(upbeat music) Hi everyone, this is Sam Black with Drafting Archetypes. And today I am going to be discussing Red White in Modern Horizons III. As always, the notes are available to follow along at patreon.com/drafting archetypes. So I have drafted a bunch, but I wouldn't say that I've drafted a ton of decks that are very archetypical. I've played just a little bit with some and not much with many of the kind of standard archetypes. And so I decided to do some research based on the extremely early 17 lands data. And early data shows that Red White is both the most drafted and most successful archetype by a pretty appreciable amount over a small sample size. And that all makes sense to me because it's a very good proactive deck and the format has felt very proactive. And for a number of other reasons that are what I'm going to be talking about today. So I figured it makes sense to start with the grounding in kind of the baseline strongest deck in the format to either know how to play and draft it when it's open or if you think that you are in a relatively inexperienced table, then just kind of doing the baseline thing will work out pretty well. And if you're not in this lane, then it's important to know what you're gonna be up against since especially as you get, you know, into like the finals of a draft or whatever, it's more likely that you're going to be playing against more Red White Aggred X that are gonna follow basically the script. So this is kind of, you know, the deck to beets or to try to draft or however you like to approach it, but this is gonna be like a pillar of the format. So the most played cards in this deck. So not looking at any kind of subjective value judgment about how good things are, how much they should be played. Just, you know, if we're looking at this as, okay, what am I expecting to see out of an opposing Red White Aggred X? Conduit Goblin, the Red White Gold Common, of course, because, you know, that's always gonna go to Red White players. Galvanic Discharge, which is the lightning bolt style instant, they can only hit creatures. Red instant make three energy, then spend energy for damage to a creature. Hex Gold Slith, the one-and-a-white two-one makes two energy, when you attack, you can spend two energy to give it first strike when it damages your opponent, it gets a plus-one plus-one counter. Inspired inventor, the three-man-a-two-two that when it enters the battlefield either gives you three energy, plus-one plus-one counter on a creature or a servo. Hairy Auxiliary, the four-man-a-three-three-flyer that puts two plus-one plus-one counters on creatures you can drop bolster to. Smelted Charge Bug, the one-and-a-red one-three that makes two energy, and then when it attacks, you can spend energy to give something menace. Fanged Flames, the one-and-a-red sorcery deal for to a creature, exile it if you kill it. Nixborn Unicorn, the Tutu Bestow Mentor Unicorn. Two to play four to bestow. Mandibular Kite, the one-one living weapon that gives plus-one plus-one and flying and equips for four. And Scurry of Gremlins, the uncommon red-white card in that order. Of these Charge Bug and the inventor underperform, I think Charge Bug is very impressive in red-black where it matters that it's an artifact and giving menace to your RAM or whatever is wearing the RAM is a really big deal. Giving menace to one of your random other tutus or whatever isn't that big a deal, while this thing gives energy, that's not a particularly unique effect. You'll have the energy that you need and you just want higher power creatures in this. I would say Smelted Charge Bug should be relatively low on your priority list for two drops most of the time in red-white. And then the inventor, kind of underperforms, it's like a filler three-drop in a deck that doesn't really need three drops. It's nice that it's pretty reasonable that you can have a deck where each of the modes is situationally the one you'd want to take, the flexibility is nice, but the overall rate's kind of whatever. So those are the core cards that are going into this deck. Galvanic discharge is just an absurd card in this deck. Like it's basically appreciably better than lightning bolts would be, I think, in limited. Like, you can't hit your opponent, which matters a lot in an Aggra deck. In exchange, you can kill creatures with more than four toughness. And this deck is very likely to be able to have energy left over from your other stuff if you want. And I talk a lot about how Aggra decks want big removal spell, well, reliable removal spells that can kill large blockers, controlled acts want cheap removal spells that can answer cheap creatures and stop them from falling behind. Galvanic discharge is both of those things, especially in this deck. And when you get both of those in an aggressive deck, it means that when your opponent kills a creature that actually matters, like you can't attack into it, you get to kill their creature and also make another play. So ordinarily, if you have creatures that are attacking and your opponent plays a blocker, and you kill their blocker, you're kind of ahead on that exchange because of the implied damage that you get for getting rid of the blocker. Here, you get that same advantage where you get the extra damage in, but also you get to make another play. So then you're like kind of also a full turn ahead on development. And that makes it really easy to kind of like snowball out of control and your opponent's like creature that they're playing stabilized just like dies at mana disadvantage. Galvanic discharge is uniquely good at that, but it is not the only card that this deck has like that. In fact, this deck is kind of flooded with pretty hard removal spells that cost one and two mana. So at one, you also have the uncommon static prison, the enchantment that exiles non-land permanent and gives you two energy and then you have to spend energy each turn to keep it in play. And then for two mana, you have fanged flames that two mana deal for dog Umbra, the flash aura that can either pass fissim a creature or Umbra a creature. Thraven charm, one and a white deal damage equal to twice the number of creatures you control to something or exile a gray bear to destroy an enchantment. Expelled the unworthy, the one and a white sorcery that exiles the thing and its controller gains life equal to its casting cost. You need to kick it to hit big stuff. At uncommon, reiterating bolts two mana for three damage that you can copy, replicate for three energy, ghostfire slash, slash. This is technically three mana, but if your opponent controls a multicolor, then it's only one mana. Four damage any target instant, that can hit players. Razorgrass ambush, the white DFC that deals three damage to an attacker or blocker. So you have like a lot of very efficient removal that can usually hit big creatures and can often be part of double spellings. So the removal in the red, white deck is stronger than usual and like a particularly good fit for the deck because it's all cheap and generally very effectively getting rid of blockers. So as far as like unique strengths of this, of like red, white in this format, good removal is very high in the list. Also, this is a format where you like really want to be proactive and you want to end games. As I talked about in the previous episode, because there are so many different kinds of plans that your opponent could have that it can be hard to prepare for everything, but you don't really need to prepare for whatever your opponent's end game is if you just kill them. And this archetype has good, cheap removal and good, cheap threats. So what makes the cheap threats so good is that they we have a bunch of ways to, so there are synergies between them in terms of like the energy stuff. They have ways to scale from the early game into the late game with abilities like mentor on the unicorn and the slith getting bigger when it hits your opponent and the presence of like bestow in general and equipment and inspired inventor the three man of two two that can put a counter on a thing can give you an attack where you wouldn't otherwise have one. Conduit goblin can make your creatures have more power which again can create attacks where they're otherwise wouldn't be and then scurry of gremlins. The uncommon formana make two one ones and then you can spend formana to give all of your creatures plus one plus one haste means that any creatures that couldn't attack for a while get to participate in a big alpha strike later when you get your scurry to happen. So you have kind of a lot of ways to keep your creatures relevant both by having them like scale up and by killing opposing blockers. And you have just like scaling rewards and synergies with the energy stuff. And you have the thing that I'm talking about where removal makes you play like kind of a turn ahead and then conduit goblin giving haste also makes you play like a turn or half a turn ahead by letting all of your like new creatures get an extra attack in. And so like when you combine the like playing ahead from the goblin with the playing ahead from the cheap removal it kind of feels like you're several turns ahead compared to, you know, where a weaker aggressive deck might be. The effect of all this is that you don't need or really want very many expensive cards. So looking at deck composition from like red, white trophy decks it looks like most decks that, like most red, white decks that trophy tend to have like eight to 11, two draw, two mana plays, two to seven, one mana plays, around 13 to 17 total, one and two mana plays. That's a lot, right? Like if you have 17, that means there are only like six cards in your deck that cost more than two mana. So the deck gets to be very, very low to the ground and you know, very good at curving out and double spelling. And then you have like a good amount of stuff that makes your damage output scale up enough that you can kill your opponent with those cheap cards. The format of cards that you want tend to be cards that have an immediate impact. So specifically like Scurry of Grammarlins and area auxiliary. Scurry of Grammarlins again is the red, white gold card, one of the best cards you can have for the deck and area auxiliary is the three, three for four flyer with bolster two. You could also play something like an infernal captor, the three, three with exploit that threatens a creature. And then these decks very often had one to three and these go at Embermages, the six mana four for the deals four damage to something at the top of the curve. And that's pretty reasonable. You're like, it's not hard to get to the point where that's like going to kill your opponent in one way or another. The presence of falter effects or things that make it so that your opponent can't block a fair turn in this format is very impactful. This deck gets access to both the mono red DFC that kills the land and falters and also the blue white DFC, that taps all of your opponent's creatures and you can spend energy to keep them tapped. You would wanna play that card in this deck even if you don't have any blue cards in your deck. It's just a tapped white land and then you can cast it and kill your opponent and also you're actually an energy deck. So you can cast it as a full sleep where your opponent's creatures all become tapped and stay tapped if you need more than one attack to kill them at that point. So the presence of all of the no block stuff gives the deck a lot of ability to like, you attack early, you get your opponent low, they play some stuff, they kinda have to like hold back to stop you from attacking. You both build up and now you have like a lot of live draws to kill them between your like scurries and your falter type stuff, maybe just like drawing removal or whatever. So the deck, while it has a really low curve to play the early game well, play is the late game well, not in that you're like doing stuff that's as strong as your opponent and to have like good mana sinks, but just in that you're often drawing live to like hit a single card that will kill them you know, you win the game on the spot. There are not a lot of three mana creatures that you really wanna play. You'll play a couple 'cause you know, you might not find enough good one and two mana creatures, but you don't want a lot of like three mana commons. All of the three mana red and white commons are acceptable. You have the two, three on earth artifact creature that does a damage to your opponent when a creature enters into your control. You have glimpse the impossible that makes three guys that exile the top three and then whatever you don't spend, you get spawns. That one is interesting in the deck because your curve is really low so it can function as like a pretty good card draw spell or if you have like multiple scurry of gremlins, then you can use it to get three bodies so that your scurry gives you a whole bunch of mana and like goes very wide. So if you have like a number of scurry of gremlins then I think glimpse becomes quite a bit better. And then in white you have the two, three that makes two energy and can spend an energy to tap something which is nothing special but does make blocking a harder and it's an energy card. It's fine to play it and you have the inspired inventor which again, a little bit worse rate than most of the two is but a totally functional card in the deck too. It's optionality and as long as you have enough twos that you're gonna play one, sometimes it's nice to like play a three. But there are some rares that are really, really high impact for three mana. Eldrazi line breaker, if you can get the colorless mana for it is really, really strong. That's the one, a colorless and a red three, three trample that gives you gives a creature plus X plus O where X is the number of Eldrazi you control and haste at the beginning combat. Lelya, Detectives, Phoenix, Flage, any of those like really high impact rare or three drops you have are huge, they're gonna make your deck quite a bit better especially because their value of a replacement among three drops is so high. Like if you're playing that instead of a common three, it's just gonna be a completely different experience. Another thing about deck composition trophy decks tend to have like three to eight cheap removal spells usually around five or six. The two mana creatures, I don't think that like, some of them are better than others, but I think it doesn't really matter that much when you're drafting, like you're mostly just like, if there's not a premium card, you're looking for like kind of any two drop most of the time. And you just want lots and lots of them. There are a bunch of uncommon two drops that are like meaningfully better than the common two drops, but they're mostly just all good and I don't think it matters too much, except like many of the uncommons, especially like Amptraptor which is the two on first strike that gets two energy and then kind of like cascades into a card and you have to pay energy equal to its cost to cast it. So like appreciably better, but mostly you just, you want the two drops. The other thing when you're drafting this deck is like pay attention to like sub themes and minor synergies. Like it's basically unavoidable that your deck's gonna be doing stuff with energy, but there are a bunch of like little things that you can have that can introduce sub themes and pull you in certain directions. Like if you have like glaring flesh raker, the colorless tutu that makes a spawn when you play a colorless spell and does a damage to your opponent when a colorless creature enters that, you know, especially if you are in a draft where maybe you started with a line breaker or something and now you're prioritizing colorless lands and then you want to like take void pamster, the three one with kicker, Eldrazi, you might take that a little bit more highly. So you could get like a minor colorless theme in there or, you know, if you have multiple scurries, you can do the glimpse the impossible scurry thing that I was talking about where you like go wide and take advantage of that. Maybe you have pearl ear, the rare three, four lifelink. And so you take like nixborn unicorns and other bestow things and also mandible a little bit higher. But all of these things, like they're not very transformative. They're just like nice little perks that you can like watch for while you're drafting to try to get a little bit more value out of your cards. For the most part, you're not trying to prioritize landscapes very highly. That's not clear that you even always want to play them. But if you have things that cost colorless, that would have to change. And reckless pyrosurfer, the haste landfall gets battle cry guy for two is really good and might make you want a couple of landscapes just so that you can have them around. And then when you play that guy, sack them to like get another like big pump effect for all your creatures. And that's, I mean, this is a pretty straightforward deck. There are like a few combat tricks you can play. I wouldn't want more than like two total combat tricks in the deck most of the time. You're basically looking at wing it, the one in the white plus two plus two and flying counter trick or the plus three plus two split second plus three plus two trample split second or kill an artifact split second instant in red. Those are fine, but you're generally gonna just play removable spells instead. And yeah, you know, basically straightforward, make sure that the expensive cards that you play make sense in an aggressive deck, mostly that they have an immediate impact. There are some, you know, reasonably powerful five mana cards that you can play, but in general, they're not gonna be like much better than just having a cheap card. And that's pretty much what's going on here. So I am going to turn it over to chat for questions. As always, at this point, I would plug the Patreon. So if anyone's interested in checking that out and supporting the podcast, be sure to check out patreon.com/draftingarchitects. Are you ever playing Nia for the green Eldrazi token makers or do they throw us off the game efficiency too much? So I think basically what you're saying is, does this deck want to splash Chrisless? And I suspect that if you have multiple Chrisless, you should probably find a way to play them. That may or may not fundamentally transform what your deck is trying to do depending on what lands are available to you. But my advice at this point is not to not take and try to play Chrisless if you see it. I don't think that you really wanna find it. Like I think that if you're playing other Eldrazi token makers, you're, you know, just like a different deck, like you're some kind of like, you know, like for the most part, this is, you know, structurally, this is as much as possible, the kind of two color aggregate that is not interested in splashing, right? You have like a very, very low curve, pretty high colored pick requirements. You have like a card that costs a red and a white that you probably have multiple copies of that you wanna play on turn two that you're really not, this is not the kind of deck that's looking to splash, which means most of the time that you do splash, you're fundamentally changing how your deck functions and what it's about and you're kind of like pivoting into an adjacent archetype. If your draft is going in such a way that you can get, you know, the green token makers such that you might want to splash them and you can get the fixing to do that. You might wanna just be more of like a Nia kind of like go wide mid-range deck or some other kind of like composite deck consisting of the available archetypes. Like, I'd be pretty happy having, you know, the lion and the chrysalis in the same deck or the watchdog or whatever and the green white three three for two and the chrysalis in the same like deck. But the way that I'm gonna prioritize others cards probably changes somewhat, although I will say, you know, just being a red-white aggregate with like especially the mandible and then having the chrysalis and then equipping the chrysalis and attacking with like an eight power flyer sounds pretty good to me. I guess it's probably not gonna be an eight power flyer in your red-white deck. It's probably just gonna be a four or five and so that's like a little bit less exciting, but yeah. That's what I have to say about splashing here. If you pick up a bunch of the removal spells in red-white early, but you end up not seeing too many early drops, you still go down a proactive path assuming you'll get some number of placeable creatures later or would you consider pivoting to some slower deck looking to splash. If I'm not seeing any two drops, I can't play an aggressive deck and clearly red-white's not open. If I have like just a bunch of removal spells and red-white's not and like the aggressive two drops just aren't there, I think that I should probably pivot into something where I'm adding blue card advantage spells or something and playing a slower game rather than just being like, well, I have a pile of like thrabbing charms and 10 creatures and I'm gonna hope it lines up and I like stick a creature and get to attack you. I think the situation you're describing where you like don't have early drops is only gonna come up when red-white is just clearly not open. Like you're competing with probably multiple other people at the table and then yeah, you're in the wrong lane and you should like, you know, try to find a way to use your removal spells in a different strategy. Would I go below 17 lands in red-whites? Also do you count double-faced cards as a full lands thought? So the answer is I would try not to go below 17 lands but I would count every DFC as an entire land. So if you think about it differently then the answer might be different. But personally, I'm looking to have, you know, like three double-faced cards and play 17 lands counting with them. If I don't find any DFCs, I could see dropping a land but I think that that's going to be worse than finding DFCs and playing like 17 lands counting the DFCs. How does this deck close the game against the big old Razi creatures? It spawns once they've hit the board. Well, you can make a bunch of extra energy and then spend the energy on your galvanic discharge or you can cast static prison or you can have a Johnny Fellows the God-Sire, the White Saga that kills a big creature in your deck. You can kick and expel the unworthy, you can cast a dog umbrella and target something or you can play either the red DFC that kills land and paulters or the blue-white DFC that taps all of your opponent's creatures or you can play Scurry of Gremlins and go wide enough that your opponent can't block all of your creatures with their smaller number of big creatures. How much are you prioritizing the 4/4 Anthem Angel? I think the 4/4 Angel is a solid top-end card but I'm not looking for a lot of that stuff. I think that I would take most good two drops over it most of the time if I felt like I was in a spot where I really already had as many twos as I want and I was pretty good at going wide and making energy and didn't already have too much top-end. I could see taking it early but I'm more afraid of having too many five drops than I am feeling like it's important to have that as an additional Anthem effect. Last episode, I talked about wanting to be big proactive, sounds like that shifted to smaller and proactive-er. I think both are good, right? Like, I think that that was basically like, I am seeing that riding Chrysalis is winning a lot and very strong and a very good place to be and the data has supported that in the strongest possible terms. As of now, I believe, riding Chrysalis has a higher win rate than any card in Outlaws of Thunder Junction. It's over 66%, it's just absolutely baffling for a comment. I think that that's a result of some people undervaluing it and that allowing people who do value it to get multiples and then the fact that it scales very well in multiples and then the fact that when multiples are cashed in the same game, they swing the win rate like further. So I think that, you know, that data, like I don't actually think that riding Chrysalis is stronger than every card in Outlaws relative to its format but I do think that riding Chrysalis is crazy. And so if you can be riding Chrysalis proactive instead of being red, white, proactive, I think that's probably a good place to be. But once everyone understands that riding Chrysalis is better than almost every other card and almost every pack and you can't get so many of them, then it might be harder to be both big and very aggressive and the way that the white aggro decks can scale in terms of like their creatures getting bigger and the removal being cheap can let them be like big enough proactive. So in a lot of ways, I think what I was saying when I was saying big proactive is not nickel and dime proactive. So really what that was coming from is not black aggro where like the black cards are kind of good at like pushing a point of damage here and there but like less good at kind of scaling up the way the white cards do. So that's kind of where I was coming from. I don't think that you specifically have like it's less. Oh no, actually I want to be, you know, pure tiny creatures aggro and I don't want to be big proactive. It's more red white wants to be tiny creature aggro and red white's very successful but it's still not like the only game in town. More general question, how are you thinking about starting a draft with a strong gold card for starting with a one color card? So this is really just like the kind of thing that is really equally a factor in like every format and different people have different philosophies and preferences on it. It really depends on the gold card for me, I guess. Like there's a very, very big difference in level of commitment between starting with a gold two drop that really wants to be in a specifically like, you know, starting with conduit goblin, you're saying, I'm trying to draft red white. Whereas if you start with ganku or whatever, like random very strong two color rare that you could splash somewhere, then you're saying, I want to be at least one of these colors as a base color probably. And you can still like be pretty flexible from there. So once you've differentiated between the different kinds of gold cards, then it's just a question about like, how much do you value flexibility versus how much do you like committing to strong archetypes? I personally like flexibility a little bit more than committing to strong archetypes, especially if it's, you know, committing to like the kind of like most popular archetype because I'm pretty afraid of it getting cut off there. Whereas if it's committing to an archetype that I happen to like because it's under drafted and I can expect it to be open, then I'd be a little more open to like taking a thing that's kind of a hard commitment to it early. I'm not really doing a great job of coming to a specific conclusion about how you should weigh these things and that's intentional. I don't really believe that there is a great universal answer to this. I think that it's correct for it to be a bit of a matter of personal taste. Should I want to damaging an evasive trick like wing it? I think I'm reasonably happy to play the first trick, but I'm not sad if I don't. I think it's like fine to play like two tricks and something's pretty weird if I'm looking to play more than that. Maybe like there just wasn't removal available. I know wing it has pretty good stats. I don't think it's bad card. It plays like very well on the slith, for example, because like flying sliths are great. So, you know, wing it I think is a solid trick, play some of them, but don't like super highly prioritize it. What are the biggest signals for going into this archetype during the draft? Obviously, if you get passed like a scurry, then the person who passed it to you isn't trying to do this and you should probably take it and just commit. Getting passed to conduit goblin isn't a strong sign, but it's an okay thing to speculatively move in on. Galvanic discharge is, you know, the kind of card that I'm looking to start with where it would, you know, be a great card to have in this, but I can also end up in different places. Starting with something like an arioxillary, like more likely you're starting with more rare cards, but as far as like, you know, you take some kind of good uncommon or whatever and then you're looking at signals. So it's like third pick or whatever and you're seeing, you know, just like random good. It's weird with a deck that's like the most heavily drafted deck to like try to get the signals because realistically, if you're getting into it, you're getting into it early enough that you're not gonna be sure how many other people are in it. So, you know, if you see late red, white, gold cards, that's a pretty strong signal. But this is the kind of deck where because it's good and popular, you're kind of trying to like get into it before you really have a signal that it's open and then trying to figure out if you need to pivot out of it if it's cut. How do you evaluate the wheel of fortune in this archetype? So today I drafted a deck with two of the wheel of fortunes and well, I drafted two of them and I ended up playing one of them. I think that it is a card that can be pretty strong if your curve is very low and you have a lot of energy stuff. It scales particularly well with stuff like scurry and aetherivolt that kind of wants you to have like a lot of cards working together. And, you know, the deck, like because your cards are so cheap and some of the other decks have very expensive cards, it's not very hard to kind of like break the symmetry where your opponent just has a bigger hand than you do but it's also like, you know, if you have any reactive cards, you need to find a way to just like fire them off on whatever. So it's better kind of like the fewer removal spells and more creatures you have and the more energy stuff you have and it's like still not great. Like I suspect it's going to have a very low in rate overall, but I think that it's a card that you can draft around in red, white and it can be fine. It's not a card that I'm like looking to first pick and then draft like super low curve red, white and I'm excited about it, but it's a card that, you know, I will expect that I can often table it and if I keep my curve low and my energy making high, then I might be happy to play with it. And yeah, that's going to do it for this week. I will be back next week with another archetype topic for MH3 and I believe I will be able to do a poll for which one that's going to be before that podcast. So thanks for listening everyone and I will see you again next week. Bye for now. Prepare for light speed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
