What I Learned from GRN Draft - Golgari, Dimir, Izzet

Golgari – How to Play Versus Better Things

What actually was the issue with green in Guilds of Ravnica? Jump-start and surveil and flat power levels. While the guilds all had their own identity, their creatures were all about the same in raw size. Douser of Lights was king, not some green donk. Jump-start and surveil meant the blue decks were just too good at ensuring they kept drawing spells while the green decks didn't have the same mechanisms, so eventually they would flood and die against good control.

Golgari specifically had this issue in spades. You had to exchange cards repeatedly to power up your undergrowth cards, and trading just maximizes your opponent's innate ability to draw better than you.

You won by ensuring you traded profitably every time. Not just getting a little bit out of every exchange, like with Spinal Centipede, but ensuring your pieces of cardboard all traded up in some way. Your end exchange wasn't just a full graveyard, but your opponent left with bad 2/2s to your remaining large creatures.

All this is building to say that Generous Stray, Burglar Rats, Ironshell Beetle, and Severed Strands were all unplayable. Every time you draw a card that doesn't exchange profitably in any way you are setting up for an easy loss and none of these do that. Even if you draw Severed Strands with a Burglar Rats you are still making medium exchanges, and that's the best cast scenario.

Ironshell Beetle was probably the most subtle offender here and took the most times failing to see why it was bad. A 2/2 doesn't trade for much, a 1/1 doesn't trade for anything, and a +1/+1 counter on a 4/4 or similar doesn't change how it trades in this format. It didn't do anything besides exist on curve when every other option did more. 

Maybe it's just a factor of how slowly this format played out, but I should be considering these card quality over a game factors more in other formats. This is always something I've run off intuition on before, and it's good to have a solid example and metrics to go to.

Dimir - Second Level Questions

You have Artful Takedown turn four on the play. Your opponent controls Wojek Bodyguard and a Fresh-Faced Recruit. What's the play?

Can you see the future?

Dimir was an archetype that often asked you what the game would look like on turn nineteen. Evaluating if you really need that land on turn five if you will draw another later, tracking their relevant cards against your remaining answers, lining up counterspells to protect your few threats, and not decking is all stuff I'm used to from weird decks in other formats.

Artful Takedown just posed another set of questions I wasn't quite ready for at the start.

The assumption is that full value from Artful Takedown is both modes, but I quickly found myself casting the card just as a kill spell. On a basic level it makes sense, you are playing Artful Takedown for the kill effect and not the tap effect. In the Wojek Bodyguard situation, I would be asking myself two questions about the future of the game.

The first is do I have a second line of defense against Wojek Bodyguard even if Take Heart shows up? That means an actual way to prevent it from attacking, not just a Wishcoin Crab that lets it jam and spread counters around. The weird part here is that often that answer should be a deathtouch creature that would already be on the battlefield, in which case you would rather just let them attack with Wojek Bodyguard into it now and save Artful Takedown for a creature you can't answer with a block.

The second is do I have a solid upcoming blocker for Fresh-Faced Recruit? If my other plays are all low toughness blockers, I'm more inclined to go big and save the life. They are likely to have another creature to cast this turn, and if they have a tempo-positive removal spell as follow up to that I'm going to need every bit of life to line my future blocks up and not die.

This depth is part of what made Guilds of Ravnica so replayable even if the draft portion was fairly scripted. Even if Rubblebelt Boar, Parhelion Patrol, and Hammer Dropper were all fairly interchangeable four drops, once you got in match the consequences of each one in your deck or across the table were huge. Over a three game Traditional match, learning your opponent's creatures, tricks, and adjusting your cards in deck and play to beat them came up time and time again.

Izzet – Adjusting for your High Picks

Golgari, Dimir, Boros, and Selesnya were all one plan decks. Maybe you could consider “All Rares” Selesnya or “I got three Dimir Spybug” Dimir different, but it wasn't reliable.

Izzet presented a unique scenario. Most people knew you could flex between the Izzet Tempo deck with Leapfrog to Izzet or Grixis Control. But there was even a third option: If you got a couple Wojek Bodyguard, you could go hyper aggro Izzet with Vedalken Mesmerist. Each of these decks was really good and capable of a 3-0 if Izzet was open, so you had flex paths from early Dimir or Boros into Izzet. Those are the two other best guilds, and this was why in the mid-format where it was less contested Izzet was such an amazing deck to draft.

This is a lesson for next set. The core of guild or other fairly linear draft formats is figuring out how to pivot. You can pivot with “Boros” cards into Izzet if those gold cards keep coming around, and figuring out how to do similar things to make functional subarchetypes is going to be big in Ravnica Allegiance. I always looked at things the other way, identifying good cards as those that naturally flexed, but actively finding ways to pivot "archetype-specific cards" into a different archetype pays off by finding niche decks like Izzet All-In Aggro. Ravnica Allegiance is probably going to be playable dense enough that you can pure swap fairly late just like this set, but if you can keep playing your early picks like Wojek Bodyguard why drop them?