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Arcane Teachings - Early Shadowmoor Limited

Impressions
by Tom LaPille

This past weekend was the Shadowmoor prerelease. To those of you who
attended, I hope you had as much fun as I did. To those of you who didn't,
shame on you because Prereleases are awesome. They bring everyone out
of the woodwork all the way down to the most casual of players, and that
gives the room an energy that few other events can match. For me
personally, they represent a rare opportunity for me to see many of the
people I've met during my six years of competitive Magic but who have
fallen away from the PTQ circuit. Of course, it was also the world's first
chance to play with Shadowmoor cards themselves, and those cards are
the subject of this article.

Shadowmoor's hook is that it is about hybrid cards. That seemed to inspire

the collective Magical consciousness to remember all the happy times that
were had in Invasion and Ravnica Limited formats. There were tons of
colors and mana fixing, the cards were more powerful than we were used to
seeing, and the women were beautiful. For me, this high lasted
approximately until 7:30 in the morning this past Saturday as I stood outside
the Franklin County Veterans' Memorial with the other twenty or so souls
crazy enough to show up before the site opened up to make sure they got
to play in the very first flight of the day. As I stood out in the morning cold
thinking about the Shadowmoor spoiler list, I had the rude realization that I
couldn't think of any particularly exciting commons other than Burn Trail,
and that the line was a massive sausage fest. Why weren't there any cards
like Terminate, Goblin Legionnaire, Pillory of the Sleepless, and Assault
Zeppelid that made the previous multicolor blocks feel so powerful, and
where were the chicks?

The short answer is that those cards are not in Shadowmoor. Mark
Rosewater hints at the long answer in this article, although it's pretty well
hidden. His message boils down to this: the harder a card is to play, the
better it can be. Normal gold cards are harder to play than mono-colored
cards, so they can be better than similar mono-colored cards and still be
balanced. This is why we have such fond memories of cards like Vindicate,
Putrefy, and so on - they're awesome and splashy, but they can be that way
only because take a serious commitment to two colors before you get
access to them. Hybrid cards, on the other hand, are easier to play than

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equivalent mono-colored cards, so they have to be worse than

mono-colored cards to keep them balanced. Generally speaking, a card
that costs 2RG must be better than a card that costs 2GG, which must be
better than a card that costs 2(R/G)(R/G). Therefore, for things to stay
balanced, hybrid cards must be worse than garden variety mono-colored
cards. A little under half of Shadowmoor is hybrid, so a little under half of
the set should be worse than cards we are used to seeing.

Mark offers two ways to power up hybrid cards without upsetting the
balance. The first solution is to make color matter mechanically, which
Shadowmoor does in the form of cards like the cycle of enchantments, the
cycle of Duos, and so on. This can also take the form of using both of the
cards' colors in mana costs of activated abilities, or having non-hybrid cards
care about colors. The second solution is to overload on hybrid mana
symbols, which is what is done on cards like Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers and the
cycle of Lieges. Keeping in mind the tradeoff between ease of casting and
card power, a card that costs (G/W)(G/W)(G/W) is about as difficult to cast
as something that costs 1GW so it can be just as powerful as the exciting
gold cards that we are used to.

I read the previously linked article way before the full spoiler was revealed,
so I expected both of these solutions to show up in big numbers at all
rarities. This was not what happened. The set explores much of the design
space of the first category of card in the commons, with an astounding
thirty-five commons that care about the color of other cards in play and on
the stack. On the other hand, the only non-rare cards that have three or
more multicolor hybrid mana symbols in the cost are Loamdragger Giant,
which is so expensive that it hardly counts, and the cycle of cards that cost
exactly three hybrid mana that includes Wilt-Leaf Cavaliers and Boggart
Ram-Gang. These latter five cards are some of the splashiest cards in the
set, which is not a surprise because they are so hard to cast. However, it's
fairly rare that you'll encounter one of those cards in Limited because that's
only five of the set's eighty uncommons. The other cards with that many
hybrid mana symbols are rare because they are actually rares, so this
solution to the hybrid card power issue is not explored very fully.

We can use this understanding to get a running start on our understanding

of both Shadowmoor Limited. A little under half the cards in the set are
hybrid, and many of these are necessarily weak because they have only
one hybrid mana in their cost. Therefore, the most powerful commons tend
to be mono-colored cards or color-stamped hybrid cards. A few examples of
the former are Ballynock Cohort and Crabapple Cohort; both of these cards
completely outclass most of the common hybrid cards at their respective
converted mana costs. The most clear example of the latter that I can think
of is Shield of the Oversoul, which is completely bonkers on a creature that
is both Green and White. Because so much of the power in the hybrid cards
is locked up in cards that care about multiple colors, drafters will quickly
realize that playing a hybrid card that is in only one of their colors as
opposed to a mono-colored card in that color is a significant sacrifice. Not
only is it worse than a mono-colored card for all the reasons from before,
but it also doesn't fully power up the double on-color hybrid cards that are

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already in the deck. Doing your best to stick diligently to mono-colored

cards and double on-color hybrid cards will keep the overall power level of
your deck as high as possible.

Because of the overall lowered power level of the common hybrid cards,
Shadowmoor Limited games go longer than Lorwyn limited games. This has
two consequences. The first is that cards that might previously have been
too expensive are now just fine. The card that taught me this was Pale
Wayfarers. My pool in the first flight I played had one, and I almost didn't
play it because I thought that the world was too fast for a seven mana 4/4. I
was very, very wrong, and it turned out to be the best card in that whole
deck. It did a pretty good job of playing Morphling with its protection ability,
and the ability to play both offense and defense at the same time was
enormous. Furthermore, it was never stuck in my hand until the end of a
game, because my games always went long. It's likely that things will speed
up as the world learns how to value cards properly, but I suspect that things
will still move slowly compared to Limited formats in recent history because
the cards are just less powerful. Feel free to include your expensive and
swingy cards during deckbuilding, because you'll probably have the time to
play them.

As a side note, this also applies to cards that you'll have a hard time casting
in terms of color as opposed to total mana count. For example, my last
round opponent in the second flight I did was playing straight red-green, but
also included an Oversoul of Dusk. When he finally cast it in our first game,
I thought to myself that he must be crazy to play a card that effectively cost
GGGGG in a deck that couldn't have had more than eleven or twelve Green
sources in it. However, if you instead think of it as something that costs
seven or eight mana, it compares very favorably to the Pale Wayfarers that
I just finished raving about. A seven or eight mana 4/4 may not be the most
exciting thing in the world, but having protection from three colors has a
good chance of being extremely relevant, especially when even
Green-White decks will have Red and Blue creatures in them. That
opponent had a Scuttlemutt and a Devoted Druid, so those along with ten
Forests makes the Oversoul a reasonable inclusion.

The other consequence of the increased length of games is that cards that
give you repeating effects become much more important. This is a similar
phenomenon to what happens in Core Set Limited, where card advantage
is hard to come by and anything that has an effect multiple turns in a row is
pretty exciting. Happily, Shadowmoor is different from Core Set Limited in
that it is very intricate and tricky, but the comparison still is fairly applicable.
Obviously cards like Silkbind Faerie and Trip Noose are going to be good
regardless of the Limited format you find yourself playing, but as the day
went on I saw repeating effects that were more and more minor winning
games. One card that surprised me was Gnarled Effigy. Early in the day,
one of my opponent could have completely dismantled me with one, but
happily he chose not to. I also saw good friend Jake Meiser win multiple
games in the main event with his two Leechridden Swamps in stalled
games. Of course, repeating effects that aren't minor become even more
awesome than before as well. I had both a Seedcradle Witch and an Oracle

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of Nectars in my second deck, and those cards were really good at taking
over the long games that I ended up playing.

An obvious question is if these observations will also hold true in the

Shadowmoor draft format. After watching a three on three draft that
involved many of Ohio's finest mages and discussing it with the participants
afterward, I think they will. The winning squad in that draft was Sam
Stoddard, Justin George, and Joe Gagliardi. Sam had a Red-Green deck in
which the only two-drop was a Devoted Druid, there were only three
three-drops, and the mana curve went all the way up to seven; Joe had a
Blue-Black deck that had only two Elsewhere Flasks for two-drops and a
similarly ugly mana curve, but they both pulled off 2-1 records. When
pressed about how they managed to do that, they both shrugged and said
that their opponents' decks were just as slow and awkward as their own.

A specific point that I would like to make completely out of context is that
there are seven very playable artifact creatures and one playable
equipment at common, in addition to a number of uncommon artifacts that
are impressive. Because of this, you should not hesitate to play exactly one
Gleeful Sabotage maindeck in Sealed. You might even try Smash to
Smithereens, although there are enough enchantments around that Gleeful
Sabotage is much more likely to find a target. Gleeful Sabotage may even
be maindeckable in Draft, but I can't say for certain because we've only had
the cards for one day as of this writing.

I had not seriously thought about much of the above before Saturday
morning when I and everyone else in my flight was able to tear into
Shadowmoor cards for the first time. Everyone in the room seemed to be
complaining about the quality of their Sealed pools, which I found bizarre at
the time but now understand. Of course, there were also those people out
there who happened to open multiple copies of cards that get their power
from overloading on hybrid mana symbols, and playing against the cycle of
Avatars and incredibly efficient three-mana creatures quite clearly
demonstrated to me that that is where much of the set's real power lies. Any
Constructed deck that uses Shadowmoor's color will likely draw from those
cards.

As a set, Shadowmoor will take some getting used to. It is a far cry from the
multicolor blocks that we have seen in the past, and the less-stringent
hybrid mana costs that the set is built around make it play more like a
strange version of Mirrodin block than a true multicolor block. Each player is
capable of playing more of the available cards than normal, but not all of
those cards will be good for them and the skill will be in deciding which of
those cards are best. In the end, players who respond most effectively to
Shadowmoor's incentives to stay true to exactly one color pair will have the
most success, and really this is no different from any other set. However,
developing an early understanding of this will give you a head start on your
competition.

Tom LaPille

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