Hey everyone! I’m sure you’ve been enjoying all of my Limited set reviews (located here: White, Blue, Black, Red, Green, Artifacts & Lands, Multicolor), and I’m just as excited as you are to finally get to those sweet, sweet drafts. Before we get to the actual fracturing of reality, though, we should probably figure out what we’re supposed to be drafting first.
Today, we’re taking a look at all ten archetypes in the set and putting together a realistic example of what each deck should look like. I’m thrilled to be back in a set where all ten color pairs are represented. Apparently having ten actual archetypes in a Limited format is pretty nice. Who knew?
If you’re unfamiliar with archetype skeletons, think of them as realistic examples of what a successful draft deck might look like under normal conditions. These aren’t magical Christmasland decks where you opened three bombs, got passed every premium uncommon, and the person to your right apparently decided they had no interest in your colors whatsoever. These are decks you can reasonably expect to put together while still giving yourself an excellent chance to succeed.
To keep everything consistent, every skeleton follows the same rules:
No mythic rares
A maximum of two rares
Five uncommons with no duplicates
No more than two copies of any common
Basically, we’re trying to build actual draft decks here, not the kind of absurd 7-0 pile you screenshot and then conveniently pretend is representative of every draft you’ve ever done.
For simplicity’s sake, each deck also uses a static mana base consisting of the appropriate common dual land and eight of each basic land. Some archetypes would obviously want to tweak those numbers in a real draft, but the goal here is to examine the structure of each deck rather than spend half the article arguing over whether the correct mana split is 9-7 or 8-8.
Azorius is the surveil aggro deck, which might sound a little oxymoronic at first. After all, you’re trying to beat your opponent down while also caring about card selection.
In practice, though, the two ideas fit together surprisingly well. Surveil helps make sure you keep drawing straight gas while your creatures continue turning sideways. Instead of flooding out or getting stuck with cards that don’t matter, you get to filter through your deck and keep the pressure coming.
That’s before we even get into all of the cards that actually reward you for scrying and surveilling. Once those triggers start piling up, the card selection stops being a nice bonus and becomes a major part of what makes the deck function.
They’re calling Orzhov the attrition archetype, which feels like a fancy way of saying aristocrats or sacrifice deck.
The game plan is pretty straightforward: play creatures that already give you some kind of extra value, then sacrifice them to squeeze even more value out of them on the way out. Ideally, your opponent is stuck trading one-for-one while you keep turning every creature into two or three different resources.
It’s the kind of deck where losing your own creatures is less of a problem and more of a business model.
The plan is about as subtle as you’d expect from Boros: flood the board with creatures, make the whole team bigger, and turn everything sideways. Rather than relying on one massive threat, you’re trying to create enough pressure across the entire battlefield that your opponent simply can’t keep up.
If everything goes according to plan, the game should be over before they ever get a chance to stabilize.
Selesnya is the lifegain deck this time around, which I’ve always liked a lot more than the usual “play creatures and cast combat tricks” version of the archetype.
Those decks can sometimes feel like they’re making a lot of the decisions for you. This version is much more interesting because you’re constantly managing lifegain triggers, payoff cards, and the order in which everything happens.
That means there’s a lot more to think through on each turn, and sequencing actually matters. Instead of just asking whether you should attack, you’re often figuring out how to squeeze the most value possible out of a pile of overlapping triggers.
Dimir is the graveyard math archetype. Does that mean this deck is only blocking? Bad jokes aside, this deck is really about doing two things at once: hitting threshold and squeezing extra value out of the cards you dumped into the graveyard along the way.
The nice part is that those goals naturally feed into each other. You want cards in the graveyard to turn on threshold, and once they’re there, plenty of your cards give you ways to make sure they aren’t just sitting around doing nothing. The end result is a deck that can look a little slow at first, but starts snowballing once the graveyard is stocked and all of those little pieces begin adding up.
We actually get a bit of an original archetype from Simic this time around. They’re usually cursed with some version of generic ramp where the entire theme is basically “make more mana and play big stuff.” Riveting.
This time, though, Simic is all about empowering Jace and getting him as cray cray as humanly possible. The deck wants to pile up Empower Jace triggers and take advantage of all the extra value those cards generate along the way.
So, for once, Simic actually has an identity beyond ramping into something expensive. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Izzet is a spells deck again? Am I going to come up with an original joke when this one is sitting right there? I’m sure you already know the answer to both questions.
Technically, the theme this time is prowess, so clearly this is a completely different archetype. Instead of being a spells deck where you play creatures and then cast a bunch of spells, it’s a prowess deck where you play creatures and then cast a bunch of spells.
See? Totally different.
The real key is making sure you have enough cheap interaction and cantrips to keep triggering prowess without running out of gas. Once the deck gets rolling, even your smaller creatures can turn into legitimate threats in a hurry.
Rakdos is doing Rakdos things, which naturally means burning everything to the ground. Normally, that involves a giant pile of removal clearing the way while your creatures do the actual killing. This time around, though, Rakdos is perfectly happy doing a ton of that damage without ever entering combat.
The archetype is packed with ways to deal noncombat damage, along with plenty of cards that reward you for doing it. That gives the deck a surprising ability to finish off opponents even after the battlefield starts getting clogged up.
Why mess with a classic? Allegedly, Golgarbage is all about value-generating creatures, because apparently that needed a fancy archetype label too.
A lot of those creatures either put cards into the graveyard or give you extra value once they get there, so the deck is really about making sure nothing goes to waste. Your creatures are useful when you cast them, useful when they die, and sometimes still useful while they’re sitting in the graveyard.
In other words, it’s classic Golgari: pile up resources, grind out value, and make every card do way more work than it probably should.
Gruul is the ramp deck this time around, which feels like it’s infringing on Simic’s copyright a little bit.
Normally, Gruul is all about big creatures and burn spells. This time, it’s still very interested in the big creatures part, but it gets there by making a bunch of Heartwood tokens to help accelerate out the monsters ahead of schedule.
The basic game plan is pretty simple: make some extra mana, survive long enough to use it, and then start dropping monstars.
Josh is a member of the elite limited team The Draft Lab as well as the host of The Draft Lab Podcast. He was qualifying for Pro Tours, Nationals, and Worlds literally before some of you were born. After a Magic hiatus to play poker and go to medical school, he has been dominating Arena with over an 80% win percentage in Bo3 as well as making #1 rank in Mythic.
