After the controversies surrounding Marvel’s Spider-Man, the next Magic: The Gathering set had to be a home run. Luckily, Avatar: The Last Airbender is cut from a completely different cloth. After enjoying some Sealed and Draft in early access on MTG Arena, I can say that this set is going to be a blast to play in Limited, with Draft looking better than Sealed.
Avatar: The Last Airbender brings back a beloved gimmick for prerelease events. Players will have to choose a theme before the event, and each kit will contain five regular boosters and one special “Character Booster” containing seeded cards themed around a character from Team Avatar (plus Azula) and also around a color.
I wasn’t exactly aware of this (I like to jump into a new Limited format with as little information as possible) but I started getting suspicious after my first Sealed deck, Toph-themed, was essentially monogreen. You can see the deck below.
I think I opened a pretty good pool and this deck smashed, not losing a single game. Green seems an optimal color, and the strategies of Earthbending and ramping into big creatures, along with the “power 4 matters” theme, mesh quite well together. Not to mention green allows you to splash any bombs you may open. There’s also an interesting Lessons subtheme with some cards like Toph, Hard-Headed Teacher, Uncle Iroh, and of course Iroh, Grand Lotus.
One pleasant surprise was the return of Treetop Village in the set. For old-timers like me, this card triggers pleasant memories, which quickly became nightmares when my opponent played it and started putting counters on it with Earthbend. This means that if you manage to kill that big, trampling monkey-land, it will come back (due to Earthbend), and even if it loses the counters, it’s still a 3/3 trampler. And a classic.
I started getting suspicious when I noticed that my opponents also seemed to play mostly mono-colored decks. When I opened my second pool, Azula this time, I realized there was something wrong, because once again I was playing a mono-colored deck with a few powerful cards splashed. Here is the deck:
This pool was also quite good and the deck performed well, but not as well as the first one. The white-black color combination in Avatar is built around sacrifice, a strategy that rewards you for getting rid of permanents. However, sacrifice decks in Limited are always hard to pull off because, to make them work, you need fodder (creatures and other permanents to sacrifice), enablers (cards that let you sacrifice other cards), and payoffs (cards that reward you for sacrificing), and even when you have everything, you need to draw them in the right order.
At this point, every deck I had seen was basically monocolored. After some research, I realized that each Sealed pool was giving me two Character Boosters, rather than one. I don’t know if this is exclusive to the early access events or if it’s a way to differentiate the Arena experience from tabletop (Wizards of the Coast’s website makes it clear that in-person Sealed kits will come with five play booster packs and one character booster pack) . Anyways, this results in two boosters containing cards of the same color, which makes it easier to build a deck, but also limits the options from your pool. If this remains in place, expect your Arena Sealed events to be a clash of monocolored decks.
I wanted to try every character option, so here are the other decks I played in Sealed:
I still believe that Toph is the best option. Green is a great color and the strategies it enables seem very powerful. Any flyers-heavy deck is always a menace in Limited, and with blue-white having that theme, I expect those decks to do well too. I was also obliterated by a mono-red aggro deck using Firebending and fast creatures, so this format really seems open to a lot of strategies. How to Start a Riot is a lot better than it looks, perhaps the best card of the “+2/+0 to all your creatures” series that I’ve seen in a while. If your opponent swings with everything in a red deck, expect this to follow.
I only had time to play one Draft. By chance, I got to try the one strategy that was missing from the Sealed decks: Allies. White and green are the main colors for this, but you can find Ally-matter cards in all colors. Fixing will be key to this type of deck, but luckily there is plenty of it in the set. One key build-around card for Allies (besides mythics and other bombs) is Invasion Tactics. I just love this card. It’s a pump effect that grows all your team for a finishing swing or, as an alternative, you can use it to get in for some damage and draw cards. Pro tip: You can Airbend this and keep playing it for just two mana, pumping your team again. Nasty.
Overall, I had a lot of fun playing Avatar: The Last Airbender in Limited. I think the mono-color seeding makes Sealed a bit too predictable, so I like Draft more, for now. This is surely better than Through the Omenpaths, but I guess that bar was too low to not be crossed.
