Episode 80 - FRA Hot Topics

And let's first talk about the set structure.

So I'm very, very relieved, I will say.

It's less happy and more relief that we have a full 10 archetype set, because that really should be the norm.

But there was some confusion.

There was a lot of worry when they first rolled the initial debut of this set out.

Because it was announced that it was going to be set on Hexhaven, the Mirror of Strixhaven.

And...

They clearly showed the five Hexhaven colleges being the allied color pairs.

There was a lot of worry that this was going to be another five archetype set, or it was going to be another set sort of like Lorwyn Eclipsed, where they were taking a, they were making an experiment with the set breakdown of, you know, there's five heavily supported color pairs and then five color pairs that you were going to draft like sometimes, which really didn't work out in Lorwyn Eclipsed.

Very happy to say that this set does have full 10 supported color pairs.

We get two gold uncommons and one gold rare per color pair, which is balanced between the two.

The five allied color pairs are centered around the Hexhaven schools.

So that's like blue, white, black, blue, black, red, that sort of thing.

The five enemy color pairs have a lot less of a heavy theme.

Like blue, white is scry surveil, and that is very loud in this format.

The enemy color pairs are themed around the Lorwyn five.

That's the original five planeswalkers they announced in, they released in Lorwyn.

That's a Johnny, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, Garrick.

And each of these has sort of like their echo verse pair.

And that makes up this two color archetype.

It's a very light theme.

Like black green is supposed to be quote unquote, trample plus death touch there really isn't that much support for that like that's not really like a theme of a deck that's just a thing you can do but the fact that the colors the color pairs in this format are actually balanced is meaning we have two gold uncommons, one gold rare, even though the themes of the Hexhaven schools are a lot louder, that will not have a significant impact on how I'm navigating the drafts because you get equal amount of gold cards per color pair.

Like the issue with lore and eclipsed wasn't that you had to be in elves, you had to be in merfolk.

Like I had plenty of times that was something we got as we got really deep into the format with lore and eclipsed.

I found that you could be in blue-white, but you didn't have to care about merfolk.