The Opener: First Pick Theros Beyond Death and other thoughts.
Welcome to another edition of The Opener! Theros, Beyond Death is back as the Ranked format on Arena so hopefully my insight can help you with your drafts.
The first pick of the draft is not extremely important but it’s fun to think about. It doesn’t always get played and it’s the pick with the least amount of context. At this point in the draft, you don’t have any idea what any other player is doing yet. Your goal when you’re first picking should be, in general, to take the most powerful card.
If you have never read a ‘what’s the pick?” article before, I will be showing you a few pack one pick one (P1P1) scenarios and I will tell you what I would take and my reasoning behind it. I will also give an honorable mention. So let’s get started!
The Picks
My Pick
Heliod’s Intervention. The best cards here are definitely Voracious Typhon, Dreaful Apathy, and Heliod’s Intervention. Most of the time, I believe that it is correct to take the rare in this format. In fact, it took me a long time to find picks for this article that weren’t super obvious. This pick is close but it is not an exception. Heliod’s Intervention is very often a blowout. I find that a reasonable amount of the time it is a two-for-one, three-for-one or even better! Even the life-gain mode is not a terrible fail-case and will catch opponents by surprise. I also believe that it is an underrated card that I believe players should take higher.
Honorable Mention: Dreadful Apathy is premium, common removal and it is what I would take here if the Intervention was not in the pack.Voracious Typhon is a great card too but I am giving a slight edge to Apathy for being removal.
My Pick
Hateful Eidolon This pack has a relatively low power level. The rare isn’t bad but I’m not taking it for two reasons. The first reason is that it is gold, which means it goes into a much smaller number of decks. The second reason is that there is only one card here that I am fine with first-picking. For anyone that is not yet aware, Hateful Eidolon is a great build-around and having it early will make every aura go up in my pick order. Especially Mire’s Grasp and Mogis’s Favor.
Honorable Mention: Return to Nature is is one of green’s top commons, I always will play the first one or two copies of a card like this. Ordinarily, cards like this are super narrow but in this format Return to Nature is the best it has ever been. There are tons of enchantments in this set and pretty often it’s just Doom Blade against enchantment creatures. Not only that, but every single mode is relevant enough that it is rarely ever dead. You can exile problematic escape cards and even destroy very annoying artifacts such as Shadowspear and Entrancing Lyre!
My Pick
Elspeth’s Nightmare This pick is probably going to surprise some people. I would think that most players would think that this is an easy Storm’s Wrath. Usually a board wipe would be a great pick in Limited but in my opinion, Storm’s Wrath is largely a trap. My reasoning for that is it doesn’t do what red decks want to do in this format. Most red decks in this format want to be aggressive and this is the opposite of what you want to be doing when you’re red. There are so few red creatures that can survive through it and even then it doesn’t really deal with the creatures that would give you problems when you are red. Outside of Final Flare red doesn’t have a good way to deal with a five toughness creature.
All that being said, it’s still a pretty good card but Elspeth’s Nightmare is just fantastic and when played early. It is very often a two-for-one that also exiles their graveyard. If you have ever played against early Nightmare, you know that card can be your nightmare too! It’s a top-tier uncommon and I’m never happy to see my opponent cast it.
Honorable Mention: Storm’s Wrath is still good if you can build around it or in just about any BR deck. Often if you start with it in your hand, it’s worth it to keep it in your hand to blow your opponent out. For those reasons, it barely edges Final Death out.
Honorable Mention: Fateful End It doesn’t kill that many creatures, but it’s still nice to have. One With the Stars can answer bigger creatures but it’s generally a worse card because they keep devotion from their creature, they can still activate it’s abilities and it can be removed by enchantment removal.
My Pick
Reverent Hoplite This isn’t a strong pack so I am taking the card with the highest ceiling. Reverent Hoplite is a really powerful build-around card and our rare is an easier to kill Youthful Knight that is an enchantment. So as you can imagine, is not that great.
This is a good and a fun format but it definitely has its faults. It’s mostly so good because it can lead to some really awesome long games. Despite often having really fun, long games with escape; tempo still matters. You can still absolutely be run over by aggro or lose to bombs quickly. Which brings me to my biggest problem with the format, bombs! There are so many bombs, and the best ones are extremely difficult to interact with. My least favorite are the ones that you need extremely narrow answers for such as Kiora Bests the Sea God, Dream Trawler, and Shadowspear. My other, much smaller, gripe about the format is there are less sweet, build-around cards than other formats. This means that there aren’t really any sweet, hidden strategies so it’s not as re-playable. But that won’t affect the average player because all that it does is make your 25th draft less fun than it might be in other formats.
All that being said though, I do absolutely recommend this format and it’s a good format to play for fun or Ranked. But be prepared for bombs. The best thing to do is try to save answers/removal as long as you can for them. However, you should also be mentally prepared to lose to them because it’s absolutely going to happen.
I hope that you have at least learned something and I hope to see you in the draft, thank you!
