Just over a month in, 17Lands now has robust data sets for Secrets of Strixhaven. We will use the game in hand win rates for cards. This will not fully reflect a card’s performance within a specific archetype. For example, Silverquill, the Disputant performs at a 57.1% win rate in Silverquill and at a 49.9% win rate when splashed in Witherbloom. The result is a 54.8% win rate for the dragon overall. This rough data will be used for all card comparisons.
Draft night is back!
Moment of Reckoning - Nestor Ossandon Leal
As the Secrets of Strixhaven metagame continues to shake out, the data from 17Lands confirms our early meta report. The metagame is healthy. All five of the supported two-color archetypes land with a win rate between 54.1% and 57.3%—a nice, narrow band that allows for metagame variance and allows players to draft toward their preferences.
Big blue decks continue to provide a near-creatureless archetype. Four- to five-color converge decks have been more thoroughly explored, and, on the whole, are less available than during the first weeks. White decks have firmly separated into hyper-aggressive early game Silverquill decks and aggressive-but-leaning-toward-midgame-value Lorehold decks. And even Witherbloom, the last place runner from the early meta, is delivering, with both feature drafts at the pro tour ending up in aggressive-leaning Witherbloom decks and going 5-1 overall.
Chord-o-calls from Limited Level Ups and Sierkovitz from 17Lands have postulated that the Witherbloom archetypes—because they have big creatures, lifegain synergies, and solid removal—are appealing to new players on arena and, as a result, are overdrafted. Being overdrafted means the overall quality goes down as the good cards are divided among more players at the table. At the pro tour, by contrast, Witherbloom was drafted the appropriate amount, resulting in higher quality decks.
Sitting down with three of our closest friends, we can reasonably hope for any archetype and a sweet set of four decks to pass time between commander games.
Let’s Draft
Pack one, pick one we open a lot of interesting options.
Environmental Scientist is an excellent piece of card advantage and mana fixing that could pair nicely with Prismari Charm, Feed the Swarm, or Silverquill the Disputant. Environmental Scientist also has the highest win rate of all the cards in this pack at 61.3%. If we want the strongest card, this is where we land.
The next strongest card is Silverquill Charm at 59.6%, nearly two points lower than the scientist and significantly less flexible in the number of decks it can end up in. Following up are Elite Interceptor (59.5%), Prismari Charm (56.7%), and Feed the Swarm (55.3%). Our dragon, Silverquill, the Disputant, lags behind at 54.8%, which is below the 55% average of 17Lands users.
Playing the dragon means that players are, on average, losing.
Here is the crux of the decision point—we could 1) take Environmental Scientist and Silverquill Charm to take the highest win rate cards and stay open, knowing one of them will likely not end up in our deck, 2) pair the scientist with Prismari Charm to get a more synergistic pairing and aim for a three- or four-color converge deck, 3) take the highest win rate cards in the best archetype by picking Elite Interceptor and Silverquill Charm, or…
… 4) do what we ended up doing, by picking Silverquill, the Disputant.
Hear me out: with aggressive Silverquill strategies posting slightly higher win rates, we can lean toward Silverquill when picks are close. We could take the charm and the interceptor as the highest win rate cards for the archetype, but by passing the dragon, the flashy mythic will heavily incentivize another player to dip into the Silverquill archetype even if the dragon’s win rate is not good.
So, we plant our flag by taking Silverquill, the Disputant.
To pair with the dragon, the charm has a very slightly higher win rate than the interceptor, but the interceptor gives us an out to Lorehold in case the packs don’t go our way and provides a creature for a beatdown-centric strategy. If we are going to end up in Silverquill and have a functional deck, we will need to prioritize creatures.
Pack two, pick two we see Ennis, Debate Moderator, Bitter Triumph, Cost of Brilliance, and Terramorphic Expanse as options.
Had we gone the Environmental Scientist route, we likely end up with the Terramorphic Expanse and Bitter Triumph here.
With where we are now, Bitter Triumph and Cost of Brilliance are the highest win rate cards for our archetype. Ennis by comparison has a negative win rate when included in decks.
For science, and definitely incorrectly, we take the Ennis here knowing we will need creatures to make our beatdown strategy work. Alongside Ennis, we pick up Bitter Triumph as a solid removal spell that is relevant at all stages of the game.
Cost of Brilliance was definitely the better pick for our deck. On board presence combined with card advantage is how the Silverquill decks keep pace with the control strategies in this meta.
Uh-oh. No black cards.
With two white cards, one black card, and one white/black card in our pile, we are offered Stand Up for Yourself, Unsubtle Mockery, Wilt in the Heat, Living History, and Fields of Strife if we want to stay in a white pairing.
Alternatively, Quick Study and Deduce are reasonable card advantage tools that would have been very good for us had we gone the Environmental Scientist route.
We aren’t quite ready to give up on the Silverquill dream quite yet and pick up Stand Up for Yourself as a card that performs well in both Silverquill and Lorehold.
Alongside Stand up for Yourself, we take Wilt in the Heat as a card that synergizes with Ennis and cuts the other drafters off of white.
We note that the best cards we are passing here are red and blue. Combined with our earlier packs, we are likely putting the drafter to our left into a multicolor control deck that should leave aggressive white strategies open for us pack two.
To continue to cut white and stay open to either Lorehold or Silverquill, we pick up Inkshape Demonstrator and Ajani’s response.
Imperious Inkmage is a reasonable signal that Silverquill may be open and that the last pack may have just been light on black cards. By win rate, the Inkmage (57.2%) only barely beats out the Inkshape Demonstrator (56.8%). Taking the demonstrator and leaving ourselves open to drafting Lorehold is the responsible choice.
Notably, Essenceknit Scholar is still in the pack as a premium Witherbloom card first picked by Nathan Steuer at the pro tour.
From our opening pack we wheel Silverquill Charm(!) and pick up an Adventurous Eater and are feeling confident that pack three was just a weird, Silverquill-light pack.
Daydream is a card that seems like it could be good. It triggers repartee, gives +1/+1 counters, triggers exile, and removes itself from the graveyard. But, it does it all so badly. Our creature will return with summoning sickness, so we can’t use the Daydream proactively for combat, and as a sorcery, we can’t use it reactively as protection. I am hopeful, but doubtful, to find a Daydream deck one day.
Even among top players, Daydream performs below replacement level.
Cost of Brilliance, ding ding ding! The sweat is over.
We pick up Dig Site Inventory alongside Cost of Brilliance and are ready to fully commit to Silverquill moving into pack two.
Last pick, we get a Living History and a Dig Site Inventory.
With double Dig Site Inventory, Silverquill Charm, and Wilt in the Heat, we have four cards to potentially enable our Ennis, plus the ability to reprepare Elite Interceptor. Can we make bad cards good?
At the end of pack one, we are solidly Silverquill with five creatures, four removal spells, and a few tricks. We anticipate that we will end up with plenty of playables by the end of pack three, and will need to fill out the lower section of our curve to get a good, aggressive build of Silverquill.
Pack two, pick one we see Great Hall of the Biblioplex, Quill-Blade Laureate, Foolish Fate, Ajani’s Response, Last Gasp, and Render Speechless as options. As a deck that will aim to beat the opponent down with low curve creatures, we pick up the Quill-Blade Laureate.
Alongside, we pick the Great Hall of the Biblioplex. As an untapped land that permanently turns into a creature if we flood out, the Great Hall provides the best value over replacement for our deck. (The amount better that our deck becomes by replacing a Plains with Great Hall of the Biblioplex is greater than the amount better our deck becomes by replacing another spell with Foolish Fate.)
Pack two, pick two, we see a second Quill-Blade Laureate that we can pair with Nita, Forum Conciliator or Forum of Amity.
Following the value over replacement idea, Forum of Amity is the correct pick. But, under the time crunch of the Arena rope and the slow processing of my brain under the block of Nita’s text, we end up with Nita, Forum Conciliator in our pile instead of the forum.
Nita looks pretty bad. But maybe there is a world where we pick up multiple copies of Hop to It over the course of the draft to enable both Nita and Silverquill, the Disputant?
Doubtful, for sure.
Pack two, pick three we pick up a Shattered Acolyte and Wander Off over basically nothing, and are happy to pick up an aggressively slanted creature that can interact with our opponents’ Potioner’s Troves alongside a removal spell.
We are surprised to see Sleight of Hand, Paradox Surveyor, and Noxious Newt here, perhaps indicating that either the player to our left did not end up with the Environmental Scientist as we thought.
Pack two, pick four, we see a third Quill-Blade Laureate and a Scolding Administrator as two premium two-drop creatures for our aggressive slanting Silverquill deck and are feeling confident that our low-curve creature count is shaping up.
On the wheel we pick up more interaction in Ajani’s Response and Render Speechless.
Likely not to make the deck, we get Eager Glyphmage and Masterful Flourish…
… and end the pack with a student eternally exiled to the sideboard.
At the end of pack two, we have twenty-four aggressive leaning cards and are regretting picking up Nita over Forum of Amity, but are confident that we will end up with a strong, functional hyper-aggressive Silverquill deck…
… and then we open Moment of Reckoning. It would be lovely to just have a low-curve, all-beatdown Silverquill deck that ends games by turn four. But, as the fifth best card in the set, and as a sweet, sweet bomb, we have to pick Moment of Reckoning here.
Maybe we can live the dream of copying Moment with Silverquill, the Disputant?
Alongside the moment, we won’t make the same mistake twice and pick up a Forum of Amity over Wander Off.
And then…
… a second Moment of Reckoning really changes the shape of what we are hoping to do.
We wanted to push double strike damage with triple Quill-Blade Laureate alongside Dig Site Inventory, Masterful Flourish, Cost of Brilliance, and Render Speechless. Now, we will shift our deckbuilding direction to encourage a bigger game.
One way we can hope to accomplish this with our current pool is to begin the game as aggressive as possible to discourage our opponents from attacking us back, then using removal to keep the game at a standstill until we can get Moment of Reckoning online.
Alongside our second Moment, we pick up Killian’s Confidence to help our card flow as we stay aggressive.
Pack three, pick three, we don’t have any meaningful choices to make and happily end up with Shattered Acolyte and Group Project to have more two mana creatures.
Our Silverquill deck can never have enough two drops.
What a gift! In our last new pack, we pick up a Silverquill Charm and a Last Gasp as cheap interaction that will enable us to either stall out the game or push damage early depending on whether or not we draw our Moment of Reckonings.
On the wheel, we don’t see anything for our deck, but are feeling generous. We pick up an Owlin Historian and an Efflorescence, feeling confident that the other drafters will have the least use for them.
Similarly, nothing for us. We pick the Eager Glyphmage and Plains.
Had we ended up wanting aggressive, double-striking beaters, Masterful Flourish would have felt like an interesting last pick here. As things stand, only the swamp makes the main deck.
During pack two, we would not have guessed that we were interested in a controlling, high removal version of Silverquill, but even then, there was little we would have done differently. We could have picked up a Foolish Fate over Quill-Blade Laureate pack two, pick one, but even in our final build, the aggressive creatures put our opponents on the back foot, making Moment of Reckonings all the more devastating.
Ultimately, the decisions altered by our Moment of Reckonings are those made in the final cuts. Without Reckoning, we would have included Ennis and double Dig Site Inventory with the hopes of ending the game before turn five and would have been soft to instant-speed removal. With Reckoning, we have a much more resilient build that can go head-to-head with both aggressive and controlling strategies.
As the games played out, we got to live the dream of Double Moment of Reckoning with Silverquill, the Disputant against an opponent with 7 creatures in play.
Both copies on the stack was too much for them.
Their avatar exploded.
Do I get first pick from the collector booster?
As always, Table for Four believes in fun, kitchen table Magic and staying open to where the packs lead us.
