Players are always trying to figure out the best faction pairs as well as the best strategies within a given faction pair. We love archetype analyses because they can save us a lot of time and losses playing with sub-par decks. I would love to be able to give detailed breakdowns of all the faction pairs but I feel like it takes a huge number of drafts to be able to say anything definitive. As one man drafting, the format has usually changed before I can write something meaningful. But I’d like to put something out there even if isn’t complete.



So here’s how I’m going to approach it.

Core Cards: These are the cards that most decks in a faction pair will contain. They are high quality commons (not rares) that are almost never bad. You’ll be picking a lot of them because they are plentiful and generically good. The archetypes within a faction pair should be able to make use of these core cards in their strategy.

Archetype: Most faction primers I see tend to focus on one type of deck in each pair. I think, however, that there are at least a couple different types of decks with cards that you may want in one type but not in the other. It’s important to distinguish between them.

Lead Heroics: These are first pick heroics that might give you a reason to draft a particular archetype. Some archetypes are highly dependent on getting the right first pick, others, not so much.

Key cards: Cards that are necessary for pulling off a particular strategy in the archetype. Think Mosstodon for Dinos or Infernal Visage for, well, Visage decks. They’re usually rare cards that you won’t always see in a draft. Cards in this category may be fantastic in one archetype but mediocre in another. A lot of the core cards could double as key cards in that they are important to a strategy (Skyknight Glider in AN Visage) but I’m not going to list them twice.

Description: Some comments on what the deck is trying to do. Playing early game vs late game, etc.

I will list 2-4 archetypes for each faction pairing in rough order of best/most common to least. I will probably include some fringe archetypes at the bottom even though they may not be as good as the main ones. They can be fun but you may want to keep them in the casual queue. Just sayin’.

I would also love for this to become a collaborative project. If you recognize one of the archetypes I list, go ahead and suggest other cards that you like to play in it. If you have a completely new archetype, make a short write up using the above format and leave it in the comments. I wanna see what you’re playing! Like I said before, it’s hard for just one person to completely define the current draft environment in a reasonable amount of time. Getting more people involved will help everyone out in the end.



What I’m hoping is that this sort of analysis will give players more direction during deck building. Instead of simply picking the highest ranked cards off of a tier list, you can have a larger vision of what you’re trying to do. If you see a particular rare early on, it may lead you into one of these archetypes. Let’s kick things off with the primer for Umbruk.