Why You, Too, Should Draft Weird Decks

05/03/2024

You may have seen my day 1 draft deck at PT OTJ.

It was the best deck I've ever drafted in a competitive event, the best deck I've ever drafted in OTJ, and I suspect one of the best if not straight up the best deck in the room that day.

But beyond just being a very good version of the deck, I didn't see too much special about it - I'd drafted

Archive Trap decks before in testing; and on Sanctum we'd talked in our limited team meeting about how it was a very real buildaround, and about how to make it work.

Of course, not everyone thinks like I do. When I posted about my deck to Twitter and Discord, I got a lot of responses to the tune of "what the fuck Jason?!?!" Certainly my deck wasn't the kind of draft deck you'd see very often; but while I thought it was completely reasonable and within the range of decks I'd expect in this format, clearly many people though I had to be doing something really special to be able to put something like this together.

So today I'd like to talk about two things. First of all, I'd like to go through my draft and talk about some of the decisions I made, especially the ones that aren't that intuitive. But then I'd also like to talk more generally about how I approach drafting, and why I think everyone should be more willing to draft weird, off-the-wall decks.

---

Part 1: How to Draft an Archive Trap Deck

I don't remember my exact list of packs and picks, but I do recall quite a few key decisions in this draft. So I'll go over the interesting picks that I can remember.

Pack 1 Pick 1

I think there might have been another reasonable card in the pack, but I remember the main decision point being between

At Knifepoint, Outlaws' Merriment, and Longhorn Sharpshooter.

All three are reasonably powerful cards - and the first two are even quite similar, as enchantments that give you a steady stream of creatures. But the choice I ended up making was one for flexibility: Sharpshooter.

In high-level pods, I value flexibility even more than normal. Since people will generally be snatching up powerful cards pretty early, it can be hard to make strong synergy decks come together - which makes heavy buildaround cards like At Knifepoint and color-intensive cards like Outlaws' Merriment a bit riskier to speculate on.

Sharpshooter has the benefit of fitting into basically any deck pretty reasonably, as a pretty clean and powerful 2-for-1. So I ended up taking that here.

Pack 1 Pick 3

I think there was another reasonable card here, but nothing with as high upside as Archive Trap. I believe I had also seen a

Deepmuck Desperado in one of the previous packs, and so thought that I could maybe wheel it (I didn't). Still, even if there hadn't been another mill card in a previous pack I was pretty happy to just speculate on a very powerful card.

Pack 1 Pick 4

The literal best pick after taking an Archive Trap (perhaps besides a second Archive Trap). If you're not aware,

Slickshot Lockpicker is the main combo in this set with Archive Trap, because milling for 26 is roughly all you need to deck your opponent in limited (since they've drawn 7 cards for turn, plus 7 cards by turn 7, plus 26 equals 40).

This was also a sign that blue was open, as Lockpicker is one of the best uncommons and seeing it pick 4 is somewhat of a signal.

Assorted Pack 1

I don't remember exactly what I had by the end of pack 1, but I know I had at least one

Metamorphic Blast, the two red removal spells, a bunch of other blue cards, and at least 1 black card.

So at this point I was pretty locked into blue, what with having the Trap+Lockpicker combo, having other good blue cards, and having a general feeling that blue was fairly open. My other color looked to likely be red, but black was also a strong contender, as I knew there weren't very many red cards I was actually excited about picking up.

Pack 2 Pick 1

There wasn't too much else in the pack, so

Caustic Bronco was a pretty easy pick. But I wanted to highlight that, as soon as I picked it, I started to look out for 3 power creatures specifically to effectively saddle it. This will become important because...

Pack 2 Pick 6ish

I don't remember exactly which pick this was - I know it was somewhat mid pack 2, before the wheel. But I specifically remember the choice here because I think it's one that many people would think of as unintuitive, and one that I feel quite strongly about.

Intimidation Campaign is a powerful card for sure. It's a pretty high pick for me generally, and something that actively draws me to being a crimes deck - which is also what almost all UB decks want to be doing this format.

Sterling Hound, on the other hand, is kind of the definition of filler. It's one of the weaker versions of this effect we've seen, not because it itself is worse (in fact the raw rate on it is better than previous versions), but because the context of the set around it is more powerful. It's a card that very rarely makes my decks, because I just have better things to be doing.

And yet, the card I took here was Sterling Hound, and I think it was 100% correct! The problem is that my deck is not a crimes deck; I didn't have any deserts or any other cheap ways to trigger crime. And even though Campaign could still be powerful in my deck, it just didn't add anything that I really needed.

At its core, the deck I was drafting was a combo deck: I just wanted to find Archive Trap + Slickshot Lockpicker, and I didn't need tp actually play a long grindy game to do so. Of course I could attempt to grind with a bunch of card draw to find my combo pieces, but I think at this point I already had a second copy of Metamorphic Blast, in addition to my Caustic Bronco, so I really didn't need to have more raw card draw either.

On the flipside, while Sterling Hound isn't an amazing rate compared to the rest of the set, it's kind of exactly the card I want! It provides a body I can block and trade with while at the same time digging towards my combo - if all I'm trying to do is find Archive Trap, surveil 2 for 3 mana is much more efficient than spending a ton of mana playing and replaying Campaign. And on top of all of that, remember what I said about 3 power creatures? It saddles my Bronco!

I honestly really loved this pick. It really demonstrates what I love about draft - how it's extremely dynamic and rewards flexibility and in-the-moment decision making. As I've said over and over again, you should be drafting your deck, and not simply drafting the cards in a vacuum!

Pack 3 Pick 1/9

The rest of the draft after that Sterling Hound pick was fairly straightforward - not much in terms of interesting decisions, mostly just picking up on the extremely open blue lane I was presented.

But of course, the picks to top off a great draft were my first and ninth picks in pack 3 - opening a second Archive Trap, taking it, and wheeling the

Jace Reawakened out of the same pack. My deck would've been good without one or both of these two gifts, but getting a full four mill combo pieces (two Traps, one Lockpicker, one Jace) made it truly superlative.

The Result

Honestly there wasn't much to say about the build/gameplay that I haven't said already - but just to give a sense of how fun this deck was:

My first match I won 2-0, where both games went the exact same way: I had a T4 Jace that plotted Sharpshooter, and then a T7 Jace ultimate that copied an Archive Trap for lethal.

My second match I won 2-1, winning game 1 again with a Jace ultimate + Archive Trap, losing game 2, and then winning game 3 with double free Archive Trap after my opponent resolved

Dance of the Tumbleweeds fully spreed :D

And my third match I won 2-0, winning the first game with two hardcast Archive Traps, and winning the second game with one free Archive trap after a Primal command and one hardcast!

---

Part 2: An Ode to Weird Decks

As I've mentioned in previous articles, I think one of the most important skills in drafting and learning a set is knowing how to use each and every card in the set.

And at the end of the day, drafting weird off-the-wall decks is just that same concept, but taken to its natural conclusion. If you can properly navigate your draft to best take advantage of the cards you see, well at that point you don't really need to be drafting "on rails" so to speak. If you can figure out each individual card as its own puzzle piece, you can put them together into any kind of deck you want, and don't need to stick to preconceived notions like "two-color archetypes".

In the past, I've often offered the advice "draft decks, not cards". But to add onto that, I'd say that in cases like these it's important to actually draft the deck in front of you, and not just a vague sense of "archetype".

Of course, this certainly isn't trivial - you do need to have a relatively good sense of how to build limited decks generally. But it's definitely a skill that more people should practice.

I often see people dismiss a certain kind of draft deck as "something only Sam Black would/could pull off". But that really isn't true, and is in fact quite an unproductive and defeatist thing to say! Sam Black's style of drafting shouldn't be something to put on a pedestal as something unachievable - but rather looked up to as something to learn from and aspire to.

So go out there and experiment more! There's a somewhat limited amount you can learn from just sticking to what's known - there's only so much you can make out of figuring out set after set how two-color aggressive decks work. Taking risks and learning from them is often key to growing as a Magic player.