We just got to enjoy our first Duskmourn games on MTG Arena and MTGO. The set looked so fun that I fired up my stream for the first time after a long hiatus, played a solid eight hours, and finished up a draft off stream.
I learned a good amount in that time. While it's impossible to have the whole format figured out in a single day, let's walk through some of the bullet points I kept in mind while playing.
Higher rarities are extremely important
There are a lot of weak commons in this set. The commons are not pushed like we've seen in some recent sets. While there are some solid ones, I'm focused on the rarer cards while reading signals. The gap is wide between middling commons and uncommons. Games are often decided by rares, which can be a disappointing game experience but is likely no longer the case with juiced-up rarities. There are more rares per draft, and it's our job to figure out how to get as many of the good ones opened and into our pile. This is as simple as identifying open colors and knowing when we opened one that's too good to pass up. We leave ourselves an opportunity to take it.
White Aggro feels strong
I tried to mix it up on stream, and the decks that felt the best were White Aggro. It's a small sample of decks, so it's only a hunch, but my intuition is often correct in these situations. I will not be surprised to see white aggressive decks have a strong performance when we get a big enough sample of data.
What did I like about White Aggro? There are a lot of value creatures at uncommon and common. We have cards like Splitskin Doll, Living Phone, and Unsettling Twins. This means you'll have cardboard in play a lot, and there are a lot of ways to utilize bodies. Between equipment, various high-powered auras, and rooms that pump your creatures, a nice curve of creatures is easy to walk across the finish line, as there's no shortage of ways to make generic 2/2s into real threats.
White also has reasonable interaction, though not great. Generally, your support color will be where you look for your desired interaction. In lieu of interaction, simply overwhelming your opponent is also an option.
Example
This deck out-carded my opponents, not in raw card advantage, but because I had 4 Irreverent Gremlin I churned through my deck, turned lands into spells and spells into lands, and had a consistent and concise game plan.
Record: 7-1
Reanimator is a trap
Orzhov's theme in this set appears to be some kind of reanimator deck, but the efficiency of this is dubious. Without some higher-end uncommons or crazy good rares to cycle back in, it's not an archetype you should aim to draft. Spending 5 mana for a 6/6 land cycler isn't a good plan in 2024.
However, you can still end up here on accident. If the pieces are in your deck already, and you happen to get a reanimation package, it's not unplayable, but it should almost never be your main focus.
Example
Here's a normal UBw Deck I drafted that had a minor reanimator package with some later picks as a way to round out the deck. The deck was heavy on interaction, which allowed longer games to set everything up and win with either Niko, Light of Hope, or often Vile Mutilator.
Vile Mutilator is my pick for the card that overperformed expectations. It's not the best uncommon in the set, but it's a solid game plan, easy to cast, and one of the cards you want to reanimate most.
Interaction is important if you're not aggressive
There are a lot of strong creatures at higher rarities, such as Silent Hallcreeper, Unstoppable Slasher, and almost every mythic rare, and there's no shortage at uncommon either. If you can't win a short game, you need to interact with these creatures. A lot of the creatures provide value out of combat, and you can't simply brick-wall them in your UG or BG decks. Since these archetypes are slower, and generally your plan is to out-value your opponent, it's too hard against the best creatures in the format.
Threat density is important
Most decks will have no issues with threat density. You have your normal deck with 15+ creatures, a few removal, and maybe a bomb or two. Control decks can get punished in this format for not having enough removal. There's lots of self-mill in its purest sense and with Manifest Dread on top that mills you slowly and turns a spell into a couple of cards from your deck. You can get to the bottom of your deck relatively fast, which is cool since you can plan around it. I already lost my first match of the format because I didn't have enough ways to attack the opponent and decked myself.
Here's the deck in question:
Record 3-3
This deck had lots of interaction and card draw but lacked bombs. It still looked like a reasonable deck, but it didn't play out well. Often, I found myself running out of relevant cards. My creatures were too weak, so I couldn't compete when any relevant threat was able to stick.
Stalked Researcher is a card template they keep coming back to, and while I don't mind a nice, two-mana 3/3 wall, I only want to play cards like this when my end game is on point, which was not the case here.
I misbuilt this deck and should have included the second copy of Spectral Snatcher as a way to close in long games.
I don't think what happened with this deck will be uncommon. You need to rely on synergy in this format. Ignoring it will lead you to soupy decks that aren't well suited to battle against decks with cards that work well together.
Lean into synergy
Synergies are more important in a format with weaker, power-level commons and when the cards individually are weaker.
The synergies are obvious and easy to focus on in this format. There aren't as many cards in this set that don't make sense in any archetype, so follow your color pair's strategy. If those synergies aren't on par with the rest of the set, then try your best to avoid those color pairs.
You can splash for bombs, but linear seems to work better than piles of cards. I'm more worried about my cards working together and picking up higher-synergistic-value cards than taking the best win-rate card. The higher win-rate cards at lower rarity in this set will be a nightmare to parse and will likely fluctuate if people are following those trends too closely, as certain archetypes will become more open, and it will be easier to capitalize on finding the open lane.
Here's an example of a deck that I leaned into the synergies. I had an awesome deck that underperformed my expectations, as it was unable to handle the long games it planned for against powerful rares.
Record: 4-3
After my first day of playing, this set has been really fun. I plan to fire up the stream again to learn more. Next time, I'll dive deeper into Duskmourn Limited.
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