Last time I covered how to draft 1996's Antiquities... now it's three sets instead of one! Why 3? They're a little bigger, much less focused, and there's less to say about each.
The main thing I'll stress is the golden principle from the Antiquities article: Do not draft toward a curve. Draft toward quality. It's still true for all three of these sets. Games are going to late game board stalls. You don't need to worry about tempo, but about breaking through the stall. Before taking a card, ask yourself: "is this good on turn 5?"
The one other thing I'll repeat is...
How to draft a non-sanctioned format (click to expand).
- Find people who will draft with you. Discord and Reddit can help.
- Set up the draft portion on https://mtgadraft.tk/
- Coordinate a time for everyone to draft together. (For groups smaller than eight, bot drafters can fill in the gaps.)
- Buy the necessary singles for your decks, and play 1:1 freeform games on the MtGO client!
If buying them sounds daunting, keep in mind: with very few exceptions, these cards are only cents each.
As for cards that don't exist online, that is up to your group's house rules to determine. Common solutions are using substitutions (Goblin Cannon
instead of Rocket Launcher) or banning the cards outright (Tempest Efreet).
The Dark (1994)
122 cards—and how many are playable in the unintended format of triple Dark?
Commons
- White: Pikemen are OK. Holy Light
I guess out of the sideboard. The rest: 1/5 rating or less.
- Blue: Drowned
and Giant Shark are respectable defenders. Ghost Ship
is the best card in the entire set. The others are unplayable.
- Black: Ashes to Ashes
is great. The rest are nothing.
- Red: Fissure
is playable. Goblin Rock Sled is a medium defender. The rest are junk. I wouldn't try to make Goblin tribal happen.
- Green: Carnivorous Plant
is the best defense in the set. The rest are odious.
- Multicolored: No to all three.
Yes, I'm being sincere about Ghost Ship—more on that later. The short version is you would be happy to play four of them, seven of them, twenty three of them, really any number you can get your hands on.
Uncommons
Rares
And that's The Dark! So why is Ghost Ship
so good? Look back over all the playable cards I mentioned: the whole set has only three cards with flying, and Ghost Ship is by far the biggest. Its regeneration rarely even comes up, because so little can kill it. It's just Fissure
or double Fire Drake
block, really. Banshee
can do it, but for 8 mana, so if your opponent doesn't have Maze of Ith
or Ashes to Ashes
, they're getting grinded out pretty inevitably. Ghost Ship is even great on defense when needed! Only a few creatures have a power of 4 or greater, and fewer still are reliable attackers.
Imagine Darksteel Colossus
costing four mana. That is Ghost Ship
in triple Dark limited.
Fallen Empires (1994)
A famously weak set... but what happens when you have three packs of it??
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If these don't look strong, you've never seen them in play. |
Commons
Uncommons
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What bombs looked like in 1994. |
Rares
So evaluating everything: what wins the day in triple FEM is banding, first strike, and Deep Spawn
. Other than Fungal Bloom
, there's not much to build around. Just find the open two colors and draft cards with raw power.
One more set!
Homelands
THE famously weak set. Homelands is funny because it's full of cards that look like buildarounds but aren't. It's just a sea of underpowered/overcosted blobs. Take the highest stats you can find, along with whatever of the meager removal is available, and hope your opponent's deck is even worse than yours.
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What defense looked like in 1995. |
Commons
- White: Oof. Abbey Matron is the best white common, and that should say a lot about how bad the others are.
- Blue: Dark Maze is a HOUSE. Almost nothing gets through it. Draft 10 of them if you can. (Its attacking ability can be nice on the last turn, but mostly look at these as permanent defenders.) Memory Lapse
obviously gives the opponent some problems, but when possible it's better to draft cards affecting the board.
- Black: Greater Werewolf and Torture
are mediocre but the others are worse.
- Red: Collect as many Anaba Shaman
s as you can—with 2 or 3 out at the same time, they take over the whole board. Joven and Chandler can flesh out your deck. A 3/3 is honestly large in this format, and their abilities both have some relevant targets.
- Green: Leaping Lizard
is legit. It's bigger than all those 1/1s and 1/2s to natively have flying.
- Artifacts: Serrated Arrows
. Trust me: you cannot have too many of these. Ebony Rhino
is also decent but Arrows are where it's at.
Uncommons
- White: Abbey Gargoyles
is enormous and hard to deal with. Its biggest strike is those three white pips, as white doesn't have enough cards to fill a heavy-white deck.
- Black: Ihsan's Shade
is SO good. (Ironically it's worse in triple Homelands than in standard, perhaps the only card to make that claim. Its biggest selling points were it was immune to the best three removal spells at the time—Swords to Plowshares
, Lightning Bolt
, and Terror
—but none of those are in Homelands. Instead we have Roots
, which Ihsan's Shade is indeed vulnerable to. But that's about all that beats it! It's still one of the best cards in the set.)
- Red: Eron the Relentless
plays. Retribution
looks amazing but always seems to underperform.
- Green: Roots
is premium removal, in a set with very little removal. Gobble them up. Root Spider is fine.
- Artifacts: No.
- Lands: I'm not convinced these are the best way to splash.
Rares
Four down, five to go!