Mana Club #6 - 100 Thoughts on Limited Magic
Featuring my 7,000 word treatise on the theories, skills, and practical tips on how to improve at limited and absolutely nothing else.
Since it’s a holiday week, I wanted to hit you with something that I’ve been working on for a while:
This is a running document I’ve been keeping for the last year or two. If the tagline for Mana Club is “Everything I’ve Ever Thought About Magic” this is that but for limited. Hell, there’s probably some generic Magic advice in here. Or even… life lessons.
In the beginning, this was going to be my personal The Art of War. Turns out I’m not a brilliant general, but I can write 7,000 words about draft and sealed for you to read on the terlit.
It’s not particularly well-organized. Some of the important stuff is in the middle and weird stuff is at the top. If you’d like to organize it, please let me know. For now, this is what fell out of my head. There are also no pictures, a bummer for art connoisseurs and visual learners alike. I like pictures in books. Don’t judge me.
So, no Finance or Commander or Breaking News this week. I’ll try to give y’all an aggressive helping of them next week, like the “filling” I had on Thanksgiving. My father-in-law adds two sticks of butter and a raw onion to boxed mashed potatoes and calls it “filling.” Your plate always has too much of it. This year, he chopped some parsley. Growth.
100 Thoughts On Limited Magic
A draft is a small sample size. Forgive yourself.
We’re thrown into a dynamic environment with seven people, all with varying degrees of expertise. It’s okay if that doesn’t go to plan. That’s why we draft. It’s an experiment in chaos that will never be duplicated again. Give yourself some grace.
Curve beats power when you’re unsure of what you’re doing.
Usually when someone shows me a deck that they believe underperformed, the glaring issue is the curve. How we spend our mana is an untallied variable in every game and decks with a strong curve win this hidden battle, even if that isn’t a traditional stat we see in the “box score” of a match. Curve is something you can consider with zero information about a format. It’s the basic building block of your deck.
If you know the format, visualize five next picks you’d love to see. The best drafters see these in different colors.
I don’t think players spend enough time thinking ahead. Don’t get bogged down in the current pick. Take the clock given to you to visualize meaningful cards that synergize with what you currently have. If there are no cards passed to me that even approach their description, I know I’m in for a long draft.
Having seven good picks after pack one means you’ll have a better chance of getting nine or more good picks in pack two.
There is a tendency to panic after pack one when we feel “light” on playables, but there is still 66.6% of a draft ahead of us. In my experience, even if we’re being “cut” in pack one, that simply means that pack two should feel dramatically more open. While we’d love to be the only person in our colors in a pod, this is unlikely. We must use the second pack to add breadth to our final deck.
A deck needs a plan. A pack does not.
Opening a bomb never feels worse than when your deck is strictly “on plan.” Staying open mentally is the most important thing you can do in some formats, understanding which archetypes have flexibility and overlap to create soft plans. Evaluating a pack regardless of plan can open your mind to new possibilities.
Most players think they’re “in” a color they’re not.
Outside of a double-pipped bomb (think Glorybringer, Tetzimoc), players have more flexibility than they think. I’ve seen people pass legitimately great cards in pack two because they’ve already committed two or three picks to okay-to-good cards in pack one. Sunk-cost fallacy impairs a lot of ingenuity in drafting, where abandoning a small amount of value for big upside would be rewarded.
Not all lands say “Land.”
Adjusting your land count based on creatures and spells that fetch lands or generate mana separates good drafters from average ones. Create a habit of evaluating your manabase each game by removing all lands that Arena adds and manually rebuilding it with considerations for the cards in your deck, noting cards that produce mana in ways you might overlook, like Treasure tokens. Evaluate your curve and think about whether your deck needs 18 or 19 lands. Do you have mana sinks? Do you have ways to discard extra lands for value? Do not take lands for granted; they’re what make Magic Magic.
Don’t underestimate play skill in limited.
Good cards can lose, and bad cards can win. Bad players with good cards usually lose to good players with average cards. It’s very hard for a good drafter with a good deck to lose to a bad drafter with a bad deck. We tend to overrate card quality because it is the variable over which we have the least control. Since we have the most control over our execution as Magic players, it’s an obvious area to target, but it’s where I see the least work put in by the average limited player.
We cannot beat the person passing to us. They are our best asset in the draft.
Drafting is surfing, but far too often, people think they can bend the wave to their will. We ride the momentum from the people passing to us in a harmonious draft and ride to our benefit. Exacting your revenge in pack two for being cut only hurts your pack three, while simultaneously giving the player you’re passing to a better deck.
We only play 55-60% of the cards we draft.
I often make the case for big swings because of this fact. Agonizing over card choices can feel heavy at times, but in reality, we’re rarely hurting for our 23rd card in modern drafts. Even if we pick up three playable lands (let’s say an Evolving Wilds and a pair of common duals), we’re still only charged with making 62% of our picks work. Two gambles only account for 4.76% of our draft. We should be bold.
Sometimes, you get a little feeling in a draft around pick 6-8.
Intuition is an important part of drafting, and these are the cards that can tip you off when you have a deep understanding of the format. Instead of feeling calcified at this juncture, we should still be feeling open and evaluating the full contents of the pack. When you find yourself listening to these whispers, you have improved as a drafter.
We don’t need to memorize a pack; we need to remember what we want to come back.
We’re given 75 seconds to make a P1P1. Start a 75 second timer right now and sit in silence while it ticks down. It’s longer than people think. If a tough pick takes us 30-45 seconds, that still leaves a lot of free time to play with. Practice mentally highlighting parts of a pack that are relevant or potentially interesting when it’s passed back. This information is a net benefit to you, but too often, we windmill slam the best card and rush to the next pick. Be calm.
Signaling is something we have less control over than we think.
We only achieve 20% control over a pack when we’re passing 4 cards, and I wouldn’t consider 20% particularly high. Yes, weaker cards are weaker signals and we must look at a pack holistically, but sending signals is a part of the game that is too overwrought with theory. We can’t know what our opponent knows. Focusing on what is being sent to you and drafting accordingly creates the best signal to send.
Understanding pack collation is the best way to know what card was taken.
Each set has a unique set of cards that are presented to drafters. In Strixhaven, we were guaranteed a lesson per pack. If this card was missing, we could speculate that Mascot Exhibition, Environmental Sciences, or Expanded Anatomy had been taken. Testing for Pro Tour March of the Machines, we knew each draft booster contained a Multiverse Legend, a Battle, and another double-faced C/U/R/M. If a Battle was missing, it was likely Invasion of Amonkhet or Invasion of Innistrad, making black a color to avoid. This is free information.
We can’t read a pack if we don’t understand which cards are strong.
Newer drafters fall prey to overrating a card and then assuming that is a signal to move into its colors. There is no substitute for card evaluation and it affects every aspect of your draft. If you don’t have a knack for grading yet, use data or trust experts.
We usually need five bodies and two spells per pack.
Internally clock where your draft is in terms of these numbers and look for opportunities later in “coin flip” situations to even them out. If two cards are roughly as valuable but it’s a choice between a creature or your ninth removal spell that’s slightly better, you take the creature every time. Online, laying out creatures and spells in separate curves can help make this more obvious.
Cards you don’t play have zero value.
When people are unsure of what they should be drafting, there can be a tendency to hedge back into a previous color or iteration of a deck. Hedge picks have zero value to your deck unless they’re fixing for a potential splash. Even then, you must make the splash to get the value. Simply put, stop taking cards you won’t play because they’re “good,” as good cards in a sideboard are dead cards. At least in best of one.
Know what is replaceable in a pack and what is not.
In decks that require high synergy to execute their game plan, knowing the essential parts of the machinery is more important than assembling cogs for a low synergy deck. Aggro decks can value two drops without concern for text. When PVDDR took a Seize the Storm at Worlds, it was because Seize the Storm is a powerful card in its respective deck and there was upside in taking the synergy piece. Taking the replaceable card is for pack three, not early.
Later in early packs is the time to gamble.
Weaker cards have a lower overall impact on the strength of your deck, so upgrading a C- from a D+ will not impact the average game. Taking a potential B in another color is a significant upgrade over a potential C-.
The better the players in the draft, the more predictable their actions will be.
Conversely, the worst drafters tend to make decisions that are hard to read, whether it’s passing good cards, changing colors constantly, or drafting for external value (gems or money). Predictable actions help us set expectations correctly and improve our floor.
A great pick in a draft makes your potential deck wider more times than it makes it extremely narrow.
While buildarounds are entertaining and worth chasing at times, the best cards have raw power without a plan and can play well at most stages of the game. Pros value fetchlands so highly in Vintage Cube because they enable you to play more potential cards, making your deck wider. With more powerful cards available over the course of the draft, the ability to play more “bests” is a massive benefit. A card that’s only valuable in a specific archetype requires a lot of things to go correctly that you have no control over.
Don’t cut weak cards in pod draft.
If I’ve been passing Rakdos all draft and a Rakdos card I don’t consider particularly impactful is available at Pick 13, I would rather validate that players read on their seat than snipe it. Reassuring people makes them less likely to pivot into my colors if they know they have the open lane in pack three.
Create skeletons to visualize your draft in advance.
We can always take a minute to construct our dream draft of an archetype, focusing on rarity and depth. The more of these “skeletons” you construct, the better idea you’ll have of which cards will be highly contested because multiple decks want them, and which cards will be “free.”
Never draft angry.
A skill requiring timed focus is hard to execute when we’re tilted. When it comes to playing Magic online (and at a FNM), draft is one of the most expensive formats out there. Value your money and wait until you’re in a good headspace.
If our process is good, results will follow. Our ability to draft better sometimes outpaces our play.
Draft is a skill that tests everything but our play. We can exponentially improve our ability to evaluate cards, understand our position on a table, and build cohesive decks in a short amount of time. Improving play, specifically limited play, takes a lot of reps. Don’t blame strong draft principals for your inability to execute them in match. Be patient.
Having a strong read on the table after pack one can help provide an advantage in packs two and three.
Retaining cards that no one seemed interested in can be a huge boon to a Vintage Cube drafter who likes combo decks but would rather avoid taking niche pieces over fixing or interaction. A Hare Apparent wheeling tells us that people might be less sensitive to hate drafting. Try to glean what you can without putting too much stock into what can be complex decisions.
Hey, great news. You’re halfway there. I believe in your ability to finish this article.
Use the end of a pack one that has been disappointing to set up a potential pivot.
If our colors feel uninspiring so far, we can start drafting the cards that will be filler in our new deck after pack two. These decks will often appear to be three colors but are just in search of a direction before we cut the excess.
Magic Online: There’s a difference between a rare that will pay for your draft and a rare that pays for a pack.
Very few cards have an in-game value of more than your draft. Even if drawing and casting a bomb would mean winning the game on the spot, you would still take a card that is $15 instead of the bomb because that guarantees the outcome we’re uncertain of. For cards in the $1-3 range, consider the strength of your deck before making the pick.
Magic Online: Understand the current value of cards before the draft begins.
Fluctuations in the MTGO economy can happen fast. There’s nothing more disappointing than taking a 20 ticket card you don’t need and seeing it’s now valued at 2. Have a bookmark available that lets you see the cards that make a financial difference and take a look before starting a for keeps draft.
Take as much time to learn what bots don’t draft as what they do.
Drafting against pick orders is a different game than against humans and we have to engage with it differently. Cards and archetypes that succeed are doing so because of a flaw in how the bots view the format. Since our opponents all operate against them, we need to leverage the pick order and format data available to us.
If you struggle to remember picks in person, try to remember something simpler, like creature count vs. spells.
Trying to keep a mental picture of your curve count or removal options can be daunting, so try to capture the minimum data that can give you value until you’re more comfortable. Memory exercises can help, but this is something that improves naturally with time and familiarity with the format.
Know when to answer the threat or the ramp.
The adage of “bolt the bird” remains foundational Magic advice, but in limited, it can be correct to “make them have it” in terms of a threat. If our opponent lacks ways to use their mana in the late game, a Llanowar Elves looks like a glorified 1/1. Heuristics are important to challenge, even concepts I present here.
When you have removal, everything looks like a threat.
One of my favorite expressions is, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” New players love to answer questions as they come up, not thinking about what questions will be presented next. Patience is a virtue in limited (especially sealed) and we can often exchange some measure of life in service to it.
Removal is not a win condition.
We need to focus on strong top-end threats when we have a removal-based strategy, particularly threats that are resilient. We must present things to be answered or risk finding ourselves dying to a token or 2/2 Bear that survived. Modern card design gives us more cards that provide benefit beyond “dies to removal” and deck building must keep up.
A threat exists only as a measure of your effectiveness at removing it.
Some decks have a plethora of ways to deal with hexproof threats like Stoic Sphinx or sticky value engines like Nine-Lives Familiar. If you have one, that’s a big problem that means adjusting your game plan. Keep a mental index of how your deck lines up against threats as you see them.
Sometimes, you deal with threats as they come up.
You know you need an answer for something, but you have to trust your deck will provide that next answer. This ad-hoc approach to removal is a vibe check more than anything when you know a match is going to be close and you have to play to your outs.
Give your opponent the chance to do what they think is right in the wrong situation.
Using heuristics against your opponent can provide valuable opportunities if you know who your opponent is. We tend to think that higher skill levels make fewer mistakes, but these players can also underestimate us and be “gotten” by cards that are unexpected. More broadly, if we never put our opponents in situations where they can make mistakes, they won’t.
Study how your opponent uses removal before playing your bomb creatures.
Are they reluctant or free-wheeling? Are they playing around spells and casting instant-speed removal during your turn? Did they remove a creature you didn’t feel was very impactful? All of these situations are data points. If your opponent hasn’t played removal, that’s not a great sign for your bomb.
Put the onus on your opponent to spend their mana effectively.
Being able to interact at instant speed can make our opponents nervous, creating mana advantages for us where they’re hesitant to play “into” something. Great decks leverage mana as well as cards and timing to create nightmares for opponents. If we can leave them guessing, they’ll have a harder time being efficient.
Unless you’re all lands/no lands, take 15 seconds to think before taking a mulligan.
We aren’t in any rush.
If you value fixing, take it early; you’ll get better cards late.
Credit to Sierkovitz for studying when to take fixing for maximum value. It’s easy to say, “take lands early” when you’re not sure you’ll be in a deck that values multiple colors, but it’s very powerful when players are panicking to get lands late in the draft. Multicolor cards are likely to be available later in a draft when people see them less as signals or a direction to move into and more of a pain to wedge into their decks.
Know the value of mana in a format.
Most importantly If there are ways to spend it or if you will run out of sinks quickly. Do cards have optional costs that can scale up, or are you playing fairly linear designs? Not all formats are build the same.
Build two decks, play one.
If there’s an option, explore it. Even in best of one, we have choices. Forcing yourself to build two decks, even if you don’t play the second, forces you to view individual card choices and justify them for the entire 40.
In sealed, have your second deck ready to go.
Always bring enough sleeves in a physical sealed tournament to have an entire second deck ready to go. Being able to side into a second option immediately can nullify an opponent's plan and capitalize on your side of the play/draw.
One card doesn’t win you the game. It’s 2.5% of your deck.
While much is made of bombs, one still represents a shockingly low percentage of your deck. Your chance of having it in your opening hand is only 17.5%. It doesn’t get to a coin flip, assuming you have no filtering or draw, until turn 13. I can’t stress enough to focus on building a functional deck built around strong fundamentals than going all in on a card.
Tutors are force multipliers for this reason.
The better the cards in our deck, the more impact a tutor makes. Nothing frustrates me more than seeing a fine deck that is concerned with finding a medium to good card with a tutor. Put another way, if our creatures are all middling, would we want to run a Fake Your Own Death? Only if they had strong entering abilities.
Recontextualize a card you see people play but don’t understand.
Swarming of Moria is a 2/2 that makes you a treasure in some decks, a sorcery to trigger Fiery Inscription in others, and two +1/+1 counters in a third deck. Viewing it from three different lenses may help provide a comparison that unlocks it for you.
Know how many turns your deck wants to play.
Each deck has an ideal clock. Build and play to the amount of time the deck wants to go.
Okay, remember when I said you were halfway there? That was a lie. This is probably halfway. I kind of just took a stab but it’s MUCH closer than the last time when I lied to you. If you need a break, consider checking out Mana Club #5.
Know your outs so you can play to them.
The best decisions I’ve seen in limited Magic come from players that know how they can win a game and go all-in on them. This is often information that only you have, so unconventional plays can lead to confusion for your opponent. Confusion is almost always a net positive. Overall, this is a benefit of playing and building with intention: this information becomes second nature.
Never concede because you misplayed.
Shame concessions punish us twice for one mistake. Games of limited are often redeemable and our opponents aren’t immune to errors, either. Force them to beat you.
Your time is valuable. Don’t play out obvious losses.
On the flip side, when we’re drawing dead (because we know our outs) and have no reasonable plays, we should usually let it go and move on.
The more game pieces a card makes, the more potential it has.
Objects in play have diverse value that often extend past the lifespan of the card that created them. Creating more bodies increases the value of anthem effects, creating artifacts can play into sacrifice synergies, etc. While these aren’t traditional two-for-ones like Inspiring Overseer, you can think about them as portions of cards. Maybe a 1.5-for-1.
Learn how our future cards will play by watching how they perform for our opponent now.
Early in the format, we’re drinking from a firehose. There are complex interactions we’ve never seen play out and we may be leaning on evaluations of similar cards from previous sets too heavily. Take stock of what seems impactful on the other side of the battlefield, not just yours.
Early in a format, avoid generalization.
Design is a long an arduous process, so if something seems too powerful, understand that might be a bug with how players are interacting with the set. Hundreds of games are played before a card is approved in the file, so trust that the design team didn’t ship an entire dud of an archetype. Look at the cards with a designer’s eye, creating unnatural pairings or seeking unintuitive interactions. Think about what the format will be rather than what it is.
The best splashes scale with the game.
We don’t splash Llanowar Elves because they have their most impact when cast on turn one in a deck with 8+ Forests. Removal is often splashable because we’re always happy to see it. When evaluating splashes, they need to be cards that make sense if we can’t play them until a little later in the game. An aggressive three drop that needs to connect is a terrible topdeck on turn six. Know when a card wants to exist and under what conditions.
Know how you lose the game before the game begins.
It’s one thing to play win conditions, but another altogether to realize what your deck is weak to. Beyond “mulling to five” or “opponent has Liliana,” knowing your lose conditions creates questions you can answer during your build.
Watch better players. We learn less than we think by doing if we’re doing incorrectly.
We’re fortunate to live in an era where great players constantly stream their thoughts about Magic daily. Take advantage. During drafts, pause before they pick and think about what you’d do in this situation. Keep a scorecard and see if you can improve the number of hits over time. We can’t copy a draft, but we can pick up a point of view and implement it.
The faster our opponent’s clock, the less incremental advantage matters.
A big part of limited is understanding when the house is on fire. Sure, it could be great to get maximum value out of bouncing our ETB creature, but the value we get could rot in our hand if we can’t deal with the threat presented. Give up the optimal play at times and survive.
Play boosters have fewer sideboard cards, so think about which weaknesses your archetype has and target 1-2 cards in best of three that will dig you out of potential holes.
Shuffling up after game two and running it back is the worst case scenario, but lots of limited players with little constructed experience have no problem with this. Creating a mental map of sideboard opportunities reinforces this is a preferred route.
Identify what your opponent may have sideboarded against you.
One of the benefits, specifically in sealed, is an opponent may make hyperspecific decisions to counter a part of your deck you feel is insignificant. If you see two copies of Broken Wings in game two and aren’t sold on flyers, pivoting to a deck with none creates dead cards for your opponent. Broadly, it gives you a feel for how they feel the matchup and what they prioritize.
Best of one punishes corner cases.
There’s never a scenario where Broken Wings is flexible enough to play in best of one, but keep this in mind for other narrow cards. Moment of Valor proved to be a mediocre (and expensive) combat trick or a dead card in too many WOE matchups, for example. A card with lower upside that can impact any matchup is too valuable to pass up.
Sometimes, the card you Duress is the least important part of the Duress.
This isn’t a case for playing Duress in every black deck, but rather the value of information in a game of Magic. Knowing how you can optimally sequence your turns, play around removal or counters, or most efficiently use your interaction makes your cards slightly better and theirs slightly worse in most circumstances.
No identical cards are the same. Context of the set matters.
Experience in limited can cut both ways, where people stubbornly presume that because A was good, B must also be good. I tend to be weary of functional reprints for this very reason. Cards are always improving, so older designs don’t always keep pace. Don’t rest on your evaluation laurels and challenge them early in a format if you’re not finding success.
The more expensive the format, the better cheap cards are.
Successful Vintage Cube drafters find ways to make low mana value cards have big impact. Part of this is that you give yourself more opportunities to create mana advantages as I discussed earlier. Cheaper spells also tend to be interactive or give you access to selection/filtering.
Failure to convert your resource advantage to card draw or creatures is worse than doing nothing.
This is a particular issue I see in Arena Cube, where players will draft plenty of green ramp but very few cards to ramp into. Having consistent ways to convert resources into threats or cards is paramount, so keep this balance in mind when you’re in pack two and pondering the composition of your deck.
Understand your curve in the context of your deck.
In a recent iteration of Vintage Cube, I was surprised to see players valuing mana dorks so highly. What they saw that I didn’t was that three drops were particularly powerful, so being able to cast them on turn two made Elves a must draft to create an early advantage against slower decks. Your deck provides context for your curve, not the other way around.
Knowing when a card is good is more important than knowing if a card is good.
A friend recently showed me a deck that featured Balance. He had no way to dump his hand, no surplus of artifact mana, and no ways to sacrifice lands. It was not a “Balance Deck” but he picked it late and knew it’s a good card. I showed a friend a Fastbond deck I drafted. He told me, flat out, I wasn’t good enough to play Fastbond in that iteration of Vintage Cube. Awareness about cards (and ourselves) is important.
If you’re worried about time, always highlight a card that’s an option, even if you’re unsure if it’s the best option.
At the end of the day, a random selection will almost always be worse than something that is at least in a color you’re considering.
Review is as important as experience.
Magic is a complicated game featuring a lot of quick decisions. There are so many times when I’ll be working with someone who catches their mistake before I can bring it up. Why did they want to focus part of their coaching session on that draft if they already knew the problem? They didn’t review it first. Watch your game tape.
If you want improvement, measure. The better the measurement, the faster you improve.
In related news, we have to clock what we’re doing correctly and incorrectly. Keeping a log of game errors isn’t just about noting the error, but also seeing which errors you’ve been making when you open that file or turn to that page. Learning and retaining information are two different processes. Draft logs and statistics help us to this with little effort.
If you don’t know the format, avoid doing too much. People that do know it will do too much better than you.
Try ranking the known archetypes in a format before you sit down to draft it by your level of comfortability. If your strength is combat and creature-based decks, think about how you’ll get into them. A deck like Rooms in Duskmourn involves a lot of decision-making you should probably avoid.
In the early days, combat tricks play better than they should.
It’s much easier to catch someone off balance when they’re not sure what they’re playing around. Boros decks often excel early for a reason. Don’t internalize observations about combat tricks (other than which ones exist) and carry that information on with you for the duration of the format. If they’re truly great, they’ll be less available and played around with more alacrity.
Don’t be afraid to be weird when you don’t have outs.
If you’re not conceding, play to a fictitious out. Hold priority after making a suspicious attack or bluff a Settle the Wreckage type effect. The only person who knows what you know is you.
The clock is your friend. Use it.
I feel like I can’t stress enough that people lose to making hasty decisions more than they lose to time by such a massive amount that it’s criminal we don’t discuss this more. Breathe. Re-evaluate. Breathe again. Time is a free asset.
Stop being afraid of milling yourself.
We rarely know what is on the top of our library. For every time it’s our bomb mythic, it’s also two lands we didn’t want to draw. Embrace the randomness and know that decks that want to mill have the tolerance for these downsides baked into the cake.
If you have the win, take it.
Magic rewards proactive play more times than it punishes it.
In best of three, get as much information without giving up your own.
If we’re losing, every additional card we get to see from our opponent is free information. Think about what you’re willing to give up to get that information when the cost is no longer free, ie having to reveal cards from our deck to stay alive. If you’re dead on board, playing your bomb and hoping they skip their attack somehow only exposes you to potential sideboard cards they wouldn’t have considered.
All formats have an internal clock.
Knowing when you’re playing a Dominaria and when you’re playing a Phyrexia: All Will Be One can help you in every phase of a draft. Gauging the speed of a format is the difficult part. 17Lands offers statistics on each set that can be more valuable than anecdotal data from friends or content creators, but also be cognisant of those numbers being artificially inflated early.
In a slow deck, you must understand the defensive speed of your early curve.
“Defensive speed” refers to how well a card can shelter your life total as you set up. Grappling Sundew protects you from evasive threats early while Cut Down deals with pesky early drops. Farewell is an incredible sweeper, but it has anemic defensive speed if you’re not ramping. You can’t skimp on defensive speed and play nothing but Think Twice for the first few turns of a game. Depending on a single creature to stabilize leads to demoralizing losses.
If there’s a best deck, it inevitably becomes the worst deck.
This is hyperbole, but bear with me. If the hivemind decides that a color combination is great, the rate at which it is drafted goes way up. A strategy can only support so many seats, and so the worst deck at a table might be the overall best archetype in a vacuum. I won an RCQ where four different players all drafted Rakdos in Lord of the Rings. I was happy to take their excess.
Rarity is a trap.
The symbol on a card relates to scarcity, not power. Scarcity is, by and large, a collector concern, not a drafter concern. While we’ve discussed drafting for financial concerns, assuming rares are powerful is a trap for newer players. As uncommons are increasingly designed for limited, we need to be weary of rares.
Cards with high mana value need to do something immediately.
The second biggest trap I see is people presuming that high mana value cards win games, when in reality, they can function as a mulligan you never took. The building requirements and draft tactics to make 6+ mv spells with no effect on the board viable in most new draft formats are not for the faint of heart. The delta between the average player and great players when it comes to these cards is wider than you would imagine.
Start with the greedy and fair versions of your sealed pool, then adjust.
Usually, a greedy build will involve multiple colors with various levels of support and a fair build will focus on curve and fewer bombs. Creating contrast can provide answers to questions you didn’t foresee.
Weaker mana sinks generate more value the longer the game goes.
Sealed is the art of extracting value from cards that may be overlooked in draft. Yes, games go longer, but how can we take advantage of that? Including things to do when games go longer. A card like Treetop Snarespinner has dual synergy, slowing the game down while providing benefit in said slow game. Jodah’s Codex might be agonizingly slow against fast Boros decks in DMU draft, but it will pull you ahead in a top deck war.
Aggro in sealed is the best deck but most people don’t have it when they think they do.
Most decks aren’t prepared to answer questions at the rate aggro can present them, but that’s the problem with most aggro decks: efficient use of early mana in sealed. Drafting helps you secure your curve. I see a lot of failed sealed pools that tried to be the aggressor but leaned too heavily on their four and five drops to finish. We have to force our opponents into fairly awkward positions with early plays for this to be a winning formula.
Know every sweeper, flash creature, and trick in the format. These are the easiest ways to be blown out.
You can save searches for sweepers, flash creatures, and tricks, then replace the set code to find your list on Scryfall.
Data is a great way to check your gut.
Game In Hand Win Rate on 17Lands is, in my opinion, the gold standard for seeing if your hunch checks out. With the volume of data available, it’s exceedingly rare for a bad card to put up great numbers and vice versa.
Use the tools available inside the software and out.
SealedDech.tech is solid for laying out pools and sorting them for old school MTGO players that don’t like building on Arena. 17Lands data logging is a must. Untapped.gg’s overlay and deck information tool can help you figure out what your outs are and see your sideboard. Goatbots is my go-to reference for MTGO prices. Learn your search operators within Arena.
Seek community with value.
Dedicated limited Discord servers are a great way to hear a variety of opinions in real time. You can even solve problems for others. I recommend Limited Level Ups, Lords of Limited, and Draft Chaff as a free option.
Lower the stakes if you want to have fun.
Drafting is expensive. It’s fine if you want to blow of some steam and jam some games without optimizing every play. Save this play for Quick Draft queues, which offer a reduced entry fee (and prizes) and are against bots, so you don’t have any pressure of a timer.
Goldfish when you’re unsure about a build.
Tapped Out and Deck Stats both have free digital options that let you draw hands and see how functional your deck is in a bubble. Before loading a deck in there, come up with a goal of meaningful question that the time can answer. Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.
Don’t play a bad card to make a medium card great.
Again, we’re trying to establish a floor in most drafts rather than a ceiling. Having a deck that works consistently means not having cards that need to be drawn together. When we draw our bad card, we’ve essentially taken a mulligan. Limited games tend to be too tight with a lower ceiling to afford too many mulls.
Medium cards that make good cards great work best with external escape hatches.
If your deck offers ways to draw and discard, for example, you can pitch the bad card with few repercussions. Perhaps it’s medium against the right opponent and you don’t mind having it as a baseline. Keep in mind what forms of “escape hatch” you can build into your deck.
Craft your uncommons the first day of a set on Arena to improve vault progress.
The Arena system is juiced to give you a decent benefit for drafting uncommons and there’s frankly no world in which we need as many of these wildcards as we receive. Over time, this will generate more wildcards that can be used to complete a set early, earning you (eventually) some free gems. It’s not ideal, but it’s the system we have. For this reason, I’ll always take an unplayable uncommon at the end of a draft where I’m set on playables.
Sometimes, you need to rare draft over a “maybe” card in BO1.
Earning set completion is a part of the Arena economy. How frequently you can afford to do this is based entirely on your win rate. Early on, focus on building the best deck you can. You never hit set completion if you’re constantly going 2-3 or 1-2 in drafts.
Great players separate signal from noise.
New players rush to make judgments about packs. “White is open!” and “Black is being cut!” are the types of pronouncements you can expect only a couple of picks in. Experienced players understand that this information is noise, not signal, and don’t let it affect their draft. This takes time to develop.
That’s it. I don’t really know how to wrap things up.
Odds and Endstep
No mail this week. What the hell? I gave you a little “Message Me” button.
Black Friday was also pretty weak on Magic deals. u/ParrotPeril summed it up well (censorship mine)
Black Friday is such a joke nowadays. “Don’t miss out on 30% off” don’t piss me the **** off. People used to hit each other over the head for a microwave that’s how low the prices were. People literally died. We used to be a country
We were indeed.
Okay, back to the normal midweek fare next week. I promise. With the holidays and then the shopping holidays, I just didn’t have gas in the tank. So I wrote all of that instead, which is actually insane.
Winner of the Week
Congrats to the weekly winner t******7@gmail.com, who did not sign up with a name but takes home these two ravaged Commander decks I parted out a couple weeks ago. Wake them up inside. Save them from the nothing they’ve become. Evanescence the hell out of ‘em.
Per Mana Club #5, if they don’t click the button above to claim the prize, it rolls over to next week with an additional something that surely is better.
As always, thanks to Casey, John, Jose, and Alex for supporting this work, which is criminally underfunded. Want to get your name in the spotlight? Hit the button, buy me a coffee.
Passing the turn,
Jake
Bonus Seymour of the Week
