How Much Does Fifth Dawn Matter Anyway?
Mirrodin/Darksteel/Fifth Dawn Draft Strategies

by Jeff Zandi - July 23, 2004

Mirrodin draft formats change significantly with the addition of Fifth Dawn to the format, but does Fifth Dawn help or hurt Mirrodin block booster drafts? In drafting MDF (aka MD5), the biggest difference from MDD seems to be the LOSS of a Mirrodin booster instead of the ADDITION of a Fifth Dawn booster. My MDF drafts have become far more successful now that I have stopped focusing on the Fifth Dawn booster (the last booster in the draft).
After playing a great deal of MDF on Magic Online in the past week, I’m starting to wonder how much Fifth Dawn matters.

Although Fifth Dawn debuted this past weekend on Magic Online, those of us who play Magic “in 3D” have been playing Fifth Dawn for two months now. (I prefer to call non-online play, the kind where you use the actual Magic cards printed on paper, “Magic 3D”. Other people call it playing “IRL” for In Real Life. I dislike that terminology because when I’m playing Magic Online, I like to think that the events taking place in front of my eyes are ALSO taking place in real life. But I digress…) People who have been playing with Fifth Dawn cards for the past two months should have a sizable advantage on Magic Online over online players who were seeing Fifth Dawn (or at least playing tournaments with the new set) for the first time. No big advantage for me, I’m afraid, because my booster draft game has been in real trouble ever since Fifth Dawn arrived. But don’t change the channel, I think I have begun to get a better handle on MDF…the fog has begun to clear!

When we first started drafting with Fifth Dawn, we were trying hard to BREAK the MDF format as quickly as we could. Right away, there were two main strategies: draft all the black cards or else draft as many mana fixers in the Mirrodin and Darksteel packs so that you would be in a good position to draft a lot of Sunburst cards in the Fifth Dawn pack.

In the black strategy, you sort of did what you were ALREADY doing in MMD or even back in MMM drafts, deciding early on whether you could possibly be the one person drafting most or all of the good black cards. First picks looked like Consume Spirit, Slith Bloodletter, some people really love Relic Bane, Moriok Scavengers, Woebearer, Nim Shrieker and so on. Actually, the Nim strategy for mono black or near-mono black draft decks has changed a lot since Pro Tour Amsterdam. The draft format in Amsterdam was Rochester draft, but even more importantly, featured only Mirrodin cards. Nim Lasher, Nim Shrieker and Irradiate were MVPs. In MDF, these cards are still good, but are much less of a consistent part of your deck because you are only seeing one pack of Mirrodin cards. The real key to this strategy is the idea that black is the one color that is very good in all three booster packs, Mirrodin, Darksteel and Fifth Dawn. One reason that this strategy works pretty well is that the more quickly you decide on black in MDF draft, the sooner the rest of your draft table will move away from the color. Even though players will splash certain black spells, like Terror and Betrayal of Flesh, most black cards won’t be of much use to players only using a little bit of the color. Darksteel probably offers more decent picks to the black player than Mirrodin does, but many players will already be in two colors by the end of the Mirrodin pack and will be less likely to delve into black in the second pack of the draft. That means you that can take a good black card from the pack you open and possibly get a second decent black pick from the same pack SEVEN PICKS LATER. At any rate, if things are looking decent for your mono black deck at the end of Mirrodin, you can generally expect things will get even better with the Darksteel packs. When you get around to the last pack of the draft, things thin out again for the black player, but you still can look forward to getting most of the better black cards all to yourself. You are looking for commons like Blind Creeper and Lose Hope and great uncommons like Night’s Whisper and Devour in Shadows. In my opinion, this is a more difficult strategy to make work.

In the five color strategy, your plan is to grab all the Talisman and mana producing Myr cards that you can from the Mirrodin booster packs so that you can be in the best possible position to take advantage of the Sunburst mechanic in the Fifth Dawn pack. For this reason, your deck is most likely to be primarily green and/or blue. Green gives you access to Sylvok Explorer, the only colored mana producer for two mana in Fifth Dawn as well as the best mana fixer in the block, the land enchantment Dawn’s Reflection.

Dawn’s Reflection is amazing for Sunburst, because a land enchanted with Dawn’s Reflection produces one mana of the color produced normally by the enchanted land PLUS two more mana of any color or color combination of your choice. If you have two Dawn’s Reflection cards in your deck, you can count on playing one of them on turn four in a great number of games. Blue is another good color for this deck strategy because Vedalken Engineer is the only colored mana producer for two mana in Darksteel. The Engineer taps for two mana of any one color you choose, but the mana can only be used for artifacts. Wizards of the Coast won’t have to twist your arm to get you to comply with the rules regarding Vedalken Engineer because most of your Sunburst cards will be artifacts. Another reason blue is good for this strategy is the ability to bounce permanents with Regress from Mirrodin or Echoing Truth from Darksteel. Fifth Dawn has a number of good artifacts, like Baton of Courage, Infused Arrows and Pentad Prism that remain in play even after you have used all the charge counters on them. Regress and Echoing Truth give you a chance to use these powerful cards a second time.

I focused on these two draft strategies for MDF for weeks, landing mostly a bunch of five color decks built around green with bizarre mana bases. Either of these two strategies can give you a chance to take real advantage of the MDF format, which is exactly what we were looking for. However, I think both strategies have some real problems too. In attempting to draft the black deck, you will run increasingly into draft tables where too many people (i.e. two of you) are trying to draft this deck, and the strategy will certainly fall apart for at least one of you. There just isn’t enough black for two people to play a bunch of it most of the time. However, the black strategy has the advantage of making your deck good even before, and possibly in spite of, the cards you get from Fifth Dawn. This is the exact opposite of the green five color deck. The five color deck needs you to draft a wild collection of utility cards IN HOPES of finding your game-breaking cards in the Fifth Dawn boosters. This plan is great when it works. When the five color plan breaks down, you end up with a deck that’s great at producing mana, but not necessarily great at reducing your opponent’s life points to zero. When drafting the five color deck, the good news is that you can generally count on getting some number of the mana fixers you need in the Mirrodin packs IF you are willing to overvalue mana producing Myr and Talisman cards a good deal. Even cards that are generally less desirable like Journey of Discovery from Mirrodin or Reap and Sow from Darksteel can be used in a pinch to help your five color draft deck.

In the end, I think both of these strategies are flawed in that they are trying too hard to take advantage of the draft as a whole. In the end, I think you are better served taking really good cards, cards that can help you win, right from the start. Yep, lots of people draft red, and if you first-pick a Spikeshot Goblin, an Electrostatic Bolt or a Shatter, you are far from guaranteed any other good red cards. Still, I like taking a quality card with my first pick, and I’m willing to gamble on a red card even if the color does run a little thin towards the end of the draft. The real insight I’m trying to impart is that your MDF drafts will be better if you don’t overvalue the Fifth Dawn cards. Draft a good deck starting with your first pick, traditionally, staying in two colors and trying to limit the number of high casting cost spells. If you do, you will be in a fine position when you arrive at the Fifth Dawn packs at the end of the draft. The speed of the format, as well as the power-to-mana-cost ratio of many of the cards in the format will allow you to easily splash a third color most of the time. If you have good, consistent access to three colors, you will be in a good position to make fine use of many of the better Sunburst commons and uncommons. After trying the five color thing for two months, I think the most important thing I can say is NOT to fall in love with cards that need five colors of mana to be played optimally.

After I quit being in love with Fifth Dawn, I quickly realized that while Darksteel ADDED a great deal of playability to Mirrodin for limited, Fifth Dawn may have HURT the Mirrodin draft environment. Frankly, the cards in Fifth Dawn don’t really go with the cards from Mirrodin and Darksteel that well. Darksteel built on Mirrodin’s affinity mechanic by adding land type affinity. Fifth Dawn plays like a stand alone set. The proof of this is how well the set played in all Fifth Dawn booster drafts on Magic Online this past weekend. The players who participated in these FFF drafts will tell you that Fifth Dawn plays better by itself than any third set of a block in many years. Therefore, please don’t think that I am ripping on Fifth Dawn, because I’m not. Fifth Dawn is a good set of Magic cards, good for limited play and containing many cards that will be good in constructed decks for years to come. Fifth Dawn does not, however, do anything to improve the Mirrodin block limited formats. This makes Mirrodin block much harder to play with in limited events. For better or worse, however, Fifth Dawn may really not matter much in the limited game. The fact is, now that the Team Pro Tour event has passed, there really are no important competitive events that will EVEN USE the entire Mirrodin block for limited play. Yes, MDF draft will play a part at the World Championships, but down here on the ground, where most of us play everyday, there won’t be much use for MDF limited skills. It is generally a bad thing for a set to not be used much for limited competitive play when you FINALLY have “all the pieces” of the block finally released. In general, Onslaught/Legions/Scourge was a better limited format than Onslaught alone. I would say the same thing about Odyssey block limited the year before, and certainly the Invasion block the year before that. I DO NOT feel the same way about Mirrodin/Darksteel/Fifth Dawn. The next time that sealed deck or booster draft will be used in a pro tour qualifier, Grand Prix or Pro Tour, we will be using the NEXT big expansion set, Champions of Kamigawa. So don’t worry too much about Fifth Dawn for limited, it just doesn’t matter that much.

As usual, I’d like to know what YOU think.

Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@thoughtcastle.com
Zanman on Magic Online