General Archetype Shapes
- Thread starter japahn
- Start date
Post is great and gives me some real insight into previous draft formats and how they functioned and what worked and didn't work. I just have a question in regards to how fixed all of this is. As I was trying to visualise this for Modern Horizons, as it is the newest set and they (wizards) told us what each of the colour pair archetype were, but some overlapped more than others.
My main question is snow a colour pair?
It is mainly UG, but with the following cards it feels more like a 5-colour deck:
Not to mention that you need to pick up basics to make the deck work, and you usually just pick up which ever ones you can which dictates the colours you are in.
Maybe I just don't understand how loose these structures can be to allow for off-colour picks, or how in Modern Masters the original UG pair was '5-colour', which just confuses me moreso.
My main question is snow a colour pair?
It is mainly UG, but with the following cards it feels more like a 5-colour deck:
Not to mention that you need to pick up basics to make the deck work, and you usually just pick up which ever ones you can which dictates the colours you are in.
Maybe I just don't understand how loose these structures can be to allow for off-colour picks, or how in Modern Masters the original UG pair was '5-colour', which just confuses me moreso.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Snow, initially, reads as a Pair archetype in GU with a very small bleed into W and B. GU very clearly stands out as the color pair with, by far, the most support for snow. However, all five snow lands can appear in boosters, since it would be unpractical to only reprint Snow-Covered Forest and Snow-Covered Island. To amass a critical number of snow permanents, it's therefor likely the GU player will pick up off-color snow basics. Arcum's Astrolabe is as much a tool to turn splash colors into the main colors as it is the other way around. The cute thing is that GU is traditionally the color pair that's best at splashing cards though, because green has mana fixing (e.g. Rampant Growth), and blue is the best at card drawing, which also helps you find both your splash cards and the mana to play those cards. In that sense, Dead of Winter and On Thin Ice aren't so much an indication that the snow archetype runs in other colors, they're WotC capitalizing on the overlap between WotC's planted archetype for GU (i.e. snow) and GU's natural affinity with being the core of multicolor decks.
Does that mean snow is indeed of the Pair archetype variety then? No, because I actually think there has been an archetype missing from japahn's musings so far, which is probably what threw you for a loop. I guess you could aptly brand this archetype as the Pivot Pair archetype, as it shares qualities of both the Pair and the Pivot archetypes. The Pivot Pair archetype resembles the Pair archetype, in that the core of such an archetype very clearly spans across two colors. This is exactly what we see with snow, which unmistakably has a GU core, which means a snow player will end up in those two colors a great majority of the time. However, thanks to off-color snow basics, Arcum's Astrolabe being an excellent mana fixer at common (that won't get picked up by non-snow drafters!), and two excellent rare payoffs in other colors, the snow drafter will very often end up splashing cards, and this is where the snow mechanic starts to resemble the Pivot archetype.
The great thing about the Pivot Pair archetype, which GU Snow is in my opinion, is that it tackles both the "drafting on rails" downside from traditional Pair archetypes, as well as the "lack of cohesion" downside from the traditional Pivot archetype. The Pivot Pair archetype's biggest downside, in my mind, is that it's hard to pull off successfully, since it so easily slips into a Triangle, Tetra or even Pentagram archetype if too much support is put in one or more non-core colors (essentially turning them into core colors), or by not offering enough tools to successfully enable a drafter to venture into non-core colors. GU snow wouldn't have been as successful at being a Pivot Pair archetype if they hadn't printed the Astrolabe, for example. Another downside is that drafters unfamiliar with the format might conclude that an archetype is supported outside of the core color pair, and end up forcing the wrong pair, ending up with a sub par deck.
Anyway, I'll leave it up to japahn to do a full write up for the archetype
Does that mean snow is indeed of the Pair archetype variety then? No, because I actually think there has been an archetype missing from japahn's musings so far, which is probably what threw you for a loop. I guess you could aptly brand this archetype as the Pivot Pair archetype, as it shares qualities of both the Pair and the Pivot archetypes. The Pivot Pair archetype resembles the Pair archetype, in that the core of such an archetype very clearly spans across two colors. This is exactly what we see with snow, which unmistakably has a GU core, which means a snow player will end up in those two colors a great majority of the time. However, thanks to off-color snow basics, Arcum's Astrolabe being an excellent mana fixer at common (that won't get picked up by non-snow drafters!), and two excellent rare payoffs in other colors, the snow drafter will very often end up splashing cards, and this is where the snow mechanic starts to resemble the Pivot archetype.
The great thing about the Pivot Pair archetype, which GU Snow is in my opinion, is that it tackles both the "drafting on rails" downside from traditional Pair archetypes, as well as the "lack of cohesion" downside from the traditional Pivot archetype. The Pivot Pair archetype's biggest downside, in my mind, is that it's hard to pull off successfully, since it so easily slips into a Triangle, Tetra or even Pentagram archetype if too much support is put in one or more non-core colors (essentially turning them into core colors), or by not offering enough tools to successfully enable a drafter to venture into non-core colors. GU snow wouldn't have been as successful at being a Pivot Pair archetype if they hadn't printed the Astrolabe, for example. Another downside is that drafters unfamiliar with the format might conclude that an archetype is supported outside of the core color pair, and end up forcing the wrong pair, ending up with a sub par deck.
Anyway, I'll leave it up to japahn to do a full write up for the archetype
Onderzeeboot's amazing post is spot on. Although I haven't drafted Modern Horizons, the limited decklists I've seen corroborate his analysis. That's a pivot pair archetype.
The genius is that off-color lands as the archetype's enablers are a bleed that feels natural, elegant, and has a small cost to include for a deck - much lower than the cost of splashing colors usually is, as an off-color land is just a Wastes, while an off-color spell is unplayable until the manabase develops enough. Converge in Oath of the Gatewatch comes to mind, for example, only needs some "add mana of any color", land tutors and one of each of the off-color lands to work. As Kirblinx said, Modern Masters had Domain, too.
I'll research it some more, look for the pattern in previous formats and cubelists, and write part 3 when I have more familiarity with it.
The genius is that off-color lands as the archetype's enablers are a bleed that feels natural, elegant, and has a small cost to include for a deck - much lower than the cost of splashing colors usually is, as an off-color land is just a Wastes, while an off-color spell is unplayable until the manabase develops enough.
Converge in Oath of the Gatewatch comes to mind, for example, only needs some "add mana of any color", land tutors and one of each of the off-color lands to work. As Kirblinx said, Modern Masters had Domain, too.I'll research it some more, look for the pattern in previous formats and cubelists, and write part 3 when I have more familiarity with it.
Oh man, what a great thread. I missed this one because I was on my honeymoon in Japa(h)n.