Drafting Archetypes
Drafting Archetypes 188: Reanimator in Duskmourn
Sam talks about Reanimator in Duskmourn Draft
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- Broadcast on:
- 05 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone. This is Sam Black with Drafting Architects. And today I'm going to be discussing Reanimator in Dust Morn. Talking about the stats in this is a little bit weird because I'm not exactly thinking of it as a white black deck, but that's kind of what it's closest to. So white black is among the least popular and least successful archetypes. And DeMere is the least popular and least successful. And black is the worst performing color. I mentioned DeMere because I primarily draft Reanimator as an Esper deck, but I also think it works well as an abzandak. And sometimes it comes together in straight white black, but I think there's very little reason to try to stick to two colors and generally a lot of advantage to adding a third color. So I'm generally drafting it as a three color deck and trying to figure out like I'm black white on something else. Notably, I'm not really drafting it as like black white splash something. It's more balanced three or like one of green and blue is a main color and one of black and white is a main color and I'm splashing the other of black and white. The primary reason that I think blue and green are really valuable here, aside from just they give you more options for kinds of cards that you want, is I think that both colors make it a lot easier to hit your sixth and seventh land drops. They give you like, you know, card advantage from blue ramping slash finding extra lands or whatever in green. Just make it so that you can naturally cast your expensive creatures, which can be more difficult in white black. And I think it's really important that the deck can just naturally cast its creatures. I think the random, like you're not a combo deck. It's, the randomation spells are good. Putting big creatures in the graveyard is easy and casting a powerful creatures at the top of a control shell is easy and powerful. So I think that the deck just needs to be built in such a way as to plan to get to a lot of mana and then just cast powerful threats. I think the deck, regardless of which colors you are, should be drafted as a control deck, meaning you want your cheap plays to be blockers in removal. You don't want any creatures that cost less than six mana and care about attacking. You wanna just like prioritize, manifesting and removal and defensive cards and then really, really powerful creatures. I guess some of the powerful creatures that are common or uncommon, somewhat combined with the randomation spells, take the role of bombs in the control decks, need bombs framework that I've talked about in the past. Basically, the set construction around white black as a reanimator archetype provides an infrastructure that you can use at lower, common at lower rarity to have the kind of powerful late game that you need without necessarily depending on rares to play a strategy that's just trying to prolong the game and cast your powerful spells. So in a way, the reanimator infrastructure kind of lets you function like you're a deck that has bomb rares without necessarily needing as many bomb rares, which is a bit of a weird way to think about it, but kind of, I think, tracks for me. So the cards you're looking to take early in the pack are the like expensive, uncommon creatures that are good to reanimate, like shroud stomper, the white, white, black, black, three, five, five death touch when it enters or attacks, draw a card and drain your opponent for two and fear of abduction, the four white, white, five, five flyer that as an additional cost to cast it, you have to exile a creature and then when it enters, you exile when your opponent's creatures and it dies, the exiled creatures are returned to their owner's hands. Those are kind of the two premium ones, but the demon that makes your opponent sacrifice stuff and you have to sacrifice something as an additional cost to cast it is also pretty solid. So those like premium uncommon reanimation targets, manifesting, I take the non-basic lands, just like the common duels super highly. The draft I just did, I second picked a common duel removal, of course, especially like two mana removal, heart advantage, this is a lot of what you're getting out of blue, stuff like glimmer burst, but also any of the creatures that ETB and put you up a card in one layer and other are pretty solid here. And the reanimation spells can be taken highly, but you also usually get them later, but they're really good. So I'm generally pretty happy to take them highly, but I would potentially take good reanimation targets or fixing whatever over them, depending on where I'm at. You wanna have some of the common landcyclers, but you don't like, you want somewhere between two and four of them and they go pretty late, like no one else really wants them. So you really don't wanna have to spend real picks on them and it doesn't matter that much, which one you have. A cards that incidentally fill your graveyard or let you discard are nice, but not necessarily important. You can really get most of what you need out of incidentally milling stuff with manifest dread and land cycling stuff and naturally just playing a game. And then like, you know, there are a decent number of games where you just play a powerful creature, your opponent has to answer it and then your reanimation spell just cast it again. Like you're not necessarily trying to use your reanimation to get like giant monster out fast. Like it's good if that happens, but a lot of the games, that's not something that like matters. You just play your game, cast your big spell and then have redundancy. If you're in green, you're a little bit more likely to care about delirium. If you're in blue, you're more likely to care about enchantment synergies. Both of these can be instantly supported relatively smoothly with your like core game plan. If you're in blue, you have, you know, like both blue, white and blue, black are theoretically enchantment-based strategies in this set. So you want to plan to be able to like take advantage of that stuff. I kind of imagined that Esper control would be more about the enchantment stuff and less about reanimator in practice. The reanimator stuff is just so good in the shell and so open, especially because the stats on the white and black cards are so bad. I don't really understand exactly what people are doing wrong. I suspect that people are playing too many like generically high win rate aggressive white cards and not enough tools to get to the point where they're just casting their animation targets and kind of approaching it more as a combo deck rather than a control deck. That's where, so I suspect that white black suffers in the stats from a combination of players playing it as just like an unfocused mid-range deck that has too many aggressive cards or a focused combo deck that doesn't have enough intent to make land drops and play long games. That's the best I can come up with for why the stats on white black are like white blacks and not performing well because I've drafted it a bunch and I'm doing fantastically well with it. My win rate in this set is higher than any other set. Small sample size still, I did take some time away from drafting, the three most recent drafts on my stream before recording this podcast, I went 21 and two with three different Esperary animator decks consecutively, so I know the cards are good and then I just have to try to guess why they're not winning for other people. But regardless, the fact that other people are having trouble winning with them works well for me since I am playing them and it's going well and they just keep being there in the draft for me to take. Yeah, so white black, so the Esper space ends up doing your animation thing because it's just pretty easy. You have the blue common rooms, both the one that has the one mana surveil two option and the one with the five mana draw three discard one option. Both of those two rooms surveil two and draw three discard, let you get stuff in your graveyard while working with the enchantment synergies. So there are a lot of ways to find overlaps here. Glamour Burst makes an enchantment for your enchantment synergy stuff while also drawing cards to hit your land drops, to cast your big spells. So it's pretty easy to just get all of the pieces of everything in Esper to work together pretty coherently and that's played super well for me. But I also, I was originally intending to talk about Esper specifically in this podcast but I realized that abs in is pretty similar and when I'm drafting in this space, there are certainly drafts where I don't know if my third color is going to end up being blue or green for a while and there are a lot of powerful green cards I want to access to. And it is possible because you're like a green controlled act that's looking to get a lot of mana and play to end up being four color here. I do think four color is appreciably harder than three color in this set but you can pull it off. So yeah, blue is a lot more likely to be doing the enchantment stuff. Green, you're probably doing the delirium stuff and you're probably not doing the survivor stuff in any meaningful way. That stuff is about attacking successfully and I'm not looking to draft cheap creatures that attack so I basically don't want any of the survivor stuff in my like abs and reanimator decks. So let me go into some detail on appropriate comments for these decks in each of the colors. Unable to scream the one mana aura that makes something an O2, this is very cheap. So it's really good to like stay alive early. It's an enchantment so it triggers all of your like when you play an enchantment stuff at a very low cost. You are like exposed to being down a card if your opponent can get value out of the creature you've left them with. But because this deck has such overwhelmingly strong late game, you're usually pretty happy to like be down a card or a fraction of a card for the amount of tempo that it buys you. So that card's played pretty well for me despite generally not being interested in aura based removal. Twist reality, one blue blue counter target spell or manifest dread. This one's interesting because blue blue is potentially challenging in a three color deck but I do like having a counter spell in my control deck and the manifest thing is pretty nice. It lets you like if your opponent played like a creature that you need to block sometimes having a counter spell is really awkward 'cause your opponent is just like attacking you and you need to deal with the board and not their hand and manifest lets you at least usually trade with a two drop. Also and often more importantly, when you have like a reanimation spell and not a way to get a creature in the graveyard you can use this as a manifest to like dig to get like a big creature somewhere. So I've liked the flexibility on it. It's felt pretty good. I don't think, I think it's not a high priority card but it's pretty nice to play if you're gonna end up with eight or more blue sources. Meat locker and drown diner I think. Meat locker in the room that's attached to it. This is meat lockers, the three manner room that taps something down and it's attached to the five manner room that draws three and discards. One, I have mentioned how the draw card mode is good for making your land drops, potentially putting a creature in the graveyard if that's what you wanna do at that stage which is honestly somewhat unlikely. And then the meat locker portion of it just being a way to buy some time and stuff is a nice bonus card on this draw three. Like you're there for the card advantage but getting to buy time while you're at it's very nice. Vanish from site, the four manner instant that puts a creature on top and you surveil one. It's just a generically solid removal spell. You're looking for removal, that works. It's not the best removal but it's fine. And a diagram on megalodon, the six man of five, seven vigilance island cycler. I think this is actually a pretty good reanimation target. I think it's essentially like the second best land cycler after the black one. I like the high toughness, I like the vigilance. It's like meaningfully bigger than the white one and lets you pressure your opponent while playing defensively, which is kind of nice. Those are the like blue commons I'm really looking for. Notably I'm like, you know, it's fine to play like the two man of three three that like has defender and can exactly play an enchantment. It's fine to play the other room. It's fine to play the 2G that makes it one one. I don't know those things are priorities but it's like okay to include them. But they're, you know, not going to be like, they're going to be on kind of a low to normal and like edge of their overall range rather than like a particularly good fitness deck. Green monstrous emergence, the fight spell that can, that doesn't actually fight. I guess the bite or punch or whatever the deal damage is equal to power and you can have a creature in your hand as the number check for that. Just another, you know, functional two man or move spell particularly high functioning. If you're playing a bunch of like big creatures that are going to be hanging out in your hand. Wary watchdog, the two man of three one, ETB or dies surveil is just a good way to fix your mana, turn on delirium, find stuff in the graveyard to be animated or whatever. Just like a good amount of value and a pretty reasonable blocker. Manifest dread, doing something pretty similar to the Wary watchdog, like filling your graveyard and giving you like a cheap creature. I'm not, I think it's probably a tiny bit worse than the watchdog but very, very similar. Say its name. This is the mill three then return a creature or land from your graveyard, your hand. I think I like it less than watchdog and manifest dread most of the time it like sees more cards but I kind of like the early blocker that the others offer. I say its name feels like it's a decent cost in terms of not impacting the board for what you're getting out of it but it's certainly in line with what you're trying to do. Skittering branch snapper, the land cycler. Again, you're just, you want some land cyclers and it doesn't matter that much which ones they are. And moldering gem, this is the room that finds a land and then for six mana you manifest dread and put three counters on the thing. White, you're mostly looking for trapped in the screen. The common oblivion ring thing sees from slumber. The five mana removal spell that's only two mana because the tap creature emerged from the cocoon. The five mana reanimation spell that gains three. Back card, I really like the game three part of that. My card's very good. Unsettling twins, the two two manifest dread. I like that less than the other cards I said by an appreciable margin but I'm pretty interested in manifest dread as a way to enable graveyard stuff and then shepherding spirits. Again, I'm interested in all of the land cyclers. The black commons honestly aren't that great but you want black for some of the like reanimation stuff and a little bit more removal but the appropriate commons here are stuff like fanatic of the harrowing, the four mana two two, the ETB, both players discard if you discard, you draw. Winter's intervention, the two mana deal two gain two. Final vengeance sometimes. That's the black sacrifice creature or enchantment exile target creature. You want to be careful about making sure that you're supporting this card pretty well but if you are, it's a nice efficient removal spell. Murder, similar issues to twist reality where you need to make sure that you kind of like had eight black sources and it can be a little bit hard to cast but still solid removal, spectral snatcher. That's the black land cycler. I kind of like this one the most because the ward is very relevant and your opponent is often trying to use a removal spell on the thing that you're animates and innocuous rat, that's the two mana one one that manifests when it dies. Doing a very similar thing to the card manifest dread, you know, just early blockers that help with graveyard stuff. Incidentally, you can also pair these with red. Less likely, red could be a splash as a fourth color. There aren't very many red cards that you're looking for here but if you do end up playing red with the reanimation stuff you're primarily looking for Impossible Inferno, the five mana deals six with Delirium to get another card out of the deal. Scorching Dragonfire, the two mana deal three exile a creature that kills. Grab the prize, the tormenting voice and glassworks that a room that deals four. Not a ton of sport but, you know, it's a decent way to get some more removal if you're not seeing it in other places and you're getting everything else that you need out of your like white and black or whatever. In all cases where you're playing more than two colors you really want to be prioritizing the non-basic lands very, very highly. I really want to stress that. I take them over all sorts of, you know, good to medium cards, not over great cards but I am really looking to have like four to six non-basic lands in my deck. I looked over some like trophy decks from Esper on Untapped and noticed that most people only had like one or two and I, you know, it can work. Obviously these are decks that have trophyed but I think that the value you get from the improvement to your man of ace is worth a lot more than the card you'd be taking over the lands most of the time. So take the fixing early and often would be my advice. That's my rundown of the animator in this set. So I'm going to turn it over to chat for questions here on Twitch while I'm letting people fire up some questions. I want to thank the newest patron at patreon.com/drafting archetypes. So Alan, thank you very much for the support. I really appreciate it. If anyone else is interested in joining the Patreon, supporting the podcast and getting some perks, access to the notes, patreon polls when I run them, coaching discounts, draft logs, stuff like that, be sure to check out patreon.com/drafting archetypes. How do I identify the animator archetype is open during the draft, any strong signal examples? So because the deck isn't being drafted as a combo deck, you don't exactly need to know that like, the strategy is open. Also, it's felt like it's just kind of always open because it's not really what people are trying to do in the format right now. But basically, I just value the expensive, high impact creatures and the reanimation spells. But because I'm drafting a control deck, if I don't get a lot of one or the other of those, I still just have like, if I don't get the good uncommon reanimation targets, I still might see, I mean, obviously, there are just like a lot of rares that are creatures that are strong and being able to get them back is nice. And it's extremely easy to find the landcyclers. So if you take reanimation spells early and you don't see the strong uncommon creatures, you can usually find something else good to do with your reanimation spells if you're playing a control deck. If you take the strong uncommon creatures highly, those cards are all pretty okay to cast, like pretty good to cast. If you're playing a control deck and you're making your land drops and you're extending the game, and if you don't end up with reanimation spells and you just have to cast them, that's also fine. So you can kind of just take the pieces that are powerful spells that make the deck work. And then once you have those, you can start thinking about the like self mill stuff and the fanatic of the harrowing stuff and the various support for it. But basically it's like very safe to kind of like gently move into the deck while still primarily prioritizing cheap removal, cheap defensive creatures, just like drafting the fundamentals of a control deck. And then, you know, as you get more pieces for animator, you can start raising how much you're prioritizing subsequent pieces. So the question of like, is this open? Isn't necessarily a question that you need to engage with directly? If you are just kind of like going with it piece by piece, being like, does this work in my deck? Can I make this work in my deck? Does this improve the other cards in my deck? And I think that that approach can get you through pretty well. What's the biggest pull from blue to the aspirate animator? I mean, obviously any like busted rares that you get that like are strong creatures and or fill your graveyard. So stuff like the blue overlord and nashi, but also anything that draws in discards, and also just like blues, cheap interaction and stuff. It's like, again, because reanimator to me is an end game for a control deck, but like you're a control deck first and a reanimator deck second. That's what I'm trying to stress with this don't be a combo deck, focus on casting, like hitting your land drops and being able to cast your stuff. So the question to me is less what blue is bringing to reanimator and more what blue is bringing to control? So all of the just like generic card advantage and removal from blue is kind of like what I'm really looking for in my reanimator decks. Like with both blue and green, their biggest advantage to me is just that they help hit your land drops. Did you ever go to 18 lands if you felt like you might not have enough ways to hit land drops early to get the cards that increase card flow? I just did a deck tech on stream for someone that wasn't a reanimator deck, but did have, you know, it was kind of like a control deck with a lot of powerful spells that are expensive, they wanted to hit its land drops and I recommended going to 18 there. That is because that deck didn't have any landcyclers. Because I'm prioritizing the landcyclers, most of the time I'm going to have two or more of them and I'm not cutting lands one to one for landcyclers, but I'm certainly less likely to want to go above 17 lands if I have landcyclers. I think I've gone to 15 lands when I had like four landcyclers. It's weird because you are pretty aggressively looking to cycle the landcyclers 'cause you want them in your graveyard for the reanimation stuff, but also cycling them is pretty clunky so you can't really trust them to smoothly function as lands. So there's a bit of a balancing, you don't want to cut too many lands, but you probably don't need to add lands because of the role of landcyclers and just like card draw and stuff like that. What are the uncommons that I said would function like bonds with your animation effects besides the black 6'5" demon, fear of abduction, the white 5'5" flying fiend hunter's type card and shroud stomper, the white black, seven mana 5'5" Titan type card. The draws a card and drains your opponent for two on enters or attacks. Is dashing bloodsucker worth including? I could imagine playing it. It is not the kind of card that I like and I haven't played with it and it's not. Like basically it would be something didn't go well if I'm playing it. This is just generically true of almost any four mana creature that's like basically numbers. I just never play those. Like if I'm spending four mana for a common creature, I'm looking to get like card advantage out of it in some way or like some kind of more immediate effect. I'm certainly not looking to have to like combo it with other correct cards that I need to be able to play after it to make it not terrible. But if you're the sort of person who puts, you know, 5 mana do nothing bodies in your deck, then it's a relatively acceptable and I guess, do you think there's a boros version of your animator centered around emerge from the cocoon and fear of burning alive? I don't think fear of burning alive is a very good card. So I guess I'll say no. I think that there are slower versions of boros that can be a bit more controlling and can use and emerge from the cocoon. But I'd want to be doing something better than that with that I think. Like basically fear of burning alive. If I'm thinking about the right card, that's the deal for your opponent. And if I'm doing anything that's remotely like what I'm talking about here, then I don't care about dealing four to my opponent. Do I think cynical learner is worth it for potentially pulling your animation targets out of your deck or would you rather have something more defensive early? I have played a cynical learner. I've been reasonably happy with it. I think a two mana three one blocks pretty well. And, you know, there are spots where it has clean attacks and you get to put our animation target or a right of the moth into your graveyard. I don't think it's a priority, but I think it's like a fine cheap card to play. I'm cynical owner is the two mana three one survivor that if it's tapped at the end of like at the beginning of your second main phase, you can in tomb, search a library for a card and put it in your graveyard. Is there any tension running both landcyclers and non basic lands? Not really. Like you're still gonna play enough basics that you can find lands. If you have like a bunch of self mill, you do want to pay attention to just like knowing how many of each basic you have in your deck to like notice, oh wait, if I cycle this, I won't be able to find a land, but I think that it, you know, mostly works smoothly enough. There's a question about would blue want scrabbling skull crab to get creatures in the graveyard? Yeah, I've liked scrabbling skull crab a lot in Asper. Sometimes you have enough of an enchantment theme to try to deck your opponent and also you can use it on yourself to find creatures to animate and/or right of the moth. I've had games where I've, you know, started by setting up my graveyard and then switched to milling my opponent. I've had other games where it was clear that I was likely gonna be trying to deck them and I start by milling them. I think the skull crab is just pretty strong if you have like a good number of enchantments. Since like it's a reasonable defensive body, it blocks all the manifest dread stuff pretty well and can actually put a meaningful amount of pressure on your opponent while also turning on your graveyard stuff. I'm a big fan. How do you view chandelier in this space as an additional animation target but also a way to guarantee that you can win the long game? It's worse than a land cycler, but I have played it as like a acceptable reanimation target if I end up really short on them or if I end up like very, very heavy on self-mill. For the most part, I'm not like excited about it or looking to play it, but if you end up, I think that it's better, well, I don't know. If you end up in a spot where you think that you're actually likely to go through your whole deck, it has a place, but it's certainly not a priority and most of the time you're not gonna want it. Okay, regarding fear of burning alive, I guess it's probably better than I was giving it credit for. You can probably pretty easily set up the delirium in a controlling red white deck such that you're going to be like killing a creature with it. I'm still skeptical of straight red white as dedicated in any way, reanimator deck, but I think that there's reasonable possibility for like Nia or Mardu having more of a like reanimation delirium theme going on that that could play a good role in. All right, so I think that's gonna wrap us up for today. So thanks for listening, everyone. And thank you as always chat for the questions and I will be back next week at the regular time and schedule for further coverage of dusk morning. So have a good week, everyone, and bye for now. - Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)