M14: Door of Destinies

July 22, 2013 Leave a comment

Okay, let’s figure out if Door of Destinies is worth drafting early, and if so, what tribes it should be drafted with. First, let’s figure out how tribal a deck needs to be in order for this card to be playable. If you play Door of Destinies on turn 4, play a creature of the named creaure type on turn 5, and never have any other creatures of that type in play, you give a creature +1/+1, which is not worth 4 mana and a card. If you had played another creature of that type previously or if you play a card that generates a token creature of that type, you give 2 creatures +1/+1 which is still not worth it. If you are able to get 3 creatures +1/+1 or 2 creatures +2/+2, the card is reasonable, but you’d really like to get a bit more to compensate for the risk of topdecking the card late or getting blown out by an instant-speed artifact removal spell.

For this analysis, I determined the number of cards of each creature type at each rarity, and used that to compute the expected number of each creature type in an 8-person draft. I also compiled a separate list of all cards that produce creature tokens. Token creatures do not add a charge counter to Door of Destinies, but the tokens do receive a bonus if they are of the chosen creature type. This list is a bit more complicated since several cards only produce tokens under certain conditions, e.g., Angelic Accord. However, some conditions are relatively easy to meet, e.g., Devout Invocation only requires that you have a creature in play. Cards that produce a token without conditions or with a condition that’s easy to meet are listed normally, otherwise I use a “c” to indicate that a card does not reliably produce token(s) of that type. (Dragon Egg is not included since it produces a token of the same creature type when the original creature dies.)

The results are in this spreadsheet. Summarizing:

  • An average 8-person draft will have 27 Humans, 20 Slivers, and fewer than 10 of each other creature type. (While a particular draft may have more than the expected number, you won’t know this if you’re picking Door of Destinies early in the draft, and the purpose of this analysis is to determine whether it’s worth picking this card early.) A Humans deck will usually be W/B, and a Slivers deck will usually be G/R, G/W, or R/W.
  • Even if you get all 9 Warriors in a draft, you will only draw about 3 in a typical game unless you have card draw or tutoring, and you may not draw Door of Destinies, or you may draw it after you have already cast some of the creatures. You also have to consider whether these 9 Warriors are playable on their own (in case you don’t draw Door of Destinies), whether they are spread across too many colors, and whether they are are sufficiently spread across the mana curve. That doesn’t seem promising. However, it may still be possible to use Door of Destinies with creature types other than Humans and Slivers if most of your creatures fall into 2-3 races/classes.
  • Most token producers are rare/mythic or conditional and so don’t make Door of Destinies more playable, even when they produce multiple tokens. The only potential exceptions are Zombies (Vile Rebirth, Xathrid Necromancer, and Liliana’s Reaver can complement the expected 7 Zombies/draft) and Elementals (Young Pyromancer and Molten Birth can complement the expected 6 Elementals/draft). Note that Door of Destinies does not work with Saprolings or Goats; while Sporemound and Trading Post allow you to produce tokens of these types, there are no Saproling or Goat (or Changeling) creature cards in M14, so Door of Destinies would never accumulate any charge counters.

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M14: Beasts

July 19, 2013 Leave a comment

Let’s look at another possible tribal deck in M14, namely Beasts. I drafted that deck recently after getting passed a few Advocates of the Beast, but only ended up with 3 Beasts to go with my 5 Advocates (I did pass a 4th Beast for a Chandra’s Outrage since I only had one other removal spell). Are there enough Beasts in M14 that I should have tried to draft that deck? Let’s crunch some numbers.

Gatherer lists 5 cards in M14 that are Beasts or produce them: Garruk’s Horde, Kalonian Tusker, Marauding Maulhorn, Primeval Bounty, and Rumbling Baloth.

  • Garruk’s Horde and Primeval Bounty are rare, so you can’t really expect to get either of them, plus they hit the table sufficiently late in the game that if you don’t already have another Beast before them, your Advocate is just a 2/3 for 3 mana until turn 7.
  • Kalonian Tusker is the best complement to Advocate of the Beast because it gets a counter at the end of turn 3 if you play it on turn 2 followed by Advocate on turn 3. Unfortunately, it’s an uncommon and is likely to be drafted highly by any green player, so you shouldn’t expect to see too many of them.
  • Marauding Maulhorn and Rumbling Baloth are commons, but both cost 4, which means you have to wait an extra turn to get a counter. They are also both quite playable in non-Beast decks, especially Rumbling Baloth, so you should not expect to pick them up late.

With 2 commons, 1 uncommon, and 2 rares, an average 8-person M14 draft will have about 7 Beasts, some of which we expect will be drafted by non-Beast players. So, G/R Beasts is a feasible deck but can only support one player at a table. Moreover, you should draft it only if you are being passed Beasts rather than because you’re being passed Advocates, as I did. Advocates are good in a Beasts deck, but they’ll come around late because non-Beast decks have better commons at 3 mana, such as Rootwalla and Verdant Haven.

Admittedly, I’d already drafted 2 Doors of Destinies, so I was looking to draft a tribal deck. I wanted to draft Slivers, but didn’t see any good Slivers until late in pack 2, although with 2 Doors I could have tried to force Slivers and hoped to reap the rewards in pack 2. In my next post, I’ll examine whether there are any other good tribes in M14 besides Slivers and Beasts that would have allowed me to play the Doors instead of having to leave them in my sideboard.

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M14: Slivers

July 18, 2013 Leave a comment

Okay, now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, let’s see if we can use that information to figure out whether Slivers is a good deck to draft in M14. Here’s a list of all the Slivers in the set along with their rarity, mana cost, and my prior evaluation of them:

  • White: Sentinel Sliver (C, 2, good), Hive Stirrings (C, 3, filler), Steelform Sliver (U, 3, good), Bonescythe Sliver (R, 4, bomb)
  • Blue: Galerider Sliver (R, 1, exceptional)
  • Black: Syphon Sliver (R, 3, good)
  • Red: Striking Sliver (C, 1, good), Blur Sliver (C, 3, good), Battle Sliver (U, 5, exceptional), Thorncaster Sliver (R, 5, bomb)
  • Green: Predatory Sliver (C, 2, exceptional), Groundshaker Sliver (C, 7, unplayable), Manaweft Sliver (U, 2, exceptional), Megantic Sliver (R, 6, bomb)
  • Artifact: Sliver Construct (C, 3, filler)

White, red, and green have the most and best Slivers. There is relatively little manafixing in M14 — only Verdant Haven at common, and Darksteel Ingot, Manaweft Sliver, and Shimmering Grotto at uncommon — so we probably want to stick to a 2-color Sliver deck (possibly with a third splash color) unless we get multiple Manaweft Slivers, which is unlikely since it’s an uncommon and is playable in non-Sliver decks. How do we decide whether to aim for W/R, W/G, or R/G?

We can start by looking at the quality of the Slivers in each color. In my opinion, green has the best Slivers across all rarities, followed by red, and then white. By this measure, G/R is the best color pair for Slivers, followed by G/W and then R/W.

Another thing to keep in mind is the mana costs of the Slivers in each color. Green and red may have the best Slivers, but if they all fall at the same spot in the mana curve, we may be better off drafting a different color pair. This spreadsheet shows the number and quality of Slivers at each mana cost and rarity for the 3 color pairs being considered (Sliver Construct is listed for each of them). From this, it seems like G/R has the best distribution of Slivers across the mana curve, while R/W has a bit of a glut at 3.

A third thing to consider is whether any of the common/uncommon Slivers in a color pair have particular synergy. The main synergy that stands out to me is that power-enhancing Slivers — Predatory Sliver (G) and Battle Sliver (R) — work well with Striking Sliver (R), Steelform Sliver (W), and Hive Stirrings (W). While W/R has the most creatures in the list above, Battle Sliver is an uncommon, and first strike, +0/+1, and 2 1/1 Slivers are all less exciting if you don’t have a way to increase their power. This suggests that most Sliver decks should run green if possible so they have access to power enhancement at common.

Finally, let’s look at is which Slivers are most likely to be drafted by non-Sliver players. In my estimate, Predatory Sliver, Manaweft Sliver, and Bonescythe Sliver are most likely to be poached by non-Sliver players. (I had 2 Predatory Slivers and 1 Battle Sliver in a G/R Beast deck recently, and they were great — my deck really needed 2-drops, and there was more than one game where I had 2 3/3 Predatory Slivers attacking on turn 4.) This is unfortunate for green Sliver players, and may lead to Sliver decks having to go R/W in some cases.

Two more things to consider. First, Slivers are likely to be very popular at casual drafts, especially early in the format where other archetypes are less known, so it may be worth staying away for a bit unless you find yourself being passed Predatory Slivers. Also, I haven’t considered other non-Sliver cards in green, red, and white that may work particularly well with Slivers, such as Hunt the Weak if you have some power/toughness enhancing Slivers. Look for such cards and keep them in mind when figuring out what color pair you want to be in when drafting Slivers.

EDIT: I forgot one other piece of analysis I sometimes do. M14 has 101 commons, 60 uncommons, 53 rares, and 15 mythics. Of the playable Slivers, there are 6 commons, 3 uncommons, and 5 rares. That means than an average 8-person draft will have about 20 playable Slivers, which is probably enough to support 1-2 Sliver decks per table.

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