Many more experienced players have written great content already, and my intent is to supplement that by mentioning a few things that I feel have been overlooked. Please, go and read the excellent articles by Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, Luis Scott-Vargas, and this nice compact one from Keith Capstick that was featured on the Daily Update.
Then tell me, have these guys been keeping up with Mark Rosewater's Making Magic articles? I ask because I feel like they're not catching a major thematic point: Hour of Devastation is supposed to feel like a disaster movie. I don't think WotC would print a bunch of big explosive cards if they didn't expect us to use them.
AKH-HOU has an unusually large number of board sweepers. The designers want you to kill everything, and raise some zombies, then kill everything again.
Here are all the sweepers in the format, plus other cards that can feel like sweepers in the right situation:
Amonkhet
Hour of Devastation
That's 14 cards I included, and I'm sure I left out some other 2-for-1's and cards that can cause mass discard. Some of the above, like Nicol Bolas, Overwhelming Splendor and Torment of Hailfire, are very slow and will incentivize winning the game as quickly as you can, but most of these will punish you for playing a lot of creatures onto the board with no backup plan. And there are so many different ones that even though they are mostly rare, you can expect to see sweepers fairly often in HOU Limited.
And that's where Eternalize comes in. The creative team wants Nicol Bolas' army to rise, and in HOU Limited, you can have an advantage against the many sweepers if you are playing creatures that return from the grave. Eternalize is super expensive at 4 - 7 mana to activate, but it curves out at or above the sweepers that you or your opponent might cast.
There is a lot of play around these cards, and there are obviously a number of ways to exile creatures or cards in the graveyard as well, but this is Bolas' set, and I think Bolas' strategy of destroy-and-bring-back-stronger will be important.
If you want to play the good guys in HOU Limited, you will want to tread carefully or use tactics that win fast, like Overcome, or cards that beat sweepers, like Leave to Chance.
One last little note about the disaster theme: In HOU there are even more ways to put -1/-1 counters on opposing creatures than before, so creatures with 1 toughness are extremely vulnerable. Aggressive players should be very wary. On the other end, I think 4 is a pretty good toughness to avoid some of the sweepers and removal (particularly against red), and 4/5 is a good set of stats because it matches up well against eternalized creatures.
Defeats
Another thing to consider for this prerelease is to build two decks to stonewall the series of cards depicting the defeat of the planeswalkers. If you have a second deck that's playable, you can swap colors after you see a card like Liliana's Defeat or see the opponent doing a lot of sideboarding between games. If the opponent doesn't catch on, they end up with useless spells in their deck. Keep this in mind also if you plan to bring Defeats into your own deck. The black, red, and white Defeats are the strongest ones, so I'd worry less about dodging the green and blue ones.
Alright, now lets all go have some fun!
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