I covered Sealed last week and wanted to cover Draft this week. In one of the drafts I recorded I ended up with a really interesting and nonlinear deck that essentially tried to win by inducing submission/fatigue. Most Ixalan drafts will not produce decks like this, but I’m happy to present one that did.
As for the deck itself, the best cards in my deck were my rares (the three durdly flip cards) and my defensive creatures, which teamed up to give me time/mana to grind my opponent out with card advantage. A key takeaway when trying to draft value in this format is to make sure you have a reason (usually powerful late game cards and/or mana sinks) to be doing so. Most Ixalan decks will not look like this; the average tribal deck instead looks something like:
16-17 lands (17 versus 16 comes down to #s of card draw, #s of 5 + CMC creatures, how many 3s/4s you have, etc; if you need a rule of thumb, if you have 3+ 5 drops play 17, if you have few/no 5s play 16)
2-5 pump spells/Auras/Pirate’s Cutlass (top 5 common in the set btw)
2-4 removal spells
0-2 other (New Horizons, card draw)
rest (13+) creatures, with a curve of 1/6/4/2/3 or something similar (2 is very important in this format, and 1 mana tricks let you curve 2 -> 2 + 1 which puts you ahead)
My preparation for Pro Tour Ixalan continues. I’ll be back next week with some more Ixalan Draft content.
