Intended as an intro for casual members of the coven as an introduction to drafting and deck-building. - Drafting - Deck building - Game plans - Phases of the game # Drafting You will draft between 45-50 cards. You will only need 22-24 playable non-land cards and 3-6 non-basic lands for your deck, which means half your draft poll won't make your final deck. With this in mind: - Don't settle on color(s) too early - Spend speculative picks on high-synergy or combo pieces and try to gradually draft around them - Take the more powerful or flexible card and try to wheel the more niche cards - Take lands highly - Take the cheaper card - Hate drafting usually isn't optimal Take fun cards, but don't neglect bread & butter effects, the generic glue that nearly all decks need: - threats and answers - evasion - card advantage - interaction and tricks - mana fixing - mana acceleration # Deck building - 40 cards - 16-17 lands, ~10 sources of each of your main colors - Most cards cost 3 mana and below - 8-15 creatures - 6-8 pieces of interaction **MARCO ARCHETYPES** No frills and fair gameplans. - Aggressive: Attack with low mana value, high-power creatures. - Midrange: Mix high-impact creatures and interaction, focusing on overall card quality and flexibility over cute synergies. - Control: Stop your opponents plans and win the game when they run out of gas. **THEMES** Overlapping, flavorful and synergistic packages. - cheat into play: reanimation, sneak attack, tinker - artifacts: aggro, tinker - sacrifice: aristocrats, low-resource/attrition, persist combo - graveyard: reanimation, lands in graveyard/land sacrifice, card types in graveyard More fun than good - zombies - humans ## GAME PLANS A sample of the thematic game plans in the cube. ### PERSIST COMBO <<[[!Murderous Redcap]][[!Carrion Feeder]][[!Blood Artist]][[!Kitchen Finks]][[!Good-Fortune Unicorn]][[!Goblin Bombardment]][[!Warden of the Grove]][[!Case of the Stashed Skeleton]]>> Assemble an infinite combo using the persist creatures, a way to put +1/+1 counters on when creatures enter the battlefield, a sacrifice outlet, and a way to do damage when your persist creature dies. Draft with a fail-case to pivot in mind into a midrange-value or suicide-aggro plan, just in case you don't pick up all parts of your combo. ### RAMP <<[[!Birds of Paradise]][[!Wild Growth]][[!Simic Signet]][[!Orcish Lumberjack]][[!Pelakka Wurm]][[!Myr Battlesphere]][[!Verdurous Gearhulk]][[!Inferno Titan]]>> Accelerate mana production in the first 1-2 turns and land an over statted beat stick ahead of schedule. ### WILDFIRE <<[[!Wildfire]][[!Burning of Xinye]][[!Coalition Relic]][[!Thran Dynamo]][[!Ripjaw Raptor]][[!Charging Monstrosaur]]>> Combine mana acceleration with a high toughness threat and these two scorched earth spells. Back-up plan could be a accelerate your mana to play a big creature ahead of schedule. ### REANIMATION <<[[!Colossal Skyturtle]][[!Reanimate]][[!Living Death]][[!Looter il-Kor]][[!Collective Brutality]][[!Malevolent Rumble]][[!Grave Titan]][[!Sneak Attack]]>> Get a big creature into the graveyard and then bring it back. Pairs well with Sneak Attack. <<[[!Lurrus of the Dream-Den]][[!Chthonian Nightmare]][[!Bloodsoaked Champion]][[!Unearth]]>> There is also more small-guy recursion theme. ### TINKER <<[[!Tinker]][[!Myr Battlesphere]][[!Nexus of Becoming]][[!Chromatic Star]][[!Hard Evidence]][[!Thraben Inspector]]>> A glass-cannon, I win button. Smart to have a fair back-up plan. Aim for ~8 reliable artifacts and ~2 Tinker targets.