Enabling Attacks in DSK

09/23/2024

Last week, I wrote an article all about grindy, soupy Rooms decks. And while I have been extremely impressed with those kinds of decks and fairly partial to drafting them, they are by no means the only powerful thing to be doing in this format.

So today I'd like to explore something completely different. I've talked a lot about how to grind and win the late game with Rooms; now, let's talk about the opposite end of the spectrum: how best to attack in Duskmourn.

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Weirdly Statted Attackers

One thing you might notice as you look at Duskmourn is that the stat lines are actually pretty weird in the aggressive decks. Nominally, white and red are the most aggressive colors; but neither of them have any 3-power 2-drops at common! In fact, the only 3-power 2-drops at common in the set are one

in green and one with defender.

One reason for this weird property of the set is pretty obvious once you look at the archetype for RW: 2 power matters. We don't have many high-power attackers, because the two most aggressive colors care specifically about small creatures.

But on top of that, this is actually a pretty interesting implementation of the 2-power-matters archetype. Specifically, while such an archetype would usually lean into go-wide synergies as payoff, there is actually very little support in the set for going wides. There is one uncommon that

pumps your team, but that really doesn't do nearly as much as the normal Inspired Charge at common would.

So, the aggressive decks face a bit of a dilemma. There isn't enough payoff or support to go wide, but at the same time all your creatures are somewhat small. How exactly, then, do you push damage?

Well, the solution to that question presented in this set seems to be in the form of a bit of A+B synergy: on one hand, cards that aren't great at attacking on their own but quite good when they successfully attack; and on the other hand, cards that are really good at enabling those attacks.

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Part A: Rewarding Attacks

Normally, the reward for attacking is simply getting your opponent dead. When you attack with a 3/1, the main benefit is that your opponent loses three life. And on top of that, 3/1s are fairly good at attacking too! The opponent needs to present a blocker with at least 4 toughness before they can force you to act before attacking.

But in this set, we see a lot of 2-power creatures instead. And as it turns out, the breakpoint between 2 and 3 power is huge! Not only is a 2-power creature less impactful when it connects, it's also worse at attacking. And it's not like the average toughness in the set was lowered to match - there's just as many 3 mana 3/3s as usual.

Instead, the way that the set is designed encourages attacking simply by tacking on very nice abilities that get better when you successfully attack.

Survival is of course the big example of this. It's an entire mechanic that hinges on having a creature successfully attack without dying in combat. Of course, there are various other ways to tap your creatures and trigger Survival - but by and large the main goal will be to attack successfully.

One of white's common 2-drops,

Acrobatic Cheerleader, is a prime example of how this mechanic changes the texture of an aggressive card. Sure, it's going to be worse at attacking and do less damage - but if you can manage to attack with it just once, it can give you a lot of value by getting in evasive damage for the rest of the game.

In addition to these Survival creatures, there are also just quite a few attack triggers sprinkled around the set.

The biggest one is, of course,

the RW signpost uncommon. Arabella is a card that is really bad at getting through combat on its own as a 1/3; but at the same time very quickly wins you the game if you can get it through a few combats, as it swings life totals extremely quickly.

Fear of Surveillance is an easier, though much smaller payoff at common. Surveilling every turn certainly isn't going to win the game on its own, but also shouldn't be underestimated.

And honestly,

Vicious Clown kind of also fits this "big payoff when attacking but bad at attacking" archetype, if in a slightly different way - specifically, it can represent huge chunks of damage if it goes unblocked, but can be quite prone to simply trading off if you don't have a way to protect it.

So, cards like these are the reason to attack. How then can we enable these attacks?

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Part B: Enabling Attacks

This category of effects is going to be much wider and broader, as it touches both into normal limited gameplay elements present in every set (as every aggro deck fundamentally asks the question "how can I consistently enable my attacks"), in addition to the more specific synergies.

Removal

This is the simplest of answers to the question "how do I enable my attacks", but of course one of the most effective. Your opponent can't block if they don't have creatures! Thankfully, there's some quite good removal in this set -

Scorching Dragonfire and Trapped in the Screen stand out at common, and Trial of Agony looks absolutely backbreaking at uncommon.

Combat Tricks

The combat tricks in this set are pretty interesting to me. Discounting the black one (as black is not very aggressive), there are three main tricks at common:

Jump Scare, Turn Inside Out, and Horrid Vigor.

Jump Scare looks to be quite important for this kind of A+B attackers-and-enablers deck. It can be of course a fine combat trick on its own - +2/+2 for 1 mana does the job decently, if not excitingly - but the real value is just using it to sneak a key attack in. In most sets, this mode would mainly be used as a game-ending shot at your opponent's last few life points - but in this set I can very much imagine firing this off midgame for value.

Spending one mana and one card for a big Arabella hit can definitely swing games as you threaten to simply chump attack the next turn. Sometimes your

Survival creature provides a card worth of value when it survives, so you're fine just spending a card to enable that. And I could even imagine scenarious where you cast it as early as turn 3 just to double spell, get in damage, and give your Cheerleader permanent flying!

Horrid Vigor, in comparison, does a similar thing but in a much less aggressive, slightly more flexible way. This is fitting for green, which is less aggressive than both red and white - but I suspect the 2 mana cost on this card will make it more of a 23rd card consideration than a key enabler.

And finally, Turn Inside Out is the weirdest of the bunch. This doesn't strictly enable attacking over and over again with the same creature the way the other tricks do - the card literally does nothing to protect the creature from death after all. But, it seems quite potent if you have many threatening must-be-blocked creatures in your deck, as then the manifest dread trigger will likely find you even more fuel to throw into the attacking fire.

Felonious Rage was a pretty good card in its set after all, and I don't imagine this card being any worse - just not quite as important of an enabler as Jump Scare.

Keyword Engines

Finally, one of the most unique features of the aggressive decks in Duskmourn is just how many keyword-based attack-enabling engines there are.

As expected, green trails the pack with

Flesh Burrower. This is an amazing defensive 2 drop, and certainly a decent attacking enabler, but ultimately does nothing to stop your other creature from just trading. It helps you make good trades, perhaps, but doesn't quite enable you to get full value from repeated attack triggers.

Red, however, absolutely excels at this, with two different premium attack-enabling commons.

First off is a very straightforward one:

Ragged Playmate. If you played in M20, I can assure you that Goblin Smuggler is back! While Playmate is only a bear in the earlygame, it gives red aggressive decks so much reach and so much ability to enable attacks through the mid-to-lategame, as basically all of your creatures have base 2 power.

But the MVP, so to speak, is of course

Most Valuable Slayer. It looks like it could be kind of clunky, as a 4 mana 2/4 in an aggressive color, but it just makes blocking a nightmare for your opponent. To continue to make comparisons to old sets: this card is basically Combat Professor from Strixhaven. Except, in exchange for MVS not having evasion, your opponent's creatures need to be a full 2 sizes bigger than yours to make profitable blocks. Seems like a fair trade to me.

One very important factor in all of this is that all of these attack-enabling engines actually stack very very well with each other, together being better than the sum of their parts.

I mentioned Flesh Burrower as being somewhat mediocre as an aggressive card as it doesn't prevent trades - well, what if you combined its effect with a copy of MVS, to make a deathtouch first strike creature? Even better, try two copies of MVS with a single Flesh Burrower - that's two creatures that can only be chumped!

White also has an attack enabler in

Hardened Escort that stacks extremely well with other attack enablers, as it itself requires attacking. If you have Playmate, Escort, and an Arabella in play, then every single turn you can have Playmate make Escort unblockable, and Escort make Arabella indestructible, allowing you to get in 2 damage from Escort plus the Arabella trigger every single turn!

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A + B: When Aggro Meets Combo

When you start putting together all of these attack enablers, your aggro deck can really start to feel a bit unfair. This is especially true when a card like Arabella enters the conversation. You can go from one turn chump attacking an Escort to get Arabella in, to the next turn casting Jump Scare to fly it in, to the next turn chump attacking with Arabella to get the final few points of damage; all of these completely invalidating any blocking-related strategies your opponent might be attempting to enact.

At the same time, though, this kind of deck can therefore be a bit vulnerable to removal on your key cards - all your methods of enabling attacks will be somewhat powered down if you don't have anything special to sneak in.

So be aware of that throughout drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. Recursion like

Surgical Suite and protection like Shardmage's Rescue are all-stars when you're trying to assemble A+B synergies!

But at the end of the day, you are still just a deck with good creatures that can attack. The nice thing is, even if you don't have the Arabella, or the

Reluctant Role Model, or what have you, you can still just win from playing a normal limited game. Synergistic shenanigans are nice and all, but even with slightly lower-power creatures than usual, rock-solid aggressive fundamentals provide a nice floor.

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Afterthoughts: Weird Cards in this Space

To close off this article, I'd like to briefly bring up a couple of the weirder enablers and payoffs for attacking in this set.

First of all,

Norin, Swift Survivalist. A very weird card indeed, which (ironically) doesn't work all that well with Survivors in general (as they don't trigger postcombat if you exile them), but is extremely potent as an Arabella enabler. I'm not sure if I would play this card without strong attack triggers in my deck, but as soon as I have one or two Arabellas I'd be looking to pick this card up.

Next, we have an extremely off-color payoff:

Fear of Failed Tests. Blue doesn't look particularly good at aggression in this set, but if you do happen to find yourself in the UR tempo-y space, Fear of Failed Tests can get really scary when paired with MVS or especially Playmate. Unblockably drawing 2 extra cards every turn is a really really nice engine. And while white as a pairing is worse at repeatedly sending in the Fear, a single Jump Scare drawing 4 cards off of Tests seems like the kind of spice I can get behind.

And finally, while we're musing about the blue attacking space:

Enter the Enigma is a card that I can guarantee literally no one else will want, which could maybe do some work with good enough attacking payoffs. The problem, of course, is that it's in blue - but I could theoretically see a UW deck taking advantage of this to enable a few white Survivors.

This is all to say: there's quite a lot of depth sprinkled across Duskmourn! Even the aggressive decks have many layers of synergy in them - I'm quite excited to explore more.