A Lesson in Avatar Draft

For the past few days I've been putting in the work playing Avatar: The Last Airbender Limited. It's been a rollercoaster, but I feel like I've finally gotten the hang of it.

My first impression was that it feels and plays a bit like Spider-Man Limited, except it's deeper and overall better. We have various synergies that play directly onto the board, and the game we play is mostly on the battlefield and less about extracting every ounce of value from each card or ability.

Why is that? Well, we have some solid one-drops at common and uncommon, but none more powerful than Fire Nation Cadets. Fire Nation Cadets are a one-drop that, with a little support, can provide you with an additional 2 mana per turn to cast various instants or activate abilities in combat. If things are going well, you can gain a massive mana advantage early, causing things to snowball out of control.

Right on the heels of Power Cube with Boros being a dominant deck, Boros is again very strong because it's the best at getting on board and snowballing with a pile of activated abilities. In normal Limited sets, cards with expensive activated abilities, such as Water Tribe Captain, could mostly be ignored. With firebending, stalemate games where you have a low life total, lack resources to close the door, and can start to slowly mount a comeback, cards like Water Tribe Captain can take over in the endgame because firebending allows for a ton of mana to sink into these types of abilities.

TLDR: Firebending is stronger than it looked to me on paper, with the same being true for all the bending mechanics.

I will say, you can take it too far—presenting my Fire Nation Cadet deck.

This deck is one of my only 0-3s in a long time, as it was comically underpowered. I managed to get my three opponents to low life totals, but I had no ability to close the door. Fire Nation Cadets have diminishing returns. While you could likely get away with four in a deck that's flush with good lessons, the average deck will want to cap out at two, maybe three. This draft was interesting because I started pack one with four copies. I knew red wasn't open because I wasn't seeing other red cards, especially the removal to support them, like Firebending Lesson.

Lessons is my favorite archetype thus far, and the only one I'm excited to draft. Lesson-matters cards are mostly found at uncommon and rare, but they are quite powerful. None so more powerful than my favorite rare in the set, Iroh, Grand Lotus. If you open Iroh, take it and run with it. It's obscenely powerful and feels like playing Vintage Cube once you stick it.

Here's a look at one of my many Iroh decks.

I could have played Mai over Vindictive Warden, but for whatever reason, chat wanted me to play the Warden. The deck plays out fairly controlling, and eventually I'd close the door with one of my rares, usually Iroh.

This leads me to my next lesson. I hate to sound cliché, but as of right now, which is still early, rares are extremely important in this format. There's a lot of filler commons, and the rares are worth so much more than most commons. That's not to say the format is durdly and you need to play soup, but my 4c, rare, heavy decks, like this one, have overperformed my expectations. While the format can be fast, generally, your pool's power level is important.

While my initial inclination was that red is the best color, white is quite strong as well. I've struggled with black decks, and I've mostly only had success with green in soup decks, including the deck above and this one.

Every deck just wants a decent curve and rares up top, but it's crucial to have ways to interact with strong rares when they're present.

Mono-color decks are another archetype I'm excited about. We have a small amount of support for mono-color decks at uncommon with a cycle of cards that scale with your basic lands, but it's just enough to make the archetype worth pursuing at times. The strongest in that cycle is the Gator, a functional Corrupt on a stick. Here's the first deck I drafted when the format became live.

I got two early Gather the White Lotus and leaned into the archetype. This deck played out well, and I've been overly impressed with Earth Kingdom Protectors. Most of the relevant creatures in white decks are also allies, so it saves them from a lot of removal and makes combat easy for the controller and a nightmare for the opponent.

Mono Red is also strong, though it probably has the worst card in the basic lands-matter cycle. My dream is to open a Valakut, which is on the bonus sheet, and get to draft a Mono Red deck, much like I did in Zendikar draft back in the day.

One of the more disappointing aspects of the format is that the shrines are mostly unplayable. I have seen them pop off at times, but it's not an archetype worth pursuing unless you see a ton of them in pack one. Even then, I'd avoid the shrines. You don't want to play two or three of them in your deck, though I have seen the white one individually do some work as a singular anthem effect in linear, go-wide strategies. Ultimately, I'm ignoring shrines as blanks in packs for the time being.

Overall, this feels like an intuitive format, but I still feel like I have a lot to learn. The bending mechanics are all new and make the cards play out much better than they felt. There's plenty I need to explore further to gain a full understanding.

With the Collector Booster Arena Direct Thanksgiving weekend, I'll focus on improving in the format and be sure to share my findings.