KTK/FRF: Act of Treason and sacrifice effects

I still don’t have a good handle on how good Act of Treason is in this format. I don’t mind running one copy as a finisher in aggressive R/X decks, but I often prefer Barrage of Boulders; in a recent draft deck, I played 3 copies of the latter and left both copies of Act of Treason in my sideboard (I had 8 creatures that could trigger ferocious). I have played Act of Treason in other decks, although it has been a little inconsistent for me, ranging from underwhelming to amazing, depending on the board state.

Act of Treason does get better if you can sacrifice the borrowed creature or if the format has a lot of creatures with relevant combat triggers. This format does have multiple ways to borrow creatures (there’s also Jeering Instigator, Mob Rule, and Yasova Dragonclaw at rare), so it’s worth examining how many effects are available in both categories.

Here’s a list of all the sacrifice effects in the format, along with their costs and rarities. One-time effects allow you to sacrifice a single creature for the specified cost, while recurring effects allow you to sacrifice a creature for the specified cost if you already have the permanent in play.

There are only 2 sacrifice effects at common, both of which are unplayable in most decks. The uncommons are much better, although the one-time effects require 6+ mana if you want to play them on the same turn as Act of Treason, and many aggressive decks may not want to run a Qarsi High Priest since it’s a 0/2. To this list, I will also add Rite of Undoing, since it allows you to bounce 2 of your opponent’s creatures if you use it on a stolen creature. That gives us a rare and 5 uncommons, an average of 2.4 cards in a 8-person draft. Even if you are willing to play Collateral Damage, this only goes up to 3.8 cards, and Collateral Damage and 4 of the 5 uncommons are in Fate Reforged, so you can’t wait until you have a couple of copies of Act of Treason before you draft them. Given this, you probably shouldn’t draft Act of Treason with the expectation that you’ll be able to draft sacrifice effects to go with it.

The other reason to run Act of Treason is because you can profit from stealing a creature with a combat trigger. I enumerated the list of such creatures in my last post. To that list, I will also add Dromoka the Eternal, Kolaghan the Storm’s Fury, Ojutai Soul of Winter, Silumgar the Drifting Death, and Yasova Dragonclaw. That’s a total of 20 creatures, but most of them are rares, and the expected number of such creatures in an 8-person draft is only about 7. So that is not a reason to draft Act of Treason either.

So you should draft Act of Treason on its own merits, and not in the hopes that you will either be able to steal a creature with a useful combat trigger, or that you will later be able to draft a way to sacrifice the creature.