An Analysis of Selesnya Draft Archetypes

The Selesnya Draft Archetypes

Azorius | Dimir | Rakdos | Gruul | Selesyna | Orzhov | Izzet | Golgari

Welcome back! This is the fifth installment of the Current History of Draft Archetypes. Halfway there! The impetus for this series 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, like 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

Green is the second slowest color in Magic, preferring to build up a board state of big creatures and smash in. White is the second fastest color, generally speaking, preferring to attack with weenies, though it can slow all the way down to control in the right format. When pushed together, they meet in the middle but trend towards the faster side as an aggressive creature strategy that can pull out some tricks to win even in the mid-to-late game.

Their shared creature keywords are vigilance, indestructible, reach, and flash, with vigilance being their "primary" shared keyword; the rest are fairly "uncommon" in one or both colors. All the same, these paint the picture of a color pair that is aggressive and resilient. Vigilance looks defensive, but in fact it encourages you to go ahead and attack: it's aggressive.

White and green are the creature colors. I talked about how red and green blended as a creature combo dedicated to singularly massive power. Green-white differentiates itself from red-green's creature strategy by going wide instead. Green-white go-wide is a strategy of note, which I'll talk about later on in the article. It wasn't as dramatic of a shift from the usual form as red-green's, but it required some reconfiguring. Instead, the wild card is...

Wildcard Archetype: Counters

Get out the tiny dice and get ready to tick them up fast, because Selesnya counters is the go-to archetype. At a glance, this may seem like it goes against the differentiation from red-green; boosting power seems like boosting power, right? The execution is key. Red wants to pile the counters in one place, while white wants to spread them out. Green works well with either!

That noted, let's look at the nine sets where green-white is a "counters" theme.

Fate Reforged

Dragons of Tarkir

Magic Origins

Oath of the Gatewatch

War of the Spark

Core Set 2021

Commander Legends

Modern Horizons 2

Crimson Vow

March of the Machine

Some caveats and possibilities to note here. I included Crimson Vow but not Midnight Hunt. This is actually the first time one of the Innistrad sets has been separated. I did some poring over those two to really confirm and, uh, yeah. Counters mattered way more in draft than the Human typeline. Midnight Hunt had a "multiple powers" theme that counters kind of helped but in very limited amount; it was definitely its own thing. That also accounts for why Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Modern Horizons 3 got tossed in a different category: counters only make up part of it.

Of these sets, I did really waver on War of the Spark. Proliferate was part of an environment designed to "build up" and especially work with the unique planeswalker theme. The green-white version did focus on +1/+1 counters, so it still goes there (despite "proliferate" technically being a set mechanic).

Set Mechanic Archetypes

Set mechanics tend to push a color pair in a unique direction, or at least appear to. Sometimes, it's just a fancy coat of paint over a normal direction for the pair, but sometimes it's truly out there. Eleven draft archetypes are clearly "set mechanic" based, below:

Return to Ravnica: Populate

Theros: Heroic

Born of the Gods: Heroic

Magic 2015: Convoke

Aether Revolt: Revolt

Amonkhet: Exert

Hour of Devastation: Exert

Guilds of Ravnica: Convoke

Zendikar Rising: Landfall

Phyrexia: All Will Be One: Toxic

Murders at Karlov Manor: Disguise

Populate was a tokens mechanic, which felt "go-wide" but actually wanted you to go tall at the same time for maximum effect. That won't be the last go-tall/go-wide archetype. Both forms of convoke, for instance, wanted you to play a lot of creatures to help you power out a really big spell.

Heroic was a Voltron-based mechanic that encouraged more of the "all-in" action than normal, and the green-white version wasn't much of an exception. (Only three Selesnya cards in the block had Heroic triggers encouraging a go-wide situation.) There's an argument about this being +1/+1 counter centric, and it certainly goes into that well, but there aren't enough cards that "care" about the counters for it to feel like one of those archetypes. The counters were the reward in and of themselves.

Revolt, exert, and landfall, as used in their sets, were aggressive decks using the keyword to bolster the effort. Toxic is similar to this, allowing for the alternate win condition of poison to distinguish it (with proliferate and other effects allowing your green-white deck to have "burn" effects in their arsenal, strangely). 

The last one on the list to talk about is "disguise" from Murders at Karlov Manor. Several of the archetypes made use of the face-down creatures, so this version had to distinguish itself by going a little slower. A green-white deck wanted to stretch out the game long enough to really get to the part where they started ripping off disguises to reveal the big creatures they'd drafted. Neat! A green-white weenie deck that turned into a monsters deck! Shame it was part of an unpopular set.

Creature Type Archetypes

Building a draft archetype around a creature type has proven challenging. If you go all-in on the creature type in rules text, the draft ends up too on-rails and same-y. Not hard enough, and there's a question of why bother? There's definitely an ongoing difficulty in figuring out where exactly the line is between "creature-type theme" and "draft theme that happens to correspond with a lot of X creature type". I didn't include Bloomburrow here for basically that difficulty, leaving us with eight creature-type-themed draft archetypes.

Battle for Zendikar: Ally

Shadows over Innistrad: Human

Eldritch Moon: Human

Ixalan: Dinosaur

Rivals of Ixalan: Dinosaur

Midnight Hunt: Human

Streets of New Capenna: Citizen

Outlaws of Thunder Junction: Mount

Thanks to Crimson Vow having a stronger +1/+1 counter theme, there are only three Innistradi creature type themes in this batch! Other noteworthy feature here is that the Dinosaur theme in the original Ixalan block was the slowest of the three (red-white being fastest and red-green being medium speed), much like with disguise, which I find interesting. 

The odd ones were Citizen and Mount. Citizen was a creature type found commonly in the Cabaretti and Brokers factions in Streets of New Capenna and was also one of the tokens used frequently in their colors. It was used as a "glue" between the two to allow for synergies. Mount captured the specific flavor of riding an animal (rather than simply a Vehicle) in the Western setting of Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Mount may return as a draft archetype in the upcoming Death Race set, but otherwise I do not foresee either of these types making up the backbone of an archetype anytime soon.

Card Type Archetypes

Focusing on a card type can experience a difficulty similar to creature types, as I'll discuss after the listing. Making sure the cards click with multiple archetypes is key to making draft environments dynamic and interesting. Witching Well worked with the white-blue "artifacts and enchantments" archetype as well as the blue-red "draw 2" for instance. 

Core Set 2019: Auras

Throne of Eldraine: Adventure

Theros Beyond Death: Constellation

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty: Enchantments

Brother's War: Artifactfall

Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth: Food

Wilds of Eldraine: Roles

Seven card type archetypes in current Magic sets! The color pair obviously leans heavily into enchantments, with four of the seven archetypes being in that wheelhouse. Theros Beyond Death and Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty care about enchantments broadly, while Core Set 2019 and Wilds of Eldraine focus more on Auras. 

There are technically two artifact-based draft archetypes, though both are very sideways of the typical artifact strategy. The Brothers' War had the color pair caring about artifacts entering the battlefield, a nice way to play with the weird Powerstone tokens and higher-than-normal number of artifact creatures. The Lord of the Rings archetype built around Food, which is technically an artifact. In practice, it's more about lifegain, but a subtype is a subtype.

The odd one out here is the Adventure draft archetype in Throne of Eldraine. This is odd because it feels the least like a "subtype matters" archetype and more like a creature-type-based strategy, picking up creatures based on a typeline. It sometimes felt like that in practice, with the rewards not even requiring you to cast the Adventure side first. All the same, not a creature subtype!

Not surprising that the creature colors are the most creature-like even when caring about supposedly noncreature types...

Other Archetypes

And now the rest. These are the odds and ends which don't neatly fall under one of the previous umbrellas. Let's take a look.

Kaladesh: Wide/Tall

Dominaria: Tokens

Modern Horizons 1: Creaturefall

Core Set 2020: Tokens

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths: Vigilance

Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: Lifegain

Kaldheim: Tokens

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate: Tokens

Dominaria United: Tokens

Lost Caverns of Ixalan: Modify

Modern Horizons 3: Modified

Alright, "creaturefall" would eventually become Alliance in Streets of New Capenna (as the red-green-white keyword, no less, but not strictly green-white...). This didn't require tokens, but they certainly helped. It was one of many creature strategies, like the vigilance theme in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. That was a quirky one, made possible by keyword counters and vigilance being the green-white evergreen keyword. 

An uncommon feature in green-white is the lifegain strategy. White loves gaining life and green is good at huge bursts, but Wizards prefers pairing those with black, as black is good with siphoning off some of that life for effects, ensuring you don't just gain a ton of life and make the game go long for no reason. Here, the color pair got the strategy and focused on the "whenever you gain life" rules text, with the biggest hoop only asking for you to gain three life in a turn. Way less durdly! 

The last oddity I want to talk about in this section is the modify/modified split. See, modified is a specific word with rules meaning (referring to creatures that are enchanted, equipped, or have +1/+1 counters). Modify is distinct because Lost Caverns of Ixalan didn't use modified but the "creatures with power greater than their base power" rules text. This allowed for anthems and pump spells (which green and white have in spades) to also click into the archetype. For this reason, I don't expect to see too much of either? The base power distinction is a little odd and complex, while modified just doesn't cover everything this color pair wants to do.

Now I only talked about five of the twelve archetypes here, but that's it for this section, because...

Bonus Archetype: Tokens

Sometimes there is a powerful archetype forming the backbone of archetypes in too many different categories to ignore. It's a regular feature but may not be an actively rewarded part of it, allowing it to guide the strategy without being front and center. Last column noted Gruul having two bonus archetypes, but Selesnya just has the one: tokens. Green-white is the color pair most strongly associated with community and go-wide, exemplified in these thirteen strategies.

Return to Ravnica

Magic 2015

Kaladesh

Guilds of Ravnica

Dominaria

Core Set 2020

Modern Horizons 1

Kaldheim

Streets of New Capenna

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate

Dominaria United

Bloomburrow

It's important to note here that some of the strategies have a go-tall element to them. Return to Ravnica, Kaladesh, and Dominaria all had some way to let you make a big creature or two, usually tied in some way to the token strategy. This of course ensures that the token deck doesn't just devolve into board stalls. The big creature can help overcome any walls and let the token army slip past. I expect it to continue in some form or fashion in the future.

As noted in the previous section, only five of these really felt like a "pure tokens" strategy, focused exclusively on making a big army and crashing in. The rest have keywords overlaid or some mix of strategies at work, but the tokens are a major factor of the archetype. I just thought this was interesting and wanted to address these.

Final Analysis

Alright, let's crunch the numbers and see what to make of it! Of our 48 total archetypes, where did we land?

Other: 25%

Set Mechanics: 22.9%

Counters: 18.8%

Creature Type: 16.7%

Card Type: 14.6%

There's a more even distribution here than we've seen in some previous color pair analyses. Not surprised to see "card type" with the lowest ranking, with Selesnya being the most creature-centric. Even the long-running "friendly to enchantments" theme found in those colors can't push it over. (Maybe if Wizards keeps doing enchantment sets, but then again it looks like Selesnya is doing a creature strategy in Duskmourn. Hm!) 

If counting the "Tokens" as a theme, then that particular archetype hits 27.1%, ahead of the pack as expected! It's a fun theme, obviously, and sets which can solve the limited problem of gumming up the board too much can make it memorable! 

There's not been a big shake-up in these colors. Modified is close, but it wants more support than most sets can easily offer, and it misses the mark anyways. I don't know if they'll keyword the "greater than base power" as its own separate thing or if they'd even want to: green-white is much more about tokens. I'm not sure the color pair will get a "Power 4" paperclip anytime soon, although more ways to tap down its own creatures for value may be the play. Mount seemed like a popular one, for instance, and it ensured that the tokens weren't just gumming up the board. Who knows!

Conclusion

A pretty stock-standard run for green-white, with no real surprises. The color of creatures is all about going wide and growing the forces. I'm curious to see if we get more enchantment sets and how that affects the distribution over time (or if black's "friendly to enchantment" acquisition will prove fruitful enough to divert some of it, as seems to have been the case for Duskmourn). 

So where do you all fall on Selesnya archetypes? Do you prefer counters, tokens, enchantments, or the weirder stuff? Who out there loved the disguise archetype? Let me know and gear up as we shift into the enemy colors with next column's entry: Orzhov!