A Limited View of Spoiler Season

Tuition

JWiley129

21 March 2016

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Spoiler season is great. We get to see new cards, analyze new mechanics, and collectively enjoy all these cards. But what’s the first thing Magic players want to do? Figure out what’s good in X, where X is their format of choice. Whether that format is Standard, Modern, Commander, Highlander, or Kitchen Table, we all want to know is this card good. This isn’t going to be a card evaluation article, that’s a series all on its own, instead I want to discuss the common pitfalls players have when looking at spoilers and trying to determine parts of the Limited format, Sealed or Draft.

Rares show up very rarely in Limited, and not all rares are created equal. For the most part, rares are good in Limited and you’ll play them. You don’t need to be a genius to see that Arlinn Kord  ^Flip is a good card in Draft and you should take her. Similarly, you shouldn’t look at Brain in a Jar and say that some Instant or Sorcery based deck is possible and/or good. You won’t see every rare during your time drafting a set, let alone play with every rare. So don’t look at a set and try to predict the themes or “best archetypes” on the rares you might or might not open.

This could almost be a corollary to Pitfall #1, but it deserves its own bullet point. As of writing 15 of the total cards spoiled are commons, that’s 15 out of 60. Why is that? Because Wizards spoils the rares and exciting uncommons first to get us hype. This does not tell us anything about the limited format or how it will play out. Limited formats are defined by two things: Common Creatures and Common Removal. In Oath of the Gatewatch (OGW), the best color pair to draft is probably the White/Black Allies deck. Why? Because two of the common removal spells, Oblivion Strike and Isolation Zone, are in those colors and can just straight up get rid of any problem creature. So far we have... Fiery Temper. We cannot, and should not, determine the speed or viability of a format based off of one common removal spell. Similarly we don’t know exactly what each color pairs’ themes are. We can guess that Vampires are a Black/Red Madness deck focused on creatures and all signs point to a Blue/Red Madness deck focused on Spells. Similarly Investigate appears to be in the Bant colors of White, Blue, and Green. So it seems like we can have Investigate decks there. But notice how I said “guess” and “appears.” That’s why figuring out the Limited format from these few pickings is near impossible.

This feels like I’m a broken record, however it’s important for people to hear. As I said above, the format will be defined by commons. Not the exciting rares nor mythics, and certainly not by the Double Faced Cards we’ll see 1 or 2 per pack. So looking at a single spoiled card and saying “this card will define the format” is ludicrous. Unless we have the whole picture, the best we can make is broad generalizations. A Magic streamer I highly respect, Gabe Reale who streams at twitch.tv/sgdoc, is often asked about his view on spoilers. Now he has a strict policy of not engaging in any Limited discussion of spoilers until he sees the whole set. Because that is when the picture of the set will come into focus. Once we see how many common removal spells there are, and what the “key toughness” is of creatures, will we get a truly expansive view of the format. But even then, there is still one pitfall we have to avoid.

Much like in Standard, you can’t draw conclusions on a Limited format without playing the damn set. We can theorycraft about how Fiery Temper is busted in Limited all we want, but until we play with the cards we won’t know if we’re correct or not. We can be totally wrong on how powerful/weak a mechanic is based solely on how Wizards prints the enablers for the mechanics. As an example, prior to Battle for Zendikar’s (BFZ) release there was some debate over how well the Devoid colorless theme would play out. Would cards like Nettle Drone have enough colorless spells to have it become more than just a weak Prodigal Pyromancer. The answer turned out to be yes, but people didn't’ know that until they started drafting and playing with the cards. So with that in mind, keep an eye out for when the full Shadows over Innistrad spoiler hits on Friday March 25th. Then we can make some conclusions about the format.