My Impression with DTK Draft

It shouldn't be surprising if I tell you that I spend every week drafting in Two Stompas. Hell, I really forgot Yugioh and NATS is only two weeks away lol. With that much practice, I can safely say that I'm started to be able to consistently draft a decent deck. However, I don't really have a good impression regarding the new draft format. I felt that the current draft environment restricts your option to play an ally-color combination.

Not that the enemy-color combination is inherently bad, it's just that the reward you get from playing ally-color is so big, that it will discourage you from playing enemy-color. Moreover, there are no gold enemy-color card in DTK, so if you decide to play enemy-color you'll have to wait until FRF to reap your reward. But even then, the reward is not worthed anyway.

Like seriously, your reward from playing U/R? Cunning Strike, meh. Your reward from playing R/W? War Flare, kinda nice if you drafted a lot of Dragon Fodder and winnies, until you realize that Great Teacher's Decree does the same thing with easier mana and a nice rebound bonus. What about G/B? You'll get Grim Contest, not a reliable one but it's still a removal, except that you probably already drafted Epic Confrontation, Ultimate Price, Flatten, and Death Wind which will make you take out the Grim Contest anyway.

Playing G/U? Ethereal Ambush and that card is just too luck based to be good. When it's good, you can manifest 2 dragons and runaway with the game. But when it's bad, you can manifest 2 lands and having troubled to find the sixth land to play your 6-drop. If you want 2 creature for one card, just play Ojutai Summons. 2/2 with flying is much better than 2/2 colorless vanilla after all.

The only decent enemy-color combination is B/W because Harsh Sustenance is such a bonker. Especially if you got Secure the Wastes as your first pick, B/W color is gonna be very attractive to you. The desire to create 6 tokens followed up with Foul Tongue Shriek and Harsh Sustenance is just too good to be passed.

That being said, playing ally color is still the better option. Sam Black even said that you just need to stick with your archetype and you'll have a good deck. What it means is that if you picked a Dromoka card, you just need to keep picking a card that is related to Dromoka clan and somehow you'll have a synergy in your deck without having to think too hard.

My favorite archetype that I have the most success with is G/R Atarka, namely green monsters featuring red burn spell. The second is R/B or red aggro featuring black removal. Next on the line is Dromoka or green aggro featuring pump spell. No kidding, G/W weenie from Dromoka can go as big as 5/5 in the late game.

U/B is kinda tricky. If you're sure that you are the only guy who play that color combination you'll have the best deck in the table. But if there are 2 or 3 people who play it, then it's almost guaranteed that all of them are going to have the worst deck ever. The reason is that U/B Silumgar in DTK draft is too synergy oriented. You'll need the right balance of cards that get their effect when exploiting something and the card that will get the effect when exploited, which means that you have to grab all of the key card from every pack to build a really good U/B deck. Unlike other color combination, you can't fill your missing piece with some vanilla 3/1. This means that playing U/B requires a lot of skill to read signal which I'm not quite confident yet, which is why I always avoiding U/B lately. Aside from that, exploiting Youthful Scholar with Vulturous Aven is always feel good.

Last one and I believe the worst one is U/W. It's kinda sad since this is the color combination I played the most in FRF draft, but it is what it is. The U/W color combination wants to play a draw-go control deck but without an efficient counter, drawer, or removal. Instead what you get is a rebound Unsummon that costs 5, rebound cripping chill, and basically cards that only generate tempo, not card advantage. Once I tried to play it with more tempo and less control and it fails miserably to the aggresiveKolaghan and Atarka. Ojutai's creatures are basically to small to fight those aggresive decks.

This is actually my other complaint about the new draft format, that it is too favoring aggro deck. Unlike KTK or FRF in which most play started with playing morph in turn 3, in DTK you have 1 mana 1/1 haste, 2 mana 2/2 that can become 6/6, 3 mana 3/3, 4 mana 3/4, the curve and the power is too good for aggro sligh deck. This makes the game finishes a lot faster and control deck will have a lot of trouble to stops those aggro beating.

From now on, I think I'll only play G/R and R/B or G/W if I have too. U/B is too risky that it must be avoided and U/W is just too poor to be played. The other option is B/W which I have had a success with once. The other enemy color is just meh, I'll avoid it as well.