A Magic: The Gathering blog post from head designer Mark Rosewater has revealed which MTG Wilds of Eldraine archetype Wizards of the Coast thought was the worst during development. On September 4, Rosewater shares early notes from MTG Wilds of Eldraine’s lead vision designer Chris Mooney. They note low confidence in the MTG set’s red-green ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ archetype.
Originally, the red-green archetype was imagined as a Midrange attacking deck with an emphasis on combat tricks. However, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for this compared to Eldraine’s other archetypes.
“Story is resonant but doesn’t have much to work with in terms of creating an archetype”, Mooney writes. Mooney also mentions the creative team were pondering a Billy Goats Gruff deck instead, but there was even less of a clear direction for that idea.
While confidence in Little Red Riding Hood was low, the other classic fairytales were doing more than fine. “You can see that some draft archetypes were closer to their final versions than others”, Rosewater notes in his commentary. And it’s true – green-white was always focused on enchanting creatures, and tapping opposing creatures was always part of the game plan for blue-white.
The final version of the Little Red Riding Hood archetype (the one we know from previous news about the Wilds of Eldraine draft strategies), is now all about big, beefy creatures. As MTG designer Gavin Verhey notes in the video above, “It’s not original, but what’s not to love about smashing your opponent with size?”.
You can read more of Mooney and Rosewater’s design thoughts in the official MTG blog post.
According to the MTG 2023 release schedule, Wilds of Eldraine releases worldwide on September 8. This means there’s still time to plan your top MTG draft strategies and MTG Commander decks. The MTG Arena release was today, so we’re on the keen lookout for updates to the best MTG Arena decks.