Duskmourn First Impressions

Today's Soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/track/2uIsTZsypUTHzRunshIcNd?si=46cbf2f264144079

Duskmourn is finally here!!!!!!!!!!

I love darker-themed sets, and most importantly, I love sets that I get to prepare in for a high level tournament. Does Worlds count?

I've been able to get a lot of experience in already through early access, draft sims, doing set reviews with Sierkovitz and the crew, and some preparation with the Sanctum worlds team.

I'm loving the set so far. It feels like there’s a really great balance of “fundamentals” & stats mattering a lot, but also pretty set-specific synergy spaces to get more out of your cards and a lot of stuff feels supported. As usual, in my first drafts I've been trying to diversify the synergy spaces I find myself in and prioritize learning over winning.

All the color pairs I've drafted felt reasonably strong and not like traps, with the one exception being trying to make RW go in a more grindy direction.

I'm going to structure this as a walkthrough of the color pairs and what I think you can do in them (or at least what I've discovered so far). There is often more than one deck per pair, which is an early sign of a format that will have a lot of depth and replayability. Let's get into it!

Color pairs and roughly what you can do in them

UW

We're actually starting out with what might be my pick for the least supported color pair in the format. It's very clear what white's other pairs are doing: red aggro, green survival, and black reanimator. Blue and white make an awkward pair, mainly because I think the so-called "eerie tempo" payoffs are just not very good magic cards.

These 3-drops are just a little behind what everything else in the format is doing. They're not terrible, but they're not cards you can build the main core of your deck around.

As such, I think UW wants to either use the white cards in a more controlling space and be a mainly blue shell with a lot of rooms and room payoffs (potentially splashing red), or closer to the RW aggro deck with some of the cheaper and higher rarity eerie triggers. Specifically I'm talking about these two:

These two cards are legitimate eerie payoffs, butI think you need 3+ of them to really want to be heavily in UW.

It’s very hard to get enough out of your synergies here so you want to be doing something other than just “play all the stuff that says enchantment”.

You can also play an esper reanimator deck, but that will likely be base-black. Just noting it as a possibility if you happen to get a lot of Emerge from the Cocoons.

Either reanimator esper space, aggro go-wide enchantments, or lots of doors seem to be the best options but this may be the least supported color pair on its own.

UB

Reanimator & control both seem viable here.

Reanimator is a largely black-based deck that can be blue or white or both. If you happen to get mostly the black uncommon reanimation spells instead of the common white one above, you can definitely go for reanimator, with the landcycler shark as I think the premium one of that cycle to get back early.

Blue has strong control spells that can be paired with black removal in a fundamentals way.

I don't think you should shy away from playing "vanilla" control decks in this format, as long as you make sure you have enough defensive speed to keep up with the red decks (this may mean playing fewer rooms and more traditional spells because you can't afford the inefficiency, but of course don't take this too far, the rooms are still quite good which we'll talk about later).

I'd generally avoid trying to build this as an "eerie" deck, because the payoffs just aren't that good and push in different directions:

RB

The reason to be in this space is for the sacrifice synergies or black bombs, since I think the RW deck is pretty clearly the better aggro deck. Making the sacrifice package come together in this set is doable, but quite tricky. The main bottleneck is good sac fodder, and this is largely accomplished through ETB enchantments, not creatures you want to sac.

These, I think, are the premium "sacrifice fodder" cards. It's easy to be able to sac things, it's harder to want to. One of the main reasons for this is this card:

This card not having a buyout mode like discarding a card or paying extra mana makes it close to unplayable outside of decks that are very sure they'll have pieces of cardboard laying around that they want to sacrifice, meaning you'll get them mostly for free. That means you priority should be finding material, not sac outlets most of the time. Take the good aggro red cards when you can't take sac stuff.

RG

The advantage RG gets is mainly having lots of strong cards. These are either the two best colors in the format or one of them is third and blue is second, but either way you're going to get a lot of strong effects here. The challenge is putting them together in a way that doesn't dilute their effectiveness.

There's some inherent tension between RG's mechanical space, delirium, which is a mechanic that wants the game to go longer so that more cards can accumulate in the yard, and RG being ostensibly an aggro deck here in Wizards' eyes. There are ways to walk this line quite effectively:

... but you definitely want to be careful that you're not an aggro deck that's playing Say its Name to make your cards do things, or a controlling deck playing Vicious Clown without many ways to trigger it.

The best cards let you do both at once (aggressive creatures with types), like

GW

GW is ostensibly "survival", but this mechanic is mostly supported at the uncommon level, and at the common level GW is more about solid-rate bodies and good limited fundamentals. My favorite! I think this is just a strong middling color pair that will be good if it's open, and probably pretty bad if it's not.

If you get enough uncommons you can do things like this:

But if you only get a few and your deck is mainly commons, I think you'll still be fine with a curve of dudes and some tricks:

Luckily, survival doesn't really need a critical mass of A+B synergies - you can sort of just add it linearly as you acquire it and your deck gets better, and the cards to pick for it will be obvious. I'd prioritize the payoffs over the enablers, because most of the payoffs are just good creatures that will be able to attack sometimes anyways.

WB

All-in reanimator is very possible and very powerful here, but inconsistent. It's important to know the actual density of these effects. There is one in common at white that we mentioned above, and there are 3 in black at uncommon:

If I get 2 of these effects by the end of pack 1, or 3 by the end of pack 2, I'm then going to be willing to go pseudo-"all in" on the reanimator shell. The first priority is landcyclers. These get themselves into the yard on their own and as a result are much more consistent than the uncommon payoffs.

The uncommon payoffs are also quite good and you want to end up with at least 1-2 of them, but they're less necessary to making the deck function in the early game, which is the most important thing.

Although I should note that maybe you need to prioritize these over the landcyclers for the simple reason that landcyclers are relatively free to pick up, but I do think I want at least 4 landcyclers in every reanimator deck, and only 2-3 of the uncommon big threats.

You can also just put together the white aggro creatures with being the “black is open because it’s the worst color” drafter and end up with a very solid fundamentals deck. It's pretty important to not get distracted by sac or deliriium here in my opinion, because the white cards aren't good at accomplishing either. There might be a sacrifice deck with the white rooms, but those mostly have utility on both sides which makes it less appealing. I think eerie is the direction to go if you find yourself in a more white-based, less reanimator, more aggressive BW deck:

If you’re the only drafter that cares about the reanimation spells I think you can end up with a trophy-level deck because the landcyclers are so plentiful and defensive speed/engineering consistency in the rest of the deck is very doable. Otherwise I'd try to avoid this space unless it's clearly open, but there's a viable second path there too.

UR

This deck has a million different ways to build it and all of them seem to be good. Another symptom of having two of the stronger colors in the format. You can go heavy on rooms and it’s quite strong:

That deck can be either controlling...

or aggressive...

... and you can also go completely without rooms and be either controlling...

or aggressive.

Many of the cards here are just straight up good and work in either space, and those are the ones I'd try and pick up early. Then once you see your payoffs (rare rooms or spell payoffs? premium aggro threats?) you can decide which lane you're going down.

If I had to summarize it’s that the spells are great at giving you tempo, and you can pay that off with either a room lategame, a traditional lategame, or a good aggro curve.

BG

Delirium is real here, but the payoffs are not amazing, merely good:

And the green decks in this format can pretty easily struggle to close games before decking themselves, especially if they're manifesting dread or casting Say Its Name a lot to acquire delirium.

As such, I think you either need a solid curve with GB to pressure your opponent, or some kind of lategame plan that's better than sacrificing Broodspinner and attacking them a couple of times with 5 1/1 fliers (though the card is still obviously excellent):

This could look like a splash for a bomb that you can recur multiple times, an "infinite value" loop like Forgotten Cellar + Keys to the House:

Or potentially a reanimation package with cards like Vile Mutilator and Altanak:

I think there also could be a straight-up abzan reanimator deck with the green fixing + manifest dread/Say Its Name and the black-white reanimation spells, but it hasn't come together for me yet.

Main point is that green has great defensive speed and it's easy to get delirium, so the main focus of your attention should be figuring out how your deck will close games - This will probably involve moving into another color a good amount of the time.

RW

This is the deck that fully 100% works at the common & uncommon level and if you get all the cards that Do the Thing, is probably the best deck in the format. As opposed to most of the other decks requiring uncommons to work, this deck can crush people with almost all commons:

These cards in multiples make the shell of a really strong deck. Of course, the uncommons are also bangers:

If RW is open, you should be drafting it. Don't pass Arabellas early in the draft, it's a mythic level uncommon. Play as many as you get, because your opponent tends to die unless they kill her on sight.

The one thing I'd caution against is trying to make RW anything but an aggro deck. I tried once, and the results were not pretty.

UG

UG is another of the stronger color pairs, again due to being chock full of good cards. The manifest deck/synergy package is very real and gives you lots of value.

There is also a rooms deck here, and they can definitely be blended together, though there’s some tension because you run out of creatures to flip up quickly. The key card is Weight Room, which lets you splash:

But almost all of the other blue rooms are good too. The green ones are more situational but can be played.

Figuring out how to win long games and not deck yourself here is definitely relevant. This is a space you should get into if you're seeing Weight Rooms going around, strong rares you want to splash, or Oblivious Bookworms (the card is almost if not as good as Arabella). If you find yourself in a manifest-heavy space without many win conditions, consider prioritizing cards like Fear of Exposure and Altanak to help you close games.

So those are my thoughts for all 10 color pairs! I think there's a lot of difference in what each pair is trying to accomplish and multiple paths for each to go down that require knowing more than "I'm in the [blank] deck, so I should pick cards that say [blank] on them.”

If you made it this far, you get my pithy summary!

Best pairs: RW, UG, UR, WB

Best colors: R > U > G (small gap) W > B but I think it’s a lot more about the pairs and synergy spaces than the colors.