Take a close look at the two decklists below. What do you notice about each deck? How does the curve look? Which cards stand out? Can you tell which deck easily went 3-0 without dropping a game and which deck barely squeaked out a 1-2? Sometimes in Magic two drafts can feel very similar but end up performing at completely different levels. The purpose of this article is to look closely at the clues available to us in order to better evaluate the subtleties of our draft decks.

Decklist A (1-2) Decklist B (3-0) 1 Typhoid Rats 1 Shambling Goblin 1 Ainok Guide 2 Hand of Silumgar 1 Glade Watcher 1 Atarka Beastbreaker 1 Hooded Assassin 1 Dutiful Attendant 1 Dragon-Scarred Bear 1 Hooded Asassain 1 Frontier Mastadon 1 Colossodon Yearling 1 Marsh Hulk 1 Dragon-Scarred Bear 1 Vulturous Aven 1 Marsh Hulk 3 Conifer Strider 1 Ukud Cobra 1 Circle of Elders 1 Ainok Kin-Guard 1 Surrak, the Hunt Caller 1 Aerie Bowmasters 1 Temur Sabertooth 1 Gurmag Angler 1 Elite Scaleguard 1 Wildcall 1 Silumgar Butcher 1 Feral Krushok 1 Defeat 1 Epic Confrontation 1 Coat with Venom 1 Winds of Qal Sisma 1 Pacifism 1 Butcher’s Glee 1 Crux of Fate 1 Douse in Gloom 2 Dromoka’s Gift 1 Grim Contest 1 Hunt the Weak 2 Blossoming Sands 1 Shamanic Revelation 1 Evolving Wilds 1 Death Wind 2 Plains 6 Forest 9 Forest 7 Swamp 8 Swamp

Removal

One of the key pieces to any great draft deck is removal. It’s pretty well understood by now that modern day removal is much clunkier and harder to find than in older sets. However, what is harder to grasp is exactly which removal is best to take for our deck, and what cards we should be willing to pass for certain removal spells. Let’s take a look at the removal spells in each deck.

Deck A:



Deck B:



As you can see above, while Deck A had a few strong removal options, only 3 cards in the deck could remove a creature, and only one of those was instant speed, making it hard to get anything more than a simple 1-for-1 out of the card. On the contrary, while the removal spells in Deck B were not quite the power level of a Pacifism or a Crux of Fate, the sheer amount of removal made it so the deck could always deal with a threat when it needed to, and with much of the removal being instant speed – added flexibility and the opportunity to punish opponents for greedy plays. The removal suite in Deck B was one of the key reasons the deck was able to win the draft, while the lack of removal in Deck A allowed it to get beaten by any opponent who simply had a good curve of creatures or single powerful card.

Curve

The second thing to compare between these decks was the curve of creatures. While this is also something that most of us understand at a high level, what does that mean in practice? Obviously this depends completely on the format, but in DTK, most drafts decks are at least quick enough to punish you if you can’t play your two and three drops on time. Take a look at the creature counts for the decks below.

Deck A: Deck B: 1-2 Drops: 3 3 Drops: 3 (+1 Morph) 4 Drops: 7 5+ Drops: 3 1-2 Drops: 4 3 Drops: 4 (+1 Morph) 4 Drops: 3 5+ Drops: 2

I had two key takeaways from this data. First, while the curve looks similar, Deck B had access to 9 threats by turn 3, while Deck A only had 7. While this doesn’t seem like a huge difference, decks like Green-Black that try to control the board and overpower the mid-to-late game rely very heavily on being able to survive the early game, and 2 additional creatures can make a huge difference over the course of 3 matches. The second takeaway is the massive clog that Deck A has at the 4 mana slot. In a normal game of limited it is very difficult to hit 8 mana consistently, therefore you will most often not be able to play out more than one of these threats out in a turn. When the number of 4 drops gets as high as 7, it would probably be more advantageous at that point to have a random 2-3 drop or more powerful 5 or 6 drop in that slot instead.

Power

While having a deck full of powerful creatures is fun, the raw power level of our top creatures is not necessarily synonymous with our expected win % with the deck. Let’s take a look at the top “game-enders” from the two decks.

Deck A:

Deck B:

This is the one area where Deck A was clearly stronger than Deck B. While cards like Wildcall and Gurmag Angler are powerful, they don’t quite have the same “take over the game” qualities like an Elite Scaleguard or Temur Sabertooth does. However, among the three factors we have identified thus far, I believe this is actually the least important. While certain powerful cards feel great to play with and stick in your memory for fun stories to tell later, they are often interchangeable with other powerful cards. Once a strong Green-Black deck is able to deal with the early onslaught of their opponent and back that up with a little bit of removal, they do not need a ton more to win the game. While it is true that something like an Elite Scaleguard or Temur Sabertooth can close out the game more reliably than a Gurmag Angler, at the point in the game where these cards most often shine, they often all perform admirably.

Random Observations

While it may be easy to point to Confider Strider+Dromoka’s gift as “cute” and part of the reason Deck A wasn’t successful, I don’t believe it’s quite that simple and would be a mistake to simply shrug it off. Those cards actually perform very well together and are very difficult for your opponents to deal with when played correctly. However, it is important to understand that these cards need the right deck to shine. They perform at their best in an aggressive green deck where you are leveraging Formidable or topping out your curve with one or two five drops. In Deck A, we already had plenty of top end power, and were weak on early defense and removal, therefore the Strider+Gift combo was very out of place in the deck and we were punished for it.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, often times we can draft two decks that both seem equally strong on the surface, but end up having very different results. While some of this can definitely be attributed to variance, it is still important to look back on these decks and try to identify the subtleties of what could have made them better. This is by no means an easy task, as some decks, like Deck A above look great on the surface, but by digging in a little deeper we can draft better in the future and become stronger limited players.

– Parnell (Telemokos on MTGO/Twitch)