Mana Club #15 - A Draft Review
Featuring a look at how colors performed in 2024, Chicago plans, and whether or not I go full Willy Wonka.
Happy 2025. We made it.
David Sedaris was asked this week to F/Marry/Kill his “greatest works” on Mike Birbiglia’s “Working It Out” podcast. I don’t want to spoil the more amorous answers but his “kill” shocked me.
He picked Naked.
How dare he. The book that made me fall in love with David Sedaris. The book I gave my son to read when he first came to live with us. The book that made Bert Kreisher feel like he had his first gay friend.
I could not believe it. But I understand it.
I’ve been doing a very writerly thing lately and obsessing over word counts. No one cares about this but me. It’s part of my hedonic treadmill1, attempting to make each one of these posts somehow surpass the previous.
Today, we’re mostly going to talk about limited. It’s a lot like karaoke: I love it more than I’m good at it, but I think it’s something most people would like to be better at. Becoming too good at it requires a level of try-hard that I’m not willing to approach. But I like the idea of getting a little better each time.
Table of Contents
Log. Log. It’s better than bad. It’s good.
A redditor reached out on one of the popular limited subs for help understanding why a deck that, with the benefit of experience, looked like a trainwreck went 0-3. People were kind and also kind of rude and it was a great summation of what Reddit is. I’m not going to share any of that.
They seemed nice. So I offered to check out another draft log for them and break it down here. You can follow along at home or make your own picks via 17Lands and then check them against my advice. Click the green “Pick” button to hide the original selections. Spoilers ahead.
On to the advice:
Rarity is for collectors, not drafters.
I covered this in my big limited article that is now paywalled (sorry! you’ve been warned!) but defaulting to “take the rare” is the biggest pitfall for new drafters. We’re taught that rares are inherently good or, at worst, complicated. That the ones that are for constructed are clearly, visibly bad, and we’ll know them when we see them.
The real skill lies in figuring out when they’re secretly bad, like a microwaved burrito with a cold middle.
Here, our intrepid hero takes a card that seems well-positioned for limited:
Is focused on creatures, which makes it more likely to play well in draft
Has a devastating effect that will often end the game the turn it is cast
Is almost impossible to answer
Is cute
This card is neutral in the type of deck it wants to go in, too. That’s massive. Green decks want creatures and while more bodies make this an “I win,” it can also serve as a one-sided board wipe where you’re ahead.
The problem is that it’s not very good.
First, the casting cost is a very real problem because it’s a non-functional card for the majority of the game. It’s your best song at karaoke that you’re saving for when the crowd’s a little bit bigger. If a bachelorette party comes in and adds 20 songs to the queue, maybe you never get a chance to sing it. A seven mana card is your Whitney Houston ballad.
Think about it this way: a card you never have a chance to cast is a mulligan you never got to scry for.
When it starts in your opening hand, that’s one less decision you get to make, fewer chances to spend your most precious resource (mana), and one less question you get to present. It’s great to have a topdeck on turn eight or nine you’re legitimately happy to see, but even then, it’s not a guaranteed win.
Lesson: Expensive cards have very real costs that aren’t printed on the card.
Next, while Big PP may be relatively agnostic about decks, you are required to make some concessions to run it. You need ramp or mana generation that will hurt your creature count.
“Well, I want my Llanowar Elves to be 11/11s!” It doesn’t matter when they’re tapped to cast it.
In general, I want cards that can fit in anywhere and don’t require coddling. Bohemian Rhapsody provides tactical musical cover for lesser singers because everyone’s just up there yelling and having a good time.
Lesson: The best cards don’t need help.
Finally, games in which you untap with a creature advantage on turn seven are already doing great. Fundamentally, “win more” cards are easy to come by than cards that help dig you out of a hole. Knowing which color pairs want those “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls songs that can save the day versus those that don’t is important.
Think about broad archetypes right now. Selesnya Go Wide/Tokens. Rakdos Sacrifice. Dimir Control. Simic Ramp.
Which decks want to be able to push the advantage compared to achieve parity or claw back?
Boros aggro is probably a key example where I see people get it wrong a lot. Wrath of God is a powerful card, but if I need to cast it in my RW deck, what’s my plan after that? Out topdeck my opponent? Sandbag my early turns and hope I can dump a couple two drops on them to turn the corner? Those don’t sound appealing!
Yet, I see a lot of people running board wipes because they have a good win rate or whatever. They fail to close the game early because they didn’t have the extra spell to put them over the top, have to clear it out and try to start over, and never get there.
To put it another way, it’s like singing Sweet Caroline with four people in the bar: you’re failing to capitalize on your strengths.
Lesson: Know which decks want to “win more” and which decks don’t.
As for the actual pick? I think you’re fine going with Vampire Gourmand or Cat Collector. They’re both great. Don’t stress that part. The decisions that win you more limited games initially are the ones that save you big percentages, not fractions. We can split hairs over pop girlies but there’s a massive falloff from Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter to random TikToker having a viral moment.
Okay, that’s it for pick one.
Nothing Beats Card Evaluation
Next, we wind up taking the second-worst blue card in a pack with two blue cards. Arbiter of Woe would have been a great follow up to Gourmand, but if we need to get to seven lands, we could do worse than Tatyova.
A lot of older drafters have Rate Memory that betrays them with the Benthic Druid—remembering a card as better in a previous format and drafting it at the same rate—because it was great in Dominaria, a slow and grindy format. Our drafter is newer, so that’s not a concern for them.
Our bad first pick has led to a bad second pick, though. You can now see how drafts snowball. We feel priced into green, we see an uncommon2 with green in it, and we draft it. If you think both of these cards are good, then you don’t see anything wrong.
Card evaluation is a skill that you develop over time, but tools like 17Lands can help in the interim. A quick check of the raw data would show that Preposterous Proportions is the 168th best card in Foundations, 28th best green card, and about as good as a Giant Growth. Tatyova is 192nd. This is not what I would consider a “solid start” or even much of a “start” at all when the 34th and 38th were right there for us.
Drafting without a depth of knowledge about a set is like getting scary-oked: you may have the words, but not knowing the melodies or timing makes it very hard to perform proficiently.
Lesson: When you don’t know a set, use the tools available to give you a baseline decision tree.
Avoid Pick Anchoring
We’re a little deeper into pack one after getting some decent white cards that we correctly take and now face a decision: stay on the new path or go crawling back to our ex.
We choose, “I swear, I’ve always loved you.”
Here, with a perfectly fine Luminous Rebuke, we opt for the second-best green card in a pack with three green cards. I don’t even hate this: sometimes, we try to make every early pick count and Selesnya is an ostensibly fine deck for a go-wide payoff like Big PP. I can see that logic.
But two picks later, we waffle again. With three white cards and two green cards, we take Strix Lookout.
It’s because we’ve Pick Anchored to Tatyova.
At this point, we see a clear lane to a GW deck that absolutely does not want to splash. Our plan is go wide, then go tall. We could find a payoff like Overrun later. Overrun decks do not want to splash.
When we anchor, we overvalue a potential path creating a lot of wasted picks. We’re drafting while looking over our shoulders. Early on in your limited career, you do not have picks to waste. At some point, you have to decide if you’re going to waste one pick (your early one) or five (the ones where you waver in pack two).
Which of the following describes you as a drafter?
A. I take the best card in my first pack and hope the rest of the draft works with that card.
B. I take the best cards early until I find my lane.
It’s great when A happens, but the odds are against us. In a draft where everyone is in a distinct two-color archetype and they’re evenly distributed, there’s a 40% chance in the dark that the drafter to our right winds up in one of our colors.
If we expand to two seats, the odds that you’re fighting one of them go up to 64%. Both? 16%. In those drafts, it’s important to find our new lane.
Lesson: Look for Pick Anchoring behavior in your past drafts and identify where it hurt you.
Tool: 17Lands has a really sweet tracker that can analyze how frequently you play your P1P1! Use it!
As for pick-by-pick analysis, I don’t do a ton of that in coaching. Don’t find it very useful. Have a pick in this draft you want to ask me about? Go for it:
Is Izzet The New Simic?
Last year, the collective Limited Universe bemoaned how bad Simic had been recently. Lotta flops. This is uniquely bad because the base archetype (ramp) is one that’s easy for new players. Draft the big bads, ramp into them. Very Commander-adjacent gameplay. It felt like my first 20 vintage cubes were all green ramp.
So I was surprised to hear Paul and Marshall declare that Izzet had the worst year when The Limmies went out.
Allow me to nitpick:
OTJ is a little unfair because the land cycle encouraged splashing, especially considering your URb or straight-up Grixis decks wanted them to commit the crimes the deck needed. Top players actually drafted Grixis more than Izzet, but also drafted a ton of Dimir with a splash. Several PT teams had Grixis Crimes as the best deck… when green wasn’t available. OTJ’s green cards were incredibly pushed, so it makes sense that the win rate of non-green decks would leave you wanting for more. Paul discussed his affinity for Abzan at length earlier this year on the pod.
In MKM, Izzet suffered because Boros was overdrafted and a beast of a deck. Hard to make your red playables when nearly 30% of two color decks are RW
That said, it didn’t perform that poorly, finishing as the sixth-best archetype. Not great for a UR artifact deck after LCI set such a high bar, but it wasn’t stone unplayable either.
In MH3, Izzet was again middling as a two-color pair, but it was often a key support color to the most dominant deck that splashed (Gruul+splash, 58.8% WR), and obviously in the best three-color deck (Temur). It was my favorite format of the year and I thought blue and red energy added a lot of texture to it beyond the Eldrazi of it all.
Otters in Bloomburrow is a very good deck that’s hard to draft. DaFore gets a shoutout in the ep, but don’t forget about Ham. My guy took home $1,000 with Otters. Spells is always a skill-testing deck and I don’t mind having those in limited. That said, I hate Bloomburrow with every fiber of my being and I hope some Cruella DeVille-esque villain skinned the whole plane.
Izzet Rooms was a miss. Flat out. Not enough support, sadly, and so we never got there. On the flip side, Temur Rooms was actually very fun. I think Luis talked about drafting it at some point. Another case of Izzet maybe missing the mark on its own, but the colors contributing to something that was actually good.
Foundations was also a miss. Not much more to say about it.
So, do we have an Izzet problem? I don’t know. Maybe. Rooms was a big, weird swing that doesn’t have much precedent. Izzet Artifacts has been good recently. Other Izzet decks were very skill-testing.
I think we have a control problem.
I looked at every instance of a card being cast this year outside of Alchemy and Pioneer Masters in premier draft, from mono blue to Temur with a splash. Four and five color decks were excluded entirely.
Dimir cards are lagging behind their more aggressive counterparts. Playing to the board and attacking remain goated in limited. Is it any surprise that black and blue, known for their answers more than their questions, can’t keep up?
Black was the real surprise here. Four sets where it failed to reach 54% was egregious.
I honestly expected this to be Simic’s loss to, well, lose. Outside of Foundations, green held its own. Blue was just too much of a dog in OTJ and BLB to keep up. For the talk of how Simic was fixed via frogs in the clip above ignores that the deck was likely a design error making it too strong along with the fact that Simic posted miserable numbers in several sets.
Paul, if you’re reading this, I’d love to hear how you think we fix control more broadly.
Mailbag
Kyle asks:
When playing "casual" (FNM/prizes on the line but not comp level) draft, how chatty is too much during the draft portion. Is it rude to talk and joke around?
I’m glad you denoted “casual” because I have now started asking before RCQ’s how much talking is allowed during sealed construction. “Oh, absolutely #$%^ing none? Great. GLAD EVERYONE HEARD YOU SAY THAT.”
Judges are too lenient about that shit. Drives me nuts. My ADHD brain cannot handle people chatting about their pools illegally while I’m trying to piece together a puzzle without the picture.
For an FNM? It’s all about vibes. I don’t think it’s cool to talk about your picks ever because draft is fundamentally all about your picks. Kibitzing is only cool if everyone has expressly opted in.
But if you have some little jokes? That’s great. Actually, what am I saying? I routinely hate this person. Drafting is my little bit of silence during FNM. It’s a time for reflection. For focus. Practice thinking about your picks.
More than anything, I don’t like the idea that you’re potentially distracting someone who is newer at draft and making everything take longer. FNM is usually a place for someone to try limited for low stakes and take home some cards. If my talking makes the draft a little harder for them, that sucks, and there’s nothing like being new to this format and feeling like everyone is waiting on you.
The clock is so daunting, even the metaphorical one in an untimed draft. No talking, please.
If it’s you and seven buddies? Go absolutely nuts you madlads.
End of a Financial Era
I’m probably winding down my store soon. I say this all the time. Last time, it was to open a bowling alley3.
But this time, I mean it.
If you read this for financial tips, I’ll still have them occasionally, but I don’t like encouraging people to engage with Magic for money. It’s messy. I don’t think it’s particularly lucrative. Learn a new language or start drawing again.
Anyway, a lot of people are buying up Master of Dark Rites before we return to Innistrad or whatever. If you need a copy, grab a copy. If you want to look way ahead to Aetherdrift, I think Cybership is an interesting single printing Vehicle that could be fine to have some copies of, even if there were four distinct versions of the original.
Goodnight Chicago, I killed a man to make you love me
Hey, great news: I’ll be at MagicCon Chicago. Not in any official capacity. Here’s my schedule:
Friday:
10:30 AM - PTQ
1:30 PM - Limited Cup if PTQ goes terribly
4:00 PM - Savvy Pin Trader Sealed if those both go terribly
Saturday:
Wide open
Sunday:
10:30 AM - Sunday Sealed and Stacked
As a “grinder” having Saturday open physically hurts me knowing there’s a PTQ. But I’m tired of being tired at these things. Of not seeing friends and having some goofin’ time. Because there’s no joy in grinding sealed for multiple days. It’s just brutal on your brain. So yeah. That’s the plan. Or maybe some kind of resolution.
Odds and Endstep
MTG Stocks annual look at the market is always fun. Despite all the stuff I said about finance.
Lords of Limited gave out some great awards. I’m so awarded out at this point but it’s worth watching.
No one is brewing harder than PowrDragn right now.
It feels like Strix Serenade might have hit its bottom? I don’t know. MH3 confounds me.
Seth Mansfield is doing good work at Ultimate Guard but standard feels so wide open.
What should I play in Explorer right now? I qualified for the Arena thing and I don’t know anything about the format.
Yikes.
Giveaway Update
I have tried to make the terms and conditions VERY CLEAR. There are strict rules in place about how this all works. After five weeks, we finally have someone see that they won. And yet, despite all of this, last week’s winner left a COMMENT.
Will I honor their win? We’ll see on Saturday.
Thank you to the following paid subscribers: Casey, John Dale, Will, Alex, Connor, Joshua, Denis, Kyle, and Ben.
Passing the turn,
Jake
Bonus Seymour of the Week
AKA Hedonic adaptation, this is when you quickly get used to new stimuli or gains in happiness, and return to a baseline level of satisfaction.
More rarity bias? IDK, but it certainly could be.
If you want the bowling alley story, you need to leave a comment.
Ok this bowling alley story is intriguing me.
If we're being pedantic, I think any notification to you that you would definitely see that was directed at you could be considered a message. :)