Rough Drafts: Shadows over Innistrad
Hello everyone! It's time for another edition of Rough Drafts! This week, since we are officially on hiatus from our journey though the year of Modern flashbacks, we get to explore a brand new draft format in Triple Shadows over Innistrad! I have to say, I'm really excited to try out the format because the original Innistrad was one of the top limited formats of all time. Will the return to Innistrad be just as good, or will it struggle to emerge from its predecessor's shadow? That's what we are trying to figure out!
Let's get to the videos, then we'll talk about my impressions of Shadows over Innistrad limited. A quick reminder. If you enjoy the Rough Drafts series and other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.
Shadows over Innistrad: Drafting
Shadows over Innistrad: Round 1
Shadows over Innistrad: Round 2
Shadows over Innistrad: Round 3 (Finals)
Discussion
Since I haven't played nearly enough Shadows over Innistrad limited to feel comfortable breaking down the entire format, let's instead focus on our deck's specifics. Overall, I thought that it functioned pretty well. Our goal was to cycle though our deck with card draw and eventually cast a huge Rise from the Tide, and we were able to do that with some consistency. However we did have one big problem.
The main thing I learned in this draft is that Rise from the Tides is not Spider Spawning, no matter how much I wanted it to be. Round two is the best example. We had two different losses where we had the ability to cast Rise from the Tides for a ton of 2/2 Zombie tokens, but it didn't matter because we could never find a window to resolve the powerful sorcery without losing the game since the Zombies enter the battlefield tapped. If Rise from the Tides had been Spider Spawning, we would have won both of those games easily by making a bunch of Spider tokens, chumping as necessary, and then flashing back Spider Spawning for the win. While Rise from the Tides is extremely powerful when it works, the fact that the Zombie tokens cannot block immediately means that making it work is much harder than you think.
On the other hand, I was really impressed by Forgotten Creation. Not only does it benefit from Zombie synergies, but the ability to discard our entire hand, trigger madness, and fill our graveyard with fuel for Rise from the Tides was extremely powerful. Better yet, it's a "may" ability, so if we want to keep our hand, we still have a Hill Giant (with skulk), which isn't exciting, but is certainly a playable card in limited. While we didn't get to use Forgotten Creation very often because our opponents made killing it a priority, when we did it was always very good and much better than I thought heading into the draft.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. So far, our quest to figure out if Shadows over Innistrad limited is as good as the original is unresolved. I will say that I have been enjoying it so far, but we'll definitely have to play some more drafts before ranking it among the best formats of all time. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestion in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
