Drafting White In Kaldheim

 I win a lot with White in Kaldheim draft. I think a lot of people either don't do that, or they say something like "well White isn't as bad as Black, Boros Equipment is good" and show me decks with 8 Mountains, 8 Plains.

I don't think they quite get what I'm talking about. I'm drafting White.

Fortunately, I can use more words and images to try and tell people what I'm doing drafting White that they aren't.

The 3 White Decks of Kaldheim

There are three distinct White decks in Kaldheim: aggro, control, and Colossal Plow. All of these are trophy decks I posted to the Lords of Limited Discord a while back. (Listen to their podcast, listen to their Discord-Patreon-join spiel each episode because they say it better than I can)

Aggro is by far the most common, and the one I'm focusing on here. One-drops and equipment are the specific cards it wants that other White decks don't. Often these decks are playing 16 lands and solidly base White due their early drops wanting to all be White, so often 10+ Plains.

Ignore that Showdown of the Skalds and that Boros deck is still really good by the way. I'm willing to admit some of my success with White is having that card 4-5 times and never losing a match I have it or a game I cast it, but I'm winning doing the same things the rest of the deck is doing in similar drafts without Showdown.

A good White aggro draft will accidentally become Mono-White Pack 3 enough that you should keep an eye on your white card count later on, and that deck wants to play 15 lands. If you have a couple Goldvein Picks you can be "mono"-White with a 12-3 mana base and 2-3 premium splash spells too.

Boros and Selesnya are far better than the alternatives. Boros has decent bodies up the curve, Selesnya has bonkers gold cards and fine creatures, and both have good combat tricks. Orzhov has a weak base of Black commons that are often Black intensive, with Bloodsky Berserker the only real incentive for the aggro pairing. Azorius just has too much strategic tension to be true aggro, including taking snow lands cutting into the higher playable count White Aggro needs.

True White aggro is a deck you want to be drafting mostly uncontested because of the large number of White playables needed to support it. Another reason Boros is one of the better pairs for White aggro is you can fall back into a more split or Red-heavy deck without much effort. Selesnya can still carry if you get passed the multicolored cards and are fighting someone in Boros for the deck. Azorius is a fine fallback if you have non-aggro specific good white cards, but again you are falling back towards one of the other two White archetypes when this happens.

Colossal Plow is literally the namesake uncommon but you can fill a bit of the same role with Raider's Karve. You are assertive midrange, not one-drops (look at that sideboard!) and equipment aggro. Combat tricks remain good because Plow forces blocks, fliers remain good when you draw Ox without Plow, and Master Skald also becomes good. Your mana base tends to be more balanced, allowing you to draft the deck if White is contested but the Plow components aren't, and while I've trophied with Selesnya and Azorius lists I can see every color combo working here.

Control white is weird. The easy path is getting Doomskar, but the White removal is good enough especially if people start valuing Iron Verdict appropriately. I've seen this in Azorius and Orzhov (Orzhov usually has many gold cards, Azorius not so much), and I've had good experiences with Abzan Snow. This deck didn't trophy and was really early in the format, but it's an example of what you are aiming for. This deck is really fine with White being contested at a table, because the good White decks don't usually want many of the things you do and often end up committed to two colors, possibly allowing good multi-color goodies like Firja to slip through to your tri-color pile.

A quick tangent: my better snow decks are often solidly three colors. Too often snow has to take snow lands over solid playables, then gets dry later packs and is scrambling to cover the last couple slots. Being three colors minimizes the odds of dead mid-pack picks, and White works because Snow-Covered Plains often comes around late freeing up picks in subsequent packs.

The White Aggro Game Plan

Step 1: Ensure you get ahead early. When they foretell a card Turn 2 after a tapped land on Turn 1, you ideally made two plays to the battlefield that are already pushing damage through.

Step 2: Once they start committing things to combat your early advantage, have ways to keep making plays and maintaining the "I'm ahead" position you established early. Boast, moving equipment, combat tricks, some removal, just having flying creatures so their counter plays don't work.

Step 3: If Step 2 didn't deal lethal damage, have some way to crunch the last few points in.

(Edit/Aside: People have said a lot of things like "Equipment is good with fliers, tricks are better with ground stuff that will get blocks". That just isn't true here. A trick punches your fliers through their less plentiful fliers, and a lot of the tricks are Mammoth Growth or Run Amok scale things that convert fine to direct damage if your opponent isn't blocking and is racing your fliers.)

The White Aggro Pick Order

The general priority list for cards is:

• Bombs
• The best threats
• Best removal, including best tricks
• Good fliers
• Good enhancements for fliers
• Cheap creatures
• Average stuff

Sam Black had a good segment a couple weeks back on his podcast (look for the Red White Aggro in Kaldheim one) about taking the best threats in aggro over good removal. I don't agree with him every set or some of his examples of premium threats, but in Kaldheim a cheap creature that contends with typical Foretell cards by itself is game breaking so in this set you should do that.

Even though I say take good removal highly, I have trimmed traditionally good removal spells from my White decks. You specifically want your kill spells to beat their Grizzled Outrider because tricks and Goldvein Picks don't do that, so my Boros decks maindeck Frost Bite less than half the time.

For stuff like Bound in Gold and Demon Bolt that does deal with big stuff, usually the debate about trimming copies starts around the 3rd one.

Issue 1: Whenever aggro gets bogged down in trading cards, the game tends to grind closer to parity where they have 5 drops and you don't. Same with when aggro drops too many removal, not enough threats to close. In Kaldheim, you want to use equipment to mitigate trading for small things, then removal for the big stuff. You still need to take removal highly because it's a more contested card type, but you want both.

Issue 2: Once you need equipment, you need lots of creatures, and from there your spell slots get limited. You can't play less than 14 creatures, and usually want 15-16 with 8-9 spells. Once Runes come into the equation sometimes you just end up cutting a third removal spell here.

So yea, sometimes you first pick Demon Bolt then end up trimming a Bound in Gold, but usually that's when your deck is a McDuck vault of good stuff and who cares about wasting picks.

High Tier Pick Order

Includes other top cards for reference. These cards are the reasons you move into White aggro early. Cards within a stack aren't in any particular order, just stuff that's generally close. The Battlefield Raptor and Vega tiers aren't actually quite in the high pick incentive stuff, but are there to give you an idea of what is right below that line.

Notes on non-obvious cards:

I don't have a great explanation on why Shepherd of the Cosmos is so great. I just don't lose when I cast despite it looking clunky, and it is always very clearly me winning because I cast it. Random two drops it returns have equipment to level up, Runes and Plows exist for larger advantages, 3/3 flying is a dominant sizing. It's the Voltron of Augury Raven and Sarulf's Packmate.

Runed Crown with any Naya-color Rune attached would just be a great equipment. You aren't trying to live a five Rune dream, you just want cantrip Vulshok Morningstar which you get from a Crown and one or two Runes in your deck. I don't tend to pair it with the Blue or Black Runes since they are lower impact additions. If a Rune of Speed or Rune of Might would be off color but I have a couple Treasure sources I would play anyways I'm OK with winging it, and a Shimmerdrift Vale helps, but I'm not trying to preemptively take weird duals to aggressively splash Runes. Tapped lands don't cast Battlefield Raptors.

Kaya's Onslaught is the Warp Pipe of the game phases I described. It compacts the "find lethal damage" Stage 3 into one combat and sometimes skips any effort of staying ahead in Stage 2 to do that. It on a 2/2 is effectives +4/+4 of damage, and it's too easy to scale even further.

I may have Battershield Warrior a bit high. In terms of how much a Boast keeps you ahead it's really high, but there's so many good enough three-drops it always ends up replacing. The 17lands.com data for the card is really bad but I always smash people with it, so my guess is also that as your deck strays from one-drop White aggro the card rapidly gets worse. For example I wouldn't want it over the Red common three-drops in a higher curve Boros deck that is trying to Axgard Cavalry a Craven Hulk.

Aside: If you haven't checked out 17lands.com for Arena draft data aggregation, you should do so. Not only is adding to the statistics pool for everyone great, having your own draft logs and results to scroll through is awesome.

Yes, I do take Colossal Plow that highly. No, you don't have to. The Plow decks can be a little finnicky.

Maja is similar to Trostani Discordant, which was Top 10 card in Guilds of Ravnica, and deserves a high billing. The rest of the gold cards underwhelm. Koll and Vega specifically require game scenarios to go right on top of drafting the cards, and Orzhov is just a conditional color pair and Firja suffers for it.

Note that with Vega I don't think Azorious Foretell is an all in strategy you should be trying to hit. It's just a nice Wind Drake that cantrips enough to be solid with the usual set of Azorius cards you build a deck out of. Also you aren't really trying to mix Auras with Koll, more equipment, but putting a Rune on something or making random Aura-based removal an even bigger joke comes up.

I might have the multicolor sacrifice lands a little bit low. The non-Boros ones are all generically super powerful, the Boros one is still good if a bit more conditional and slower, and if you have Shepherd of the Cosmos that's a nice little combo. White aggro's lower land count and heavy color bias make taking lands over solid playables less exciting, and I have found that they unfortunately aren't signals to end up in a specific color pair because people just pass them a lot.

White Aggro Playables Pick Order

The other way you end up in White aggro is if you see the top tier of these cards coming around later in a pack or wheeling. I don't have things within a specific pile ordered strongly, but in general take the mono-colored cards over the multicolor ones until you know that's your color pair.

Moving out of the single card incentives into the backbone filler, every creature that costs two or one is better than the more expensive ones. The only exception is Starnheim Courser because flying is great. Codespell Cleric is another card in the Battershield Warrior camp, where it gets real bad real fast once you drift away from low curve aggro but any deck with two Battlefield Raptor, two Codespell Cleric is well on the way to a trophy. Beskir Shieldmate tends to be the better two-drop than Story Seeker since you do a lot of work with a 1/1 body and equipment or stallking for fliers.

Almost nothing below the second tier is a default priority for me. The Wings of the Cosmos tier is all fine cards I'll play if I get them but are cuttable. The next tier down is sideboard cards and things I tend to cut, but Giant Ox and Master Skald have specific applications. 

Obviously Colossal Plow is good with both of these cards, but I sideboard in Giant Ox against Red and Gruul opponents when I have fliers. 

Master Skald is good once you get a couple Sagas in the three-color White control decks. I don't like taking Master Skald before I see the Sagas though, since most of the White non-rare Sagas aren't exciting and the off-color good ones are things you won't have many shots at. Also, don't put it in your deck because of Showdown of the Skalds, but do play it because of Firja's Retribution. The game should not need to continue to the second Showdown cast, but Retribution sometimes just dies to removal.  

Raider's Karve is also almost exclusively a Plow backup plan, since I don't want a lot of 3/2 or 3/3 for fours in my White decks.

Divine Gambit is more of a control card than an aggro card. Aggro cares too much about tempo to potentially waste two mana letting your opponent swap their five drop out for another five drop. It pairs best with another removal spell, since whatever scary thing they were dropping you were just going to kill anyways and you keep card and usually mana parity doing this.

Raven Wings looks much better than it plays every time I try it in White aggro. Just a lot of mana for what you want to only spend a little mana on. Not horrible, but try to keep them to your Sealed decks.

The two cards on the far right are there because they fall outside of what White aggro is doing. Doomskar Oracle is bad in aggro, and I'm not even sure it's good anywhere. It sits in the overloaded three drop slot, but just trades down. Iron Verdict is a solid card, but not in aggro. Once you are a controlling deck it plays like a high quality backbone card, but hopefully you are still getting them a bit later in the pack.

Don't play Valor of the Worthy, but try to draft decks that look like they want to. Then cut it every single time. It's not good, but the decks that look like they want it are great.

Gods' Hall Guardian trades horribly on rate against basically everything. If it sticks it's not embarrassing, but it sure isn't good and leads to a lot of rapidly lost games when it gets bounced or killed.

Warhorn Blast should probably be lower. I hate the card, it was bad even in a six one-drop deck with multiple Usher of the Fallen, it never does anything against me, and the 17lands data on it also agrees its terrible.

Funeral Longboat is the worst thing you can try to leverage random creatures with. If you somehow end a draft with no tricks, no equipment, and all dorks, I'm not even sure this is good enough to fix your issues.

White Rares

Notes on the ones that aren't just Angels or broken Sagas.

I didn't include Cosmos Elixer because the color White doesn't impact my picking of it, but it's a first pick windmill slam out of every pack it is in. Being White aggro doesn't even make it worse. The discount from Starnheim Courser is great, it makes racing with fliers easy, and forces people to attack you or die which is rarely profitable for them.

The other colorless cards of note: I haven't played with Maskwood Nexus in draft, but my Sealed experience leads me to believe it's fine but not a priority in White aggro. Tyrite Sanctum is probably at its worst in White, but if you have three legends it is actually pretty good and Changelings help you take the buyout of "technically Mistwalker is a God". Sanctum is more likely to be in my Plow decks than my Aggro decks for sure. Not in for Faceless Haven though, taking Snow lands isn't happening. Pyre of Heros remains not a playable card until someone proves me wrong.

Doomskar is my slam dunk path into White control. If you aren't comfortable drafting that deck, don't worry about it.

Righteous Valkyrie is mostly a 2/4 flying for three, which is good, but I've had it be phenomenal in Azorius with Mistwalker and Littjara Kinseekers as secret Angel Clerics.

Niko Aris is pretty bad for a planeswalker. The +1 does nothing, getting the -1 to kill a relevant thing is often tough, and the Shard token output is just paying mana for the right to pay more mana later to draw cards. It's still a high impact spell, but really slow and noticeably worse than Behold the Multiverse.

Rally the Ranks is a card I've seen be conditionally good in Boros, but I don't think the ceiling is much higher than Goldvein Pick or Tormentor's Helm.

Relevant Off Color Cards

I mostly end up in White because of White cards, not because other color cards point me to White. That said, being in White does change the values of certain cards in other colors by a fair amount.

Most of the red cards just kinda work with the White ones. Dwarven Hammer might be the exception and really lives up to the "best uncommon in the set" title I get it in Boros (and Rakdos, but that's not today's subject)> I mentioned cutting Frost Bite in many White aggro decks, Squash is obviously less exciting with a color that isn't Giants or Changelings, and Axgard Cavalry is downgraded to just a 2/2 status unless you are the split Boros deck with more Craven Hulks. 

Frenzied Raider and Fearless Liberator are both less exciting than they look. There's just a lot of win more in "I can attack with multiple creatures and spend mana on an on-board trick" or "my 2/1 is uncontested in combat" and a lot of potential for them to be Goblin Assailant and Goblin Piker. They are both cards I'm glad to include, but I think both are worse than Battlefield Raptor in many Boros decks.

Magda is pictured here because you should just be first picking that card. The floor of a two-drop that one shot ramps is great, and it just spirals out of control too easily even without really looking for other Dwarves. 

Don't play Reckless Crew. I had an opponent do all the things for it, cast it, and it ended up being Dwarven Reinforcements. The best case scenario it the card is a decent common.

Green shifts a lot since a lot of green cards don't work super well with White's not caring about snow. The reason to be Selesnya is usually Sarulf's Packmate or actual Selesnya cards. 

Horizon Seeker is really just a doofy 3/2 in non-control White decks. Any heavy Snow card is bad outside White Control. Elderleaf Mentor feels like it should be a Selesnya card, but you want your four-drops to do more and it's low quality filler.

On the flip side, Mammoth Growth is quite good in Selesnya Aggro or Plow. Same with Snakeskin Veil. King Harald's Revenge is kinda a low key reward for ending up in Selesnya. I'm unsure it's better than Mammoth Growth, but it's at least comparable and you get it last pick because Snow and bulky Gruul players pretend it doesn't exist. I don't even care too much about the pseudo-Searing Blaze aspect of it, I've been happy just giving a flying creature +4/+4 and bashing.

Oh, and Jaspera Sentinel is wonderful in Selesnya, probably taken just below Battlefield Raptor on that playables tier list one you know your color pair. It's not Loam Dryad, because Loam Dryad didn't pick up equipment and battle. Also that format had a lot less instances of Selesnya decks with piles of one- and two-drops but also a broken five-drop uncommon.

I have yet to Arachnoform anyone, but believe me I've come close. You can sideboard it in for mirrors if you want to replace a spell, I have lost to it granting reach.

There is just so much tension between Blue and White aggro. Blue is good support for White Control or the Plow deck, but aggro would require some weird set of exactly Augury Ravens and Berg Striders. Behold the Multiverse is not a super exciting aggro card, and neither is Mistwalker due to the heavy blue commitment to pump it.

I'm actually fine with Berg Strider in the White aggro decks at the high end. It's expensive, getting 3-4 snow lands is much more free than getting 6+, and Snow-Covered Plains is free enough. I again just haven't had the circumstances come up where I want to take Blue cards and mix them with White one-drops, and I really doubt I will.

Before you ask, the Blue creatures aren't good with the White creature enhancement stuff. It's just a horrible mix of clunky plays, creatures not needing the help, and drawing hands that don't do anything.

Again, the Plow and Control decks are fine with blue cards. Just don't mix Battlefield Raptor and Behold the Multiverse.

So... about Orzhov

Don't draft an Infernal Pet plus Codespell Cleric theme deck. It won't work. You will lose. It will be horrible.

I can imagine starting a draft with a couple Bloodsky Berserkers, then ending up in White aggro and splashing those, some Demonic Gifts, and maybe a Raise the Draugur or Village Rites. It's fun to imagine. In practice they are usually just bad versions of taking Boros cards instead.

Your Orzhov decks are probably more grindy Plow decks, maybe with Ascent of the Worthy once you already are trying to play Master Skald. Or they are solidly White Control, either heavy Black with Firja and some White removal and fliers, or the Abzan Snow Control stuff I showed off earlier.

Or you can tell yourself don't draft Orzhov and you wouldn't be too wrong.