EOE First Impressions

Table of Contents

• Intro

• CABS in SPACE?!?

• Color & Archetype Preferences

• Base-Color Synergy Spaces

• Removal & Card Flow

• Sample Decks

• Conclusions

We’re a few days into EOE being released online, and while the Pro Tour is still a few months away (kind of wild after getting used to 2-week turnaround windows), there’s always a special dose of excitement that comes with learning a set that you’re going to play at a major event. Every draft could be the one you sit down for on the big day; every decision, every learning is preparing you for that moment.

Even if this weren’t a PT set, I’d still be very excited for EOE, much like I was for Tarkir Dragonstorm. It looks like this set was designed by folks who wanted to make it a very unique experience, bringing Magic to a new frontier! I’m generally a huge fan of sci fi, and though I’m mostly in the Ben Stark school of “I’d play with the cards if they had blank art and only stats”, I’ve personally been blown away by some of the art and worldbuilding in this set. Limited gives us a chance to play fully “in-world” in Magic so to speak, so I’ve been enjoying that part too.

I’ve mostly been drafting on Arena best-of-one, because it’s rare that I get the chance to do that these days! There will be plenty of time to wade into the single elim mines on MODO, but discovering the set along with the masses of Arena players is really a joy. Today I’m going to be going through some of my initial learnings. There’s nothing like getting your hands on the cards to learn how many things you got wrong.

CABS in SPACE?!?

The literal flagship mechanic from this set is spaceships, which are kind of a hybrid between vehicles and battles. You “station” ships like crewing vehicles, but it’s a one-time threshold that builds up over time instead of a turn-by-turn small cost, much like dealing damage to battles (except all of it is unblockable and summoning sickness doesn’t matter).

This is inherently a very scary mechanic to put into a limited format from a design perspective. Ships are even more demanding than vehicles in their requirements for pumping board presence into them before they give you any back, and as a result, the payoffs are larger. AKA, feast or famine: a format where the player who gets ahead early on board presence snowballs out of control while the other player has very few tools to catch up.

Going into EOE, everyone was aware of this fact, but it was clear that the designers of the set had been very intentional with how they statted things and set up the environment to avoid the kind of snowbally gameplay you’d expect from a “mega-vehicle” mechanic. On first read of a lot of the cards, it seems like everything is pulling in the long-game direction - there are extremely few bodies statted to be good at attacking early, and lots of cards that incentivize you to play towards the long game and “big games” where both players try to amass resources instead of killing each other quickly.

How does the format actually play out? In general, I would say that the designers succeeded at slowing the environment down enough that the slower spacecrafts are playable and the games don’t all hinge on snowballing starts with very little counterplay… but juuuuust barely. We’re teetering on the edge of reasonable here in my opinion. Yes, it is possible to build decks that are geared towards a long game… but only if you put heavy respect on fighting the snowballing wars.

The basic rules of engagement of the format are that the player to “win” the development stage has a massive advantage. That doesn’t precisely make the format “fast” in the sense that the aggro decks aren’t always winning, but it does mean that if you try to stock your deck with “grindy” cards and assume doing some dinky things early will be enough to prevent you from dying, you’re going to be losing, a LOT.

In other words, you really do need to be fast, whether you’re being defensive or aggressive. Allowing an opponent to build up a medium-sized board while you sit behind a small set of blockers that’s just barely holding their guys off gives them time to deploy their spacecrafts, which provide an untenable amount of value to contend with for a deck that was planning on winning the long game.

This means that the decks I've been winning with in this format are very focused on most of their cards being able to immediately affect the board. I've also been playing a very low amount of ships. In my last 10 drafts, I count 12 ships that have made my maindeck, and 8 of those have been specifically Pinnacle Kill Ship, which I'm using as the payoff for developing a strong board presence.

I haven't been consciously avoiding cards with the type "ship" -- I only noticed their absence because I thought to check. Mostly what I've been doing is making sure all of my decks are including CABS -- cards that affect the board state. If you do this, the ships you do put in your deck will be much better, and your opponents' ships will be worse.

Color and Archetype Preferences

So far, this has felt like a very balanced set from a color perspective, and I don't have a strong opinion about which colors are the best or worst -- it feels much more about adhering to the "rules of engagement" than figuring out what archetypes to be in.

That being said there are 3 color combinations I've found myself drafting the most, and if you read into them strongly, it does paint a coherent picture of "pillars" of the format. I've drafted straight RB 3 times, straight UW 3 times, and 5 green-based "soup" decks. (To finish out the 15 drafts I've done, I have a BG, a UG, a RW, and near-mono-U deck splashing some red).

This roughly seems like it points to 3 supported "lanes" in the format -- UW and RB are the most cohesive seeded "archetypes" (double spelling and sacrifice), along with the green "soup" space, which comes closer to being an intentionally supported deck than it's ever been with the Lander mechanic.

What I actually think is going on is that this is lowkey a mono-color format. I don't mean that you should be drafting completely monocolored decks, but instead that you should have a clear understanding of what is your base color and what is your support color. This plays into the rules of engagement: Your base color is the color you are leaning on for the development stage, the color that curves out with its commons and ensures you'll win or at least tie the board presence war. Your secondary color might not be as open in the draft, but it's going to be the color you happened to pick up some powerful cards in and wanted to make sure you fit them in the deck.

I see RB, and slightly UW, as exceptions to this rule. They have themes that really do require you to be "base" 2-color to maximize them, and reward you enough for doing so.

(I also think that there is a third supported 2-color "synergy space", RG landfall, but it bleeds too heavily into the soupy decks to be truly distinct. If you're in base-RG, you're already going hard on landers as a theme, and this naturally incentivizes you to splash powerful cards of other colors. Just something to keep an eye on though, because the payoffs for landfall are quite appealing.)

Base-Color Synergy Spaces

For folks who have been around long enough to remember, I see this set as pretty structurally similar to the original Throne of Eldraine. That was a set that intentionally tried to push players towards playing mono-colored limited decks, and despite the structural disadvantages to doing this in limited, largely succeeded in making these decks viable. You wanted to be CLEARLY in a single color during the drafts of that set, and were willing to "duck and weave" early on in the draft in order to find that open lane.

EOE doesn't feel quite that strongly geared towards monocolor drafting, but the thing that pushes it in that direction is the severe lack of fixing outside of green. If you're not drafting a green deck, it's going to be very hard to build a consistent manabase if you're splashing at all, because the few fixers you do get are best used to shore up the weaknesses of the traditional 9-8 manabase. If you're in green on the other hand, the freedom to play cards of any color in theory, while being tied to producing early green mana to get your fixing online, meaning that you're really drafting a "mono green" deck that is splashing everything else.

Obviously, this green soup space is one that I've been enjoying quite a bit along with Jason and the rest of the PT team. But what are the other colors doing? Here's what I've been able to gather so far:

• White's strength is that it's good at putting a lot of bodies onto the board early and supplementing them with counters to make combat math always at least somewhat favorable. The cards generally read slightly weak, but in a format all about early board development, this can be really powerful!

• Blue is a mix of card advantage and catchup tools. I haven't talked about card advantage yet, and you might think it's worse in this set because of the need to have all your plays affect the board early, but I actually think when everyone is playing this game, the player who can refuel the most effectively is going to win a lot. Blue gets the tools to do this at the common & uncommon level without needing to rely on putting together packages of synergy that can get disrupted by removal. Because players are trying to tap out to affect the board for the first 4-6 turns of the game, blue's countermagic tends to "trade up" pretty well too and can largely be counted towards your "board presence".

• Black, as usual, gets some of the best removal, which is of course one of the strongest ways to affect the board as much as possible throughout the entire game. It also gets some reasonable card advantage, though sometimes this is reliant on sacrifice synergy packages sticking around.

• Red is... confusing. In a set that's all about affecting the board early, the aggro color might be favored, but the designers seemed to account for this and were pretty careful to not give red the tools to just run people over. Instead, red feels like it's meant to mostly be a support color in this set -- with black, it accentuates the sacrifice package, with green it turns the soup deck into a more landfall-focused one, and with white it forms the format's only true "aggro" deck - but one that can be very good at running people over who aren't doing enough to respect the rules of engagement. I haven't been very impressed with red-blue as the "artifact aggro" archetype it's supposed to be -- blue's best cards are its card draw and its counterspells, and these don't play particularly well in an artifacts deck.

Removal and Card Flow

One of the best ways to make sure your spells consistently affect the board in limited is to make sure you have a large removal package. Removal scales in value with the game and with the strength of your opponent's deck, so it's more difficult for it to be "irrelevant" in the same way that a random 2-drop might be in the lategame (I wrote about this last year in "What makes a Good Limited Deck?")

Because the designers clearly wanted to avoid games snowballing too quickly and keep aggro decks from running over everyone else, they skewed towards giving every color in the set access to good removal. What this means is that no matter what color pair you're in, you get to prioritize removal that will scale with the game.

The downside of removal though is that it doesn't do anything proactive to actually win you the game. If you stock a deck full of removal, it's somewhat likely you'll be able to make the game go long, but if you only have a few threats, your opponents get to pick them off one-by-one even if they don't have the same amount of removal that you do.

The traditional solution to this problem is card draw. Decks that pair removal with spells that give them card advantage can use their removal to extend the game, and their card draw to make sure they have a decisive advantage in that extended game. As long as you're buying yourself the time, going "up" on cards is one of the most powerful things you can do in a game of Magic, so counterintuitively, I've been enjoying pure card advantage spells in this format.

Here are some cards I've been liking in these "removal + card draw" strategies that I think are somewhat underrated by the general public right now:

As long as you're playing by the rules of engagement and every other card in your deck is good at affecting the board directly, having the last few slots be dedicated to pure card flow can have a big impact.

Sample Decks

To round things out, I'm going to share some sample decks I've had that feel particularly illustrative of what deck "shapes" do well and poorly in this format.

The first two decks I want to talk about are actually two different builds of the same draft pool!

I had just finished this draft where UW was heavily open: https://www.17lands.com/draft/f8a7a6eea7fd4f32912ac66091b6e2c3

I was struggling to figure out the right build, so I messaged the PT discord to see if other folks had thoughts. Here was my first build:

And here's what Jason built:

The differences here are subtle, but I think they tell us a lot about what's valuable in the format. I started out 2-2 with the first deck before switching to Jason's build and going 5-0 from there.

The first deck is somewhat muddled in its themes. It's got a +1/+1 counters subtheme and a double-spelling subtheme, and is playing some conditional cards in each to make them work (Mental Modulation and Dual-Sun Technique, along with Luxknight Breacher, and the Illvoi Operatives to try and tie the themes together).

The improved version of the deck is more focused. All it does is play bodies that gain it card advantage and cast removal spells. This lets it keep hitting land drops and eventually close with either insurmountable value or a big 6/6 flyer in the air. It's not trying to put together synergies and make them "work", it's playing cards that will have a consistent impact on the board regardless of the situation, and cards that keep those cards (and land drops) flowing.

The stark difference between how these two builds played out was a big level-up to me early in the format. I think this is a set where structural synergies are much more important than "linear" synergies (another concept I talk about in the article linked above!). Getting lost in the "archetypes" is a recipe for trying very hard to put together synergies that ultimately don't have a greater impact than just playing solid bodies and removal spells that consistently affect the board.

This DOESN'T mean your decks have to be boring, though - especially when there's so much to do with green fixing in this set! This deck was the strongest deck I've drafted by far:

Notably, this has a ton of powerful rares, so that's part of what's going on here. But unlike the stereotype of a "greedy" deck, this deck's full of ways to play to the board on turns 2&3. It gets its fixing through landers that come along with respectable bodies and its land slots, not dedicated fixing spells (for the most part). It gets its card advantage from using every part of each card - Virus Beetle can be an artifact you sacrifice to Selfcraft Mechan or use to trigger Pinnacle Emissary, a random body that becomes a relevant body when you play your Atmospheric Greenhouse, Glacier Godmaw, or Genemorph Imago, or a permanent to tap to Gene Pollinator. In many games it was all of the above!

Although there are a lot of interlocking synergies, every card here holds its own as either a card engine or a board-affecting play. And there are 5 straight-up removal spells to fill in the gaps.

It's not easy to replicate this kind of thing consistently unless your name is Jason Ye or cftsoc, but I'm happy that I've started to be able to "cook" some soups of my own :)

Now I want to show you a pair of relatively similar-looking blue decks, one of which trophied and one of which went 2-3. Can you tell which is which?

[Space to avoid spoilers --- Really think about it and try to guess!!!)

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Okay, have you guessed?

UW Deck: https://www.17lands.com/draft/6ac31405c07a403db81b285e577d65fa

UR Deck: https://www.17lands.com/draft/ae5520886f9b4da5a295fe5f99bb6859

Which of these decks is better at playing to the board early? That's the one that trophied. The UW deck has more premium uncommons like All-Fates Stalker, Cerebral Download, Tractor Beam, Station Monitor, and Gigastorm Titan, and both decks have one very strong rare (Genemorph Imago / Anticausal Vestige), but the UR deck is full of cards that just do something to the board state every time they're played (Nutrient Block and Slagdrill Scrapper are probably the two notable exceptions, and these are 1-drops to help with double spelling to grow the Ilvoi Operatives which are your board-affecting 2s).

The UW deck, on the other hand, has some Cryogen Relics and some Divert Disasters as its main 2-drops. Station monitor is best played on turn 4, not turn 2, and Genemorph Imago is a splash so it's not expected to be played on turn 2 most of the time. All you're left with is Mechan Navigator, which has the same stats as Ilvoi Operative but never grows. If you're lucky, you can counter their 2-drop with your Divert Disaster (appropriately named), and follow it up with an Uthros Psionicist as a 2/4 to protect you. But then all you're doing from there is hoping it's enough to bridge towards your draw 3, whereas the UR deck has played an Ilvoi Operative into a Codecracker hound, and is planning to double spell over the next two turns to grown that Operative into a 4/3 that can trade with their 4-drop, all while continuing to hit land drops until it can cast one of its many board-impacting expensive spells (the UW deck only has 3 of these "finishers" as opposed to 5, which means its lategame is going to be largely dependent on whether the first one it plays gets killed or not... in a format where every color gets lots of strong removal).

I think both of these decks are nothing spectacular, and the UR deck probably overperformed a little while the UW deck performed appropriately, but the difference in how they played out was still pretty stark. Lots of the UW deck's cards probably have decent 17Lands game-in-hand winrates, but the cumulative effect of them is a deck that does a lot of wheel-spinning rather than pushing out more and more board presence as the game goes on.

I've been showing a lot of blue decks, so I want to finish with one of the more straightforward decks I drafted that I thought wasn't amazing, but played out much better than it looked: https://www.17lands.com/draft/d0b01b27dba34616b9d1469e74230389

There's not a ton to say here -- it's just a pile of decently-statted creatures that are able to gain small amounts of value, and a ton of straightforward removal. It's not an "engine" deck, even though there are some basic synergies like void + removal, it's just a meat-and-potatoes limited deck. That is a very good formula for this format!

Conclusions

I'm a pretty nuts-and-bolts, fundamentals-first limited player, and I feel like EOE plays into my strengths so far, while also giving some room to learn from the best limited "chefs" out there (who happen to be on my team, luckily!).

I'm very curious to see where things go once everyone starts to realize how to play to the format's natural incentives, but I think there's at least a week to go where you can get a ton of winrate out of slamming hard on the fundamentals.

Go out there and crush!