Dies to Removal

Post your predictions!

Based on the spoiler, what do you think are the most powerful colours?

Think you'll be forcing a colour or strategy in your first drafts?

What's better - aggro or control?

Get in the money!

Red is the best color. You always want to be in red.

Red has core set quality removal in Theros, it's gonna be hard to beat that.

Grey Merchant of Ashwhatever looks like a very powerful black common.

Specifics aside some decks that seem built into the format:

Heroic Aggro: With so many aura's that cantrip and the heroic mechanic, it's clear that RnD knows Aura's are generally bad value, but wanted the hero mechanic to be a thing, so they made aura's that replace themselves so people don't feel bad for drafting aura's that go with all of there heroic guys.

G/x Ramp: There's infinite expensive guys in this set and a couple green ramp cards and color fixers, so I can see domain fatties being an archetype.

UR tempo: aggressive red cards, and blue bounce spells/counters looks cute along with red having the least shitty removal it looks like.

Blue looks to me to be among the deepest of colors yet again in terms of versatility; the amount of Scry and draw they can access is potentially huge. and many of the more powerful support cards are splashable. I was goofing around with the Sealed simulator and the second pool I generated was just mindblowing in terms of relative and actual CA.

This set is going to require you to make a major decision on the front end: What role Devotion plays in building from your pool. If you have strong reasons to push a given color hard, you're going to be looking at different building choices than if you lack key cards that want you in a particular color. It also pushes you to make decisions about what support cards you're going to run...does your pool favor trying to build up with enchantments, or are you better off focusing on removal/combat tricks and such. The more I evaluated card pools, the more different nuances and
directions I saw possible for deck focus.

This is going to be a very interesting prerelease season...

Looks to me as though there are a lot of 3/3's - those will define combat's baseline, I think. Along with a lack of removal and a lack of aggressive fliers, Aura's really are going to play a strong role at breaking symmetry (which I guess is exactly what they're shooting for). I think things like Pheres-Band Centaurs will be a lot better than they look. Anax and Cymede are going to dominate combat, probably right up until turn 5 or 6 at least.

Red has the only good quality removal, but if you're playing red, you'll want to be fast enough that you can just sweep blockers rather than count on your burn to be killing enchanted creatures. I guess that's about the same as usual. Just don't be surprised when you get a slow start and end up losing to a 7/7 all of a sudden.

It does look like a fun set for limited. I'm looking forward to it.

I think the Red promo looks pretty sweet with the LD , as well red in general. Flamespeaker adept ,fanatic of mogis , and as has been said all the nice removal...Plus it seems to be pair well with everything but white , not a fan of the heroic guys in red.. Probably be going for U/R as it has two lots of common bounce , which I can save for anything going monstrous , or maybe R/G aggro if I can get warriors lesson , fade into antiquity or satyr hedonist for an early monstrosity. Plus Mistcutter hydra seems insane.

This might help out a bit. This is data from my set breakdown. This chart shows each colors access to non rare removal and evasion.



Personally going either red for removal or blue for evasion. So a RU deck would be sweet.

So, I won my prerelease tournament with a R/W deck. This was my list:
That format seemed to be based on a few basic strategies. The first is to play a big monster then play more mana and make them a bigger monster. The second is to take a dude and buff him up to be a really big dude. That last is to play a lot of little dudes and buff them sort of big and rush everyone. And, that's about it. Everyone except the last strategy is trying to see whose got the bigger dick, I mean dude.

Since everyone is having a penis size contest, the removal in this format is absolute shit. [card]
Magma Jet[/card] and Lightning Strike won't kill much of anything unless you nail it the turn it comes down. With all the bestow stuff that someone might play once they have the obscene cost for it. Shit either gets big or big shit gets bigger. Bouncing it doesn't do much, because bestow just falls to the ground. And, if you're trying to get rid of that 3/5 Giant dude, removing him for a turn does nothing for you when you can barely swing in anyway. That's why, I think white is probably the best color in the set. It has the best all around removal, Divine Verdict.

I think it's the best because it's... reasonably... costed at 3[mana]w[/mana]. It simply destroys whatever is coming at you. So when your opponent tries to shove his imitation redthirst piece up your ass, you can smack it away because no needs fake redthirst cock. It also chops their wanna-be monster dick off when they decide they wanna do sword
fighting with your overgrown wanna-be monster dick.

As for my strategy, I was kind of forced into playing a lot of dudes and buffing up a dude. I had a lot of early drops with heroic, but with only 1 Ordeal of Purphoros and 2 Dragon Mantles, it was something that was nifty, but the heroic rarely worked out. However, Two-Headed Cerberus with Dragon Mantle is fucking nuts. When you've got 4 or 5 red untapped, you can swing in with a 6/2 double striker and basically dominate a game. This won me more games than any other card or combination of cards.

(M)Ember Swallower was my only monstrosity card. It's actually not bad to pull off when you're ahead of your opponent in mana and just played your 6 drop bomb. You can screw them over and start to dominate because they can't summon a penis big enough to deal with yours.

So, yeah, I got lucky with
the Elspeth pull. She's not super high impact the moment she comes down, but she is able to generate crazy advantage with all the soldier tokens. I never got to use her -3 because most of my opponents didn't have a 4 drop out and more soldier tokens just worked better. Speaking of which, it just dawned on me, but Elspeth hates guys with huge cocks. Any man with a penis size 4 or greater just gets shut down by her. She's like a merciless feminazi dyke who was just blessed with teeth down there and plans to exact her member crunching wrath upon the men of the world. But small ones are okay because those guys are a joke anyway.

The last thing is that the top 4 decks of my tournament were:

1. R/W had Elspeth
2. G/U splash B for Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
3. G/W no planeswalkers
4. G/W had Elspeth

I'm thinking X/w is the strongest color pair. Divine Verdict by itself is probably responsible for that.

I just entered my first online Theros prerelease. I chose blue and have what looks to be a really nasty UG deck.

I did one online prerelease and chose blue. Opened 2x of the flyer that scrys 3 when it attacks, plus a handful of other flyers and some black removal. Ended up going 0-2, losing to mana screw or tricks both rounds. The tricks in this format are so cheap that it is just a blowout when you tap 5 mana to kill a creature on their turn and instead the creature is now twice as big due to heroic.

After that I did a draft and forced RW heroic after opening a pack devoid of anything worth first picking. Went 3-0 with 2 turn four wins. Hopefuly I'll be playing a lot more soon

All 4 drafts I've done have had me in white, and one draft I actually managed do monowhite. I think people don't respect it, I see divine verdict wheel all the time, and yesterday I got gods willing as my passout 2nd pack. I think part of it is that keep getting newbs on my right. Even in sealed I see people with vicious white in their pool and they will leave it behind. Red does have good removal this format, but as always it's toughness dependant (though it can be aimed at face), which is way disadvantageous when there are so many big dudes. Blue's tempo is pretty bonkers, wavecrash triton and triton maneuver both keep the game locked down while get your seamonsters online. Everyone is going after the jund colors, they will splash blue or white, but no one wants to primary blue or white. I have been picking up win after win pickin' my honkey brothers.

I won another 8-4 with a UW deck that basically just played heroic dudes and loaded them up with auras. Heroic is very strong

Heroic is really good in draft, much better than Sealed.

I honestly feel white is probably the strongest on the ground, they have all the tools to come out fast and hard, and keep their steam as they chug through. Last breath is better than it seems, divine verdict is a common and nails everything, their heroic guys all get bigger through out the game, making them stay relevant.

As much of a red mage as I am, I don't think I want to be primarily in red in sealed, though in draft I would like it a little more. I will happily go into red for removal if my pool leads that way, but I want to primarily be in another color. I was in white at the pre (I suspected that the archon would be more generally useful than member swallower in limited), and splshed red, only for the fact that my pool had 3 lightning strikes, 2 rage of purphoros, 1 hammer of purphoros, and a magma jet, there was nothing all that stand out aside from the removal. I didn't even run the xenagos I pulled.

nEven the jank white cards are fairly decent, compared to the number of turds in red. Again I say this as a self-identified redmage, and I take no glee in saying it, but aside from good burn red is shitty. The RX gold cards aren't bad, I really like several of them. All of this really only counts for sealed, it's workable in draft, I would rather white be open, and anytime I can get into UW I think I going to be happy with the results, because UW has a ton of good tools, and their gold uncommon (battlewise hoplite) is fantastic. Green is characteristically green, it's neither great nor bad, and with that scorpion I am interested. Black has the uber scary grey merchant (how is this a common?) and some decent removal and dudes.

After playing the set more, I'm firmly in the camp of forcing white supremacy. W/x heroic is pretty fucking powerful.

has forcing your color ahead of time worked in your favor often?

tonight will be my first FNM that im going to have a chance to draft theros... apart from suggesting a second look at the white cards in the set, what advice can you guys give on cards that tend to get passed that may be more powerful than they look based on the rest of the set... or what are the most used tricks? i still need to memorize all the common/uncommon instants of the colors, but i have no idea what is continuously winning for ppl. any advice? =)

Forcing is not really what I would want to be doing in any draft past the first 4-5 picks. It's almost always better to draft "submissively", you'll get better cards and send a cleaner signal. If you have to force only force one color and submit another. The only color worth trying muscle into with any vigor in triple theros is white, so you can try to, but everyone else is thinking the same thing, so be careful and pick your spots with it.

Yeah, thats typically the strategy that most players use.. I just was surprised when LP was explaining from his experience he would force white to use the heroic trigger. each color has a pretty good uncommon spell that targets 2 creatures.. so splashing would be easy if you picked up one of those. but i only see bestow being the only other solid cards that would use the heroic effect... maybe battlewise valor....maybe! im not sure why forcing white would be any better than just feeling out the colors from what you open and whats being passed to you.. LP can you delve a little more into this?

Green has some decent pump effects, and triton tactics is way better than you think (like it's probably the best limited combat trick in the set, and way easy to hide behind voyage's end or annul).

W/G is probably the best combination, Heroic and Pump, sign me up