Going Aggro in Reality Fracture Draft

I'm currently taking a break from playing the Limited Arena Champs Qualifier which has gone pretty well so far. I've won far more matches than I lost, and converted my first run by doing exactly what I said I wouldn't: drafting white.

The Arena Limited Champs format has been announced, complete with a 250k prize pool. Sure enough, Reality Fracture and Star Trek will be the two formats we get to play in the event, and regardless of how I do this weekend I have an invite for that event locked up.

We'll be playing best of three for once, which means as soon as this 2,000 Prize cash tournament weekend is over, I'll be pivoting my play and content to best of three Limited.

For now I'd like to discuss when and why we should get into aggressive decks in the current Reality Fracture environment.

Like myself, almost everyone wants to draft Blue in this event. There's a lot of quality drafters and players, and while us Limited diehards will get to play softer opponents without ranks being involved, we still need to navigate the drafts well to give ourselves a good chance.

My current feeling is to let the draft come to me and take what I'm given. It's honestly a rarity these days because the rares and uncommons tend to be really strong relative to commons, and Reality Fracture is no different. However, I don't like playing slow grindy decks that can't create some inevitability, and that often happens if you're forcing those decks despite others at the table not giving you late pick value cards. You just end up bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Aggressive white decks are a great place to be in my opinion if a majority of players try to play slower magic. There's a lot of value to be gained in the least drafted color, and you can really punish opponents who keep slower draws.

Here's my first deck of the event, which went 7-0:

BW Aggro

Funnily enough in the Arena Direct BW Aggro was also a 7-0 deck for me, and I don't think I've drafted this archetype at all before. We can find lifegain synergies, or pile up on Empower Jace to make sure we're never running out of gas while also cranking up the pressure.

This deck relied heavily on lifegain synergies between Lyra, Archangel of Dawn and the Unflinching Hortimancers. Murmuring Volume was a late addition when I realized I had the ghouls, but I also don't like playing 17 or more lands in this archetype because you really need to draw spells together to turn the diamonds in the rough into actual diamonds.

Black-white has access to great removal so it's easy to keep pushing damage if you can get on the board quickly as a lot of the soup decks in this format need to take turns to set up with cards like Protege's Awakening or Way of the Mind Sculptor. Those are turns you need to get in for big chunks of damage.

Aggro decks do have a bit of an issue with Empower Jace as you don't want to spend a lot of your damage output on hitting Empowered Jaces, so attacking him becomes incredibly contextual. Often times I'll attack a 3-loyalty Jace for like 1 or 2 damage instead of killing it outright, enabling me to get the opponent in lethal range. The longer the game goes, the worse it becomes for you.

Yoshimaru, Beloved Companion made an appearance in my deck for the first time and it was great with the Twisted Fates on multiple occasions, but it does feel quite bad to play on turn 3 since it's easily killed and almost always outsized.

Aside from black, I really like blue as a supporting color for white aggro decks. Unsummon can become an all-star if you can pressure the opponent enough, making it a great card to pick up in the middle of a pack. Blue is obviously the best color in the format, but you also utilize cards other decks don't necessarily pick early and can focus a bit on surveil synergies to make your late pick Phantasms really do work.

Azorious Aggro

Here's an Azorious Deck I got close to trophying with and came up just short.

Rakdos is another aggro deck that has an extremely high ceiling, however I find you need a lot of uncommons to make it really fire on all cylinders, so I tend to avoid it unless I pick up some of the Rakdos uncommons later in a pack. Stingerquill Voxmancer is a huge enabler for a lot of the archetype and without it I really don't like Rakdos aggro all that much. Often I just run out of gas without any real plan for a long game but cross my fingers I draw enough burn to finish the job.

Even with blue highly contested you can still play soupy decks, but a lot of them will focus on red uncommons such as Kiora of Fire and Ashes or Craftwork Crusher. I tend to draft those Gruul+ decks as Jund if I'm not Temur. I think Gruul gets to splash for any removal pretty easily with access to cards like Fblthp, Knows the Way and Something Worth Saving in addition to landcyclers and Murmuring Volume. Green decks also ramp often, making the landcyclers a lot better than in other archetypes because they give you flood resistance in addition to extra colored sources for your splashes.

Aggro decks can really punish these landcycler starts though, which is why I'm slowly coming around to attacking their life total more, and slowing down on trying to win a resources arms race. I do really want to be in white if I'm aggressive though because it has a lot of lifegain and counter synergies that I think help push you over the hump.

I'm excited to get started on best of three this next week but for now I'm going to get back to trying to earn some cash this weekend. For everyone playing I hope you managed to make some cash yourselves!