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Drafting inMagic: The Gatheringis fun, rewarding, and one of the best ways to engage with new Magic sets. It’s also hard. Conceptually, it’s not too difficult tolearn the processof taking a card, passing the rest along, and waiting for the next pack to come to you. Which cards you should be choosing is an entirely different story.
Magic Arenais one of the premier places to draft sets both new and old, but Draft as a format requires a very specific set of skills to excel at, whether you’re playing online or in person. If you want to improve your Draft game, you’ll need to refine a specific skillset that’s much different than what’s needed for other formats like Constructed andCommander.
Understand The Format You’re Playing
Some players can go into a new format blind and piece together all the different archetypes and decks available from the cards they see. Others need a little bit of a nudge in the right direction to set them on the right track. Either way,understanding the focus of a specific set is crucialto crafting decks that fall in line with the themes of that set.
Is this an artifact format? Are there mechanics that help fight mana flood? Isflyinga prevalent keyword on creatures? These are the types of questions you should be asking to determine which cards line up with the over-arching themes of a set.
Multi-colored ‘signpost’ cards can clue you in to those major themes. Nearly all modern sets are designed aroundthe ten two-color pairs, each focused on a central strategy.The multi-colored uncommons will often indicate what that strategy is. Some are more explicit; if you see a red-white uncommon that givesWarriors+1/+1, you can bet Warriors is that set’s red-white theme.
If you’re just trying to get a snapshot of a format but don’t have time to read up on every card in a set, there are some categories of cards you should focus on. Knowing whatinstants, flash creatures, and haste creaturesare present covers just about anything that could catch you off guard, whereas you can evaluate sorcery-speed effects as your opponents play them.
Speed Of The Format
‘Speed’ is a bit of a loose term in Magic, but it’s often used to describe about how quickly games end in a given format. If the format’s full of decks that can threaten to win on turns five or six, that’s a very fast format. On the contrary, if the average game lasts ten or more turns, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty slow format. Most formats fall somewhere in between.
Nearly all modern Magic sets favor assertive, proactive decks, which pushes them into faster territory. That doesn’t mean games literally end on turn five, but that could happen if you’re not affecting the board or interacting with an opponent. As a rule of thumb, you shouldfocus almost the entirety of your draft on cards that add to your board, or ones that remove opposing creatures.
This is known as ‘CABS’ theory, a term coined bypopular Magic podcast Limited Resources. It stands for ‘cards that affect the board,’ and indicates that you should ideally be drafting cards that do exactly that. You have very little wiggle room for cards that don’t interact with the board directly, sokeep things like pure card draw spells and discard spells to a minimum.
Don’t Trust BREAD
BREAD is a mnemonic device taught to many first-time drafters, but it’s actually a fair bit misleading. The BRE- in BREAD stands for ‘bombs-removal-evasion,’ though there’s no consensus on what the -AD even stands for, which should be an indication of just how useful it is.
Outside of maybe your very first draft ever, you don’t need someone to tell you todraft the amazing bomb cards. In fact, some cards that look like bombs can be complete duds in a format, maybe because they’re too expensive or require you to build a deck in a way that’s not really feasible. Without further explanation, ‘draft bombs’ isn’t particularly insightful advice.
‘Draft removal’ is also fairly contentious as a blanket statement, sinceremoval’s role shifts from format to format. There are some draft sets where it’s great to pick up every piece of removal you see, and others where the removal lines up poorly against the set’s themes. You should draft removal, but you need to adjust how much you prioritize it based on a number of other factors.
Draft Towards A Singular Strategy
Instead of repeating BREAD in your head over and over, the main question you should be asking yourself while drafting is: ‘What is my deck trying to do," or “what is my main gameplan?”.
Having a unified strategy in mindcan guide your Draft picks, pushing you towards cards that all complement one another rather than simply having a pile of individually decent cards.
The best Draft decks are better than the sum of their parts. They have synergy between individual pieces that all work towards one specific goal. If you’re a dedicated aggro deck that wants to play 16 lands and win the game as fast as possible, there’s no room for a splashy seven-drop, no matter how good of an individual card it is.
If you’re unsure what your goals should be,try asking yourself if you plan to be the aggressor or not. Do you have aboard wipe, or a great late-game threat that you just need to survive to win with? Probablybest to play defensively. A bunch of one-drop and two-drop beaters? You’re the aggressor. Make sure your draft picks complement that strategy.
Pay Attention To The Wheel
The ‘wheel’ refers to the point in a Draft pack when you start seeing packs you’ve already passed.That means picks nine and beyond, starting with the pack you originally opened. The cards that ‘wheel’ give you valuable information about what your fellow pod-mates drafted; or rather, what they didn’t draft.
Pay close attention to the cards that wheel, especially in pack one. If a well-established powerful card makes it back to you on the wheel, that’s usually a clear indication that the card’s color{s} is being underdrafted by the table, and it might be worth sticking to that color yourself. Likewise,if a color’s completely absent on the wheel, it’s being heavily draftedby other players.
There are also some packs where you cantry to formulate which cards might wheel, and make your pick based on that. You might open a pack with two close options, but if you can expect the second one to wheel, perhaps because it’s not usually a high-pick card in the format, you should probably take the other option.
The role of the wheel in Draft changed significantly with the introduction ofPlay Boosters. These packs have less cards overall, and therefore fewer cards come back on the wheel.
Tap Into Online Resources
Data acquisition has explodedin modern Magic, which means there are more resources available online than ever before to help players improve at drafting. It’s completely up to your discretion whether you want to mine this data or figure everything out on your own, but for players who are struggling at drafts, the tools exist to help.
Arena TutorusesDraftsim.com’s tier lists and draft simulator to tailor ratings to cards in any given Limited set.The overlay can help guide you through a draftin a completely unique way, and is especially useful for novice drafters. It also provides deck statistics during the draft and gameplay portions, which can be pivotal information to have access to.
17Lands.comis also a popular tool that collects player data and parses out cards in a Limited set by win percentage, giving a quick snapshot of how formats break down. It’s not the most useful tool during the first few weeks of a format, butit’s excellent for formats that have existed on Arena long enoughfor the site to gather larger sample sizes of player data.
