Gatecrash Draft Primer
I’ve Already Discussed the Simic Combine in a Previous Article. to Wrap up the Current Season, This Article Will Cover the Other Four Guilds of Gatecrash: the...
I’ve already discussed the Simic Combine in a previous article. To wrap up the current season, this article will cover the other four guilds of Gatecrash: the Boros Legion, the Gruul Clans, the Orzhov Syndicate, and House Dimir.
Boros is about fast, naked aggression. Start hitting them on turn 3, and don’t stop hitting them until they’re dead. Boros decks live by the two-drop, and they die by the two-drop. A Boros deck without a turn 2 play and follow up on turns 3 and 4 won’t win many games. You’ll need at least six two-drops to have a strong Boros deck, and having seven or eight is even better. You don’t have to worry about having too many because the quality of your two-drops is so strong that they can compete with other people’s three- and four-drops.
A Boros deck without both white and red mana won’t win many games either, so the mana base will almost always be eight Mountains and eight Plains give or take a Boros Guildgate or two, which you very much want since they cut down on mulligans. In extreme cases, you can run fifteen lands if you have a Sacred Foundry or Boros Guildgate. Even when you end up with a higher mana curve than you would like, it’s almost always right to stick with sixteen since there are no mana sinks other than extort, Sunhome Guildmage, and Truefire Paladin. Splashing is almost never right, and the only remotely tempting card to consider splashing is Clan Defiance.
In terms of creature counts, due to battalion and the need to not miss spots on your mana curve you need a large number of creatures. You don’t want as many as Simic, where I said you need a bare minimum of seventeen and are happy to be at 20+, but I’d still say the bare minimum is fifteen and I prefer seventeen or eighteen. The good news is that these creature counts will emerge organically if you properly value men, and it’s rare that you find yourself in a position where you don’t have enough men in your deck unless the draft simply had none to take.
Occasionally, you’ll be short and need to prioritize, but it’s rare; generally, the worst-case scenarios involve running five-drops you’d prefer to avoid. The first one or two expensive cards are fine, especially if they are strong, but more than two cards that cost five or more starts to hurt and more than four is very bad. There is no such thing as “Big Boros,” only bad Boros.
Boros has a few subthemes: battalion, flying, Court Street Denizen, and Foundry Street Denizen. At a minimum, you will use one of these themes, and often you will use two or three; occasionally, you will use all four. Each of the themes depends on having the right set of enablers.
The battalion theme is about being able to turn all your creatures sideways to trigger battalion on Wojek Halberdiers, Daring Skyjek, Warmind Infantry, and friends. The three routes to making this plan work are to remove the blockers, to win the combats when they try to block your weaker creatures, and to assemble creatures that can’t be profitably blocked. Anything that doesn’t make it to 2/2 is highly vulnerable since either a 1/4 or a 2/2 can beat you in a fight. The ideal is being able to not get taken advantage of by a 2/3 either since there won’t be that many creatures that get bigger than that and you can have tricks for those.
Even if an attacker doesn’t hit hard, it’s fine as long as it doesn’t get picked off by blockers. Removing blockers, either by burning them or by borrowing them with Act of Treason, is also a good solution, but if every decent creature must be removed, then you’ll quickly run out of removal. This will stop you from saving removal for their best creatures, so this strategy is rarely effective as a primary plan. Winning combats with bloodrush, especially Skinbrand Goblin, which is very valuable to you since it does double duty as this and also as a two-drop, is excellent for getting you past a few 2/3 or 1/4 blockers. A good addition to this plan is to have a Court Street Denizen theme.
Plan two is flying. Boros has a number of excellent flyers, and if you emphasize them and concentrate your removal on enemy flyers, you can go over the heads of your opponents’ blockers. This is the place where removal shines most since there aren’t that many flyers in the format and many of them are large, so killing those guys will let you get through in the air, although it also makes removal of other creatures unnecessary. The key is that flying is additive. The more flyers you have, the more valuable it becomes to get more flyers and ways to enable flyers. It also lets you add Daring Skyjek to their number; a fully flying battalion that can’t get eaten is usually game over, and often you can afford to throw one ground attacker away per turn to hit them in the air for five.
Plans three and four are Court Street Denizen and Foundry Street Denizen. Foundry Street Denizen is a minor subtheme, but if you can turn two or three free picks into strong one-drops that often hit for two, then you have a huge leg up on racing and triggering battalion. The problem is that he will often go dead and you’ll effectively be a card down. If you go down this road, you’ll need to emphasize speed even more than usual along with having lots of red creatures. A lot of people will go down early and hard, but in exchange you’re giving up the long game, so it’s important to own that and not try to hedge your bets.
For Court Street Denizen, you’re picking up an entire new game plan of tapping down blockers to clear the way for your armada. This allows Boros to have a long game in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise, have unless you get one by playing cards that are more expensive than you would like. Court Street Denizen also works well with your best non-rare six-drop, Urbis Protector, and vastly improves the value of Knight Watch at five. Even one Court Street Denizen makes it acceptable to run Knight Watch, and multiples make the card quite good since it doubles as a Falter. If your deck is mostly white creatures, and especially if you have spells that make multiple white creatures, Court Street Denizen goes way up in value, and it’s reasonable to expect to get it late, including wheeling it in sufficiently deep packs.
Boros is also the archetype that benefits most from sideboarding. There are two groups of opponents. Against Orzhov, Dimir, and Esper opponents, you need to worry about your creatures being eaten by blockers and allowing them to win by removing the ones that matter once they’ve blanked enough of the ones that don’t. This means you need as many good men as possible, even if it means being a little expensive and you need to get rid of cards that don’t impact the board permanently like Act of Treason because you’re not in a race.
Against Boros, Gruul, and Simic, you do the opposite and move in on cards that win races for you. Whoever stays on the offensive will have the advantage; you can’t afford to be blocking against a Gruul deck, and they can’t afford to be blocking against you. Also good here is Smite, which can help a lot in a race if you can technically block but which is often effectively dead against Orzhov and Dimir. Once you are sure you will get a tight set of playables, you can put a higher priority on getting both configurations to be strong rather than taking only cards that go both ways. If you fall behind, you need to avoid such cards when you have the option to make sure you get to 24.
During the early part of the draft, it’s important (like all the other guilds) to decide if you’re in or out and draft accordingly. Boros has a lot of very good gold cards, so cornering the market pays off, but it’s also deep enough to survive a two-way split and still be quite good. If you know you want to be in Boros, you need to prioritize the gold cards to try to discourage others from joining you; a late option on one of the good gold cards will often happen and is a strong signal that Boros is open. Even if you have to take a worse card to do so, avoid passing such misleading treasures.
Prioritize even terrible cheap cards over the filler-level expensive cards early on because you will usually get enough expensive cards for free or from picking top-shelf ones and often you’ll end up with more than you can play even in a bad deck without trying—in fact, this happens most often when your deck is going to be bad. Later on, if you know your curve is low, you can take solid four-, five-, and six-drops over bad two- and three-drops since you know your curve can handle it. Do it too early and you can end up with a train wreck of a mana curve.
Without further ado, here are my Boros card rankings. Note that these rankings, like the Simic ones, don’t care about flexibility or signals, only the value of the card to your deck. Where they differ substantially from Boros master Paul Rietzl list from before the Pro Tour, I note the disagreement:
Windmill Slam
Aurelia’s Fury
Firemane Avenger
Assemble the Legion
Boros Reckoner
Frontline Medic
Gideon, Champion of Justice
Aurelia, the Warleader
Truefire Paladin
Wrecking Ogre
Angelic Skirmisher
Sunhome Guildmage
Five-Alarm Fire (Paul does not think it’s this good)
Firefist Striker
Foundry Champion
Syndic of Tithes
Mugging
Wojek Halberdiers
Daring Skyjek
Skyknight Legionnaire (Paul has this higher than the good two-drops)
Boros Elite
Holy Mantle (I keep wondering where this belongs; Paul thinks it’s a little lower)
Skinbrand Goblin
Rubblebelt Raiders (1RRR is harsh, but it’s amazing in play)
Hellkite Tyrant
Guardian of the Gateless
Hellraiser Goblin (high variance depending on if you can pull this off)
Homing Lightning
Must Read
Always Play
Warmind Infantry
Legion Loyalist
Armored Transport
Boros Charm
Knight of Obligation
Ember Beast
Madcap Skills (decreasing marginal value)
Blind Obedience (never had this, so not sure about ranking)
Spark Trooper (very unsure about this one, had it once)
Viashino Shanktail
Maya is a hardware enthusiast who tests and reviews smart home devices, smartphones, wearables, and audio gear. She focuses on practical consumer value and build quality.
