Hello everyone!
In this article, I will be presenting Sunyveil’s draft ratings for Fall of Argenport. These will include cards from Fall of Argenport packs as well as the curated packs. In case you don't know him, he is a great player and you can catch him drafting on https://www.twitch.tv/sunyveil or in the video section of the eternaltitans.com.
Ratings
The ratings can be found in the following table: Sunyveil's FOA draft ratings
There, each card is graded as follows:
| S | Take this card and think about moving into this faction even if you're not in it yet |
| A | Take this card unless you are far away from playing this faction |
| B | Solid card for this faction, but not worth derailing your draft |
| C | Positive filler |
| D | Negative filler |
| E | I hope you don't have to play any of these |
Such ratings don't really give the full picture of what you should pick. Drafting is complex, the value of cards change as your deck takes shape and each player will have their personal preferences according to their previous experiences. So, when looking at draft pick orders or card ratings you shouldn't try to see what is marginally better than what. Focus instead on the big discrepancies between your evaluation and the author’s and reflect on that. Are you frequently playing some cards which are rated low? Are you switching colours or splashing for a merely good card?
I will now highlight some key points of Suny’s ratings, give some counterpoints and share other personal views on the format.
The Bombs
Let's start with the best cards! Below are shown the S and A-rated cards for each of the factions.
Here we see a lot of rares and legendary bomby cards. Be mindful of what is not here, there are loads of flashy legendaries that weren't included, so don't go completely out of your way to play those cards.
A big surprise for me is seeing Momentum Builder so highly rated, and I will definitely try it out the next time one is passed to me in a draft. For those that don't know, the buff it gets from each attack is permanent, but you do need to give it some attack points before it can start brawling.
The biggest stand out here are the Spellcraft cards, especially the common Fire ones, that take several of the A spots. This is where context and understanding draft matters more than just ratings. All of these weapons are very good and even the ones not listed here are pretty close in power level to them, but to use their full potential you need to have a good power curve of units. Having more units in play gives you more options on how and when to play the weapons. Also, if your units are expensive, you will spend a large portion of the game with these weapons stuck in your hand, while spellcrafting is already very power demanding. Anyway, spellcraft weapons are great, but be mindful that they do compete against each other and everything else that doesn’t put a body on the table. I think one of the key challenges of this format is balancing units non-units and power well in your draft decks.
The Commons
The bulk of your deck won’t be those rares or legendaries, the commons are what really define what you are doing in a draft.
As you might have noticed from the previous section, Fire commons are quite busted. I haven’t had the chance to try Pyre Elemental yet, but it clearly punches hard and fast when properly enabled. Hotblood Barbarian is a card that I am really fond of; it fills the curve well, threatens a lot of damage AND also creates a Temper when you need it (which for some is a desirable card in this format) - I would actually rate it even higher. Even though Fissure is a good card, it does something very similar to Welding Torch, Gun Down and Final Shot. So you shouldn't prioritize it very highly.
It is pretty easy to overlook Master-at-Arms, but it really is one of the best cards to keep pressuring your opponent. Peacekeeper’s Helm may seem weaker than Changeestik and Welding Torch, but in aggressive decks, Rebuking a unit is almost as good as killing it and the cost efficiency does make up for the lower stats.
I strongly disagree with Suny’s rating for Primal. I believe the format is fast enough that you can’t play a 6 power 2/4 and wait for things to happen. Snowrager and Downpour are not consistently worth a card. Changeestik and Lethrai Darkstalker do carry their weight, the first is a splashable bomb, while the second enables a powerful nightfall aggressive strategy (be mindful that nightfall is not present in Justice and Fire).
I do believe Suny is undervaluing Entangling Vines, Shamanic Blast, Snowfort Trumpeter and Scavenging Spikeback, and I will make a quick diversion to talk about these two units.
So, this new draft format came with Fall of Argenport and that’s how we will always see it. However, half of the cards we get are from the curated packs. Dire Wolf Digital uses those to bring balance and define archetypes for the draft format. The card quality of the curated packs is pretty high and they can really push you in certain directions. Fall of Argenport (as far as I can tell) doesn’t really have anything in terms of Yeti synergies but packs 2 and 3 are full of very strong cards that care about Yetis. The point here is that no one is going to start pack 2 drafting Yetis, but you should often leave pack 3 with a great Yeti deck. Grenadins seems to be in a similar spot, with a lot of support in packs 2 and 3, but I have not seen a good version of this deck yet. Trumpeter is a card that helps you fill your Yeti density from Fall of Argenport packs, it has very good synergy with both Yeti Snowslinger and Slope Sergeant, and is a great punting target.
Spikeback is more of a build around. It gets a really sizeable tribute buff for its cost and overwhelm does complement it well. Now, the first thing that comes to mind when trying to make a deck that activates tribute are sacrifice and discard effects or small useless tokens that can suicide attack. While those can do the job, in my opinion, the best path to exploiting tribute is by having units that force the opponent to block. This means cheap high attack/low health, warcry and infiltrate units. Spikebacks can go really late, so you can have as many as you want in your deck and during games you can have a cascade effect of forcing your opponent to trade in combat due to a chain of 4 power 5/5’s. This might not be a premier strategy in the format, but you can build ruthless decks around this card and the likes of Clan Hero, Yeti Snowslinger, Hissing Spiketails, etc.
Corrupted Umbren is a surprisingly powerful common. It can completely turn games around and with a little bit of support, reaches bomb level status. There is a big drop in the rest of the Shadow commons; Cut Ties is a tad too expensive and Lethrai Bladewhirl is so much worse than Master-at-Arms. I see a lot of people going out of their way to kill the inspire units, some of them warrant that respect, but quickdraw isn’t that powerful, so try to assess your situation before spending valuable removal on the Target Caller. The overview is that Shadow isn’t particularly deep in this set. Also, note that none of Shadow’s best commons are Wisps.
In contrast to Shadow, Time is a much deeper colour. All these cards are fine and so are many that got left out from this Top 5 list. Wurmstone is the core card of a spell-centric archetype (with the aid of the perfectly serviceable Training Ground).
Spiteful Lumen is a card that has disappointed me and I know this will go against the general view of the format, but I am not a fan of the Wisps and Radiants archetype for Xenan. There are just too few common Wisps I am willing to play and consequently, cards like Spiteful Lumen don’t really generate much value. At uncommon, Preserver of Dualities is great, but it doesn’t really gain any support from the rest of your deck. Mistress of Light has a powerful effect, but it isn’t enough to convince me to play horrible 1/1’s and 1/2's.
Alternatively, I have felt that Xenan is at its strongest when combining big bodies with Killer effects and recursion. Dark Return and Predator’s Instinct are common in the curated packs and Surgeon’s Saw and Deft Strike add a lot of redundancy to this plan. Don’t forget that most Time bounce effects can be used with your own units to reset Killer.
Overplayed Bad Cards
Naturally, there are a bunch of horrible cards that shouldn't come close to your deck. Here I highlight some cards that I see quite often that I don't think are worth their inclusion in your drafts (they were all rated D or below by Suny).
Archetypes
Fall of Argenport draft shows a big departure from what we have seen in Set 3. There, due to the tribal theme, decks were more often than not very synergistic and played out very differently. For example, Valkyries had a lot of evasion, Dinos and Sentinels played big dudes, Gunslingers tried to win with early beats. Here, independent of factions, most decks will be more similar, combining spells, units and weapons in very standard cost curves. This means that you should focus more on having a balanced deck and picking individually good cards over synergy.
Fire seems to be the best faction by a fair margin and it not only got the best spellcraft weapons, but it also has Torch and Oni Ronin in the curated packs. In my experience, it did blend well with all the other factions except for Time, where it missed some of the evasion that the other pairs provided.
There are some more synergy driven decks that I alluded to before. Time spells-matter, which is heavily carried by Wurmstone and even though it works best with Primal, can be of any faction. Primal tempo nightfall, where you want loads of Lethrai Darkstalkers. Xenan Radiants, which seems to really need the premium uncommons to work well. It also seems to exist a Berserk deck with Gift of Battle, Overheat and Galeprowler at commons, but people don’t seem to have cracked it yet. Either way, don't worry too much if your deck doesn't have a theme, you can do just as well with goodcards.deck.
Final Words
Well, this is my initial view of the new draft format and I am sure there is still a lot to be learnt about it. Let me know what you guys think about it, what strong archetypes am I missing? Is mill actually viable? What cards did Suny evaluate horribly wrong? Why are Wisps and Radiants actually good?
As I said before, there are is a high density of good/archetype defining cards in the curated packs, so I will follow this article up with a discussion of what is going on in packs 2 and 3 - the subthemes, the best cards in each colour, the traps and some major takeaways.
Since I am also presenting a pick order here, I feel responsible to end this article warning people not to use it blindly to drive your drafts. Each deck will have different needs and strengths, identifying, correcting and potentializing them is something that requires experience and creativity and no chart of grades can help with that.
