Friday, December 6, 2019

A Throne of Eldraine Limited Design Review

Batting Above Replacement


Credit is absolutely due.




None of the 2019 Limited formats have been all time greats, but they were all set up with the potential for huge systemic issues and none of them were utter failures. Since Guilds of Ravnica Wizards of the Coast has been doing a great job of batting above replacement value on all of them.

We had two heavily factioned Ravnica sets with five core archetypes and only mild alternatives, and both were pretty good and also very unique from the other one. War of the Spark's planeswalker fiesta layout has all sorts of fundamental issues, and it being even remotely reasonable is a miracle. Core Set 2020 was a core set that didn't feel utterly bland and horrible even if it wasn't Magic 2013 levels of good. And Throne of Eldraine had the mono-color needle to thread without the Shadowmoor hybrid playable buffer.

Any of these sets could have easily fallen into the worst of all time category, and instead we got four sets that were all good enough to keep drafting for their expected life time. Add Modern Horizons, which is at or near that all time great tier, and I have almost no concern about the future stewardship of Limited Magic.


Sliding Scale Mono-Color



One of the absurdly amazing factors of Throne of Eldraine that helped it break through some of the normal issues with mono-color sets was the flexibility of Adamant.

If you want some proof this mechanic was designed to perfectly fit Limited, there are zero rares or mythic rares with Adamant.


 


Oh look, you can scale the baseline effect to make Adamant matter more or less. Or you can scale the cost to make the card more or less of a payoff. Vantress Paladin wants you to play at least 12 or 13 Islands, but Garenbrig Paladin is fine with 10 or even just 8 Forests.




That’s another use, an “any color mono-color” card.


 


The more you look at the set, the more you realize a bunch of individual cards say the same basic message of “play mono-color” but tell you to dive into different depths.

The two biggest issues with mono-color formats are the repetitiveness of each archetype and the inability to flex your draft once the ball is rolling (aka you get on a color train and hope it doesn’t lead to garbage town). Throne of Eldraine really has neither of these issues. Even beyond supporting fifteen archetypes of each color pair and each mono-color deck, each color pair is three subarchetypes depending if it’s an even split or skewed in one direction. Not each of these three subarchetypes in a color pair is necessarily good, but the gradient existing gives options and the puzzle of figuring out which ones are good. Your drafts end up looking really unique even dozens of drafts in, and you get really rewarded for knowing exactly what shade of color your deck is going to be and selecting cards appropriately.

I really don’t think I’m doing the nuance here justice, but there’s more points to hit along the way today. Basically, the more you can make your theme a sliding scale the more you can make each deck feel really unique and the less people are forced to lock in Ixalan style in Pack 1 and hope they get all the Vampires and don’t get a bunch of useless Dinosaurs, and Throne of Eldraine did that with flying colors (and the non-flying ones too).


Mono-Color and Sideboarding



While I think the whole Throne of Eldraine plan of promoting mono-color, supporting color pairs worked really well, there was one notable hole in the set's layout that ate into its replayability to me.

Supporting fifteen archetypes requires a lot of playable cards, and Wizards did a good job there. There are less than 10 cards including rares I would describe as F-level unplayables. But that also means every card is playing a specific maindeck role.

You can best see the impact of this with mono-color payoffs. You technically can sideboard in a Vantress Paladin or Locthwain Paladin if you need a random body, but are you really happy with the card in a two color deck or just taking out something that is actually blank in the matchup for a card with power and toughness?


 


This is kinda the flip side of why Guilds of Ravnica had deep replay value even if the draft portion was miserably inflexible. There were only five archetypes, but the set was also light on unplayables. That meant a bunch of cards played dedicated sideboard roles and each matchup shifted drastically between games. There were even re-levels, like Boros downgrading two drops to 2/2s that survived Mephitic Vapors.


 


In Throne of Eldraine, if you had a bad matchup you were mostly dead. The way to make a green deck beat a blue deck was just not draft the Curious Pair half of the color and instead draft the Wildwood Trackers. Or if you are a blue deck, just draft a different color if you need to beat Rimrock Knight. The best sideboarding you could do with many decks was True Love’s Kiss against Revenge of Ravens. Or red against the bulky green Food deck, like Rock-Paper-Scissors. And that’s on top of the issue with mono-color decks and playables, where in actually contested drafts your mono-color deck is not going to have a lot of on-color options on the sidelines by virtue of basic math.




Supporting extra archetypes is definitely better than the alternative of everyone drafting mono-color, but I wonder if Shadowmoor accidentally tried to do things the right way. Only support bridging mono-color into five two-color decks instead of the full ten, just enemy or allied or some weird mix, and see what happens. That way your set has more room to breathe and let decks flex, and there are even pre-defined ways you can expect your mono-color decks to flex that can be scripted to help the skewed matchups. Make black cards that help mono-red when it has to play against the green decks that are just fine with the base black strategy.


White Versus Red, AKA Youthful Knight is Trash



The whole “white has an issue in Limited” thing is well tread at this point.


 


The short version of the problem: white still isn’t allowed to have big creatures, isn’t allowed to have card advantage, and isn’t allowed to have the Kabuto Moth and Blinding Mages it dominated old formats with (for good reason, have you played against a Kabuto Moth?). Or Triplicate Spirits, a card that ruins games by making them card-agnostic counting and multiplication when you cast Fortify or whatever. At the same time every other color gets big creatures and card advantage. So white can only win if it’s effectively aggressive with low drops that stretch relevant into the late game, but that level of aggro leads to formats like Gatecrash and Zendikar and Amonkhet and Ixalan that people don’t like. So we have a color that doesn’t really aggro exceptionally well, has no staying power, has no late game leverage, and just is primed to underperform.


 


Adventure was an absolute delight for white in Throne of Eldraine. If the problem is staying power, the good white adventures were a big step in fixing that. White wasn’t the best color in the set, but I also don’t think it was the worst.

But something stuck with me from my team’s final review of the set. We spent a lot of time discussing the specifics of all fifteen possible color combos (including mono-colors) and the conclusion was largely that there wasn’t a reason to be mono-white. But everyone thought mono-red was the best archetype.




The weird part is that neither color had significant adamant payoffs, and the hybrid four-drops that promoted mono-color decks were similarly strong mediocre. There wasn’t an amazing heavy color commitment low drop in either color, there weren’t distinct differences in mono-color promoting rares. There wasn’t an active set-specific reason to be mono-white or mono-red, but mono-red was great and mono-white was often better off with another color.

When you start comparing the purest, mono-color forms of what works for a color and what doesn’t against each other, things get real clear real fast, and Throne of Eldraine was just the forced perspective to figure it out.


 


Let’s walk down the commons. Scorching Dragonfire, Rimrock Knight, Searing Barrage, Weaselback Redcap. Ardenvale Tactician, Flutterfox, Faerie Guidemother, Trapped in the Tower. Both sets of cards are reasonably close in power. Then what?




Red gets Seven Dwarves and Brimstone Trebuchet. White gets Youthful Knight and Lonesome Unicorn. There seems to be this fundamental idea that Youthful Knight or Pouncing Lynx or Moorland Inquisitor isn’t just Goblin Assailant. Seven Dwarves in multiples steals games, Youthful Knight in multiples just loses games to a 3/3. Similarly late game a five mana 3/3 isn’t getting you anywhere, while Brimstone Trebuchet wins games.




(Some of this is the odd omission of any real white payoffs for Knights. Do the Gatherer Search. White has Shining Armor and Venerable Knight below rare. Black has Barrow Witches, Smitten Swordsmith, and Belle of the Brawl. Red has Brimstone Trebuchet, Joust, Burning-Yard Trainer, Ogre Errant. Why is white the color with multiple commons that are sized and costed as if card type Knight is an upside?)




Red is self consistent. If you literally just stack the red cards up, they all battle well. Even if you have something like War of the Spark’s Invading Manticore, a top end creature that stabilizes for control or grinds well for recursive Rakdos decks, it is still six power for six mana and battles your opponent down. No one ever died to Bulwark Giant beats, or Ardenvale Paladin.

White might actually be the only color is is full on self-inconsistent at lower rarities these days, which is kinda the most common failure mode for colors in draft. Self-inconsistency can be overriden with raw power, as with white in Throne of Eldraine, but any time that slips a bit you start down the road to Battle for Zendikar green, a color that was split between four non-overlapping synergies (Eldrazi, Landfall, Converge, Allies) along with being underpowered. On the flip side you can have white in Core Set 2020 if you have self-consistency even at low power. Every card except Aerial Assault was directly related to battlefield presence and leveraging easy wins in races, and even Aerial Assault did that in certain flying heavy archetypes.

So fixing white in draft is a two-fold problem.




Add leverage to low drops, even if you can’t print Adventures in every set. Ancestral Blade was kinda perfect, a Kabuto Moth without the instant speed considerations of that card, and I would hope to see more cards in that vein.




Stop printing stupid blocking-only cards unless you are going to completely support a control deck in white. Give the color a real long game engine at low rarities if you can’t give it pure card draw, stop this stupid size imbalance where green gets two mana 3/1 but white can’t have a 4/4, or make the defensive leverage Sun-Crested Pterodon that also battles.


Fifteen Archetypes the Medium Way



This was a bit of a leftover realization from Modern Horizons, and might be a bit of a Pro Tour inside-baseball issue.

One thing I learned in the Return to Ravnica to Hour of Devastation era is that early format high-level competitive events are all over the place for draft. People testing in different groups come to wildly different conclusions, preferences are unpredictable, and you are rewarded for having wide knowledge of how to traverse different draft scenarios and exploit whatever is undervalued.


 


Modern Horizons at the MC Hogaak was late in the format. At that event people generally knew how to draft Ninjas, but also that snow-lands shouldn’t wheel and what white cards could convince you to draft the color. Everything was contested, and that changes a lot. If you aren’t the only person willing to speculate on Segovian Angel in a pod, you don’t want to have your C-tier W/U deck facing off against C-tier B/R because B/R is just a better deck in that comparison.

Drafting the medium way is much more rewarded late in formats. You can know all the archetypes, you can know how to draft a successful version of all of them, but you should bias towards the archetypes that tend to land higher on the deck scale in close scenarios. This is especially true in a format like Throne of Eldraine where you are incentivized to lean towards one color and branch out as good stuff shows up. If you start off with two Ardenvale Tactician, then see Syr Elenora and Reave Soul, you should know which of those color pairs better with white and pick accordingly.

For reference, the preferences I listed for Throne of Eldraine just for white to show this idea of routing:

If I start in white, I don’t want to stay entirely mono-white and am likely to end up 10-7 or 9-8 on mana. Black and green are preferable pairings, with W/B being an odd color pair that overperforms low expectations, red is fine but has weird anti-synergies due to the non-Human payoffs, and blue I need a real reason to move into.

And now in general:




I’m avoiding U/R, U/W.




I solidly favor mono-R, G/U, and G/R if given the choice and slightly favor W/B if things are equal.




I’m aiming to splash in “mono”- white, blue, and green, but if I have all red or all black cards that’s great.

Again, this is something that is magnified by this set to become clear in broadly applicable ways. There are incentives to stay mono-color, so there are clear routes where you are base one color and looking for options as opposed to choosing between three colors of playables early. There’s fifteen archetypes instead of ten, so there’s likely to be more above replacement color pairs and more low tier archetypes.

But going back to normal sets, I'm going to be a bit more formal with my descriptions of these kinds of things. Routing, preferences, and what not. It's just one more thing to add to the Limited meeting checklist.


Really Dumb Rares



Yea… the other reason you would stick to early colors that made knowing this routing became so important.




There are 68 unique rares and mythic rares in Throne of Eldraine. At least 35 are bomb rares, where only the 2 best removal (Bake into a Pie and Epic Downfall) and 3 utter bomb uncommons (Trail of Crumbs, Syr Carah, Syr Konrad) are in the same picture. 25 of those were even better than Syr Konrad, a solid historical level “mythic uncommon”. This isn’t even weighted that hard towards Mythics, even accounting for the split rarity over half of packs will contain a slam dunk rare.




That is twice as many as Modern Horizons. That is 1.5 times as many as War of the Spark, a format where everyone complained about the bombiness. I think if you drop down from “rares in the A- or A range” to “rares that absolutely dominate games” dropping cards like Murderous Rider and Stonecoil Serpent you get closer to War of the Spark, but that’s still ignoring context that magnifies the bombs in Throne of Eldraine.





I don’t think bomb heavy formats are necessarily bad. Both Hour of Devastation and Eldritch Moon, two of my favorite formats of all time, are fairly bomb heavy. But Throne of Eldraine just didn’t hit the mix right to make it work. I spend an entire post talking about this after Etheral Absolution, so check that out for some context.





Back to War. War of the Spark was entirely built around the idea you can mitigate planeswalkers with battlefield presence. You could beat most of the rare planeswalkers by having a couple things that attacked well, or one of the many uncommon bomb-lite planeswalkers in the set. You can’t attack a Feasting Troll King off the battlefield, Throne of Eldraine is slow enough that attacking its controller down is rough, and there are far fewer uncommons operating on that high, game solo-ing level of impact. And unlike the Spellgorger Weird days of War of the Spark, there are actually no commons doing that.




You could beat this sometimes with metagame exploits giving you reliably crazy mono-color strategies, but in heavily contested contexts (ie. the Mythic Championship) it felt like a lot of times the best 50ish cards in the format were the only things that mattered in games they were cast. That’s 35 rares and 15 or so bomby uncommons, often hybrid. You would do your best to Faerie Guidemother, Flutterfox, Ardenvale Tactician your way out but sometimes they just draw Lochmere Serpent and there isn’t anything you could do.

A lot of the rares also lacked a scope of unbeatability (see my prior post on making good bomb rares for draft). They are just going to dominate the game regardless of the point you resolve them, with maybe Lovestruck Beast and Questing Beast as the top tier exceptions (both of these are notably worse than Syr Konrad, an uncommon that is basically a scopelessly unbeatable rare). They also largely weren’t the seven or eight cost bombs that win games but come at real situational costs. It’s just a bunch of three to six drop game enders in a format without a reliable way to race in the face of Food and tons of x/4 blockers. Losing to each of them felt the same and miserable. They drew their rare, they cast it at some point early or late, and you died horribly. Eldritch Moon and Hour of Devastation leaned heavily on this concept of scope, and even War of the Spark did that in the sense that each extra cost on a card represented a more than linear scaling of traction your opponent could amass to handle it.




I can’t help but wonder if some of this is the intersection of modern battlefield Magic design and generally pushing a set past the limits of what is reasonable for broad Constructed power level (you aren’t going to convince me Throne of Eldraine is in the healthy limits for Standard any time soon). Your broken cards are all limited hits and not Mox Opal or Aetherworks Marvel, and even past that you are just trimming mana and adding points to each card because “you have margin to make them exciting”.

I'm not saying that we want more Aetherworks Marvels. Just that the equivalently powerful "normal" or "fair" cards have chilling effects too. The depth of this issue is a completely different post of its own, but its impact on Limited is just one aspect of the power creep issue within Throne of Eldraine.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

The Actual Problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns



Today, we get to talk about yet another problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns. If anything, it is the original problem with the card.

The one that when Oko was first revealed, everyone was buzzing about.



What is a Food token?




When I first started trying to write something about current Standard, the thing that came to mind was the idea of a forced or unforced error in design.

War of the Spark and Modern Horizons had their share of missteps, but each was a fairly resource straining and epic undertaking. They were also both working in totally new spaces. If you look at past Magic design mistakes, almost all of them are caused by trying new things and missing (Smuggler's Copter, Skullclamp, Jace, the Mind Sculptor), not being able to allocate enough resources to what is going on (True-Name Nemesis), or both (the Energy mechanic, the two sets I mentioned).

When you shoot high and strain resources in the hopes of putting out something awesome, there's an excusable level of failure. When you ban something like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, you know it's because they were shooting at making 250 cards matter and be great and one or three missed too high.

What was Throne of Eldraine's excuse?




I wrote an article titled The 10 Most Broken Cards in Throne of Eldraine last month. One of the cards I scored exceedingly high was Feasting Troll King.

I probably had some Hogaak on my mind biasing my rating upwards, but Feasting Troll King is an extremely powerful card. When first looking at the set it felt like there were a number of ways to generate Food at minimal mana or card cost. Basic cardboard economics show turning minimal investment into a 7/6 trample is good.

The follow up issue was that turning any investment into a 3/3 Elk was much less good.

When it was possible Oko, Thief of Crowns would be banned before Mythic Championship VI and SCGCon, I went back to thinking about Feasting Troll King. I looked at my decks, and remembered the experience I had playing them. Which was that Oko, Thief of Crowns was my best Food generator, and without it the easiest way to make a Feasting Troll King was tapping Castle Garenbrig to cast it.




Another common theme among Magic mistakes is a parasitic mechanic running out of control. The best recent example is Energy, though the classic is Affinity for Artifacts.

You print some cards that enable Energy. The pieces fit together and make all the other cards that do it better. Every more subtle interaction in the format now has to stack up to those obvious ones. You push the power level on some of the pieces, because if you don't you wasted a lot of cards that only work with each other.

If you don't push enough, you get Ixalan where the tribes barely made an impact. That might be an equally bad mistake on its own.

If you push too hard and don't print appropriate interaction to punish going all in on that one thing, you can easily end up in a scenario where that thing outclasses everything else.

But Energy didn't really go over the top without Rogue Refiner from Aether Revolt. And Vampires and Dinosaurs both got raised to highly competitive options with some targeted Magic 2020 buffs.




There won't be another Food card for Feasting Troll King for a long time. Maybe one can slide into Core Set 2021 if needed. There isn't a Hunt for the King or whatever a second Throne of Eldraine set would be. And if the mechanic was any more complicated than Food token, we might not see it until a Modern Horizons style set.

Throne of Eldraine is only the third true standalone set of this type in the Modern era. Dominaria was the first, and War of the Spark the second. Ravnica Allegiance and Guilds of Ravnica were set up in traditional Ravnica block fashion, where they don't expect any given mechanic to carry forward and all 10 guilds are the cohesive whole.

Dominaria and War of the Spark had linear mechanics, but they were open ended. Legendary or artifact stuff matters gets cards every set. Proliferate works with any counters.

Throne of Eldraine's first is being the first standalone set to support a parasitic mechanic.




From this idea of having one shot to make Food hit Standard play, the narrative of creating Oko, Thief of Crowns is easy. I'm not excusing missing the utterly stifling impact Oko's +1 has on deck building, but the rest falls into place,

You want Food to hit Standard. You are spending a planeswalker on it, and that planeswalker is one you are setting up as a prominent current and future antagonist. Even if Food misses, you want this card to hit. So numbers get pushed a bit to ensure it works by itself.

If you look at Simic "Food", the only real Food card is Wicked Wolf. Food as a mechanic has largely missed Constructed, we just see a lot of it from Oko and Gilded Goose. The failure case came true, and Oko "succeeded" at surviving that.

When you ban Oko, and that's a when not an if, you will see basically no Food. Even when Attune with Aether was banned, Energy showed up.

If you want another actionable, large scale design lesson from Oko, it is here.

Parasitic mechanics will be made again because they do new and interesting stuff. You have less cards to spend on them now that everything is single serving. How do you make them in a single set without having this issue again?

We have two existing models. I'm not sure either is optimal, but I present them anyways.

One came about after the Affinity fiasco. The Soulshift and Spirits mattering was a key part of Champions of Kamigawa block, and Ravnica: City of Guilds had plenty of Spirits to grow those synergies. You don't have to push and worry as hard if mechanics grow and change over time. That was repeatedly implemented block-to-block, but that now has to be woven in on a set-to-set basis. I'm unsure doing this is possible. You have general ideas of a block's mechanics early enough to seed it months or a year ahead, but not a single set. Throne of Eldraine feeds Theros Beyond Death's assumed  Devotion theme well, but War of the Spark and Magic 2020 didn't really feed Throne of Eldraine. Maybe this is another issue, since those sets and the Ravnica ones were so busy they didn't have space.

The other option is treating everything like an old small set. Mechanics become disposeable, you don't care a ton if they fail, and you don't go on Oko sized excursions pushing them. But that sucks, because everyone loved Constellation in Journey to Nyx and hated seeing nothing more of it.

Maybe standalone sets need to share mechanics. Maybe you need to break down the Core Set walls and have it serve a dual intro and supplementary purpose more. Maybe the 2 + 1 + Core model we saw in Ixalan + Dominaria or Guilds of Ravnica + War of the Spark is best since you can seed ahead of the standalone within the same year.

All I know is I really don't want to see the same thing that happened with Oko happen again.

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Turbo Red - Top 50 Mythic





This entire run took me around 85 matches, with a 75% win rate.

Since my deck was 18 Land Mono-Red, each match took me 5-10 minutes.

Turbo to blog post successful. 

Credit for this list goes to wordy333 on Magic Online, who Top 8ed a recent PTQ with it. I've changed 2 cards since that first list, and I've come to the conclusion that maybe I should change a 3rd. Maybe.



4 Fanatical Firebrand (RIX) 101
4 Ghitu Lavarunner (DAR) 127
4 Scorch Spitter (M20) 159
4 Viashino Pyromancer (M19) 166
3 Rampaging Ferocidon (XLN) 154
3 Goblin Chainwhirler (DAR) 129
4 Light Up the Stage (RNA) 107
4 Shock (M19) 156
4 Lightning Strike (XLN) 149
4 Skewer the Critics (RNA) 115
4 Wizard's Lightning (DAR) 152
18 Mountain (XLN) 273

1 Mountain (XLN) 273
1 Rampaging Ferocidon (XLN) 154
2 Act of Treason (M19) 127
3 Fry (M20) 140
4 Lava Coil (GRN) 108
3 Risk Factor (GRN) 113
1 Goblin Chainwhirler (DAR) 129

The Play Philosophy of Fire


For those who haven't been following Magic content since the Myspace era, The Philosophy of Fire is the concept for your strategy being centered around converting each card you draw directly into damage.

That's the entire goal of this deck. 

That doesn't mean you toss spells around irresponsibly. You need to maximize the damage you deal per card, and also aim to not sequence in a way that sticks you with cards in hand. Get the most attacks from your creatures, play your Spectacle cards or Wizard's Lightnings right before they risk being non-Spectacled, do the math on when burn is better as removal.

Good thing I'm here to tell you how to do that.

Tips and Tricks



As much as I hype Rampaging Ferocidon, I'm fairly sure Scorch Spitter is the card that makes this deck possible. The other 1 drops we have seen in Red decks for a while aren't enough to support an 18 land curve, you needed another card for the redundancy to operate off only 2 lands.

But often your hand has multiple one drops. Which do you lead on of Ghitu Lavarunner, Scorch Spitter, and Fanatical Firebrand?

In general, Scorch Spitter > Fanatical Firebrand > Ghitu Lavarunner.

Scorch Spitter first is obvious. It's two damage per attack, doesn't have haste.

Fanatical Firebrand beats out Ghitu Lavarunner largely because it sequences better into Light Up the Stage. If your Turn 2 is Light Up the Stage, then land drop after seeing the flips, then your other 1 drop you would rather get the haste damage off Fanatical Firebrand than play it after combat and your 2nd land. Ghitu Lavarunner will just have haste for immediate damage later anyways.

Ghitu Lavarunner is the most conditional lead off. If you want to block a 1 power creature against other Red decks or Vampires, you can play the 1/2. It also can make sense if you want to Wizard's Lightning on Turn 2, but can't lean on playing the Ghitu Lavarunner that turn. This comes up most if you have 1 land on the draw against Wildgrowth Walker.


I still don't know if I'm playing this card correctly, but it's felt better as I got better at timing it.

You are aiming to cast Light up the Stage when you have access to two mana after and your next plays don't diminish in damage if delayed. 

I try not to fire off Light Up the Stage on Turn 2 unless I kept a 1 lander trying to Light into a 2nd land. Too often you hit multiple cards you can't cast. Or worse, you have a 3 drop in hand you really wanted to cast and suddenly script yourself out of max Rampaging Ferocidon value. The 3 drop thing is usually the biggest gate on Light Up the Stage, why give yourself more cards to cast next turn when you have the thing you want already?


On the subject of 1 land hands, my keeps are fast and loose. Raw card density matters so much to this deck. 1 land with a 1 drop and a Light Up the Stage is a keep. 1 land with 2 one drops is a keep.

4 lands is when you start thinking about a 6 card hand, especially if there isn't a good aggro curve involved.

Not having a 1 or 2 drop creature is more of an issue than lands. Occasionally you can keep a hand with a couple lands, some burn, and 3 drops, but it's matchup specific. Twelve of your spells are gated by Spectacle or a Wizard, and that usually means controlling a creature to cast them effectively.


When should you kill a blocker, outside of the obvious case of something like Wildgrowth Walker?

Think about it from how much damage the attacker deals. 

Obvious one: They have a 1/1. You have Scorch Spitter and Shock. Shock deals 2. The attack deals 2. If you Shock the blocker, you get that Shock of damage immediately and more later if you attack more.

Less obvious: Same on Turn 2, but you have Viashino Pyromancer. What is your alternate play, and what is your Turn 3 play? If you are playing Rampaging Ferocidon Turn 3 and have another 1 drop to go with Shock, kill it now. If your Turn 3 looks more like some burn spells, get the extra body down.

Even less obvious: You have Ghitu Lavarunner and Lightning Strike. They have a 2/1 Merfolk Branchwalker. The attack is only 2 damage, the spell is 3 damage, and they may or may not have a blocker to follow up.

How much burn do you have relative to their life total? If it's 1-2 points away from lethal that's an easy top deck. 3 is unfavored but not horrible odds. 4 means you need multiple spells. The further you are, the better killing a blocker is since they might fail to block more times and let you get more damage.

Do you need to leave up the burn as removal for a bigger issue, like Wildgrowth Walker?

Is there some clear end game they are likely hitting soon that bricks Ghitu Lavarunner forever?

Do you want them to use removal on Lavarunner so you can stick Rampaging Ferocidon?

If the board is more complicated, does this bring them from 2 to 1 blocker so you get more repeat attacks even if you are throwing something away in combat?

I can't list all the angles to consider here, but hopefully this gets some of the right wheels turning.

Sideboarding Basics


-Don't cut small creatures unless something is horribly skewed.

-Trim Shock if it doesn't kill creatures.

-Often Rampaging Ferocidon or Goblin Chainwhirler does nothing. Cut them when that happens.

-Trim Skewer the Critics when you want more removal as it's hard to use it to clear a blocker.

-Act of Treason won't show up in the sideboard guide. You want it 5% of the time, but that 5% is Gruul or Dinosaurs that are close matchups where the card is 3 mana auto-win.

-The last slot debate is 4th Fry over the Mountain or 3rd Risk Factor.

-Similar to my Azorious Aggro primer, I'm going to describe a lot of matchups in medium ways. Just remember that a lot of this is prefaced by "the games they get to participate in", and you just dunk on them a reasonable percent of the time. While this deck is 55% in games your opponent stands a chance, it's +10-15% because they literally died before casting spells.

-My details here are going to be less specific than those for the Azorius Aggro deck. Your plays end up way more fluid based on exact life total numbers and cards in game, so it's hard to preempt a ton of play patterns. The ones you can are largely "GO FACE", which isn't as nuanced as white creature sequencing and lineups.

Matchup - Esper 


Of the major matchups, Esper is definitely the worst but still winnable. Their life gain cards (Oath of Kaya, Basilica Bell-Haunt) are huge issues. 

Sideboarding:
-1 Shock
-2 Goblin Chainwhirler
+1 Rampaging Ferocidon
+2 Risk Factor

Risk Factor is generally good, but drawing multiples is a huge risk against Narset, Parter of Veils. Goblin Chainwhirler isn't amazing, but sometimes it clearing a Teferi that bounced a creature is great. Almost no one plays Hero of Precinct One anymore making Shock dead.

-Don't attack planeswalkers if they control Oath of Kaya. I've made this mistake.

-If you Shock your own creature in response to Oath of Kaya's trigger targeting it, that stops the gain 3 making Shock into Lightning Bolt.

-You can only really play around Legion's End with Shock your own duplicate. Accept that you get got sometimes.

-If you can deal 2 to a 3 loyalty Narset, that is usually worth it. Dealing 3 is closer.

Matchup - Kethis


This matchup is favorable but loseable. They still have some of the problematic elements of Esper and a fast kill, but your burn as disruption is a huge deal and they draw a bunch of nonsense non-interaction every game.

Sideboarding:
-1 Shock
-3 Rampaging Ferocidon
+3 Fry
+1 Goblin Chainwhirler 

Ferocidon doesn't have much life gain to stop and just gets bounced by Teferi if they care about it in a combo setup. Fry is absolutely your best card as instant interaction. The Goblin Chainwhirler-Shock swap is kinda whatever, but Goblin Chainwhirler free rolls Fblthps.

-Kill their Diligent Excavator on the spot. Plan your burn to be able to do this, such as the previously mentioned Ghitu Lavarunner plus Wizard's Lightning starts.

Matchup - Any Ramp Deck



You are massively favored. By far the most common matchup I faced up the ladder and I think I lost twice.

Sideboarding:
-3 Goblin Chainwhirler
-1 Shock
+3 Risk Factor
+1 Rampaging Ferocidon 

(Note: Wilderness Reclamation-Nexus of Fate is a different sideboard plan, Rampaging Ferocidon is bad, multiple Risk Factors are bad, just max out on Goblin Chainwhirlers and jam)

-Time your Rampaging Ferocidon well. On curve it's a good threat, but if you are already clocking them and have it in hand often have a window to cast it after they would Time Wipe on curve but before Field of the Dead triggers.
-The reason these matchups are easy is they lack interaction for your early attackers. Your best hands involve multiple fast creatures.


Matchup - Mono Red



Shockingly skill intensive. Think a lot about how you position against Goblin Chainwhirler and how your plays line up with their open mana. You actually beat Experimental Frenzy by just turboing through it. If they stabilize, have 4 lands, and cast it yea that's good, but often they have the wrong land count, a blank Frenzy instead of an early play, something that just lines up wrong and you go under them.

Sideboarding (draw):
-1 Rampaging Ferocidon
-1 Skewer the Critics
-1 Scorch Spitter
+1 Goblin Chainwhirler
+2 Lava Coil

Sideboarding (play):
-2 Skewer the Critics
+1 Mountain
+1 Goblin Chainwhirler

Only 2 Lava Coils come in because they can be a liability in multiples when your plan is racing Experimental Frenzy. The extra Mountain slightly balances out having seven 3 drops that you really need to hit on time on the play. 

-Don't waste removal on x/1s if you are going to Goblin Chainwhirler them.
-Don't run multiple x/1s out until it's clear you aren't getting Chainwhirlered.
-Kill their creatures unless they are in lethal burn range.


Matchup - Feather


The Feather matchup is close. I've won more than I've lost, but I've lost in fairly definitive ways. This is another removal centric matchup, so don't keep non-interactive Skewer the Critics and creature hands on the draw.

Sideboarding:
-1 Shock
-4 Skewer the Critics*
-1 Goblin Chainwhirler
+4 Lava Coil
+1 Rampaging Ferocidon
+1 Fry

Skewer being awkward to sequence as interaction is a deal breaker. Fry not killing Legion Warboss or Dreadhorde Arcanist is a deal breaker, even if it does hit Gideon Blackblade. The 1 Fry I'm trying here is a hedge against that, and I'm not even sure it's better than the last Skewer the Critics. Goblin Chainwhirler is staying in largely because you need to kill them with continuing beats as you hit their creatures, the ability only matters against Legion Warboss tokens.

-Their Gods Willings are fairly telegraphed. Don't run whole turns into them.

Matchup - Vampires



Another matchup where I've won more than I've lost, but I'm convinced this is bad. They have so many cards that you struggle to beat. The more recent lists without Sanctum Seeker are a bit easier, since that card both immediately gains life and clocks super fast.

Sideboard:
-4 Scorch Spitter
-3 Skewer the Critics
+4 Lava Coil
+1 Rampaging Ferocidon
+1 Goblin Chainwhirler
+1 Mountain

These jerks play so many 1 mana 1/2s. How can your 1 mana 1/1 that needs to attack compete? At least Fanatical Firebrand can team up with Goblin Chainwhirler to kill stuff. The Mountain is a must have with eight 3 drop creatures. Fry doesn't kill most of their stuff, don't bother with it.

-You are really incentivized to have them enter Turn 3 with no creature or you having a kill spell up to mitigate Sorin. If they have to -3 Sorin you can easily mop it up and win, especially if Champion is just a 4/4 cantrip.
-Save Lava Coil for the x/4s if possible. Vona is a giant pain if you don't have it, a joke if you do.
-Similar to Red mirrors, try to max value Goblin Chainwhirler and not kill x/1s if you can. Sometimes you die to Sorin, but sometimes you need to get greedy.
-Fanatical Firebrand messes up Adanto Vanguard big time with pings in response to the activation. They can sometimes pay 4 life to keep it around, they can basically never pay 8.