Deck A is roughly “menace tribal,” the deck you’d expect to draft if you just looked at the BR signpost hybrid uncommon. While they share many of the same generically good cards, the core plan of each deck is different. GW mutate with a vigilance package or UW cycling with a Skycat Sovereign are common places to end up. Once in a blue moon, a true BR menace or UB flash tribal deck will come together, but your allied color pair decks are going to borrow their main theme from one of the enemy color pairs most of the time and sprinkle in some of those keyword tribal synergies. You shouldn’t expect to always be able to build around one of the allied color payoffs like Slitherwhisp, as the cards to make those decks tick may not be opened in a given pod. This is especially true with the allied color pairs, since their “keyword tribal” themes are substantially less supported than the enemy color pair themes. If you lock yourself into the box of saying “I am GB, I want to be a graveyard deck,” you’re going to miss out on a good GB mutate deck a percentage of the time. If you tunnel yourself into an archetype or a theme after you’ve picked up a few good cards of two colors, you’re limiting your possibilities. For example:Ī UG mutate deck with a reanimator package…Īlthough the enemy pairs have extremely linear plans that you’ll often build your deck around, each color pair doesn’t have just one thing it wants to do. But when your lane isn’t perfectly open, you’ll usually have to do a bit of improvising. When a streamlined RW cycling or UG mutate deck with good enablers and payoffs comes together, congrats! Your deck is probably great. You can’t simply rely on the gold cards or the suggested archetypes that WotC have laid out for each color pair to build your deck for you, you need to be critically thinking about how each of the cards in your pool interact with each other and not just auto-piloting by picking the good cards in your colors. While this is still true in Ikoria and the best-of-the-best decks are indeed trying to execute a linear plan based on archetype-payoff cards, the perfect cycling or reanimator deck isn’t always going to fall into your lap, even when your colors are open. In a lot of sets, if you first pick a strong gold uncommon, that card can act as a guiding light, telling you what that color combination wants and the kind of cards you should be looking to include in your deck. ![]() A color pair doesn’t always define what a deck wants to do you as the drafter are responsible for defining what your deck is doing. In Ikoria, the gold and hybrid cards don’t tell the full story of what each color pair is capable of. This is true for the most part, but there’s a defining feature of Ikoria that sets it apart from most limited formats: In theory, this structure seems fairly similar to the ten multicolored signpost uncommons structure we see in most sets, with the exception that you’ll find yourself in an enemy color pair more often than an allied one, by virtue of the enemy color pairs having more support. Most decks in this format end up being two colors, or two colors and a light splash.įor reference, here are the themes Wizards has outlined for each of the color pairs: This is not a wedge set you shouldn’t draft it trying to end up in three colors. ![]() But if you draft it like Khans, trying to draft a straight-up three-color deck every time, you’re going to run into some issues along the way. On its surface, Ikoria looks like a true multicolored set, similar to Khans of Tarkir. Instead, it opts for three gold uncommons for each of the enemy color pairs that support the set’s main themes, and one hybrid uncommon for each of the allied color pairs to support some of the set’s minor themes. Most notably, Ikoria doesn’t contain the traditional structure of ten multicolored signpost uncommons that hint at what each color pair wants to be doing. ![]() Over the years, we’ve grown accustomed to several “hand holding” mechanisms that help guide deck building, many of which don’t exist in Ikoria in the same forms we’re used to. ![]() 's "Draft decks not cards" mantra is the only way to draft a deck that'll get you anywhere in this format.- Alex Nikolic April 19, 2020 I think IKO fundamentally is going to change how people think about limited formats.
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