By now everyone knows the power of pairing Trials and Cartouches, but Twitter voted and wanted to know; what happens when you take *every* Cartouche and Trial? Do I have what it takes to prove myself worthy?
Not really as it turns out.
This was a particularly tough Full Force challenge and ended up being a lot more of a stipulation draft than an actual archetype. This doesn’t mean that Cartouches or Trials are bad, just that you can’t easily mix and match all the colors in this format to make a zany deck like this work. The other two big problems are that the payoffs for the deck (the Trials) are all uncommon and that by warping your deck to fit all the Cartouches and Trials you have less creatures. The latter might be the biggest problem, since you need creatures to actually use the Cartouches in the first place, leaving you in an awkward Catch-22 where you need extra Cartouches, but won’t have any way to use them.
None of this is to say that you can’t get an excellent deck utilizing the strengths of the Cartouche/Trial combination. You shouldn’t want to pick up every Cartouche you see just because you have one or two trials, either. Moderation is the key here. Take good Cartouches (Strength/Ambition) and Trials early and if you’re lucky you’ll end up with two-three of each and get some insane power going, just don’t expect to be able to draft around it as an actual archetype.
Next week, I’ll delve into the popular new plan of ultra-aggro Slitherblade!
