Innstrad Ltd: Stratergy and Synergy

 Hi everyone. 

Innistrad has now been fully spoiled and the pre release is coming up this weekend, first thing to say about this set for limited is that it looks absolutely awesome! everything about this set screams flavour, and should be a blast to play in both sealed and draft. 

Now around this time, every set, all mtg writers are spewing out articles about the different specific cards and there thoughts on how they will effect one format or another. For me to repeat that here would be nothing but an exercise in futility for all concerned and I have neither the time nor the patience to go through and review every card in the set individually. Instead what I'm going to do today is just give a brief overview of the set as a whole for the purposes of limited.

Bare in mind when reviewing this set for limited I have been looking just at the common // uncommon lvl cards, as everyone knows mythic in bombs are insane in ltd. you dont need telling.

This article is about the synergies and strategies for the different colours in Innstrad ltd. specifically sealed. What’s written here is quite generic in application so feel free to message me to pick my brain if anyone wants to know more about more specifics.

White:

Lots of humans, a few spirits, no gribbley monsters to be seen.

It’s possible to have a sweet human tribal theme going on, plays like a white weenie, lots of guys that die to make tokens, or make other guys bigger, or transform your men. + removal + fliers.

Not very good against other white decks as there stuff is made for killing wolf men.

Also. Rally the Peasants is insane. Splash red for it ^^

Blue:

Mixture of humans, zombies and mutants.

Generic blue fliers counter spells and ‘tap’ effects.

With the right combination of cards a mill deck may be possible, most of the time this will be very weak. The mill effects are passive on a ton of reasonable cards in blue, these effects can be put to much better use by milling yourself in order to pay for the additional casting costs on your Skaab guys (which are all sweet btw) there are also several good flashback cards that don’t mind being in the yard. Careful not to mill yourself though :p

Black.

 ZOMBIES! Also- vamps and skeletons.

Unsurprisingly, you can do zombie tribal. Allows you to generate a lot of tokens, backed up by solid removal. Zombie theme is less aggressive but has inevitability, which makes a controlish build work better.  Conveniently, blue also has zombies.

Red:

Vampires, werewolves

Lots of cheap efficient creatures with nice abilities. Tons of spells/ creatures that act as removal // burn.

Most of the werewolves are okay, but are sometimes hard to transform, and can randomly change back. In ltd, this is usually okay, as somebody is going to run out of spell eventually, and then they do the wolves get big. But this will take time so you can rely on them to be super aggressive. The best way to use them is if they are okay in there normal form then run them, then if they transform it’s a sweet bonus.

Green

Humans werewolves.

Werewolves in green are less exciting as they are generally more vanilla than their red counterparts, but possibly more reliable, as they’re bigger before transform. The power swing looks something like:

Red Werewolves:  Before: Weak and Puny. //// After: Obscene Violence

Green Werewolves: Before: Below Average //// After: Above Average.

See.

Green is also the major colour for morbid, which is unfortunate considering there is no removal here. it is a pretty strong mechanic, but as it is usually on creatures (and thus wants to be active in your turn)  so unless you can attack and trick your opponent into blocking to activate it, your best up pairing up with another colour that gets it dudes killed all the time. Namely black or white.

So that’s what the colours do for the most part. At first glance we can see which colours apear to work well together:

WR Aggro:

the red helps support the white aggression. Access to loads of removal with flier and burn to wrap the game up.

UB control;

probably with zombies. Has a large ability to utilise the graveyard, lots of flashback cards to generate zombie hordes and exile useless creatures to play under costed blue dudes.

GW // GB; Morbid.

I think morbid is strong enough to actively build around with help from white or black. Black has removal and sacrifice dudes, whilst white has many puny creatures which die attacking.

Obviously in ltd you can mix any colours you want, you’ve gotta use what you got anyways and there are clearly many more good combinations, but on first glance these seem like solid ideas to try to aim towards whilst your building a deck. Hopefully this has provided some insight into the workings of Innstrad in ltd.

I guess we’ll get to see how far off I am at the events coming up over the next couple of weeks. Good luck to everyone playing the pre release this weekend, I’ll see you all there ^^

Written by

Andy Mather.