Dwindle is not a great removal for sure, but you are describing the floor of the card, in the other extreme it can handle:
- Demon of catastrophes
- Baloth
- Any problematic flyer
- Dreadmaw
Pioneer is pretty straightforward but it does deliver 2 bodies... if that´s worth something for your deck, the 1/1 flyer ... is not a threat not a reliable clock, and the 1/2 is a once in a lifetime blocker... if you had Skilled Animator or those 3/2 that draws a card if you got one Artifact... I would consider it, but as I can see Dwindle offers more value at this stage of the draft.

Picked Aviation Pioneer and went 7-2. Blue turned out to be really open and I picked up some great blue cards including a Bone to Ash. modulo was right, the Submerged Boneyard tabled, but I took Hired Blade over it since I'm doubtful a 2-color deck needs duals. I cut Sleep and Macabre Waltz since my deck had few creatures. End result was excellent. Thanks for the help guys! Only games I lost were to mana stumbles. Perhaps keeping a 2-lander on the draw is too risky (opponent turned out to be an aggro deck), as is keeping a 1-lander on the draw on a mulligan to 6 (the hand also contained an Omenspeaker, but the land was a Swamp). The deck was superb at grinding and I was happy to wait until the late-game against everyone.

Hired Blade was quite mediocre - it did work well with my other instants, but it didn't have much impact. My deck was too defensive for 3 damage to matter, and later in the game it's not big enough to attack past my opponents' creatures. Aviation Pioneer was also quite mediocre, but then I almost never needed Dwindle either since I had more removal than good creatures to kill. A couple of times the Pioneer's blue body turned on Gearsmith Guardian. Murder was really good as predicted, and even better with Salvager of Secrets (I got passed that late, too). Rise from the Graves also did quite well, including highlights of bringing back my opponent's Regal Bloodlord that made a bat, and a Leonin Warleader.

Last round was against a GW deck that had plenty of auras. That was actually surprisingly effective against me in spite of my suite of removal, since if even one creature sticks, Colossal Majesty + Talons of Wildwood gives him a big advantage. I got some of his creatures off the board with gang blocks, then eventually drew enough removal to kill all his creatures. Neonate overperformed, it blocked his 2/2 vigilance early and then later drained over 6 life to keep me in the game. Cool play on his part: Talons kills Departed Deckhand for free.

On to the next draft!

Dwindle isn't THAT bad. You use it on a rather big creature (Colossal Dreadmaw, Frilled Sea Serpent) or an aggressive flier to lock it down. Some of these threats Electrify and Strangling Spores cannot deal with. It's a notably worse Luminous Bonds, but Luminous Bonds is great and there's enough room for Dwindle to still be a solid or even good card.

Manalith is ramp and fixing, but not every deck wants to spend a card slot for that. Lategame, Manalith is much like an additional land without the benefits earlygame (for instance, you can keep some 2-landers, but you can never keep a 1-lander with Manalith; or some easy 3-land keeps suddenly become a lot sketchier if they are 2 lands plus a Manalith; on the flipside a hand with 5 lands and a Manalith is as much of a mulligan as a 6-land hand most of the time).
Manalith is a consideration if:
a) You're splashing (free source of your splash colour, which means you'll have to run less non-main-colour basics)
b) You need an artifact to enable synergies
or c) You have a LOT of top-end (8 or more 5+-drops) and not much curve beforehand.
Your deck fits none of these criteria and honestly, very few decks in M19 want Manalith (you rarely want to splash, artifact decks generally have better enablers, the high-end decks want different ramp cards like Druid of the Cowl or Gift of Paradise or are better off lowering the curve if possible)

An on-colour dual is better than Manalith because the opportunity cost of running it is much lower. Unlike Manalith, Submerged Boneyard can be fully counted as a land at any time during the game, thus being run over a Basic. And while it may not seem like a huge improvement at first, a 10-8 or 9-9 manabase is quite a bit more reliable than a 10-7 or 9-8. You don't have to prioritize them highly, but they're good pickups if the other cards in the pack look like they don't make the deck much better.

I'd run 18 lands if I have good ways of using my mana even past the 7th and 8th land drop and/or I have a rather high curve but little carddraw/ramp. Since M19 has very few good manasinks, I'll rarely run 18 in M19; classic 18-land formats are Dominaria and Hour of Devastation.



Yeah, Hired Blade is more of a filler creature; most of the time I like Tolarian Scholar better. Flash is surprisingly irrelevant most of the time since you often don't have anything else to play anyway (sometimes you ambush a 1/3, but that's about what you can do really).
Pioneer giving you the 1/1 thopter as well as 2 blockers is mainly good against R/W aggro, but also against B/W if they go wide.

Salvager is good, but I found you can pick them up surprisingly late often. Not all blue decks want them and even those that do (mostly UB and UR) don't want more than 1-2 copies of it since it can be quite clunky.

I'd still rather draft Electrify or Strangling Spores over Dwindle!

Re Manalith: doesn't my deck have lots of 5+ drops already? As for Submerged Boneyard, the problem is it comes into play tapped. I could have 2 Islands 2 Swamps with 5-drops in hand, and draw Submerged Boneyard. This should compensate for the times when I'm color screwed. I'll play them if I get them, but I currently view them more as splash enablers. This particular Submerged Boneyard was competing with Hired Blade. If I didn't pick Hired Blade, I'd have had to start Macabre Waltz or Sleep or maybe Scholar of the Stars, all of which seem like they would've weakened the deck.

About Hired Blade: it's certainly not a great creature, but it's a "I can hold up mana and still progress my board if my opponent does nothing" kind of card. Say I pass with Bone to Ash and Hired Blade in hand. If opponent plays something big, I can counter. If not (or if he plays something Hired Blade can contest), I can play Hired Blade. It's similar to having counters & Glimmer of Genius in constructed, which is always a nice place to be. Besides even if Hired Blade trades for something, it's still a trade. Aviation Pioneer can gang block Hired Blade for example and it' be a 1-for-1. I personally find Tolarian Scholar almost unplayable, and in fact am not particularly impressed with Centaur Courser either, but that might be because of Dominaria.

Salvager is a great card in my opinion, can even be first picked out of pack 2 or 3 if one already has enough spells.

You do still want Electrify and Strangling Spores over Dwindle most of the time (though Strangling Spores is close to Dwindle IMO, since many creatures you want to kill happen to have 4 toughness like Vampire Sovereign or Horizon Scholar).

Your deck has quite some expensive cards, but really only has two 5-drops (Vampire Sovereign and Gearsmith Guardian) and one 6-drop (Psychic Symbiont); and that's a fairly normal number. You don't really have a big advantage casting Rise from the Grave, Totally Lost or Lich's Caress a turn earlier, and Salvager of Secrets is also not a tempo-play to use the Manalith.
In general, U/B is not about powering out tempo-plays on turn 4, which is Manalith's biggest selling point (which is why Manalith is not a good card in most U/B decks).
Regarding Submerged Boneyard, I think you're estimating the probability of topdecking exactly Submerged Boneyard as exactly your fifth land way too highly. Submerged Boneyard lets you keep hands with only one type of standard lands (3 Swamps is often a mull, two Swamps and one Boneyard is often a keep). Also, having the fifth land untapped doesn't mean you automatically get to cast your 5-drop (with 3 Islands and a Swamp in play, you can't cast Vampire Sovereign off a drawn Island, for instance).

Regarding Centaur Courser, I agree this card is not at its best in the format (similar to Harrier Naga in HOU). The main problem here is that Green decks often want to take rather aggressive roles; and while Courser is better at these than Tolarian Scholar, the format dissuades it from attacking too often (opponent has a bigger creature or a board that can block it profitably). Tolarian Scholar's role in U/B is being part of that board that can block creatures profitably; and as a 2/3 body it does that job reasonably well. I agree I would prefer to not play Scholar, but it's a serviceable filler 3-drop and most certainly playable.

Another big part of how good a card is is context. For instance, Oran-Rief Hydra would be a bomb rare in M19, but was mediocre during Battle for Zendikar because of the abundance of cards like Clutch of Currents and Ruin Processor.

Huh. First picked Mentor of the Meek and went into wb. Was hoping to pick up some topend but got nothing. Best cards were mentor and the 5 mana enchant that gives you a 2/2. Rest of the deck was trash two drops and I was fully expecting to crash and burn. Did have a bonds, inspired charge and 2 take vengeance so it wasn't without some tools, but looking at it I'd have thought maybe 5 wins.

Ended up 7-2, just crushed people. Mentor is a way stronger card than I thought, didn't lose a game where I drew it, just makes the flow of things so much smoother and some turns I drew 3 cards. I was comparing it mentally to a less good Lifecrafter's Bestiary but the 2/2 body is super relevant.

After an awful run with GW, UW and all sorts of bad decks... I just start forcing RW and... that deck is so easy to build coz its main pieces are common and uncommon but mostly common... I just pulled a 7-0 with a P1P1 Boggart Brute with no removal.

I do think this is the best deck in the format coz is so easy to build, and it can deliver 5 wins on a regular basis.
BU I like too but is far less reliable in my experience.

I find boros miserable in m19, it's so coin flippy. There's not much room to outplay people, either your 1/1s and anthems run them over or they brick you out of the game (and it doesn't take much to brick a bunch of 1/1s). Plus it's so dependent on drawing a mass pump, remember one I did where I had 2 heroic interventions and didn't see either in any of the games. Much prefer UB, WB and UG where even if it doesn't hit the 7 mark you can be confident of going 5 where boros can just crash and burn if it gets a couple rough matchups.

Personally I've had the most success with UB, but Boros is very strong as well. I agree it's kinda coinflippy and you need to mulligan aggressively, but a deck like Cucho's (Heroic Reinforcements, 2 Angels, 2 Coursers, tons of reach) can definitely put on the heat.

Weird, I've had completely no success with Boros. I just get stonewalled so easily. Like, take the deck Cucho posted. The entire early curve is stonewalled by an Aviation Pioneer. Afterwards one can barely get past a Giant Spider, a Daybreak Chaplain enchanted with Oakenform, etc. If you don't get a good curve out you're effectively busted, if you're on the draw you also have a much harder chance of punching through, e.g. opponent goes land land Omenspeaker, you're not getting damage through till turn 4. And then there's Heroic Reinforcements, which is great if you're winning and an exceptionally bad Raise the Alarm if you're not, since the 1/1s can't attack.

I wish we had a video of a pro player drafting the R/W deck or something, since it's just not working for me.

Here ya go:

Well the archetype being bad is why he bombed out 1-1 right? He was even very lucky to win M1G1 - on the play and within three turns he had to hope to topdeck something. M1G2, the only other won game, was on the back of Chaos Wand too which is a rare card. In match 2, he was on the draw and even though the opponent was somewhat color screwed, he lost quite decisively.

It's like, if you're able to draft lots of Goblin Instigators and Inspired Charges and Angels of the Dawn and Lena, Selfless Champion, maaaaaybe, otherwise it just never works for me. I've seen Ben Stark's articles saying Heroic Reinforcements is on par with Dryad Greenseeker as the two best uncommons in the set, and I just cannot agree. Dryad Greenseeker is extremely good, competitive with many rares, but right now I consider Heroic Reinforcements weaker than e.g. Murder, Vampire Sovereign, Herald of Faith, Volcanic Dragon, Horizon Scholar ...

Sure Strike does quite some work in my decks, and I have won lots of games with no play till turn 3 so is not at all as fragile as you guys think. Pioneer is not a problem ever, and the deck is not made of 1/1 is made of 1/1, 2/2 vig, 3/1, 3/2 menace, 1/3 flyers, 3/3 haste or flyers, when you got two 1/1 and two 2/2 attacking T5 and you don't block thinking on Trumpet blast or Inspired charge you are dead on the spot or you are sacrificing your entire more expensive board for a bunch of crappy creatures, if the game goes long sure you are in trouble but then you got Act of treason, Pegasus, Angel and Axe to finish things up.

One of the best games I pulled on that 7-0 was against UW Sai deck and this guy had 3 of those 2/1 arts, + the 3 1/1 flyers that Sai poop, + the 5/5 guy that cares for blue creatures, a Piooner and some other thing, I had instigators, Boggart brute, Pegasus Courser Gallant Cavalary, one sure strike and Trumpet Blast -which I prefer over Inspired charge; 2 Blast and 1 Charge is the sweet spot for me- he did not want to block with Sai, and at the time he builds the board he was already at 3... and that's too little to late coz one act of treason on his biggest dude obliged him to block... trumpet blast and that's that, I trade his entire board and left him at -3
Another fine game was against BW life gain with T1 neonate, 2 epicures of blood one 2/2 flyer and the Chaplain... I got 2 Angels a couple of cheap tricks, one instigator, one Motivator and Pegasus and a hasty Minotaur... that was close coz all the life gain in fact if he had one more turn I would have lost but... he did not get that turn, one Epicures of blood died to combat trick and from there on he was forced to made bad blocks so he would not lose the 2 life per turn combo between Epicure and Neonate.... but even so little by little my attacks in the air raced his life gain... final blow was delivered by a hasty Pyromancer that allowed me to trade all my board for all his life.
I have posted quite a few 7 wins WR decks and there is nothing to fancy on them, they are just easy to build and consistent in my experience, coz the cards are so bad in a vacuum but when you mash them together they work great.

Overall I think the best archetypes of m19 are:
1. Boros Aggro
2. Dimir Control
3. Orzhov life gain Midrange

So I did try that approach at the beginning of M19 and enhancing small creatures is too slow IMO... I mean who am I to tell anything to Ben Stark but I do think he did not draft the better version of the deck... I rather have combat tricks and bodies over Equipment or auras and the Artifact synergy with the 2/3 that buys them back is not where you want to be IMO... or what has worked for me, swarm the board and pump the team is the game plan.

I personally like Dimir Ctrl over Boros Aggro, on the back of Blue being probably the best colour in M19 draft. Orzhov Lifegain is a solid deck, but it's a distant third if it even is in third place (Izzet Ctrl gives it a run for its money IMO).

What deeply saddens me is how bad Green is. It's not unplayable, but you need to get hooked up in basically every archetype you're playing as the average green deck lacks power. The commons are solid (Colossal Dreadmaw, Rabid Bite, Druid of the Cowl), but rather unexciting and in general you have less redundancy than you'd like; it doesn't help that vanilla creatures are rather bad this format due to how clogged up the ground is.


Regarding Bens draft video; he explains that his deck is not the approach he wants to take, but rather the deck that was handed to him (I don't think he saw a single Inspired Charge/Heroic Reinforcements); and while I don't agree with every single pick he's made (I'd have picked Make a Stand over Oreskos Swiftclaw in pack 3, for instance) the deck would not have been much better; the packs didn't break too great for him.
He'd much rather have a deck that's closer to Cucho's; with a ton of evasion, reach and team pump. While Cucho's deck is not perfect (I'd like another 2-drop over maybe Lava Axe or, for mana consistecy considerations, Inspired Charge), it's very close to how a good R/W deck should look like.

I think the power of Wb entirely depends on the removal they get - 2 take vengeance, a bonds, a murder and a caress makes the deck nutty. Neonates are very strong and doomed dissenter can really clog up a board so even if they don't get quality early drops it's not easy to run them over and the endurance trick is very good on quite a few creatures you'd want to run (dissenter, fell spectre, dwarven priest), also Pegasus Courser is a very real card. The uncommons/rares are very strong too (Sovreign, Herald, Warleader and Demon especially). I think a solid WB deck is super hard to beat in this format and just a decent one is going to rack up some wins. The deck can both aggro and grind, it's a good place to be.

UB is a deck I really enjoy playing, but I think it's harder to draft a strong UB deck than a WB. The creature quality is just a bit lower, gearsmith is great and some of the flyers are good, but I do think you need to open something pretty decent to go into the archtype.

Personally I find green to be pretty strong, especially green/blue. The synergy between them is very real and the skyrider is absurd. It's pretty hard to deal with big tramplers backed up by disperse, totally lost and sleep. And divination/sift give you something to do with all the mana available. Plus that 1/3 is great.

G/U needs to come together and you need to open some specific Uncommons for the deck to be good though. Sure, this is the deck for Skyrider Patrol, and Sleep (and Aether Tunnel, for that matter), but if you don't open these, you'll have some problems closing out games. Totally Lost I'm not high on altogether and while I like Disperse, oftentimes you'd just want a solid combat trick, and Blue is the only colour that doesn't really provide that (Titanic Growth, Sure Strike, Abnormal Endurance and Mighty Leap generally work better with Tramplers than Disperse IMO).
In that regard it's kind of similar to the R/B sacrifice deck. The good versions of that deck are really, really good, but you often don't get the tools you need (in R/Bs case, these are the sacrifice outlets, which are ALL uncommon) to make the deck work.

The reverse is true for U/B this format; you just grind the hell out of your opponent using cards like Divination, Macabre Waltz and Salvager of Secrets; all the while having access to excellent removal and even solid finishers at common. While the deck gets better with uncommons (Vampire Sovereign, Exclusion Mage and Gravedigger come to mind), I don't think they're essential to your gameplan.


IMO the best archetype with Green is G/R. This is the Green deck with the most cohesive gameplan, and Red offers a great deal of redundancy alongside removal and reach. Overall I think the archetype is solid, but not one of the best.

G/U I talked about, G/W is quite possibly the weakest archetype in the format, G/B is a "goodstuff" approach that can work if both colours are open; if not the deck often ends up underpowered and, unlike W/B or U/W, doesn't have a synergy backdoor.

Yeah, sometimes you want a trick, but Disperse is overall much stronger than a trick since it doesn't require your opponents consent to be good. And with big creatures it's imo a better trick than sure strike since if they double block intelligently they still lose two creatures from the table not just one. Also it's great for forcing through surprise lethal via trample, acting as a enchantment removal with upside, fogging Plainswalkers or just acting like a timewalk. I'd rate it over any of the combat tricks and all the enchantment removal bar rec sage in the set since it has far more flexibility. It is card disadvantage in some situations granted.

Totally Lost is just an expensive disperse more or less, apart from edge cases where the opponent is mana screwed, but an expensive disperse is still a great card in m19.

Personally I feel that UG is the strongest green archtype, you can already get all the big creatures you want from green so all red gives you is some ok but not great removal. I never feel like I need reach in green, mostly I want value and disruption which blue helps with a great deal. I don't think cancel is all that good in the set, think it's overdrafted tbh, but it's certainly good in green.

The red green list that's kinda broken is the Unsealing list, now that's a disgusting list if you can not be too slow.

Disperse certainly is more flexible than a combat trick, but in the applied case, Disperse is worse, because while both Disperse and a combat trick let you win a combat and possibly remove two creatures from the battlefield, Disperse moves the worse creature to the opposing hand instead of the graveyard, thereby not being a 2-for-1. I do like having access to one Disperse in basically any blue deck, but I almost never want my second, whereas I have no problems running two or three combat tricks in the correct deck(s).

In comparison to Disperse, Totally Lost denies the opponent a draw step, at the cost of 3 mana. It is also a lot less flexible (as you need to leave up 5 mana (instead of 2)), it is much worse against token creatures like 2/2 Knights and 5/5 Dragons and it is actually often a negative tempo play (there's very few creatures costing more than 5 mana). I'll play one in my controlling blue decks if I have to, but am never happy to play it; and think it's actively bad in tempo decks.

Red gives access to the best common instant-speed removal in the set (Shock and Electrify), which double down as combat tricks (Also, Electrify is premium removal in a format full of 4-toughness creatures and Shock, while not quite as premium, is still really good). It also gives a good out to excess mana in Sparktongue Dragon (meanwhile the card's not unplayable if you need to tempo out at 5 mana either) and access to good aggressive creatures in Boggart Brute and Havoc Devils.
The deck is not broken by any means, but you can build a much better GR than GU deck out of only/mostly M19 Commons.

I'm not a fan of Cancel in Limited in general, but M19 is probably the format that suits Cancel the best. It's definitely not a top common or anything, but I'm not unhappy to start 1-2 Cancel in my more mid-range-y/controlling Blue decks. It's a more expensive and harder to cast, but more flexible Essence Scatter, and Essence Scatter is a really good blue common (arguably Blue's best, IMO its best by a notable margin).

In the situation I'm talking about a trick wouldn't get you a 2 for 1 - e.g Boar vs 2 2/4s a sure strike is a 1 for 1 where a disperse is a 1 for one and tempo so strictly better. Rather than be unable to attack into a good double block you can make the attack and dare them to block. Also disperse completely blows out opposing tricks, regardless of what they are they get beaten by disperse so you can be much more aggressive attacking into open mana knowing that at worst you'll trade for their trick plus the mana cost of the creature.

I'm really not sold on red removal in this set, shock is better here than most places, but it's not great and electrify is ok I guess. I very rarely see electrify while drafting so it's not something I've played with much, rabid bite is a sorcery but it's far more efficient. Maybe I'll give rg a go, just can't see it bringing as much to the table as blue though - divination and sift are very easy to pick up which are things green has no access to wheras it does have access to big things and removal.

edit: thinking about it, there is a trick that isn't blown out by disperse, assuming there's multiple creatures attacking/blocking, which is Uncomfortable Chill. Another strong effect, but more niche.