Analysis of Rakdos Draft Archetypes

Current History of Rakdos Draft Archetypes

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

Welcome back! This is the third installment of the Current History of Draft Archetypes, all about Rakdos! 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 (Artifact Sacrifice); I make the final call on a case-by-case basis which it's more representative of, but also try to address that in the notes.

The Color Pair

Black is the color of power through any means, a color who can go slow but doesn't always. It trends towards the middle, a midrange color which can commit to the board early and then start grinding value. Some of its recursive threats, like Reassembling Skeleton, can support aggro by coming back to attack over and over, or control by being a body to repeatedly sacrifice. Red is the fastest color in the game, full of little creatures who smash fast, backed up by burn spells that either clear blockers or hit the opponent directly. It rarely slows down enough to support control, but some of its damage-based sweepers can find their way into such decks.

Combine the two, and you have a color pair dedicated to aggression backed up by kill spells. Something both colors like to do is sacrifice permanents, which can allow for aggressive strategies to cash in outclassed creatures for nice value in the mid-to-late game. 

The colors' shared creature keywords are menace and haste. Menace became their primary shared keyword with Magic Origins. Black gets haste the least out of the three colors it appears in (outside of exceptionally rare one-offs in blue, like Errant, Street Artist), but it still shows up. Both of these are exceptionally aggressive keywords, working to help you turn creatures sideways early and often.

When digging up the archetypes, I expected to see a lot of aggro and sacrifice: black-red sacrifice has been an iconic theme for so long, the wildcard theme couldn't be anything else. However, I was surprised to see how versatile the archetype ended up being and how it managed to click into differing strategies. 

With that, let's dive into the categories.

Sacrifice Archetype

You know it, you love it. Rakdos Sacrifice has been a staple of draft year after year, occasionally making it as a tier 1 Standard deck. This archetype can float between aggressive and midrange. In the aggro version, you commit to the board with early beaters and then sacrifice them as they become outclassed for whatever value you can get out of them. Sometimes, the sacrifice effects let you cast a more efficient kill spell or pump a creature. Other times, the sacrifice synergizes with the set's Act of Treason effect to let you permanently remove an opponent's creature while still getting value. The midrange version plays similarly, but it chooses creatures more so for either making tokens or being recursive so that the player can get more sacrifices per card. It may focus less on early attackers and more on ways to steal the opponent's creatures.

There have been ten "pure sacrifice" archetypes since Return to Ravnica, listed below.

Magic Origins

Dominaria

Core Set 2019

Theros Beyond Death

Core Set 2021

Commander Legends

Streets of New Capenna

Brother's War

Phyrexia: All Will Be One

March of the Machine

The general application of sacrifice is the same: play cards that can get you multiple bodies, play a card or two that can repeatedly sacrifice for some positive output, and go to value town. Sometimes, it's about dealing damage as quickly as possible, while other times it's trying to get card advantage. 

I'd like to note one of these, Theros Beyond Death, is fuzzy in its distinction. Several cards in the set reward you for sacrificing enchantments, and a few of them reward you for having cards in the graveyard. However, all the enchantment sacrifice effects allow you to sacrifice a creature instead. This felt ultimately like an example wherein the sacrifice theme was moderately affected by the set environment without actually changing into a card type theme. (At the time, black being tertiary in "friendly to enchantments" hadn't been developed fully. Future enchantment sets may do this!)

Before I cover the other sets, I'd like to note there are approximately 19 sets in the given range where black-red has sacrifice as an element of its archetype. In some cases, I felt that the sacrifice was incidental value, like flying in white-blue or graveyard shenanigans in blue-black. In others, I felt that another element (such as the set mechanic) was a greater focus in some capacity. 

Set Mechanic Archetypes

Set Mechanic archetypes are always a treat because of the ways they often bend a color pair this way or that. The color pair will rarely change its speed of play, but it will bend away from the core play style in some way that feels new and fresh. For black-red, there have been nine sets where the color pair took on a mechanic specific to that set for its archetype.

Return to Ravnica: Unleash

Fate Reforged: Dash

Dragons of Tarkir: Dash

Hour of Devastation: Afflict

Ravnica Allegiance: Spectacle

War of the Spark: Amass

Lord of the Rings: Amass

Lost Caverns of Ixalan: Descend

Murders at Karlov Manor: Suspect

Amass, as seen in War of the Spark, leaned a little into the red-black sacrifice archetype. Amass was a way to repeatedly make a token. If you made sure to sacrifice the token after amassing once, you got more value. The format also had planeswalkers which could only tick down, meaning they had limited use. Once they got low, you could sacrifice them as well to various effects for a unique playstyle not found in any other Limited environment (so far). The "descend" mechanic, an effect that cared about cards going into your graveyard from anywhere, also allowed for some sacrifice, but let you do mill or a normal aggro strategy. 

The rest of these worked with the color's aggro tendencies. Unleash and suspect made better attackers which couldn't block. Dash and afflict gave you additional ways to push damage through. Spectacle rewarded aggression with cheaper spells. 

Of the ones we've seen, only amass has actually made a full return. I expect it to happen again in the right set. Spectacle has been back in an unnamed fashion once or twice; I think the flavor is just neutral enough that it could return as well. Unleash, dash, and afflict all seem unlikely for play pattern issues, while descend and suspect required very specific flavor that I don't see cropping up often enough for them to make a comeback.

Creature Type Archetypes

You might be surprised to discover that one of the most aggressive color pairs has had a lot of creature type themes. Creature type draft themes are very popular, of course, and have fluctuated in their execution over the years. There's certainly discussion to be had about how much Bloomburrow counts as a strictly-kindred set in terms of drafting in comparison with its predecessors. 

Theros: Minotaurs

Born of the Gods: Minotaurs

Battle for Zendikar: Eldrazi

Oath of the Gatewatch: Eldrazi

Shadows over Innistrad: Vampires

Eldritch Moon: Vampires

Ixalan: Pirates

Rivals of Ixalan: Pirates

Modern Horizons 1: Goblins

Throne of Eldraine: Knights

Zendikar Rising: Party (Cleric, Rogue, Warrior, Wizard)

Midnight Hunt: Vampires

Crimson Vow: Vampires

Wilds of Eldraine: Rats

Outlaws of Thunder Junction: Outlaws (Assassins, Mercenaries, Pirates, Rogues, Warlocks)

As usual, the Innistrad monster type accounts for the largest share of the themes, but it does not make nearly as big of an impact in this color pair as our earlier entries. For both white-blue and blue-black, the Innistrad monsters made up half (or nearly half) of the kindred themes. For black-red, it doesn't even account for one-third of the fifteen draft themes centered around the creature typeline. 

Notably, black-red features a certain flavor of malice and destructiveness. When it plays into a kindred theme that crossed multiple color pairs, its version tends to be the most bloodthirsty. This can be seen in Eldrazi, Pirates, or Knights, where the black-red archetype sometimes played up the sacrifice route when possible. 

As usual, I highly expect that Vampires will return, as Innistrad will never fully go away. I'm honestly surprised Goblins have only popped up once in current Magic, but with the upcoming Lorwyn set, I highly anticipate their return to black-red. As I mentioned in the blue-black article, black Pirates are the least common. With Ixalan's identity shifting into general exploration and away from the kindred structure, I see it as unlikely (in premier sets). Party and outlaws were batches of varying levels of success. Party is likely to be in supplementals only, and rarely, while outlaws will only return if Thunder Junction proves popular enough. Rats will almost certainly pop up again, but only time will tell if they trend blue-black after Bloomburrow's immense success.

Card Type Archetypes

Archetypes centered around drafting cards of a specific type require some work, both in terms of the design and creative. Furthermore, neither red nor black are primary in caring about any card type, nor do they overlap as secondary in any card type (other than land). For that reason, I was not expecting red-black to have the same number of artifact archetypes as white-blue. They even both had a draft theme around an artifact subtheme, but I get ahead of myself...

Kaladesh: Artifact

Aether Revolt: Artifact

Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: Treasure

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty: Artifact

Modern Horizons 3: Artifact

The Kaladesh block was artifact-themed, of course, so both sets got the theme. Red also cared about energy in that block, but black wasn't a focus point for that particular set mechanic. This made artifacts a good fit. Likewise, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty had a focus on artifacts and enchantments. Red was on the side of artifacts, while black was the "balance" color who worked with both. Modern Horizons 3 got to do weird things all around and chose a very specific version of an affinity theming to play out in the red-black archetype. In all four sets, the colors cared about artifacts in a general sense, with a healthy dose of sacrifice.

Why mark them as artifact and not sacrifice? They each had several cards that could only sacrifice an artifact and other cards which cared about artifacts without necessitating a sacrifice strategy. Nonetheless, sacrifice is a way that black-red gets to play with artifacts in a way that feels very different from white-blue, which normally tries to "build up" in some fashion.

The odd duck of the bunch would the treasure strategy found in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. Treasures are an artifact subtype that are almost exclusively found on tokens (Goldhound being one of six total exceptions), which makes this an odd card type to build around in Limited. It requires looking for the Treasure text in the card, almost like a keyword set mechanic rather than the norm. Still counts for card type! 

Other Archetypes

Some archetypes don't fit neatly in any one category. They don't rely on a keyword or sacrifice or a type for identity. These are the more nebulous archetypes, of which there have been nine since 2012.

Magic 2015: Midrange?

Amonkhet: One Card in Hand

Core Set 2020: Aggro

Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths: Menace

Kaldheim: Aggro

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate: Death

Modern Horizons 2: Self-Discard

Dominaria United: Death

Bloomburrow: Opponent Loses Life

I confess a weakness: the M15 set archetypes are really nebulous and I only interacted with that set a little bit when it was out. From what I could find online, the black-red archetype in the set seemed to be more of a midrange strategy, but this could be a fallacy. With that unfortunate blip out of the way, the rest!

Normal aggressive strategies, all about attacking, were found in M20 and Kaldheim. Kaldheim technically had a Berserker sub-theme, but the kindred cards were only found at rare. The closest to this pure aggro theme would be the "death" themes I found in CLB and DMU. These cared about creatures dying, which did allow them to work with regular aggro or the sacrifice themes that black-red also enjoys. These were kind of a gray area for that reason. There's an argument to be made that Dominaria (2018) also leaned more into the general death theme, but I think the number of cards in black and red that cause you to sacrifice make it separate from these.

Menace and the unnamed "one card or fewer in hand" (unofficially called heckbent) were fun spins on the aggro archetype. Menace is a solid form of evasion that makes it easier to get in, while heckbent was just about curving out as quickly as possible to smash in. Fun, specific forms of the aggro archetype. This is related to the Bloomburrow black-red theme, which cares about opponents losing life. It plays in the same space as Ravnica Allegiance's Spectacle keyword or even the Bloodthirst mechanic from Guildpact, allowing you to trigger it through the combat step or just use black's lifedrain and red's direct damage to make it happen. Fun and innovative spin on an old standby!

Finally, the Modern Horizons line of products sure can get weird with it. Red and black's aggressive tendencies can push it to want to discard its own cards for power, a strategy even found in the Amonkhet premier set. In the premier set, however, this was done in low numbers. For Modern Horizons 2, it clicked into several different graveyard themes and had several madness payoffs in case the drafter didn't pick up some spicy reanimation targets or delirium picks. 

Final Analysis

Alright, let's look at the percentages!

Card Type: 10.6% 

Set Mechanic: 19.2%

Other: 19.2%

Sacrifice: 21.3%

Creature Type: 29.8%

We once again have a 3:1 disparity between the most and least popular draft archetypes. This is a trend I'm excited to learn more about with the other color pairs. It should come as no surprise that the aggressive color with graveyard synergies loves creatures and creature strategies, be it kindred or sacrifice. 

For the record, I hold to the idea that only "pure sacrifice" archetypes like the ones I listed in that section should be counted as such. A white-blue deck that cares about spirits is liable to have a lot of flying because of the flavor and power of the mechanic but would not strictly be a "flyers matter" deck. So, too, I felt about sacrifice. Sacrifice is an interesting hoop to jump through and works for the color pair. Nonetheless, if you chose to count it, I found 18 sets that could be counted as sacrifice-themed, making it 37.5% of the draft themes in the date range.

Whew. Hope you like graveyards! (I know you do.)

Conclusion

Another one down! Red-black looks fairly balanced, able to mix it up between sacrifice and aggression (and occasionally blending the two) for a nice amount of speed variance. I'm interested to see how the color pair progresses over the next few years. It's picked up more general graveyard strategies to better synergize with other B/x strategies in drafts, which may evolve into a stronger red-black graveyard deck like the Chainer, Nightmare Adepts of the world.

Whatever happens, I know black-red drafts can look forward to turning creatures sideways and not caring what happens in the meantime. What's been your favorite archetype of the ones discussed? What do you hope to see more of in the future? Let me know in the comments below!

Join me next time for the first appearance of green as I discuss red-green!