low curve. There are like cards that are on plan all the way up the curve and because a lot of the cards naturally land to grinding a little better than white red often can. You really don't have to be like a hyper aggressive deck but you do want to have like cheap threats and apply pressure early because I think that this deck really wants to be on the front foot. You're very good at generating good attacks in a variety of different situations but you're not particularly good at defending yourself. A lot of your cards strictly have like offensive abilities like attack triggers and keywords like menace that only do things when you're attacking. And when you have to defend yourself your cards aren't really designed to do that. So it does have some higher toughness creatures that can block a bed but mostly you're good at attacking. So because the deck is hard to defend against but doesn't defend itself terribly well I think the best plan to try to beat white red in a vacuum or an aggregate is a slightly bigger proactive deck that has removal for their key creatures and mostly tries to put them on the defensive. I think red green might be pretty good at doing this. I before this stream was or before this recording was streaming a black white deck that was very good at making two two tokens and that played pretty well against white red. They just having like a lot of creatures that I didn't care very much and could make more of and could block with meant that it was hard for them to like go wide around me and when it came time to attack as predicted they were pretty open to me attacking with whatever I wanted to attack with. I wanna call out pyroclasm as not as effective as you might want it to be against white red because of things like glimmer light and the common room that can put counters on things. There are two toughness creatures don't always die to pyroclasm and a lot of their creatures have more than two toughness. I've found it pretty hard to reliably kill more than about two things with pyroclasm and often those are their less important things. So where you would expect pyroclasm to be really good against the like white red go wide small creatures matter archetype like that seems like the best place for it. It's just not particularly well positioned in this format or match up and like I'm still playing pyroclasm in my defensive decks but I'm not expecting to get a ton of value out of it. Just something to keep in mind because pyroclasm certainly reads like a very significant time common and in my experience it's been somewhat disappointing. Just particularly relevant to know when you're trying to figure out how to position your deck against the aggressive decks in the format like white red. So I guess that was pretty concise. I didn't get a lot into like specific card choices. I think that how you build white red is kind of flexible because it can play in all these different ways. And I think that for the most part if you just look at the stats of card win rates on untapped or 17 lands they are going to be about as predictive as anything I could say. I think you want to look somewhat for your synergies and for exactly what kind of pace you're trying to play because that can kind of grind or kind of lean into going wide or kind of lean into the one attack or per turn thing. Like the fact that someone who's playing against white red has to prepare for all of those to be things the opponent might be doing. It doesn't mean that any given white red deck needs to plan to do all of them or all of them equally. You can certainly lean into intending to play out to have your deck play out in such a way that you do one of those more or less often. So it feels like it should have taken longer to go over all of this than it did. But it's also kind of what I know. Like I'm not very many drafts in and I'm primarily approaching red white as what does my aggregate opponent look like and how do I want to be ready for it? So I don't have a ton to say going super in depth. So this is my overview and now I'm going to turn it over to chat for questions. So always I want to thank the newest patrons. So thank you to Cody and Sam for the support over at patreon.com/draftingarchitites. Do you think it's difficult for white red to balance being low to the ground and wanting the five-man removal spell? I don't think it really wants the five-man removal spell. Like I think it's fine to play it, but it's not a priority. I think that Inferno is better in most other red decks. I think that you want your top-end stuff to be more like top-end threats, which I get is interesting because of what I've said in the past about aggressive decks wanting to play creatures then spells and therefore wanting more expensive removal. But in this case, I feel like, especially when you get up to like five drops, you want to be like going wide and then playing like pump your team type five drop or just like, I think there are some five drops that are really good threats that you want to play like the razor can hard collar. And I think that you can just get more efficient hard removal like trapped in the screen. And if you are going to play a five-man removal spell, I think the white one that will sometimes only cost two is probably better because I'm not sure how often you're going to have delirium for the red one anyway. Yeah, so I did mention the Inferno earlier, but I mentioned it among the cards that have a lesser impact because they're weaker. So like there are things that the archetype can play but often won't. But yeah, I don't think that you want to be trying to be in that space like playing the Inferno. How do I feel about the three mana manifest dreads slash six mana creature double strike on attack room, ticket booth slash tunnel of hate? I have been impressed with it in teamer type space. I'm less impressed with it in red white. I think that you're not reliably going to have a creature that you're excited to give double strike two and three mana for the two two on the front is smaller than what you want to be doing to stay ahead. So I think that while it would be, you know, acceptable to have one of those or whatever in the deck, you're not getting a lot of the value that it like is trying to provide to other decks that care about the room or care about the delirium or make better use of double strike. So I don't think the white red's a great place for that one. How do I feel that shattered yard? The expensive part of the deal for room that pings the opponent for one each turn is late game reach. I think that that's, you know, I think that the deal for the image room is pretty good. I think that's fine, like appropriate removal for this deck. And I think the additional late game reach is nice. You'll activate it sometimes. It'll work with your strategy pretty well. What do I think are the bomb card combos in these colors? Well, as far as like actual, like, you know, what rare goes totally nuts here, I have to call out the red enchantment creature that when it dies becomes an enchantment that gives creatures plus two power and haste when they enter that one's like very crazy with any of the go wide cards, especially Midnight Mayhem attacking for nine where it all has menace and lifelink instead of three is radically different. Yeah, the four two haste that has to be blocked uncommon is nice with most valuable Slayer, where you get to give it first strike and they have to block a five two first strike. I feel like ourabella abandoned doll goes pretty crazy, pretty easily with like anything that makes it hard to block or anything that makes a lot of tokens. So this sort of strategy specifically a red, white one or can white X support this type of deck in general? Could Blue's evasion and card advantage support it in a similar way as red? I mean, if you're just saying, are there other white aggressive decks? I'm sure there are other white aggressive decks. The nature of red white specifically, I think is fairly unique in that red is contributing a lot of reach and like most valuable Slayer is a big part of the exalted type gameplay. And turn inside out is a big part of the like alpha strike go wide into big stuff gameplay. And the red white gold cards are both like very significant to the way in which the deck is like wide and wants to be on the front foot. So are there other aggressive decks in the format? For sure, are white reds like defining characteristics in this set somewhat unique to white red? I think so. Kind of depends on like what aspects of each of the decks you're focusing on. I'm sure you can find similarities, but I think that white red is pretty unique here. Thoughts on why unwanted remake seems to perform so poorly destroying creature for one man, and since being seen is pretty good, even if they get a manifest. Destroying a creature to give them a manifest for one man isn't very good. It's like only useful at all against creatures that are very large and you're not always being attacked by creatures that are very large. I think like thinking of white red, for example, as kind of the baseline thing you're trying to defend yourself against unwanted remake is very bad at doing that. The manifesting creature is gonna be about the size of their other creatures. And similarly, it wouldn't be good for a white red deck that's trying to attack to use it to kill a bigger creature because the two two is gonna line up relevantly against your creatures as well. So if we assume that white decks in general are in this kind of like go wide-ish type space, then like, I don't know. I mean, unwanted remake is good against a very small subset of creatures and really, really bad against the rest of the creatures. And in general, removal spells that give your opponents another creature are basically always bad. So it's not surprising to me that this one is also bad. Notice the nice interaction between Jelly Balloon Man with Arabella. If you're looking for the last few points of damage with enough two-barre creatures on board, I turned to a one-one flyer. I turned it into a one-one flyer and exact the original legendary to get through in the air. Yeah. Certainly a thing that you can do to push one extra damage, it seems like you're not pushing a lot of extra damage there since like Arabella doesn't need to connect to push like most of the drain. But yeah, I would imagine most other uses for Blue Man are better, but Blue Man is good and good with Arabella. How about am I running fewer than 17 lands in this space? I think relatively rarely because I think the deck is like, so there are a lot of, you know, red, white, go-wide aggressive decks that want to play fewer lands. I think this set is pretty good at giving you mana sinks in terms of additional rooms to unlock or sometimes manifested creatures to turn face up and in this deck having reasonably powerful four and five-minute plays. So I think that this wants to have a little bit smoother of a curve than some white red, than white red in some formats, where you just want to have like as many one and two drops as you can. I think that there are just too many like good on plan cards that are more expensive that most of the time, you just want to make your land drops and play those. This is the sort of aggressive deck that cares a lot about its ability to like, curve out and cast its big stuff on time. Like you don't want to stick on two or three lands because you want to play your four drop on turn four and your five drop on turn five. And you're like applying meaningly less pressure if you miss and have to play down curve. There are ways to build the deck, you know, like if you get a lot of good one and two mana aggressive cards, you're, that's, it's easy to believe that's a good deck and you know, you can trim lands if you don't have top end, but I think the aggregate red, white deck doesn't want to because there are just too many good four and five map spells in the format slash, you know, it's enough of the time the best card in the pack for you is going to cost enough mana that you usually don't end up trimming lands. Can the archetype support splashes? It's certainly the kind of archetype that doesn't want to splash by default. You're pretty aggressive, have a lot of versatility within your colors and have a lot of synergy within your colors. So like it's, you know, not super clear what you'd want to splash. I mean, there are aggressive cards, engagement colors, there are powerful gold cards. There is common fixing. You could try to get away with it, but I, I generally just don't want to in aggressive decks. If you are going to splash, please don't try to splash multiple colors. It seems to be a lot of good for it to opt. Should any of the commons accept maybe unsettling twins and most valuables there end up making your deck most of the time? I think that those are the best format of commons and that there are some format of uncommons that you want to play like Midnight Mayhem. So off the top of my head, I think that there are not other format of commons that you want to play. Note that that's really just saying Rip Chain Razor can isn't a card you're trying to put in your deck. Ooh, how resilient is the deck in terms of having enough good comments to have others drafting it in the pod? So like how many players can this deck support? So given that it's both currently the winningest and most drafted, again, maybe second on both of it on each of those deck, I think that there's certainly like enough room for multiple people to be drafting it. I think like looking at kind of the win rate spread of coming the archetype and looking at, you know, the cards that have like a lower win rate, you know, looking at stuff like living phone and Rip Chain Razor can and Holt herder impossible in for now. Like even a grand entryway slash Elgin Rotunda, the room that makes a one one and then puts counters on things has like not very good stats but I don't think it's like very bad if a white red deck has to play some of these cards. So, you know, like you don't want to be making your deck entirely of bottom win rate cards but the bottom win rate cards are not embarrassing still generally on plan. So I feel like, you know, if you have to go deep on the commons that you're playing, there's room too. So I certainly think it can support multiple drafters in a pod. So yeah, like, you know, if you see good cards for it early, I would be willing to fight for it, I guess. Okay, I think that's actually going to wrap us up. So thanks everyone for listening. Thank you very much, chat for the questions. I am now back in town and returning to my regular stream schedule. So I look forward to not being so far behind next week and thanks for bearing with me in this first week. So bye for now everyone. Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)