5 Tips To Conquer MH3 Limited!

After a lengthy trip on the hype train, we’ve finally arrived at our destination: the release of Modern Horizons 3. Well, the Prerelease weekend for Modern Horizons 3, to be exact. In just a few hours, players will be cracking open their Prerelease kits and getting down to some good ol’ fashioned Sealed deckbuilding. It’s the perfect time, in other words, to soak in some handy MH3 Limited tips.

5 Crucial MH3 Limited Tips

Tamiyo, Seasoned Scholar | Modern Horizons 3 | Art by Magali Villeneuve

The advice I’ll be dispensing below doesn’t just apply to Sealed, but to Draft as well. A format that, based on all current projections, looks to be incredibly popular for Modern Horizons 3. Whether you’re a new or experienced Limited player, you can’t go wrong by committing some of these tips to memory. They may just give you the edge you need to take down your events.

1 | Don’t Fall Into The Money Trap

We’ll start with a tip for all the Drafters out there. One of the most common mistakes you can make as a new Draft player is to immediately pick a card because of its financial value. In a set like Modern Horizons 3, where there are plenty of high-value cards on offer, it’s more important than ever to avoid this habit.

Opening, or being passed, an expensive card is exciting, but you need to consider how it will fit into your deck. A lot of expensive cards are great in 60-card Constructed, but not so much in Limited. Cards like Nethergoyf and Ugin’s Labyrinth are prime examples. When you can build around them consistently they’re amazing, but when you can’t they fall short. And you almost certainly can’t in Draft.

Of course, there are limits to this advice. Don’t go passing up a Serialized Eldrazi Titan just because you probably won’t be able to cast it. But don’t go grabbing a $10 card just because it’s worth $10, either. Current prices will almost certainly take a dive post-release anyway. So picking the big money cards now is a short-term plan at best.

2 | Be Careful With Colorless

Naturally, given the huge number of Eldrazi it contains, Modern Horizons 3 is a set chock full of powerful cards with colorless mana symbols. Before you start drafting them and adding them to your Sealed decks, however, it’s important to remember how colorless mana works. Unlike the other five colors, you can’t add colorless-producing basic lands (Wastes) to your Limited decks for free. Instead, you’ll need to find specific colorless sources within your pool.

This complicates the deckbuilding process and means you’ll need to make some concessions in order to include the powerful new Eldrazi cards. For the most part, you’ll be relying on the common Landscape cycle of lands, since all ten can tap for colorless. If you don’t use them to fetch, that is.

Beyond these, you have some options at Uncommon, like Urza’s Cave, Nesting Grounds, and Snow-Covered Wastes. You can also pick up Deserted Temple at Rare and Phyrexian Tower at Mythic.

Getting any of these lands consistently can be tricky. Fortunately, you can also get colorless mana by sacrificing Eldrazi Spawn tokens. There are plenty of low-rarity options for generating these, including Malevolent Rumble and Glimpse the Impossible. When building your Limited decks, don’t forget to make sure you can cover your colorless costs. It’s easy to get caught out if you don’t.

3 | Take Every MDFC Land You Can Get

Any Commander player will tell you how useful MDFC lands are. But the same logic that makes them great in singleton formats also makes them great in Limited. Being able to include spells in your land slots is a huge deal when you’re trying to wring out every last drop of possible value. These lands let you do exactly that.

This is particularly true for the mono-colored ones, which can come in untapped for three life. The two-color tap lands are great too, though, even if you’re only in one of their colors. The hybrid casting costs ensure that you can still play the spell sides if that’s the case.

These cards were great back in Zendikar Rising Limited, but this time the front faces are much more impactful. You’ve got full-on removal spells like Fell the Profane and Stump Stomp available, as well as card draw from Rush of Inspiration and Bloodsoaked Insight. Effects that are good in Limited already, in other words.

Even the less useful MDFCs are well worth including in your decks, however. On the off chance a situation comes up where they’re good, the opportunity cost of including them was so low that you really might as well. All of these cards should be valued highly when drafting, and considered for inclusion in Sealed. You won’t regret it.

4 | Go Big Or Go Home

Looking at Modern Horizons 3 as a whole, it’s remarkable how many high mana cost creatures and spells there are. This is perhaps unsurprising given the Eldrazi theme, but even so, it looks different to most sets. Especially given the speed of Modern, the main format it’s serving. For this reason, games are likely to go longer than usual, and having big creatures to tip those late-game scales will be more important than ever.

This isn’t just because of the big creatures themselves, either. Modern Horizons 3 is packed with ‘high mana cost matters’ synergy cards, including Ugin’s Binding and Kozilek’s Unsealing. The Emerge mechanic, which lets you cheat creatures out by sacrificing others with high mana costs, also returns here. By including some huge chonkers in your deck, you can tap into all of these synergies.

Of course, just having these cards in your deck isn’t enough. You’ll also need the mana to cast them. Eldrazi Spawn tokens can make good temporary ramp, but you can also use traditional ramp like Flare of Cultivation and Planar Genesis, too. Basically, Modern Horizons 3 Limited has a lot going on at the top end of the mana curve, and you should be prepared to engage with that where possible.

5 | Don’t Forget About BREAD

And to top off our MH3 Limited tips, we have an all-time classic. When building a deck for any Limited format, a good acronym to remember is BREAD. This stands for Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Aggro, and Duds, and it’s used as a guide to prioritize the cards you put in your deck.

Bombs are big, splashy cards with game-changing effects, typically the Rares or Mythics you get in your pool. When drafting and building your deck, you should almost always hone in on cards like these first, as games are often won or lost because of them.

Removal is self-explanatory: spells, or in some cases creatures, that can remove opposing creatures. Getting rid of big threats is incredibly important in Limited, since, left unchecked, they can run away with the game. Unless you’re taking a Bomb instead, it’s almost never correct to pass a removal spell in Draft.

Evasion refers to creatures that can sneak through for damage, with abilities like Flying, Menace, or Trample. Creatures like this are incredibly effective in Limited because games go long and they can be hard to address.

Aggro refers to aggressive cards that can get down early and get in damage, while Duds are exactly what they say on the tin: barely playable cards. These two categories are less important in general. In Modern Horizons 3 Limited, Aggro is even worse than usual, so feel free to write these two off and stick to BRE.

Keep this acronym in mind during your deck building, and you’ll end up with a serviceable stack of cardboard every time. If you take just one of my MH3 Limited tips on board, let it be this one.