UNSTABLE Magic: The Gathering draft – Pound your friends with just four commons

What to be careful of

Unstable is home to some brutal rares and mythics, but chances are you won’t have to face those down. Instead, I’ll focus on a few commons and uncommons that might give you a bit of a scare if you’re playing Jund Pain for Pounder.

This card pushed me into a stalemate since it made a first strike creature immune to ALL of my creatures. Once the Ground Pounders get bigger, your opponent will have to chump with this, letting the smaller ones through. However, this might buy them enough time to take over the long game.

A variant card with several different versions, so it’s not as common as you think. However, my group determined that both Painiac and Ground Pounder had open mouths since you can see their teeth, and I had to agree. This will hold back the Pounders for a few rounds, letting your opponents build their defenses.

Walls are hell on an aggro deck, but this one, in particular, has its own circle in hell. Your Painiacs and Ground Pounders must be pretty large to take one down, and even if they get big enough, your opponent can force a re-roll potentially making them smaller. They can also beat your Snickering Squirrels on the stack, rendering their boosting ability totally useless.

All three of these cards can be taken down with a Just Desserts, Wall of Fortune requiring a chump first, but if you don’t have any, a Hazmat Suit (used) might help your creatures get around them.

Infuriating, to say the least. Thank goodness GO TO JAIL doesn’t have flash. This is a hyper-efficient removal spell that can ping off your Ground Pounders one at a time if your opponent drafted enough. Squirrels don’t help you revive them back either since you MUST roll double-sixes to remove this dreaded enchantment.

However, those dice rolls do allow Ground Pounder to get his trample. Don’t forget that!

Final thoughts

My thoughts on Unstable are that it’s fun as a joke set, but underneath the humor, there is a sound set of mechanics that you’ll need to take into account. Like any Magic: The Gathering expansion, your deck will become weaker as it loses focus, and players who try to cram dice rolling, Augments, Hosts, Cranks, and tribal synergies into a single deck are going to get nowhere fast.

Again, like any Magic set, pick a mechanic and focus on it. Augments are really powerful if you can hold the fort down, and Cranks have the potential to be stronger than Planeswalkers with proper timing. For me, aggressive dice rolling with a semi-theme of Goblins prove solid enough to hone a deck on.

With the right mindset, you can make a solid, well-constructed deck that consistently works, just as if you were drafting a normal expansion.

A few mythics and rares seem like trolling cards designed to make games miserable, most notably Rules Lawyer and The Grand Caulcutron, but they are rare enough that you probably won’t bump into them.

And as a side note, Wizards of the Coast obviously invested in a better paper stock for the cards. They feel marvelous to the touch and a lot thicker than the last few sets, meaning less non-foil warping. Nice choice with that, and it makes the set’s unique full art lands feel all the more valuable. I might pick up another box somewhere down the line just to snag me a few more of those lands.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/12/17/unstable-magic-the-gathering-strategy/