As I prepare for the World Championships in Las Vegas, a tournament that features Duskmourn: House of Horror draft, I want to share some insights into the format that readers may find useful. At first, I found this format difficult to digest, but with several drafts now under my belt the format seems pretty straightforward. I’m going to go over what to look for, as well as my favorite archetypes.

Before I jump into my favorite decks, I want to remind players that Play Boosters are once again present in Duskmourn: House of Horrors. The most significant consequence of cutting one card from each booster pack (going from 15 cards boosters to 14) is that drafters have less maneuverability than they used to. I used to advocate for waiting quite a while before actually deciding colors, but with Play Boosters sticking to a lane the entire draft now is a more rewarding strategy. 

UG Manifest

Of all the color pairs I have found Blue-Green to have the highest power level. One of the biggest reasons is I find this format to be heavily focused on the high power uncommons. Sure, it’s nice to open a good rare, but getting good uncommons is a more reliable, fool-proof strategy. In my opinion, the Blue-Green color pair has the highest density of powerful uncommons. Furthermore, this color pair also synergizes with arguably the most important mechanic in Duskmourn: House of Horrors. 

The uncommons in this color pair include monocolored cards like Unnerving Grasp and Under the Skin that manifest while also providing another useful effect, for the low cost of three mana! However, the multicolor uncommons like Growing Dread and Oblivious Bookworm that other decks cannot play and are extremely good for a two-mana investment, and are the true payoffs for drafting the Blue-Green colors.

With one of the core colors in this deck being green, there are also reasonable fallback plans if you do start to get cut. Splashing is made simpler when you have various green commons and uncommons that can search for basic lands or provide mana of any color. Splashing removal is often what makes the most sense, but there are several directions you can take once starting with the Blue-Green base.

BG Delirium

Delirium making its way back into limited is quite exciting, and there are a lot of ways to enable delirium quite quickly. On the flipside, the payoffs for getting to delirium aren’t always going to be that significant, depending on what you end up drafting. I have had golgari decks that have one card with delirium or double digits. Notably red also provides some useful delirium spells, so while it sometimes makes sense to be red based or Jund, I have had most of my delirium success with golgari. 

As is the case with all the two-color archetypes you do have powerful multicolor uncommons here like Drag to the Roots and Broodspinner. However, there are also a ton of commons and uncommons that make sense with delirium. Whether it’s a card with manifest, a way to self-mill, an artifact or enchantment creature, or one of the cyclers, there are tons of ways to get delirium without working that hard. Cards like Spineseeker Centipede can quickly go from solid to very good when played in a black-green deck. 

Orzhov Reanimate

The orhov reanimate deck is one of the more challenging decks to draft, but it can come together nicely when you have powerful creatures like Shroudstomper to reanimate. I’m happy there is in fact support for a deck that’s primary plan is reanimating threats and gaining some life. Cards like Emerge from the Cocoon go from unplayable in most decks, to a major priority here, which means you often won’t have to fight with other drafters for the key pieces of this deck. 

Rakdos Sacrifice

Admittedly, when I hear rakdos sacrifice my mind goes to Constructed, but in this case I am in fact referring to Limited. While many players will overlook the rakdos colors, I have found that pairing the best removal with sacrifice outlets works well. This is a deck that loves to have some rooms, because you get value off them, and then can sacrifice the room later. Final Vengeance is an example of a card that can be very efficient if played alongside enough good sacrifice outlets. This deck wants creatures like Innocuous Rat that actively don’t mind dying. 

Boilerbilges Ripper is the type of card many decks may not want to play at all, but when you are consistently dealing two damage with it in a format with lots of manifest creatures, it starts to look pretty appealing. Having efficient removal also means the opponent will have trouble executing their core gameplan in many situations. 

Other Notes and Considerations

Now that I have shared my personally favorite archetypes, here are some broad takeaways that should be useful. 

Avoid Izzet: I have found the izzet deck to be mostly a trap, trying to do too much with rooms. While I’m not saying I will never draft it this deck hasn’t impressed me so far. 

Avoid Gruul: Vanilla creature beatdown is not only unexciting, it is underwhelming. The gruul deck either ends up trying to be hyper-aggressive, playing as a bad delirium deck, or just an assortment of cards without any real synergy or card advantage. 

Having 2-3 Rooms is the Sweet Spot: I don’t like going crazy on rooms, but they are valuable mana sinks and sacrifice fodder. Almost all the rooms are playable, and provide nice mana sinks in the lategame, while also having synergy as an enchantment that can also be sacrificed as needed. 

Expensive creatures without an enter the battlefield effect are not good: For example, it used to be that a card like Fear of the Dark would look like a solid playable, but with the recent power creep in limited, this is the type of card I’m very unhappy if I end up playing. 

I often find myself playing 16 lands with 1 or 2 landcylers.

This format has lots of sweepers, so be aware of how board states can flip quickly!

Playing against manifest creatures is difficult: Figuring out when to use a removal spell on a manifest creature, or block a manfiest creature is situational, and often requires making a judgement call.