Nationals are upon us, and with them we get a peek into the minds of some of the top drafters in the world. Its always interesting to compare different pros’ opinions on the format and see if they line up or vary wildly. From what I gathered it seems like the consensus is that blue is the best color by a landslide, but the way it should be drafted isn’t so obvious. Some suggested Foresee was easily the strongest common while others liked Aether Adept or even Azure Drake better. There is some love for 3-5 color green-based decks, and White Weenie got some love.
Before the set was released I wondered if a blue mill strategy would actually be possible, but it doesn’t seem to be (sadface). I also had my eye on a heavy red Act of Treason/Fling/Lava Axe burn concoction, but that doesn’t seem all that viable either. However, there are definitely still more interesting and janky decks possible than in M10 (such as the BR Bloodthrone Vampire/Reassembling Skeleton deck that LSV championed).
This week I’ll showcase a draft where I try an unusual archetype that I’m not very familiar with and see how it goes.
This is actually the first time I’ve drafted red in over 20 drafts, and I think it shows. I’m uncertain about the value of cards like Arc Runner and Act of Treason. Still this draft seemed like it turned out pretty well for an aggro deck, with plenty of playables to choose from.
I easily make the decision to run 15 lands in this deck, as it’ll be fine on 2-3 lands for a long time and only has one five drop which is generally the last spell to be played anyway. Leaving the Fiery Hellhounds in the sideboard makes the mana base much more reliable.Thunder Strike and Safe Passage both seem fine in this kind of deck, but there were simply better cards to run over them, although Manic Vandal will be easy to side out.
Match 1 Game 1 (vs B4na):
I win the roll and choose to play. Keep or mull?
Generally five landers are the easiest hands to ship for aggro decks, but I think this hand is fine. Squadron Hawk guarantees plays from turn two to four, and after that an Ascension for +4/+4 or more. I keep, B4na keeps, and after a little thought I play out a Plains and pass.
Now it is almost always correct to play Terramorphic Expanse as your first land, but there is no reason to in this situation. By holding onto it I gain the knowledge of what to search for. If I draw a Mountain then I can search out a Plains to boost my Ascension, knowing that Ember Hauler can be safely cast if drawn. The only way holding onto the Expanse becomes bad is if I want to use every available mana every turn until I run out of land drops. The only way this can happen is if I draw spells for four turns in a row *and* I have a three drop I want to play on turn three, as well as either Lava Axe or two spells adding up to five mana on turn four. In other words, the risk is very low and the reward is moderate, so its definitely worth it to wait.That was a lot analysis for a simple turn one land drop, but these are the types of small edges that add up to game wins in the grand scheme.
Back to the game at hand! My opponent starts with a Black Knight and Barony Vampire as I play out Squadron Hawks on turns two and three, searching out a Plains with the Expanse. I do this because I think the added bonus to Ascension is worth the risk of drawing Ember Hauler while not drawing a Mountain. What I do draw is Cloud Crusader, War Priest of Thune and Lava Axe. My opponent attacks his Barony Vampire into my Cloud Crusader and I decide to bait out the Stabbing Pain both because I’m losing the race and so it will be safe for me to Ascension a Hawk later.
After a Sign in Blood the life totals stand at 13 for B4na and 16 for me. I decide to wait on Ascension to bait out more removal, and sure enough my opp has another Stabbing Pain for my Infantry Veteran. I decline to block an attack since I plan on Ascensioning up my War Priest next turn, and Lava Axe makes me confident I can win the race. Here is the board state:
B4na has a Howling Banshee which he used to chump block my War Priest on my turn, and I hold back two Hawks to trade with his Vampire since I’m only on 8 life. An Assassinate deals with my fat flier, but a drawn Arc Runner puts my opponent to 3 with me at 6 and a Lava Axe in hand. Corrupt for 7 does the trick.
Match 1 Game 2:
I side out Manic Vandal for Safe Passage in hopes of stymieing that Corrupt.
I choose to play and open up with an easy keeper: 3 Plains, Terramorphic Expanse, Stormfront Pegasus, Lightning Bolt, Ember Hauler. Nothing broken but if you’re sending hands like that back you might be a little greedy. I search out a Mountain and find another Lightning Bolt on top before playing out the Pegasus. B4na has a Child of Night which I’m happy to bolt out of the way of my War Priest of Thune. My Pegasus is the sad victim of an Assassination and I start running out of action:
Do you Bolt the Vampire? I do, since I really just want to push damage through. This deck won’t do well waiting for better threats, especially when its getting flooded. B4na has a Black Knight while I hold onto an Arc Runner. Next up is a foil Grave Titan, bringing along its foil Zombies, and getting exiled by my topdecked, non-foil Brittle Effigy:
Despite my luck-sackery topdecking the pimped out Undead prove too much for me (or perhaps it was the back-to-back Corrupts for seven apiece). Either way I’m dead as disco.
This last game shows exactly why I don’t really like aggressive decks: sometimes they just get shut down. To be fair I did get a little flooded and my opponent had a sick deck, but the point still stands. With control I feel like I have so much more, well, control. Sure there are great aggro decks and they often do get there, but the times where I just sit there feeling helpless are too numerous for my liking. It’ll probably be a long time before I draft red in M11 again.
Thanks for reading!
Dylan Pratt (Jester123 on MODO)
Artist / Film / TV Show / Book of the Week:
DJ Shadow / Fargo / Important Things / The Foundation
I don't think you can draw much of a conclusion about the strength of aggro decks based on that game you described. The red/white deck that was drafted was reasonably strong, and may have been the best deck you could draft. You just happened to run into a deck that was stronger. Monoblack with grave titan, black knight, and multiple corrupts is just plain nasty. Blue is well known to be strong and is getting overdrafted; it was good to go in another direction.
I'm assuming that, per our last convo on mtgo, you are still using Windows Live Writer to compose your articles. Reiterating some tips to take them from good to great in terms of presentation:
1. Use the crop tool!
Quick, simple image cropping is one of *the* benefits of composing on WLW for me. When you paste in an image, under the "advanced" tab, there is a "Crop" option that gives you a window you can move around, expand, contract, etc. In ten seconds, you can take a "would you mull this" screen and crop it down to just the hand. When you are showing your final deck, you can crop out all the noise around the crucial parts: the main deck, and the board. Same with game states.
There is just no reason to show people a gigantic, empty battlefield to present a mulligan decision, or show deck-editor frames, empty 6, 7, 8, and 9+ drop slots and a Lava Axe in the card window of your final deck. The more you crop, the bigger the relevant info appears to readers.
2. Tune your default "Link to" settings.
Right now, if you click on an image in your articles, it takes you to...a smaller version of that image. :/ That's pretty useless, and you should either turn off the link functionality entirely, or link to an original-sized, or large-sized image.
To do this, in the same image dialog, under the "Picture" tab, there is a "Link to" drop down, with an "Options" button below it. Click the Options button, and change the size in the drop-down menu to "Original" or at the very least "Large." I go with "Original" because if you pick "Large," sometimes images will be blown up bigger than actual size, which isn't useful. Of course, in this case, you ought to just switch the "Link to" drop down from "Source Picture" to "None," as people don't need image links when the image in the article itself is already full-sized. I do this for things like mulligan hands or anything else that can be cropped to perfectly-good in-article legibility.
When you have made the change to the "Link to" settings, click the "Save settings as default" link at the bottom of the "Picture" tab, and it will auto-link your images to a full-size version automatically.
Now I'll read/enjoy the rest of the article, but I may start boycotting you if you don't take advantage of the simple, great image composition tools at your fingertips. :)
@unspeakable: Yeah I didn't mean to extrapolate too much from that game, it was meant to be a point on my opinion on aggro decks in general, but I definitely didn't make that clear enough. What I meant is: aggro decks are certainly as viable as control decks in general, but I personally am not a huge fan of aggro because of situations where I feel helpless. The last game was such a situation, in which a control deck might have had a few more tools at its disposal to deal with my opponent's threats.
@Godot: "Crop": For some reason the screen shots my computer takes are quite low resolution, so whenever I crop them down and enlarge the quality becomes terrible and it ends up looking even worse.
"Link To": I thought you meant the card pic images! Again the problem stems from the resolution, since linking to a larger pic does increase the size but the pixelation becomes a big problem.
Thanks again for the advice and help, I'll make sure that the pics in my next article are both cropped and linked properly, I'll just have to do a little research first on how to increase the resolution and clarity of my screen shots.
Weird! FWIW, I don't do anything special, I click on MTGO, Alt-PrintScreen (Alt = capture the active window only), and paste it into Live Writer. I have done nothing to change the resolution of the images captured by the "print screen" button, and have never even heard of someone getting anything other than a WYSIWYG, pixel-by-pixel copy of the screen.
Are you not using print screen? How are you grabbing your screen shots?
man.. 3rd hawk was SUCH a gift. what other card 8th pick or so can improve your deck quality as much. You just replaced 2 mediocre cards for 3 excellent cards. mise.
also, I <3 Foil Tokens. They need to start printing those IRL.
Hmm I'm not sure what would cause that, I just use the "print screen" button. I'm on a laptop if that makes any difference. But yeah, comparing my cropped cards to yours in your latest article, Ryan, my cards are quite a bit fuzzier and harder to read (comparing the same size of course). However, I think I can find a happy medium if I just don't stretch the images too wide (width of 700 seems solid)
Regarding links, the same thing is still an issue. When I click on your third pic (with the Piker and Companion) I see a very high resolution screen shot. The same size screen shot on my computer is quite difficult to read. For now I think the best solution is to use cropping where necessary, don't make the image sizes too big, and set link to "none".
P1P3: It's only the 3rd pick and you are already giving up on Knights. Ironically, your next two picks are common knights. 2/2 First Strike for 3 is solid, and it becomes a fantastic card with even 1 of those Cloud Crusaders out. Your argument holds merit later in the draft, but I am always picking the Knight in pack 1.
P1P13: Thunder Strike is virtually unplayable. I've seen it used a few times successfully, but I still never find room for it maindeck and it never comes in out of the board. Demolish however is a great sideboard card and frequently gets sided in to deal with pesky equipment or Crystal Balls.
P3P3: Armored Ascension is, for all intents and purposes, a bomb. Even with an Ember Haulers, the Ascension provides a finisher while the Griffin is just another efficient creature.
P3P4: I think I take the Terramorphic here, especially because I just took the 2nd Ascension. This will make casting a turn 2 Ember Hauler a lot easier in a deck that wants to play a lot of plains.
P3P6: One card does not make a deck un-aggresive. Arbiter is an outright game winning bomb. Without removal, he's good game. The griffin is solid, but you already have some good 3 drops, why not take the game winner?
P3P10: Canyon Minotaur sucks but it might make the deck.
P3P11: Sorcerer's Strongbox is another card that sits in the board whenever I'm playing blue, but in these so called aggressive decks, it's a solid card to re-fill your hand after you've already blown your load on a bunch of bears. I'd play one in this deck.
All in all, I think you could've built a winning deck in RW. Arc Runner has been sub-par for me, and with 3 in the deck, I think the Lava Axe is redundant. Also, why would you sit safe passage. That card has won me game after game. It is a mid to late pick, but I tend to run every one I draft.
@Deckwizard: first off thanks for all the critiques!
P1P3 The problem I have with Knight is that there is only one common card it helps, and a 2/3 flier doesn't actually get that big a boost from +1/+1 and indestructibility. However! I think you're definitely right about this pick. If it were Cloud Crusader, Stormfront Pegasus, or Assault Griffin than that would be the pick, but Wild Griffin simply isn't strong enough to edge out the potential of the knight lord. Good call!
P1P13 I have seen Thunder Strike played as essentially a Giant Growth for fine value, but Demolish is defensible too.
P3P3 Like I said, this pick was very close and I essentially just erred on the side of caution, but Ascension does have potential to be a lot better.
P3P6 If we were discussing Vengeful Archon I would agree, but I don't think Arbiter is quite a "game-winning bomb". It is a bomb, but since it comes down so late I find my opponents will often already be in topdeck mode, so the ability doesn't actually have much of an effect. I'm gonna stick to my smaller, but way cheaper Griffin.
P3P10 True that.
P3P11 You're absolutely right, and I think if I'd had more experience with red I'd've taken and played the Strongbox too.
RE Safe Passage, I actually love that card too, but I don't think this is the deck for it. I won't be able to set up any big blow outs and I just want to pounding face, I like Safe Passage in more defensive decks mostly.
10 Comments
I don't think you can draw much of a conclusion about the strength of aggro decks based on that game you described. The red/white deck that was drafted was reasonably strong, and may have been the best deck you could draft. You just happened to run into a deck that was stronger. Monoblack with grave titan, black knight, and multiple corrupts is just plain nasty. Blue is well known to be strong and is getting overdrafted; it was good to go in another direction.
Hey Dylan,
I'm assuming that, per our last convo on mtgo, you are still using Windows Live Writer to compose your articles. Reiterating some tips to take them from good to great in terms of presentation:
1. Use the crop tool!
Quick, simple image cropping is one of *the* benefits of composing on WLW for me. When you paste in an image, under the "advanced" tab, there is a "Crop" option that gives you a window you can move around, expand, contract, etc. In ten seconds, you can take a "would you mull this" screen and crop it down to just the hand. When you are showing your final deck, you can crop out all the noise around the crucial parts: the main deck, and the board. Same with game states.
There is just no reason to show people a gigantic, empty battlefield to present a mulligan decision, or show deck-editor frames, empty 6, 7, 8, and 9+ drop slots and a Lava Axe in the card window of your final deck. The more you crop, the bigger the relevant info appears to readers.
2. Tune your default "Link to" settings.
Right now, if you click on an image in your articles, it takes you to...a smaller version of that image. :/ That's pretty useless, and you should either turn off the link functionality entirely, or link to an original-sized, or large-sized image.
To do this, in the same image dialog, under the "Picture" tab, there is a "Link to" drop down, with an "Options" button below it. Click the Options button, and change the size in the drop-down menu to "Original" or at the very least "Large." I go with "Original" because if you pick "Large," sometimes images will be blown up bigger than actual size, which isn't useful. Of course, in this case, you ought to just switch the "Link to" drop down from "Source Picture" to "None," as people don't need image links when the image in the article itself is already full-sized. I do this for things like mulligan hands or anything else that can be cropped to perfectly-good in-article legibility.
When you have made the change to the "Link to" settings, click the "Save settings as default" link at the bottom of the "Picture" tab, and it will auto-link your images to a full-size version automatically.
Now I'll read/enjoy the rest of the article, but I may start boycotting you if you don't take advantage of the simple, great image composition tools at your fingertips. :)
@unspeakable: Yeah I didn't mean to extrapolate too much from that game, it was meant to be a point on my opinion on aggro decks in general, but I definitely didn't make that clear enough. What I meant is: aggro decks are certainly as viable as control decks in general, but I personally am not a huge fan of aggro because of situations where I feel helpless. The last game was such a situation, in which a control deck might have had a few more tools at its disposal to deal with my opponent's threats.
@Godot: "Crop": For some reason the screen shots my computer takes are quite low resolution, so whenever I crop them down and enlarge the quality becomes terrible and it ends up looking even worse.
"Link To": I thought you meant the card pic images! Again the problem stems from the resolution, since linking to a larger pic does increase the size but the pixelation becomes a big problem.
Thanks again for the advice and help, I'll make sure that the pics in my next article are both cropped and linked properly, I'll just have to do a little research first on how to increase the resolution and clarity of my screen shots.
Weird! FWIW, I don't do anything special, I click on MTGO, Alt-PrintScreen (Alt = capture the active window only), and paste it into Live Writer. I have done nothing to change the resolution of the images captured by the "print screen" button, and have never even heard of someone getting anything other than a WYSIWYG, pixel-by-pixel copy of the screen.
Are you not using print screen? How are you grabbing your screen shots?
man.. 3rd hawk was SUCH a gift. what other card 8th pick or so can improve your deck quality as much. You just replaced 2 mediocre cards for 3 excellent cards. mise.
also, I <3 Foil Tokens. They need to start printing those IRL.
They have but they are somewhat rare. Unhinged/Unglued had some I know of. I forget where else.
Hmm I'm not sure what would cause that, I just use the "print screen" button. I'm on a laptop if that makes any difference. But yeah, comparing my cropped cards to yours in your latest article, Ryan, my cards are quite a bit fuzzier and harder to read (comparing the same size of course). However, I think I can find a happy medium if I just don't stretch the images too wide (width of 700 seems solid)
Regarding links, the same thing is still an issue. When I click on your third pic (with the Piker and Companion) I see a very high resolution screen shot. The same size screen shot on my computer is quite difficult to read. For now I think the best solution is to use cropping where necessary, don't make the image sizes too big, and set link to "none".
A few critiques:
P1P3: It's only the 3rd pick and you are already giving up on Knights. Ironically, your next two picks are common knights. 2/2 First Strike for 3 is solid, and it becomes a fantastic card with even 1 of those Cloud Crusaders out. Your argument holds merit later in the draft, but I am always picking the Knight in pack 1.
P1P13: Thunder Strike is virtually unplayable. I've seen it used a few times successfully, but I still never find room for it maindeck and it never comes in out of the board. Demolish however is a great sideboard card and frequently gets sided in to deal with pesky equipment or Crystal Balls.
P3P3: Armored Ascension is, for all intents and purposes, a bomb. Even with an Ember Haulers, the Ascension provides a finisher while the Griffin is just another efficient creature.
P3P4: I think I take the Terramorphic here, especially because I just took the 2nd Ascension. This will make casting a turn 2 Ember Hauler a lot easier in a deck that wants to play a lot of plains.
P3P6: One card does not make a deck un-aggresive. Arbiter is an outright game winning bomb. Without removal, he's good game. The griffin is solid, but you already have some good 3 drops, why not take the game winner?
P3P10: Canyon Minotaur sucks but it might make the deck.
P3P11: Sorcerer's Strongbox is another card that sits in the board whenever I'm playing blue, but in these so called aggressive decks, it's a solid card to re-fill your hand after you've already blown your load on a bunch of bears. I'd play one in this deck.
All in all, I think you could've built a winning deck in RW. Arc Runner has been sub-par for me, and with 3 in the deck, I think the Lava Axe is redundant. Also, why would you sit safe passage. That card has won me game after game. It is a mid to late pick, but I tend to run every one I draft.
@Deckwizard: first off thanks for all the critiques!
P1P3 The problem I have with Knight is that there is only one common card it helps, and a 2/3 flier doesn't actually get that big a boost from +1/+1 and indestructibility. However! I think you're definitely right about this pick. If it were Cloud Crusader, Stormfront Pegasus, or Assault Griffin than that would be the pick, but Wild Griffin simply isn't strong enough to edge out the potential of the knight lord. Good call!
P1P13 I have seen Thunder Strike played as essentially a Giant Growth for fine value, but Demolish is defensible too.
P3P3 Like I said, this pick was very close and I essentially just erred on the side of caution, but Ascension does have potential to be a lot better.
P3P6 If we were discussing Vengeful Archon I would agree, but I don't think Arbiter is quite a "game-winning bomb". It is a bomb, but since it comes down so late I find my opponents will often already be in topdeck mode, so the ability doesn't actually have much of an effect. I'm gonna stick to my smaller, but way cheaper Griffin.
P3P10 True that.
P3P11 You're absolutely right, and I think if I'd had more experience with red I'd've taken and played the Strongbox too.
RE Safe Passage, I actually love that card too, but I don't think this is the deck for it. I won't be able to set up any big blow outs and I just want to pounding face, I like Safe Passage in more defensive decks mostly.