Rakdos. Once the colour pair of removal and bad creatures, now a little more complicated. In my mind, it's the colour of steal-and-sacrifice decks. In recent years, though, as you will see below, it has often benefited more from sacrificing artifact tokens than from getting rid of real creatures.

LOTR: Tales of Middle-Earth

Uh oh. This is a bit of a blind spot for me, but I suppose it had to come up at some point. I have never drafted the LOTR set, so this I'm going to be piecing this together solely from the 17lands data.

Orcish Bowmasters. That's a card. One-time scourge of Modern and Timeless, now merely one card among many. Its performance in LOTR Limited earned it a spot on the list of best arena bombs of all time. Okay, but that's just one rare. What else did Rakdos have going for it? Nazgul looks pretty solid. I wouldn't peg it for a top uncommon in the entire set just by looking at it, but being tempted by the ring was a pretty strong mechanic apparently. Eomer of the Riddermark makes sense to me, as a Charging Monstrosaur that trades trample for creating more bodies. Fear, Fire, Foes! is an interesting design and I can see how its flexibility makes it a top-tier bit of removal.

Honestly, a lot of the best cards at lower rarity look like they would be good in any set. If LOTR was core set adjacent, like other Universes Beyond sets, it makes sense that a lot of the best cards are removal. Claim the Precious, in particular, looks like one of the best Murder variants I've ever seen.

Meanwhile, Amass was pretty good in War of the Spark, so that being on a lot of highly performant cards is understandable. Dunland Crebain is basically a colour-shifted Aven Eternal, and I know that card was excellent. Good cards plus strong mechanical themes equals good colour pair. Throw in a smattering of powerful removal and, yeah, this wasn't too hard after all.

Crimson Vow

Oh, look: the set about a vampire getting married managed to have a good vampires deck. Team Jacob were still in shambles after Midnight Hunt fell flat, but Edward fans were eating good in Crimson Vow. Bloodtithe Harvester was a Standard all-star - the kind that translates to Limited. Alluring Suitor was a little finicky, but paid you off big time and Vampire's Vengeance was an excellent way of pushing the Suitor through safely.

Appropriately, though, Blood tokens were the life blood of Rakdos decks. Red-Black was a colour pair that wanted to turn its creatures sideways and end the game early. Blood tokens went a long way to negating the downside of aggressive strategies, by turning your sixth and seventh lands into real cards. Moreover, WOTC put plenty of cards into the set that used blood as a resource. Clearly, Bloodtithe Harvester was the best of them, but Restless Bloodseeker was pretty good and Anje, Maid of Dishonor was even better, albeit harder to come by.

VOW was a format where an aggressive deck got mechanical synergy and late game reach. It's no big surprise that vampires dominated the vampire-themed set, but it's interesting to know that it wasn't as simple as just pushing all their cards to a higher power level.

D&D: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

Treasure! Treasure everywhere. In my mind, this was about the time that people started to complain about there being too many treasure tokens in the game. It was the first set to really push the mechanic as a design space for more than just making mana, and Red-Black got to benefit from that the most.

Skullport Merchant spotted you a treasure, then turned it and all your other ones into card advantage. Kalain, Reclusive Painter used treasures to buff your team. Even the threaten effect, Price of Loyalty, rewarded you for making treasures. In a lot of ways, this was Crimson Vow 2.0, but replace Blood with Treasure. Disposable artifacts were everywhere, and they did a lot more than you'd think just by looking at them.

Finally, while I don't like to dwell too long on rares in articles about limited, it would be silly not to at least mention how many of the best rares in the set were Rakdos coloured. We still got two planeswalkers in every set back then, both of them were in Rakdos colours and both were among the best cards in the set. Lolth, Spider Queen was narrowly edged out of overall top spot, but she was surrounded by bombs like Gelatinous Cube and Inferno of the Star Mounts. Rakdos had it all in AFR and it's no surprise to see that it was the most dominant the colour pair has ever been.