Do not play Black in Lost Caverns of Ixalan Draft

If you understood the title, you are go to go back into Magic Arena and fire up a draft.

Now, if you need a detailed explanation, you are in luck.

Lost Caverns of Ixalan (LCI) has five main mechanics:

• Discover
• Craft
• The hella confusing duo Descend and Descended.
• Explore

Discover

Discover is the newest attempt by Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) to create a fixed version of a broken mechanic – in this case Cascade. They are functionally the same, except Discover is limited to a fixed number and Cascade is always the cost of card minus one. More importantly, Discover triggers when the card resolves or comes into play, while Cascade happens when you cast the spell. What that mains is that counterspells are effective against Discover and easier to tune the power.

Did it work? No. In limited at least it is equally powerful. It brings you multiple cards for the cost of one. That is the first reason BLACK is bad. Single target removal means you are spending a card and not dealing with the whole threat. On top of that, discover is mainly in RED. GREEN and WHITE both have powerful one ofs in “Walk with the Ancestors” and “Zoetic Glyph“. BLACK one of is straight up unplayable.

Craft

Next, we have the second problem: Craft. It is only in artifacts, which BLACK does not deal with. It requires other cards fully reach its potential, that is good for BLACK, right?

*touches earpiece*

There are a lot of tokens, artifact tokens especially.

*touches earpiece*

It works with cards in the graveyard? So, BLACK has no answer to it? NOPE.

Descend/Descended and Explore

All of these are graveyard based mechanics. They all either put cards in the graveyard, count them or do something when a card goes to the graveyard. Usually graveyards are BLACK’s realm and it should benefit it above all else. In this set it does not. Even though, Descend/Descended are mainly in BLACK, every color can access and benefit from these mechanics.

What does it all mean?

The combination of tokens, graveyard mechanics and free card advantage makes blocking and grinding the opponent out hard. That reduces the value of BLACK cards. Once BLACK is underrepresented in the metagame, single target removal become rare, increasing the power of bombs. i.e. The best cards in the format will survive more often and be more impactful.

There you have LCI limited: a bomb-driven, four color format.

The last time, a color was completely unplayable, it was GREEN in Battle for Zendikar (BFZ). To be clear, BLACK in LCI is not as weak as GREEN in BFZ was. There is a high skill level version of almost mono BLACK decks that are good. Those decks require you to be the only BLACK drafter and one of BLACK bombs: “Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal” or “Preacher of the Schism“. That is to say DO NOT DO IT.

Data

Big Cat God, I don’t believe you! Where is the data?

The best data, you will find is probably at 17lands.com. Let’s look at their color winrates:

Observe that the winrates for all black decks are below the average player winrate (56.2%). (The average player tracking data is higher than 50% since it is not every player and they are better/more entrenched players).

I do not use 17lands because it won’t track the games on my phone, which would skew my record. But you can see that the numbers agree with my analysis.

Funnily enough, “Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal” has the highest winrate when drawn in the set. Each confirms that a) it is a bomb and b) it is a bomb driven format. When you look at decks that have “Aclazotz, Deepest Betrayal” but did not draw it, the winrate falls insane 19.8 percentage points. AKA BLACK is bad.

CATS

We all should have know, when it was revealed that there were cats in the set but none in black.

Have fun

Besides, the imbalanced LCI is a fun draft format. Games are interesting until an unbeatable bomb shows up. There are cool combos to discover. The Caves deck is fun, if hard to pull together. And you can win a lot with this one little trick:

DO NOT PLAY BLACK.