Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths was the most interesting limited Magic set of all time.
That is not an exaggeration for effect. Nor does it mean that this most recent Standard set was the best limited set ever, or the most powerful (although it has a strong argument for that last one). But between the cards in the set and all the circumstances surrounding its release, I sincerely believe that its position as most interesting is unassailable. So as we look forward to the release of Core 2021, let's do a quick recap of our limited jaunt in monster land!
For better or worse, Ikoria will forever be linked to... everything.... happening around the world in 2020. Personally speaking, Ikoria is probably going to be the first set to come out while I'm actively playing the game that I will never draft in person with other players, and I imagine I'm far from the only one. Apparently this didn't affect the actual sales of the set too badly, thanks to the various alternate art styles available. One can only imagine how well the set would have done if conventions, FNM, and paper magic in general had been able to continue as usual.
While it would always have been available on Magic Online, the developers working on Magic Arena pushed up the roll-out of human draft pods on the newer platform to be available for the release of Ikoria as well. This was perhaps the best decision they've ever made in regards to managing Arena. Human drafting has all sorts of advantages over the bot drafts we had been making do with for months, the main one being that human drafting is self-correcting. If there are colors or strategies that are clearly better than your average draft deck, then having multiple people at a draft table fighting for them makes those strategies generally weaker, giving other decks and color combinations the chance to compete on more even footing. We saw this at the start of the Throne of Eldraine set where a well constructed mill deck with multiple Merfolk Secretkeepers would dunk on the entire format. And bots would never value a one mana 0/4, so you could almost always get three to four merfolk and a bunch of recursion to re-buy them. Pair them with other defensive creatures and a handful of removal, and UB Mill made the early days of Eldraine draft on Arena miserable.
Ikoria launched with a similar problem; cycling was way, way too bonkers good. This has been well documented from every angle, so just quickly; the combination of a bunch of 1-generic mana cyclers, some printed on totally reasonable cards in their own right, plus an incredible swath of cycling payoffs in red and white (including the most mythic of mythic uncommons we have ever seen in Zenith Flare) made RW cycling the best limited archetype I have ever seen. Due to the nature of cycling as a mechanic it was both incredibly consistent as well as fully capable of functioning with just 13-14 lands, and with a ton of 1 mana cyclers you could stuff in your deck without caring about casting them, your Snare Tacticians dominated combat, your Prickly Marmosets attacked with impunity, and your opponents died at instant speed when they tapped out at 12 life.
However, this problem solved itself thanks to the nature of drafting. Instead of having to wait for an update to the client to make the bots value the cycling cards and payoffs more highly, it was a poorly kept secret that got out to the general public within a week. And once people started fighting each other for the payoffs and people started valuing the cheap cycling cards more, the average cycling deck came back down to a more reasonable power level. You could of course occasionally see a first pick Zenith Flare snowball into a juggernaut of a deck still, but it became uncommon instead of guaranteed every time you saw a turn one Flourishing Fox.
Once the cycling deck got under control, we could turn our attention to the more obvious aspects of the format; mutate and companions.
The rare cycle of ten companions have a solid argument of being the best limited cards ever printed. And this time when I say best, I do mean most powerful. They are the first instance of Magic trying to circumvent the unspoken caveat that every other bomb card ever printed has had: "This card is broken and will win me the game, if I draw it."
Companions, as a group, were running so roughshod over the world of constructed Magic that Wizards felt they needed to, for the first time ever, nerf a mechanic. They clearly didn't want to ban the entire flagship rare creature cycle from their most recent step, so they took the unprecedented step of changing how companion worked. Instead of being able to cast the card directly from your sideboard, now you must first pay 3 generic mana at sorcery speed to put the card from your sideboard into your hand. This was a desperately needed change for Standard and beyond if they were unwilling to take the step of banning the cards outright, as Yorion, Sky Nomad and Lurrus of the Dream-Den in particular were showing up in what felt like every game in every format.
It's kind of a shame that this change also applied to limited, because in draft these cards were incredibly good but not oppressively so. They altered the way your draft experience went, changing your pick priorities and opening up different archetypes, and it was never a guarantee that just because you first picked Obosh, the Prey-Piercer that you could definitely build a busted deck around it. (Although with it first picked, it was pretty easily done.) Some companions didn't ask much of you like Jegantha, the WellSpring, others completely changed the way you approached draft like Umori, the Collector. As a cycle of build around rares, they added much more to the format than they took away.
Mutate was the other hallmark of the format, and ate up a ton of the complexity budget for all of Ikoria. I challenge anyone who has not yet heard of the mechanic to read the rules text of say, Gemrazer, and figure out all the implications of a "mutate stack".
Got some questions, I imagine? (Some common answers; the mutating creature does not enter the battlefield. If blinked, they return to the battlefield as separate creatures. If put into your library, you can choose the order they go in.)
But once you played with the cards, especially with the nicely animated transitions on Arena, you understood immediately. Now all you had to do was remember that there was a Glimmerbell under that Dreamtail Heron, you idiot, they can obviously untap and block...!
Ahem.
Finally, it bears mentioning that Ikoria was home to some of the best fixing we have ever seen in a standard set. This was a wedge-focused set in terms of color balancing, and not only did we get the full cycle of gain lands printed alongside Evolving Wilds and a new colorless fixing buddy in Farfinder, but we also had a rare cycle of, well, cycling tri-lands. Which just also happened to have basic land types, if you care about formats containing fetchlands. But what could you do with access to all those colors?
Yeah, you could actually cast these in games of limited. And over half of them were really, really good.
And on top of all of this, the format evolved over time, as the better limited sets tend to do. Evaluation for certain cards fluctuated wildly, with things like Whisper Squad going from "I guess if I have a couple they're okay" to "I will pick these over premium removal". Weaponize the Monsters stayed underrated for what felt like months, and I still pick them up on the wheel every so often. Green was identified as the weakest color early on, which may well have been true, but then saw a resurgence as people figured out the BG Reanimator archetype and how to actually, properly build Sultai-wedge mutate decks. (And no, Wizards, I will not force myself to learn the alternate name of... *checks notes* Zagoth?)
Crazy powerful synergy decks. All-time great archetypes. The best limited cards we've ever seen. A launch impacted by a once-in-a-century global health crisis. The maturation of their new online platform.
Yeah. We'll be talking about this one for a while.
コメント