(I like swords.)

#1: White by itself seems strong at removal, but not good at building a board: their best creatures are fuel for their color pairings and the best you can get is a 3/4 flyer for 5, if you put the +1 counter on itself. What makes white top tier, however, is that the power levels of all colors at common are pretty close together, and every single pairing of white's is top tier. White/blue can play 3/3 vigilant flyers for 3 just by breathing, white/black has an easy to build sacrifice machine to get cards and treasure, red/white makes full use of equipment synergies, and green/white plays a creature every turn and then a fat chocobo. You also have uncommons like multiple ways to protect your creatures, the menace that is Adelbert Steiner, catching a fish, and Primal Garuda. Some of their rares are also GG rares, like stalling the board and then playing a Wind Crystal, several cards that will win by themselves, and several gross bonus sheet cards. The only bad thing I can really say about white is that it may struggle to beat other boards and it has some mechanics that are alien to the main themes of the color pairs, like lifelink and cleric tribal. With good flyers, good removal, and vital pieces for all their pairings, it's gonna be very hard to pick a color that's not white. Unless you luck out that is.

#2: Blue isn't #2 because of white/blue. It's because of how absolutely insane their commons are. Almost all of them are among the best of their kind and the rest are at minimum serviceable. Plenty of cards don't just get you card advantage but also a better board. You can just play Sahagins and win by virtue of being a blue/red deck. The only bad thing I can say about blue is that their common counterspell is an X spell and any of their other spells that can't be cast for 4 mana or more don't contribute to any pairing. And that Dragoon's Wyvern is not good. You should instead be playing cards like Rook Turret and Retrieve the Esper. Retrieve the Esper specifically works in just about any deck and it's insane a blue creature spell can give you a 3/3 on turn 4 then a 5/5 on turn 6, all in one common card. Surveil, while useful and has some good cards around it, is not the plan for blue/black. It's some nebulous thing called "control" without giving enough options for obtaining said control. Meanwhile they gave us Brainstorm on the bonus sheet which...why? Even if it's just a 1 mana spell Brainstorm is considered one of the best draw spells in the game for a reason, and there are ways to easily shuffle your library. With how often you'll be playing 4 mana spells Ultros can stunlock any problem blockers. Ether is a mistake. You can sketch, you can Shiva, you can just win. And finally we have Terra Branford...just kidding she rips her face off and it's actually Urza. Thanks for reminding me how much I hated playing against him in Modern Horizons. Honestly, blue has chosen violence this set, and it's devastatingly good at it. The only reason why it's not #1 is because its removal is...actually among the worst of the colors. Because it chose violence, you see. Blue has few options for actually sending something to the graveyard that isn't their few counterspells. If they are somehow losing and they don't have a bomb ready there's no coming back. This is honestly pretty typical of a limited format blue in modern Magic but I feel it's especially bad here.

#3: Red has an absolutely ridiculous selection of common cards. Three burn spells, strong supports for their pairings, and, specifically, the burn spell Light of Judgement, which will be the perfect counter to most of the scenarios you'll find yourself in in lategame. Blue/red, in particular, is a menace and if it was just a little bit better I would call it the best color pair in the set. They also have, honestly, the best common equipment in Warrior's Sword. Their only downsides are a relevant amount of their cards are just, bad, and they have the displeasure of being the other half of black/red, which is awful in draft. Though, a Sabotender on turn 2 can also just, shorten your opponent's life by 4 or 5 or more if not answered. Their uncommons are terrifying, especially their cheap ones like Fire Magic and Lightning Bolt. Fire Magic will invalidate both black/red and red/green that have to rely on awful tokens to function. Funny enough that's half of red's pairings and you can see where I'm going with this and why red is #3. Just play either a bunch of equipment or their big noncreature spells and you'll be happy. You should probably also take Choco-Comet no matter your other colors because of its ability to close out games. (Why did they print this...? This is so gross with Ether.) Seifer is also ridiculously powerful and any color pair can play him, unlike that loser SeeD. (who is also really good but not playable in every deck) Unfortuantely that's it for stellar noncommons. Their other noncommons aren't bad but aren't gamewinners...but you do have Freya who will give red/white the insane rushdown power it's capable of.

#4: At common green does possess some heavy-hitters, good cards for color pairs, and very effective combat tricks, but really struggles to do much else like, say, outpressure their peers or survive their removal spells. The ceiling for green's common creature stats is 6/6 and several of their spells are ineffective ramps but if you had to play a fatty and you missed the Iron Giant, green's commons will do. The problem with this strategy though is that you'll be seeing a lot of removal being held back for fatties like yours. I would have hoped the Broken Wings expy would be good in this format but since it costs 3 mana it's usually going to not trade well with the boards you'll be facing, nor stop what will kill you. Their noncommons are good, but not game winning. It's just the normal fare of combat trick here, board pump there, Ride the Shoopuf, trying to make birds work in spite of really bad cards for it. This color is honestly propped up by Golgari and its many wincons, like, say, Diamond Weapon. Some of those wincons are even at common. If you luck out though you'll get the red/green actual signpost uncommon and put together a terrifying board on turn 6. Don't try to draft Towns. They're bad, because they kind of forgot to make cards that care about them except for YoshiP. You can also really luck out and get Titan, which may be the best summon that you can reasonably cast. You just have to hope you get the right creatures for the right color pairs. This color doesn't have a plan B if it doesn't get what its pairings want.

#5: How can a color that has Sephiroth be the lowest rank? Because their commons are low-power, that's why. They might be able to scrape by by being the supporting cast of a white/black deck or a black/green deck, but the heavy lifting needs to be done by other colors. Your best common creature is going to be the Ahriman, which is honestly playable in any deck. In fact, so is the rat you can draft. The Malboro is not my idea of a good lategame creature and you are better off just paying the extra mana for an Iron Giant instead. (Though if you get into a scenario where your opponent's hand is just their last removal spell, playing Malboro will make them cry.) They also have to be dragged down by the awful color pair that is black/red. 0/1 wizards that ping face for 1 when you cast noncreature spells is not remotely close to enough damage to win games. Trying to force those tokens and triggers will make you play bad cards. Honestly black is best played skipping most of their creatures and letting other colors take those slots. Their spells are good. Their noncommons are a bit better with stellar 1-drops, a wall, the return of Deadly Dispute, and The Final Days. (Might actually be one of the best cards in the set, especially if you are black/green, so, you may wanna keep it in mind.) If you draft Vincent or Zenos though you can bully the other bad color pairs like red/green. The problem is that, to make black a competitive color choice, you need to draft noncommons. A fair bit, to pull the weights your common core is supposed to be pulling. It's really one of those colors that will likely hold your deck back instead of propel it forward since if you aren't lucky, your board is not going to stand against much. Sleeping on this color is allowed.

Set Observations:

Before I get into the set proper, I'm going to tell you what I keep on hearing from people drafting this set: the bonus sheet is a horrible addition to limited formats and it should go die in a fire.

Anyway, I am a bit disappointed that it's 2025 and there's still some color pairs that are lopsided in power level. Artifacts, big spells, yard filling, and equipment are very strong archetypes that will be fun to play. Birds, control, wizard tokens, and towns, are not. The rest--wide boards and snackrifices--are okay. It's the future and thankfully the colors are pretty close to eachother. (I'm still scratching my head over whether green or black is worse.) However, I do feel like a large amount of the cards really want you to be the color pair it's associated with. I don't find that weird in modern Magic, but I think what I'm saying is I'm kind of missing the days where the single colors stood on their own and they didn't have to feed off eachother.

Some of these takes aren't my own but it's worth repeating: the power levels of the cards are very close to eachother. I do think in most scenarios where you could play one of the common fatties, an Iron Giant would be better, but the blue and black ones do have utility...that isn't the landcycling on them. Plenty of the stellar noncommons keep within a close range of power level between eachother, with the only outliers being cards like the ones I mentioned already. (coughcoughfinaldays) I do think this is not a beginner friendly set so oh boy our newcomers are going through a trial by fire! But, hey, I started playing Magic again because Modern Horizons 1 was actually quite a bit of fun when I didn't know nearly as much about Magic as I do now. If I can do it so can they. If I can also spend way too long learning the intricacies of Magic, then again, so can they.

But on the flipside of these points, sometimes you just have to get lucky. Now, "get lucky" in this context is get one of the high-end bombs that are available, or, get enough of the good removal to be able to answer those and still present a winning board state. Part of the reason that went into putting red at #3 is because, while they don't have a lot, their removal has so many uses and their good pairings are so good I believe that will be the most fiercely contested color in draft. You're gonna have a hard time just getting those handed to you. But honestly? I feel like picking a solid core of noncreatures is part of playing draft good, and so far, from playing against the AI and some matches against players, I still think that.

I think the reason why some pairings don't look fun to play is because there was just no room made for their gimmicks. Control is bad this set. Tempo play is great this set. Going all in on removal and playing bombs will probably fall flat, especially since one of the colors for it has the worst selection of removal amongst all the colors. And Towns, guh, there's some good Towns, but there is like nothing supporting green/blue. I guess a green/blue deck would probably just leverage the strong midgame plays that aren't its ramps because all but one of them are only playable by midgame. Red/green suffers from this as well; there's not a lot of support for birds either. What supports there are are okay, I've seen the snowball take off and threaten to win games, but also I've seen plenty of decks stop the snowball and then red/green just dies. If we didn't have cards like this or this, we'd have to worry about red/green aggro again, but nope.

In fact that's honestly my critique of this set: aggro and control are kinda toothless so it's all just midrange and tempo this set. It's not bad Magic, I don't mind playing this sort of Magic, but it can honestly feel one-dimensional at times. There's a reason why I hyperfocused on the best common fatty. It's because whatever's the strongest after midgame is what's going to win before you can't really go under or over the average line of creature stats. Evasion has some place here, but otherwise it's just get as much bodies and stats on the board to win. You pretty much have to never play control stuff early because you need to shut down their lategame threats to either win or come back from losing. This is why Poison the Waters is also one of the worst cards. Nevermind that very few things that are good have 1 toughness.

I'm also a little worried about how high-power many of these cards are, but, then again, I do not pay attention to constructed metas in this day and age and have no particular desire to start. For all I know it's already in a bad spot, or a good spot, and people may or may not like it that way.