(upbeat music) Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And today I'm going to be discussing MH3 very speculatively. So some kind of behind the scenes, thoughts or whatever on structure and podcast topics in my process. Very many of the commons in MH3 are not currently on a scryfall. I believe that I could have found most or all of them from assorted leaks, but I don't know a good way to find and sort those. And it makes trying to study the archetypes using them more difficulty than I could really put up with. So I am looking at this set without being able to look at most of the commons. So this is very speculative. Under normal circumstances, I might have waited a week to do the preview episode, but next week on Wednesday, when I record my podcast, that will be the day of the early access Modern Horizons 3 stream on arena, which I'll be participating in. So I'm going to be recording the podcast next week Thursday instead of Wednesday. And that will be my typical like, first impressions after playing with it episode, which means this is the week for the preview expectations before playing it time. I could have delayed the podcast, I hope to get access to more of the cards, but I think there's enough to be able to look at like big picture stuff that's happening. But I'm going to be talking about like, the officially stated themes for the colors. And I'm not going to know exactly what support there is for those. I just kind of am going to take their word for that existing. So as always, notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/draftingarchtypes, even if they're a little bit sparse this time. Big picture. I like to start with the mana in the format. In this set, there are at least 10 and I believe only 10 common lands. It's a cycle of lands that taps for a color list, or you can tap and sacrifice to search for one of three different basic lands. And then it cycles for mana of the three corresponding colors. And there's that for every three color combination. These lands are really good. They're like evolving wilds, except they're also untapped colorless mana. But they can only find three of the colors instead of five of the colors. This set also features colorless mana symbols, which means that it's kind of a six color set rather than a five color set. But the sixth color doesn't function quite like the other colors still. Like, it's not like there's an archetype for colorless plus each of the other colors. And there's not as much colorless as the other colors. But it's an extra kind of mana that some decks are going to be looking for. And basically between the lands being very good and the fact that any deck might end up wanting to play some colorless cards, it feels like these are really strong and should be a high priority in drafting. They give you a lot of flexibility to include powerful cards that you see later. And then also at uncommon, there are 10 ETB-tapped dual lands in the form of DFCs. And that's just like a strong card. Like a land that's either just like a tap duel or a spell is something that you can also take pretty early in a draft fairly safely and it'll give you some flexibility. So there's a lot of incentive to pick lands highly. And the nature of the common lands is kind of, once you have some of them, you want more of them. And the reason for that is once you have some of them, you're more likely to look for things that cost colorless mana. And then if you're going to play some of the cards that cost colorless mana, you'll want more colorless sources, which you can find by taking more of these lands. And then as you have more of these lands, it's easier to splash. And so you want more of them because you are better able to splash. And so what ends up happening is that taking lands highly becomes a lane that can be open or not open in your draft the same way that a color might be open. So where I said that really there are like six colors because of colorless, as far as like finding the open lane, it's kind of like there are six colors and one of them is lands. This is a pretty common dynamic when there are lands that are very strong and appear frequently. This happens, in my opinion, in most cubes that have fetch lands and many other cubes. And also happens with sets that have snow lands, for example, or other things where when you take lands, you kind of want to like take more lands as a result. There's like a little bit of that with deserts in a quarry, but it's not as pronounced or not in a quarry, sorry, in OTJ. But it's not as pronounced as it is in some other sets. I expect it to be pretty pronounced in this set. So taking lands early will be reasonable and lands encourage you to take more lands more highly. So one way to draft is to just end up taking all the lands and then figuring out your spells later because you can just cast whatever. Alternatively, if you're not in the land lane, you can just spend your early picks on high-quality cards in whatever colors you want to settle into and commit to just like playing two colors. So basically, I don't want to say that taking the lands really aggressively means that you're going to be playing five-color soup. You probably can, but more likely, because the lands aren't actually five-color and they're like fetch lands that are like a little bit more narrow than that, you would start with the lands that you see and then kind of like narrow down to figure out like which three-ish colors are your primary colors. And then draft round those. But also, the colorless symbols aren't exactly evenly distributed in terms of like where they have synergy and like what colors they appear on and stuff. So some colors will want to be in this kind of like land space more than others. So this is a set where figuring out how your prioritizing lands is going to be a prominent like feature of the draft experience and irrelevant skill that's being tested. I always like that situation, structure, aspect of a draft. So I'm looking forward to that. If you like other sets in that vein, then this would be a promising sign. If not, sorry, but also you can kind of opt out of it and focus on the two-color themes. There are some sets where I think focusing on a two-color theme hurts you, where like there are a lot of gold cards and a lot of rewards for being able to play a third color or whatever. I don't think that that is the case here. I think the density of gold cards is low enough. And probably the themes are tight enough that just being a two-color deck and ignoring the lands will be very reasonable. So I'm certainly not like I think very much guesswork and I didn't play that much MH2 because it wasn't on arena. But I think that this will be more two-color focused than MH2, but very low confidence and not very significantly. Now getting into the official themes for the color combinations, blue-white is listed as energy flyers. I don't know what to make of that. I don't know how much synergy there is with the flyers. It sounds to me like it's saying normal blue-white stuff and by the way, energy. Blue-black is the even less descriptive card draw. There's like the uncommon brain surge, which is brainstorm, but you draw four instead of three originally. And it costs two additional mana. That's a way to like draw a bunch of cards. And then there are some number of cards that care about having drawn extra how many cards you draw. There's, you know, looting effects are like a reasonably-causted way to have cards that want you to have drawn more cards, have seen you draw more cards without like needing to pay full price for drawing extra cards. So there's gonna be some of that. Black isn't doing energy stuff, blue is. And I know some of the energy stuff that common involves card draw. So like I could see like the blue-black theme kind of like meshing reasonably well with like an energy theme from like another color. If you were to try to do a three-color blue-black thing, like blue-black is very low explicit synergy, which means pretty high flexibility in terms of like splicing and other decks. Red-black is artifacts, affinity, and there is no other color that explicitly cares about artifacts that there are other colors that care about modified. And maybe there's like a density of equipment that helps with that. I'm not really sure. Red-black doesn't look at a glance, like a color combinations that's looking to play to splash, right? Like you're prioritizing colas cards and red and black cards. You don't need to be prioritizing fixing 'cause if there are colas artifacts, those are like particularly easy on your mana. And the deck is presumably pretty aggressive. So I expect red-black to not really want to be part of three-color pairs. Red-green is Eldrazi spawn. So that means that cards that make spawn let you cast colas cards. So I expect you to be interested in also having lambs that do that. So red-green is likely gonna be doing some splashing, some ramping. It's gonna play pretty well with some of the other colors that are interested in doing that. Green-white is modified bestow. So as we're going to see, all of the abzan color combinations care about modifying and then they do it in different ways. Green-white does it with bestow. Green-black does it with adapt and white-black does it question mark, but it rewards you when the modified creatures die. White-black is modified dies. Of course, all of the abzan color pairs being caring about modified makes it reasonably likely that you'd want to just play them all together. We'll get into three-color pairs in a little bit. Blue-red is energy mid-range. You might notice I'm interpreting that as identical to the blue-white archetype. Green-black is modified, adapt, as I touched on earlier. So creatures with adapt that become modified because you adapt them and presumably some other modified ways to do modified stuff. Red-white is energy aggro. So like blue-red, but the white cards are more aggressive than the blue cards, I guess. Blue-green is Eldrazi ramp. The distinction between Eldrazi ramp and Eldrazi spawn is probably not the brightest of lines. So that suggests that there's like a team or Eldrazi thing going on. So three-color combinations. The ones that stand out are just guy energy. All of the just guy pairs are just like energy and kind of generically the stuff that their colors do. The abs-an is just, we have three different takes on modify. And Teamer is, well, you have Eldrazi ramp, Eldrazi spawn, and then the blue-red part of it is energy mid-range, which is again, like barely a thing. So you just take the blue and red cards that don't care about energy and you probably have like a coherent mix with like the green stuff. Those are the three-color pairs that like very loudly and obviously make sense. I looked reasonably closely at the other three-color pairs and there wasn't like clear overlap. Grixis being just like, well, you have card draw, you have artifacts and you have energy mid-range, like none of these things make any sense together on their surface, but like maybe you just take the black and red cards that aren't artifacts and you may or may not end up caring about energy, you probably don't, but like maybe you do 'cause you have both blue and red. Again, I mentioned there's some overlap with the energy and the card draw. Like I imagine there's like, it's not difficult to build a coherent Grixis deck even if the like stated themes don't make sense together. I expect several of these stated archetypes to, I mean, a lot of them are really loose anyway and I usually some portion of the themes are kind of like failures or traps. I doubt all of these themes are going to be reasonable and I think that like everything is gonna be a little bit soupier than most of these themes suggest. I suspect some of these themes will be extremely tight themes where like if you're doing this color pair, you're almost always doing exactly the thing that it says, like I suspect that there just is a black red artifact stack, for example. That's again, very speculative and largely based on the uncommon living cranial plating, but it seems likely to me that that's how it's gonna go. And it's very hard for me to get into details beyond this without having been able to study the commons more. I'm being told that the full spoiler is up now, but not in a way that I could reasonably parse it before recording this. So that's what I got. Happy to open it up for discussion. But, you know, again, this is just to kind of like get a basic idea of what to expect and what we're thinking about going into the first drafts. And again, I'll be able to kind of like have a lot more information about what we're looking at next week still in advance of the prerelease. So chat, what are we thinking? Where do I rate the MDFC untapped single color lamps? So every color has two uncommon untapped MDFCs. One of them is a creature and one of them is a non-creature. And the land can be played as a land that taps to a single color that works the way that the rare lands before worked where you can pay three life for it to be untapped, otherwise it's tapped. I think that because the common lands enter untapped, having some lands that enter tapped is not going to be very punishing and being able to pay three life if you have to is enough to mean that you're pretty unlikely to get punished very badly by the lands. Three is a lot of life, that's a very real cost. If there's one that I don't think is good in my deck, I don't think it's like clearly better than just playing a basic land. But I do think that most of the time you're going to want to play most of the uncommon MDFCs that you draft over corresponding basics, as long as it's not like, oh, I only wanted to play like two of these and I have like some common fetchlands and like I'm just gonna, like I don't want to not have like the forest to find. And it's like a splash. So I'm not going to play the DFC here. I suspect that you'll usually played every DFC you can get in your main colors. But I also don't know, I mean, as to how high a pick they are, that's really gonna depend on how good you think the front side is in your deck. If you're usually gonna be playing it as a land because the front side's not very good, then I wouldn't like take it over good cards. Yeah, how high are we on taking MDFCs in general, I guess? Like not all MDFCs are created equal. Some of them are like much better spells than others. For example, like the green MDFC Uncommons, one of them is a three mana, like basically a savage smash or whatever. The like red, green, gold prosperity reprint card is called. Like a creature gets plus two plus two and then fights something is like the front side of one of them is the of the spell. And the front side of the creature is a six mana three three where you can sack a creature to gain life and draw cards equal to its power. Most of the time six mana three three sack a creature to gain a bunch of life and draw a bunch of cards doesn't seem that great to me. Some, I can imagine that's where it's good, but most of the time it's hard to afford to like stick. Six is a lot of mana to like draw some cards and go down a thing on board and only get a three three. I might be wrong. My guess is that the fight spell is like generally of significantly better limited card than the creature. And so like that's an appreciably better card like then the creature card. And like I'm not drafting them identically as MDFCs which like, well, how much better is an MDFC than a land? But on the other hand, they might actually fall into kind of a similar bucket in my rankings where it's like, well, I'm taking premium cards that are like much better than other stuff over MDFCs. And I'm taking basically any MDFC over basically any replacement level card because it's more likely to be better than a land than the replacement level card is to be better than like the worst card that I would play. And I can potentially like cut a land for it. So while the MDFCs are very much not all created equal, there will be kind of a bucket for, yeah, I would take any MDFC over this mediocre card. So I guess that's kind of the floor of MDFCs and then the ceiling is, this is a great card and I want to take it very aggressively. So there's a question about if the common fetchlands were two types instead of three, they cycled for like the two mana instead of cycling for three mana. So like instead of this finds a forest, planes are Island and cycles for Bant. They were, this finds a forest or planes and cycles for Selesnea. Would that be better or worse for two color pairs? So the two mana cycling ability would be way more significant than the three mana cycling ability and much easier to do. I'd be more likely to increase my land count by one because of playing them. So that would be a reason that it would be better for two color, like the cycling part would be a lot more real. On the other hand, there would be exactly one of them that you could play in your two color deck instead of five of them or whatever. So it's like much harder to find them. So really if they were two color, it would be way worse for trying to like support getting a colorless land in your deck usefully. That's about as far as I can go on this hypothetical. Do I have any tips if drafting synergy based, if like synergy based drafting like MH sets often are isn't your strong suit. I guess like if you are committed to not trying to focus on a synergy, then you're structurally looking to have individually powerful cards. And that means that you wanna be prioritizing like removal 'cause you wanna be breaking up your opponent's synergy. So I guess like in a lot of ways, my approach to cube, especially like vintage cube is to ignore synergy, especially vintage cube or unfamiliar cubes. I try to ignore synergy and focus on power level. And I think that that's a valid thing to do. And you just prioritize like fundamentals, like fixing and removal so that like 'cause the synergies are gonna be tightest in two color pairs. Whereas if you prioritize fixing, then you can just take, snipe all the good cards, removal, card advantage, random bombs. So I would say if synergy isn't your thing, you're gonna wanna find your way into the land lane more often than not and focus. Good rate like cheap cards that slow the game down. So cheap efficient removal. And then powerful stuff and card advantage would be how I would approach this or any other format if synergy was like a big part of what was going on and I didn't wanna participate in that. Question about the commander cards are in the main set. So there are cards that were printed in previous commander sets that are in the main set and modern horizons that are in MH3 that are now going to be modern, legal and modern. Separately from that, there are modern horizons three commander cards that are not in modern horizons, three packs, like the play boosters, I believe, that are not legal and modern. Unless some of the MH3 commander cards are somehow in play boosters, in which case that'll be interesting. Well, I'll find out. Yeah, okay. So there will be a very low drop rate, one in 21 play boosters will have one of the eight commanders and then you can play that in the draft format and the rest of the modern horizons three commander cards that are not legal and modern won't be in the draft format. And I guess those eight commanders specifically that are in the draft format still won't be legal and modern. Yeah, I have an understanding now. I don't know for sure that that understanding is correct, but I hope that it is, otherwise I've misinformed everyone. We'll find out soon and after I open some packs, I will be sure to update on whether I was wrong about all that. All right. I've said everything, I feel qualified to say. I apologize for this, what I would consider slightly low on professionalism episode. I promise I will have much better information on this set next week. Again, I'll be recording a touch late next week because I will be playing with the set on Wednesday. So I'm looking forward to a much more informed look at modern horizons three eight days from the time of recording this Thursday of next week. So have a good week. Most likely most of you, like me, will not have an opportunity to play with modern horizons three, but hopefully this will give you some idea of what to be looking at Wednesday or whatever you're first, a week from now on during the early access event or whatever, your first exposure to the set is, and hopefully we'll have much better information before most of you need to actually play with these cards. So bye for now, and I'll see you then. Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
