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.
