An Analysis of Dimir Archetypes

Current History of Blue-Black Draft Archetypes

Welcome back! This is the second installment of the Current History of Draft Archetypes; the first one is here. You can read all about my reasoning there, but the short of it is that I was interested in how often certain archetypes really show up and what kind of variance there tends to be, so I dug in, looked up old draft formats, and crunched some numbers.

I think looking over the archetypes reveals interesting patterns, telling us what tools are most useful in a designer's belt and letting us predict what could be around the corner. It's also a great way to highlight some interesting evolutions and developments over the years. 

Summary of caveats:

• I include all premier sets from Return to Ravnica through Bloomburrow.
• I included most, but not all, supplemental sets released during that time.
• I only included sets with a two-color archetype in the analysis of that color pair. No three-color/five-color draft themes included.
• My research on determining an archetype was either a direct statement about the color pair's theme, looking at the gold card in the set, or occasionally looking at some articles talking about the set if it couldn't otherwise be determined.
• Sometimes a theme is part of two categories (Artifact Sacrifice); I make the final call on a case-by-case basis which it's more representative of, but I also try to address that in the notes.

The Color Pair

Blue is the slowest color in Magic, being all about reacting to your opponent with counterspells and the like in order to slow them to a halt while drawing cards until they can either establish a small, evasive creature to whittle away at your opponent's life or a big sea monster to crush in short order. Black is a flexible color but trends towards the middle. It uses kill spells and the graveyard as its primary tools, sometimes supporting an aggressive strategy by clearing the way for its recursive threats or a controlling strategy that slows the opponent and grinds out value. 

Combine the two and you have a nightmarishly mean control pair dedicated to stopping everything the opponent does while beating them to death with some small creatures that are hard to block, hard to kill, or both. Blue is the primary color for milling, and black loves graveyards, so the two are also the most likely to play with the graveyard as a resource. 

The shared creature keywords, much like the aforementioned white-blue, are flash and flying. Blue and black are most likely to focus on flash, the reactive keyword that allows you to still cast a threat if the opponent didn't do anything worth responding to on their turn. Excellent for control.

Going in, I expected the pure control archetype to be popular, but was pleasantly surprised by my findings. Let's dive in!

Graveyard Archetypes

That's right, our "wild card" archetype was the graveyard. There's a lot of ways to pull off a graveyard deck, be it self-mill value, reanimator, or those offshoot variants like descend. By using cards to mill huge chunks of your deck and then other cards to get the best card for the situation back out, it's similar to tutoring in the terms of flexibility offered. 

This archetype has a tendency to become a set-wide mechanic because graveyard themes are fun! I tried to determine which category they "strictly" belonged to based on whether the set mechanic was focused in one archetype (like Bloomburrow's Threshold) or across the set (like escape from Theros Beyond Death). With that in mind, the following sets feature blue-black as pure "graveyard" archetypes.

Fate Reforged

Dragons of Tarkir

Magic Origins

Throne of Eldraine

Magic 2021

Commander Legends

Modern Horizons 2

Streets of New Capenna

March of the Machine

Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth

Lost Caverns of Ixalan

Bloomburrow

That's a total of 13 graveyard draft archetypes over the last twelve years. Other sets have had a graveyard backing to the core archetype, like the Innistrad Zombie archetypes or Dominaria's historic draft theme. It's hard to pinpoint exactly how many of those other archetypes count as a "graveyard" deck. I'd estimate about ten more prominently feature the graveyard as a strength, which could bring us up to 23 themes. Again, I'd only count 13 as "pure graveyard" archetypes, with that zone being the focus of the draft theme. 

The interesting nature of the graveyard archetypes is how they do, in practice, play very differently. There are one or two that want you to mill out your opponent, but most are self-mill. Within that self-mill, some want you to self-mill so that your graveyard recursion spells are more powerful while others want to cast cards from your graveyard, and others want to "eat" the graveyard for value. All of these have similar enablers but the outputs feel different.

With that noted, let's move on to...

Set Mechanic Archetypes

Set mechanics are a key flavoring element that go into the design file, being what really makes them obviously distinct from one another. Sometimes the mechanic is a gentle re-skin of an existing part of the color pair or provides a unique reward for something the color pair likes to do. Other times it feels incredibly different from previously tread ground. A quick overview of the blue-black archetypes defined by a set mechanic:

Gatecrash: Cipher

Battle for Zendikar: Ingest

Amonkhet: Cycling

Hour of Devastation: Cycling

Guilds of Ravnica: Surveil

War of the Spark: Amass

Theros Beyond Death: Escape

Kaldheim: Snow

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate: Initiative

Phyrexia: All Will Be One: Proliferate

Murders at Karlov Manor: Clues

Outlaws at Thunder Junction: Crimes

Special note: cycling and surveil would go on to become deciduous mechanics due to their high utility. They were used at the time as set-specific, so I stand by marking them as such. 

So which of these pulled blue-black in different directions? Cycling, surveil, and escape were essentially graveyard-oriented. Proliferate, clues, snow, and crimes were a fancy coat of paint over a control archetype. Initiative is the oddest one in the set: it encourages a mix of aggression and turtling up; maybe more of a midrange option?

Card Type Archetypes

Rewarding drafters for going in on a noncreature type during draft is tricky: creatures are the primary win condition in Limited games, after all. A person hoping to set up a control plan out of a pile of instants and sorceries may find themselves run over by the Boros aggro player on turn four. Playing an artifact or enchantment deck in Limited is always a pleasant treat, no matter how A/B it is, but blue-black players might not know the feeling as well.

Over the last decade, there have only been three Limited environments where the Dimir drafters were encouraged to pick up specific card types, and two of those were in the same block. 

Kaladesh: Artifacts

Aether Revolt: Artifacts

Dominaria: Historic (Legendary, Artifact, or Saga)

Blue is primary in friendly to artifacts, while black only has secondary in "friendly to enchantments," meaning it's unlikely to do that unless the set has an enchantment theme. I want to take a quick note here about Dominaria United, because all three blue-black uncommons mention instants and sorceries. However, that set was built a little differently from most modern sets. Each mono-color was given a particular draft theme which could synergize with the others. Blue had all the "spells matter" cards, while black had none, being a graveyard color. It plays out like a Control Archetype that way, and will be counted there.

The Kaladesh block, however, had a strong artifact theme throughout. Blue and black worked with that for a different spin on their control archetypes. Meanwhile, Dominaria had the historic batch, which did include artifacts in the grouping. When a theme shows up in three color pairs in a set, each one is usually set to a different "speed": aggro, midrange, or control. This helps keep the decks from fighting too much over the cards and makes them feel different. Blue-black was the slowest of the three, trying to grind out value with historic cards over time.

Creature Type Archetypes

Buckle up. When I started this analysis, I knew blue-black would have a few more creature type archetypes than the color pair justifiably ought to; Innistrad and the popularity of Ninjas would help there. All the same, blue is the color with the fewest creatures, and black isn't far behind. Surely this couldn't be a creature color. I was shocked to find that ten sets since Return to Ravnica have you drafting Dimir as a kindred theme. 

Shadows Over Innistrad: Zombie

Eldritch Moon: Zombie

Ixalan: Pirate

Rivals of Ixalan: Pirate

Modern Horizons 1: Ninja

Zendikar Rising: Rogue

Midnight Hunt: Zombie

Crimson Vow: Zombie

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty: Ninja

Wilds of Eldraine: Faerie

Four of the set archetypes were Zombie-themed, of course. Innistrad is going to skew things for all the ally colors in that fashion. Eight of the draft archetypes in original Ixalan block being creature type-themed was another odd moment that has caused the traditionally slow control color pair to lean harder on creatures for victory. Rogues was party of another crack at the kindred set, using the Party mechanic as a fun glue between the four factions, while Ninjas and Faeries were chosen due to the setting.

Pirates did not get a full draft archetype on our return to Ixalan and have mostly been blue-red ever since. (There are only 25 mono-black Pirate cards printed since 2016, compared to 45 red and 49 blue.) 

Ninjas were part of the exceptionally popular return to Kamigawa, and will likely make a return along with it. Eldraine is a beloved plane; I don't know how well Wilds did just yet, but I know the accompanying Faerie Commander deck did gangbusters. Rogues are a commonly used class, but I don't see it returning as a full draft archetype particularly soon.

Now for the rest!

Other Archetypes

Some archetypes don't fit neatly in a given category but still merit discussion, so here's the others: eight archetypes from the range.

Theros: Control

Magic 2015: Flyers

Core Set 2019: Control

Core Set 2020: Enters the Battlefield

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths: Flash

Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: Saboteur

Dominaria United: Control

Brother's War: Draw 2

Three sets have been more "general" to the point where blue-black was simply "control," with no seriously focused theme beyond that. I must stress this as not being a bad thing. Control has an important place in Magic ecosystems! It's just that without a clearer identity, these feel less purposeful or distinct.

To that end, The Brothers' War could help solve this in future Limited environments. The "Draw 2" has appeared in every two-color pair involving blue, and for good reason: it's a simple hoop to jump through, one your deck probably wants to do anyways. It lends itself to control strategies, but gives them a more specific flavor. Will it appear more often in the future? I'm hopeful!

Finally, a fun note about Magic 2015 having flyers as the archetype was that it was before flash had been settled on as the blue-black creature keyword. Flash being settled would take another four years or so to happen before it would get to be a draft theme in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. 

Final Analysis

Alright, there's the overview. Now let's crunch some numbers.

Set Mechanics: 27.7%

Graveyard: 27.7%

Creature Type: 21.3%

Other: 17.0%

Card Type: 6.4%

The wild card draft theme, graveyard, ends up at 27%, higher than white-blue's flyers! I wondered about how perception shakes out; flyers is considered overdone by some players, but not graveyard. I think this comes down to the graveyard being an entire zone of the game, it being "divided" amongst several different keywords like escape or threshold, and the play pattern varying from time to time. As discussed, graveyards have multiple ways to pay out, while flyers only have one real endgame.

An interesting diversion from the previously analyzed white-blue: card types! The card type column is half the percentage of the second-lowest type, a comparatively large outlier. None of white-blue's categories were double the percentage of the others, but here we have a difference by triple. I'd note this as, again, black not having a high affinity for any card types. As such, blue-black cards that care about artifacts or the like are more likely to be constructed shots, and even those are probably going to occur only in sets bent around a particular card type. 

As usual, further questions could be concerning how to count certain archetypes. Certainly, Bloomburrow's Threshold Rats counts as a set mechanic, graveyard archetype, and creature type. I threw it into graveyard, as that felt most relevant for the theme's playstyle and feel. Broadly, Bloomburrow archetypes wound up in "set mechanic" territory rather than creature type due to the abundance of new tips and tricks in the designer's belt that make it feel like a normal draft environment and less like Ixalan or Lorwyn. A few sets had mechanics like surveil or escape which lent themselves strongly to being graveyard themed. Once again, this is where science becomes art.

Like I said with white-blue, I'm curious as to the overall speeds of the different blue-black archetypes. It's apparent that this one tends towards control, even compared to white-blue. I'd say even the creature-type oriented archetypes like Pirates and Zombies were the slower archetypes of their respective formats. Sussing that out is beyond the scope for now, but worth considering!

Conclusion

Another one done and analyzed! Blue-black has a major focus on the graveyard, but one that I think is sustainable long-term due to the "broadness" of the archetype. Players like graveyards! I don't expect card type themes to pop up every often, but with black acquiring enchantments as a theme, it might pop up in Duskmourn in some capacity. Duskmourn is a horror set, but it may choose not to focus as much on the graveyard as another way to distinguish itself from Innistrad. Excited to find out soon!

What's been your favorite blue-black archetype? Were you surprised by any percentages or shake-outs? What would you like to see more of in the future?

Let me know in the comments below, and I'll catch you next time with black-red archetypes.