Hey everyone! The official launch of Tarkir: Dragonstorm is about to hit MTG Arena on April 8th so I’m sure you’re all just as hyped as I am to slam as much limited as humanly (or in some cases, inhumanly) possible.
Today I’m going to be going over the different intended archetypes as well as providing you with an example deck for each of them. For those of you unfamiliar with archetype skeletons, they are built with limitations to show what a solid, but not amazing version of that deck could look like. These are the types of decks that could trophy, but aren’t a guarantee. Building busted versions doesn’t really help anyone because those are harder to come by and tend to build themselves.
The limitations that I’ll be using are two rares (No Mythics or Special Guests), five uncommons (not including the land for the tri color decks, they will have 6), and not more than two of any common.
While we are normally doing one of each color pair, this set is a bit different. This one has five two color pairs and five three color archetypes for the clans. Of course, there will be plenty of times that you take all the bombs with enough fixing to figure it out later, but that’s another one that doesn’t fit within the limitations of this exercise.
I’m going to keep the mana bases relatively static for this. That is for simplicities sake, please don’t message me about the number of colored sources for each deck. I didn’t do the math for these.
This one is pretty self-explanatory. You sacrifice some of your creatures for fun and profit. The trick is getting lots of extra ones you don’t care about through mobilize or endure.
Take advantage of double spelling to bury your opponent in a flurry (sigh, I know it’s low hanging fruit, but I had to do it) of value. Hey, at least I didn’t make the “Izzet a spells deck again?” joke. If I did, the answer would have been yes.
We’re not talking about the counter spell types of counters, but most of the other versions of counters that you can stack on your creatures. There are plenty of +1+1 counters along with a variety of others such as lifelink, deathtouch, or flying.
Boros is doing it’s usual Boros thing which is to flood the board with as many dorks as possible to overwhelm your opponent. It’s an attempt to go under (or around) all of the crazy things your multicolor opponent is trying to do.
It’s nice for Simic to have an actual theme instead of the usual “I don’t know, maybe ramp and big dudes?”. In this case it is a bit closer to the normal Golgari theme of filling the yard and getting value out of it.
Endure lets you either stack piles of counters on one creature or go wide with spirit tokens. That gives you plenty of options when it comes to attacking your opponent’s life total.
As we’ve already discussed this in Izzet, flurry means that you get a bonus for double spelling. Adding the extra color just gives you more options to get that done.
With Simic encroaching on Golgari’s normal territory it should come as no surprise that you get a graveyard deck when you smush them together. You’ll get plenty of extra value from the cards that are dropping into your graveyard.
In another total shock, when you combine the sacrifice deck and the tokens archetype you end up in a mobilize deck. Make plenty of extra dudes and enjoy the benefits of tossing them in the bin for value.
Harmonize lets you double spell off of one card by casting it out of the graveyard on the same turn. That’s obviously amazing value wise even if the “flashback” tends to be a little expensive.
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.
