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Invasion Know Your Commons

When I looked through the Invasion commons my first reaction was 'Wow! If this is what white is like, what will the other colours be like?!' The answer: well, pretty much just like white really. In terms of number of creatures, power/toughness, average casting cost, etc, the colours are all very even.

White's creatures are of course a bit light on the offense, but White has 3 common creatures with kicker, the other colours only have two creatures with kicker. White has lots of flyers and even two creature removal--Rampant Elephant basically allows targeted removal of 1/1s--spells as well as a Fog, and the mandatory variant on the Circle of Protection theme. The combat tricks available to the creatures are a bit less subtle than with Classic, but the 'can give Protection' abilities of the Acolytes allow for even more evasion.

Blue's creatures are very cheap, but also tend to the small side. Also note that only 9 out of 19 Blue commons are creatures, so if more than half your Blue spells summon creatures, that may indicate unusual strength in this area. If you have few creatures but a couple of spells or creatures that you really must include, then be quite ruthless cutting out the rest of it or else you may end up with too few creatures. There are lots of expensive cantrips (cheap cantrips good, Napster bad), and some portable evasion in the form of Shimmering Wings and Travelers Cloak (evasion good, Napster bad).

Black is much weaker with creatures than it has been traditionally, but this brings it more or less into line with the other colours. Bog Initiates and Soul Burn is a nice way of getting a life swing. Other than that, the Phrexian Battleflies is the only real (common) sink for lots of Black mana, where 2 counts as 'lots'. There are few double black casting cost spells, the vast majority only require one coloured mana, but its creatures tend to cost more than the equivalents in other colours.

Red certainly comes off a lot better than it did in Classic. Crown of Flames and Maniacal Rage add some nice offensive punch, especially on a creature with evasion. Of course, there isn't much in red with evasion, and so the Crown's ability to go back to the hand is probably the most useful of the 'returns to hand' abilities. Combined with a source of lots of Red mana, and Green mana a Rampant Elephant could kill quite a lot of the opponents creatures. Or combined with a suicidal trampler--that stupid 1/1 elf for instance, I mean, who puts trample on a 1/1? Oh wait, it has kicker, it has a *lot* of kicker--that could be a lot of direct damage to the opponent. Red also has the obligatory wussy direct damage. Oh, how we long for the days of Lightning Bolt ... no wait, those days sucked because everyone who had four Ball Lightnings played Red and everyone else just lost. Ahem. Oh well, never mind. ;-)

Green has lots of creatures that are either fractionally cheaper than the Classic equivalent, or fractionally larger. It has quite a few mana support abilities, including that of the Nomadic Elf, Quirion Elves, Harrow and Fertile Ground. Harrow of course works marvellously with the domain ('where X is the number of basic land types you have in play') ability. It is a very cheap way to thin out your deck, especially since the lands do not come into play tapped. I suspect though that the strategies which rely on having many different land types are weaker than they appear. Of course if you could get a couple of Harrows, as in booster draft, that would make it a far more viable strategy. Green also has the only common mass removal in the form of Tranquility. My guess is that Wizards is going to just put out better and better enchantments until people actually play this puppy, so you might as well bite the bullet and start playing it now. That they keep putting the good enchantments into Green doesn't say much for their collective IQ though ;-). Compared to Classic, Green stands out less for its creatures, and more for its ability to be the glue that binds other colours together.

It is obvious from looking at the commons that Wizards intended Invasion to be a multi-colour type of set. Seven out of 100 commons have a double mana cost, and five of those are the gold common 2/2s with protection. Discounting those that is less than 2%. Most people won't play with Phantasmal Terrain anyway, they tend to forget it can also be played on their own land to get them out of a mana deprivation spot, but I know that some people will be upset that Green has the theme of making other colours better. If that applies to you, just get over it.

The main question that Invasion raises is: now that I know all that, how do I win? In previous sets Sealed for instance a good strategy was to drop some beef to stall your opponent's ground attack, and then nibble them to death with evasive creatures. Now given that there (a) is no beef, and (b) the Benalish Trapper, Thunderscape and Stormscape Apprentices would all be able to tap the beef even if you had it which you won't because there is no beef. Which makes maniacal rage all the better because even though it is only pork, in a land with no beef, the pork is king.

So it looks like with all else being equal, it comes down to the uncommons and rares, right? Not so quick Grasshopper. You've just ignored the majority of your deck, which is what is actually going to do the work. Sure you and your opponent could just sit there dropping commons until one of you top decks their rare and the other concedes at faster than instant speed ... or you could get creative and win. I think that Invasion is actually an enormous test of creativity and ingenuity. The people who think that there is no skill in Sealed are just so wrong its not funny. The skill is: given a limited set of cards very similar to your opponent's, come up with a curve ball and win.

If this was Chess, then this would be the equivalent of moving from the principles of Steinitz (the positional approach, a stodgy defense equivalent to making sure you have proper mana curves and card advantage, real basic stuff), to the wild combinations of Morphy, in which the sum of the parts is greater etc. In Chess this means brilliant attacking and counterattacking ... in Magic?

To the creative will go the spoils.

Rick
(AWOL from Paradise)