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An Examination of Draft Strategies


Preamble

The following is an examination of various draft strategies. While each section is intended for the basic eight-man booster draft, the strategies can be readily applied to booster drafts of larger and smaller sizes, as well as other similar limited variants. If you find any grammar errors, spelling errors, or broken links, please inform me. If you have differing views on part of the guide, please voice them as well. This is a recreation of the thread created by Rush Clasic, who asked me to take his place in the management of this thread.

Table of Contents

• Introduction Post
  • Preamble
  • Table of Contents
  • Contributors

• Drafting Knowledge
  • How to Draft
  • Deck Building Basics
  • Know the Set
  • B.R.E.A.D.
  • Card Evaluation

• General Draft Strategies
  • Power Drafting
  • Flex Drafting
  • Archetype Drafting

Contributors

The following people deserve credit for helping to build this guide, whether as an active contributor or a reference:

• Edict (for his Big Ol’ Draft Guide, the last official guide this forum had.)
• Scion of Krosa (for his BREAK thread.)
• zammm (because I basically stole the formatting from his FAQ’s.)
• Rush Clasic, because that is the base of almost the entire thread. Except, of course, the new stuff that I add.

Deck Building Basics

A limited deck can use any or all of the cards you have drafted. It must have a minimum of 40 cards. You are allowed as much basic land as you need from the draft organizer. Those are the absolutes, here are some recommendations:

• Play 40 cards
• Mana curve
• Land balance
• Color balance

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Play 40 cards

• There are rarely any good reasons to build a deck of more than 40 cards.  The fact is that some cards in your deck will be better than others, and getting to the best cards in your deck as soon as possible increases your chances of winning.  You want as much consistency as possible in your deck.

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Mana curve

• Different decks will find different turns to be their most important, but every deck needs to be able to handle the tempo of the game, whether creating it or controlling it.
  
  
• You need more cards to play on your early turns than you need to play in your later turns. Most decks have a mana curve that looks like a pyramid, with a few cards able to be cast for 1 mana, more cards being able to be cast for 2 mana, and most cards being able to be cast for 3 mana. From there, the curve goes back down. The number of land you run should be adjusted to match your curve.
  
  
• The importance of curving your mana is to ensure that you have an impact on the game. If every card in your hand costs four or more mana, your opponent may be able to win before you ever play a spell. Conversely, the more mana a spell costs, the more powerful it usually is, so finding a way to put those in your deck is a must. You just can’t have too many. Having cards to play through all stages of the game is very important.

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Land balance

• 17 land per deck is the base average. This fluctuates depending on the mana requirements of your spells, as well as how many replacement mana sources and quick sifters you have.
  
  
• If your deck has higher than usual casting costs, three or more colors to support, cards that have powerful, reusable mana activations, or cards that are so good that only missing land drops will make you lose, consider moving up to 18 (or in extreme cases, 19) land.
  
  
• If your deck has lower than usual casting costs, 2 or less colors to support, mana helpers and land searchers, or quick cantrips and card filters, consider going down to 16 (or in extreme cases, 15) land.

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Color balance

• Different formats allow for a greater or weaker ability to splash for different color cards.  When building your deck, you must assess how able your deck is to access different colors of mana.  Many decks can do no more than support two colors with a tiny splash of a third. Other decks can play all five colors readily.  The blocks with the most mana fixing are generally heavily multicolored blocks, such as Invasion block, Ravnica block, and Alara block. In these formats in particular, mana fixing is significantly more important because it is more likely to play more than two colors.
  
  
• The more colors you play, the less color heavy your spells need to be. Although a card like Grave Pact may be powerful, it will usually be too difficult to cast in a four-color deck.
  
  
• Your main colors need to be able to support anything you wish to splash. Cards like Rampant Growth or the colored land cyclers from Conflux don’t work well when that color is the one you are stretching for.
  
  
• You should divide your mana sources so that they show up as often as the cards that need them. This shouldn’t just be organized by color, but by the degree of color. Count the number of mana symbols of a particular color there are in the card’s mana cost. Let’s say you have a number of cards with 20 green mana symbols and 14 white mana symbols. If you were to run 17 lands, you should use 10 forests and 7 plains. In multicolored blocks, you will likely have to adjust these numbers based on off color activated abilities and nonbasic lands.

B.R.E.A.D.

B.R.E.A.D. is an acronym that gives a basic guideline on how to rank a card’s importance.  While it is extremely useful to learn, it is still just a stepping stone to more advanced drafting techniques. With that said, the basic principle is still used at some level in every expert’s game.

• Bombs
• Removal
• Evasion
• Application
• Defensive

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Bombs

• Bombs are cards that usually do one of two things: they win all on their own; or they severely hinder the opponent’s chance at winning.  They should create a continuous threat or win very quickly.  Though they aren’t required to win a draft, having a bomb or two makes your deck much more threatening.
• Cards like Loxodon Warhammer and Fireball are great because they can gain so much card advantage, create big life-swings, and simply finish on their own. 
• Cards like Damnation and Teferi’s Moat prevent the opponent from being able to kill you, giving you ample time to set up whatever win condition you can find.
• Of course, the most obvious bombs are the ones that are just fat, evasive, or have relevant abilities, such as Woodfall Primus or Flameblast Dragon.

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Removal

• Creatures provide the main route to victory in almost every limited game. Being able to handle troublesome creatures is an important key to winning. Removal is an important counter to handling an opponent’s bomb.
• The larger variety of creatures a removal spell can shut down, the better. The cheaper it can accomplish this task, even more the better. Spells like Terror , Pacifism , and Lightning Axe are all valued for their versatility and range.
• Some removal spells are valuable not just because they remove a creature, but because they have other applications as well. Burn spells are an obvious example of this, but cards such as Slave of Bolas provide the ability to both remove a creature and provide some sort of extra bonus.
• One more thing to note is that permanents that can tap down creatures are a form of removal. The ability to switch between what you are hindering is a valuable asset. However, most of them are creatures, and are therefore vulnerable to removal themselves. Some examples of permanents that tap down permanents would be Minister of Impediments and Fatestitcher .

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Evasion

• Aggressive creatures lose their value when they no longer can damage an opponent. Thus, creatures with evasion are generally valued higher than those without it. Flying, landwalk (situationally, of course), fear, and other such abilities will help to get around the stalemates that occur after many turns of playing creatures.
• Flying is the most basic evasion and is therefore highly important. Even if you do not have a any creatures of your own that can fly, you should have something to combat it ( Giant Spider ). The same is true for any set that puts importance on a specific type of evasion, such as Tempest block with its shadow creatures .

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Application

• Application refers to a few different ideas:
  
  • Draft what holes you feel your deck has.  Too many big creatures?  Grab a 2-mana/3-mana creature. Thinking about running a third color?  Grab a mana-fixer.
    
  • Pick up cards with combat relevant abilities.  Creatures like Saltfield Recluse and Rootwalla make it difficult for opponents to make good attacks and blocks.
    
  • Pick up cards that you could use as sideboard tech against an opponent.  Artifact and enchantment removal usually misses the main-deck, but can be a strong option to have coming into games two and three.
    
  • Particularly in multicolored blocks, mana fixing is quite important, so you may want to consider it rather than an efficient creature sometimes.
  
  
• What application basically means here is to draft cards that actively affect games, rather than cards that passively wait for the game to act upon them.

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Defensive

• When no pick will help make your deck and its options better, pick the card that would most likely hurt your deck, or the card that would most likely make another player’s main deck. This concept is also known as hate drafting. Do not hate draft unless none of the cards in the pack have a chance at making your deck. It is more important to strengthen your own deck than to weaken another’s.

General Draft Strategies




Power Drafting

Power drafting is the most popular limited strategy.  The premise is to pick the strongest card in each pack until the signals you receive tell you which picks will benefit you most.

• Overview
• Concentrated Power Drafting
• Reactive Power Drafting

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Overview

• The card evaluation for this strategy is based on the direct power of the first few cards opened.  Drafters utilizing this will spend their early picks grabbing whatever card they believe will have the biggest game impact.  The picks don’t need to be a like color or theme initially.  The idea is that taking the best cards now will establish a stronger base for the deck, letting later picks fill in holes in the deck.

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Concentrated Power Drafting

• Concentrated power drafters will take the best card in each pack, then move into a specific theme or color as soon as pick 2 or as late as pick 9.  This strategy cares about grabbing power early, but also about settling-down into consistency.  While more powerful cards may still be coming his or her way, this drafter has chosen to assist his or her first picks by selecting cards that work better with those cards.  For example, if the first two cards were powerful blue cards, that player will be inclined to pick more blue cards earlier on, even if they are a bit weaker than other cards in the pack.
  
  
  • Pros
    • Early picks are strong
    • Creates consistency
  
  
  
  • Cons
    • Gives up power during middle picks
    • Relies heavily on the power of the early picks

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Reactive Power Drafting

• Reactive power drafters will take the best card in each pack, and may not move into a specific theme or color until pick 10 or as late as pick 20.  This strategy cares about constantly grabbing the best cards available and doesn’t care to settle-down until it either gets an exceptionally strong signal or has retrieved enough power picks to move in a concentrated direction.  This strategy relies on its late picks to round the deck out into a workable form, looking for mana-fixing and creatures that fill out missing slots.
  
  
  • Pros
    • A lot of early strength
    • Flexible to move into different colors and themes in late picks
  
  
  
  • Cons
    • Risks consistency
    • Sometimes creates hard-to-fill holes

Archetype Drafting

Archetype drafting is the premise of aiming for a very specific draft strategy and varies depending on the block format you are doing.  Where in core set drafting, you come up with fairly simple, linear decks, block drafting provides a plethora of strategies that allow you to change up your draft each time.  This guide will focus only on block drafting and not on core set drafting.  In terms of cards to look for when drafting that archetype, I will only list commons and uncommons, since those are the foundation of any deck and it should be obvious to put the on-color bomby rare into your deck.


Alara Block Show