MTG Draft Advice

“How do I get better at booster draft?"

“What tips do you have for an absolute beginner to drafting?"

“I don’t like draft because people get mad at me for ‘signaling wrong’, for taking Tablet of the Guilds first pick instead of Sphinx’s Revelation."
 

Drafting is complicated.  It requires you to, under pressure, choose cards while drafting, use those cards to build a deck, and then play several matches of magic with that deck.  Each of these three tasks requires you to evaluate and make decisions quickly.  The decisions you make while drafting impact the decisions you can make while deck building, which impact the decisions you can make while playing.  These decisions compound upon each other.

Drafting is complicated, but if you come prepared, you come in control.  Drafting is less random than it first appears, because you get to make all the decisions.   Don’t fear these decisions – embrace them!

In this article, I assume you

1. Know the basic rules and how to play magic
2. Understand how drafting works
3. Want to learn, with the goal of winning more fun games and matches when you draft.

If you watch high-level players draft, or read on forums or articles about drafting, you will see a lot of advice, references, and comments about "signaling".  About knowing what your colors are, when to commit, when to abandon your first pick rare.  About knowing “what’s open” in your draft.  About pick orders.

These are advanced topics that assume you know and will already utilize the basics of drafting, deckbuilding, mulliganing, and playing Magic.  You want to learn about these topics, or you want to learn about a specific draft format? (Lorwyn-Lorwyn-Morningtide, 3x Gatecrash, Kamigawa Block?) Google them.  Go search for articles.  Look on forums.  Find videos, and guides.  I will not teach you these things here today.

My article aims to teach you the basics of drafting, deckbuilding, mulliganing, and playing Magic.  There is a list of TL;DR bullet points towards the end.

BEFORE THE DRAFT:
1) TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF 
Key Point: Other factors than the game itself can affect your game.

Get plenty of sleep

Eat healthy  (whole grains, lean proteins, fresh fruits and vegetables, in reasonable portions)

Get some exercise (I find rolling out of bed and exercising first thing in the morning works best for me, before breakfast.)

Shower, manage your personal hygiene and appearance

Find activities to relax and de-stress.  (your mental health is just as important as your physical, and requires attention and care)

These are not jokes.  Take care of yourself.  Being happy and healthy both require effort, and will impact every aspect of your professional life, personal relationships, and performance in your hobbies.  Being happy is a choice.  Being healthy is a choice.  Treat yourself right – it is hard work, and it is the most important thing you can do to improve yourself.  Including your gaming ability.  It's called leveling, right?

Back to Magic:

2) READ ALL THE CARDS IN ADVANCE 
Key Point: you don’t have time to read and figure out what the cards do while you are drafting them.  Commons and Uncommons make up the bulk of your decks, and are what you should focus on learning.

Go to gatherer and pull up the advanced search tool.  Set the expansion(s) to the set(s) you will be drafting.  Read all the cards.

Now, remember, when you draft, you open booster packs.  Each booster contains 15 cards - 11 commons, 3 uncommons, and 1 Rare or Mythic Rare.

What cards are going to make up the bulk of your draft decks?

COMMONS.

Now that you have read all of the cards you will be drafting, you might want to start studying them.  During the draft, you don’t have time to learn what the cards do.  You have to understand what they do before you sit down at the table.  You don’t need to memorize all stats, or know every card in the set (though that helps).  But you need to know them well enough that you can see the art and the card, and know approximately what they are, and what they do.

In order of most to least importance, you should

Study the commons

Know the uncommons

Be aware of the rares and mythics

Beware of exciting rare syndrome when drafting.  Compare the rare to the commons, and remember even if you take it, it will still be only one card in your deck.  Sometimes they are bombs that can take over the game, but sometimes it’s just a six-drop when your deck desperately needs that two-mana creature, or more removal spells.

The mythics and rares can be big, and splashy, and powerful, but you won’t have more than one or two. Even one or two good rares would be extremely lucky. You CAN reasonably hope to see a particularcommon at some point in the draft, and that is why you should plan around the commons.

The fact that you “just needed one more land to get your dragon out” means diddly-squat if you die with it in your hand waiting for that land!

3) UNDERSTAND THE ABILITIES AND INTERACTIONS ON THE CARDS 
Key Point: You need to know how and which cards work well together, so you can benefit from the synergy or combo that they make.

Example: In Gatecrash Draft,

a. If you control Experiment One and Cloudfin Raptor, and cast Knight Watch, how many times does evolve trigger?  How much power do you end up with in the end?

b. Can you cipher onto a Keyrune?

You not only need to know what the cards are and do, you need to know how they work, and how they interact.  With the release of each set Wizards of the Coast publishes detailed FAQs and information on exactly how every card works.  Use this resource, and ask questions about anything you don’t understand!

  

Now you have seen all of the cards you will be drafting.  You know how they interact with each other, and which ones work well together.  You totally went and did that – you’re not one of those people who reads the article and doesn’t follow the advice, right?  You went to gatherer and read all of the cards, so that once you sit down to draft, you already have an idea what they all do.

[answers: a. Evolve triggers 4 times.  Experiment one becomes a 2/2, cloudfin raptor becomes a 2/3, with the Knight tokens you have 8 power total.  b. Yes, as long as you activate the keyrune and turn it into a creature before your cipher spell resolves, you can cipher onto a keyrune, and it will even still be encoded in later turns when you activate the keyrune again.  See the Gatecrash FAQ for clarification and more info.]

DRAFTING, DECK BUILDING, MULLIGANING, AND PLAYING YOUR LIMITED DECK

Now you are ready to open your pack and start picking cards!  Right?

Woah woah woah, slow down, hotshot.  First you need to understand what you are looking for, and why.

4) COLORS 
Key Point:  Stick to two colors when possible. 

In your average limited format, your deck should be two colors.  This varies widely between formats, though.  Some formats have great mana fixing (cards that allow you to make or access multiple colors of mana.  Green often has this ability, and some lands or artifacts help as well).  This mana fixing can allow what is called a splash, which is where you run ~1-4 cards that are not in either of your main colors.  These cards have to be particularly powerful, or fill a necessary void in your deck.  The risks of splashing is that you might not have the correct colors of mana when you need them – which is why mana fixing is so important when you do decide to splash.

This is draft.  How do we know what colors we are going to play?  Doesn’t it depend what cards we open, and what cards people pass us?  Alternatively, what if I don’t understand any of the blue cards in this format, and don’t want to play blue?  What can you do?

There are lots of ways to handle your color choice when drafting, two of which are particularly popular.  1) is to use your first few picks taking the most powerful card in each pack.  Even if those cards are different colors, you take the most useful and powerful cards.  By the end of pack one you should be able to decide on a main color, and possibly a second color as well, and going into packs two and three you can take only cards from your best colors.  2) is to do what is known as forcing.  This means you decide before sitting down to draft “I am going to play <strategy>”.  For example, “I am going to play RED-BASED AGGRO”.  So you immediately take all the red cards you can, even if they are mediocre and there are better cards in the packs.

Both of these two approaches have their benefits and drawbacks.  The better you get, and the more you learn a format, the more you will know when and how to choose your colors.  For now, start with either drafting powerful cards until you decide your colors towards the middle of pack one, or force a particular color/set of colors. 

5) MANA CURVE AND FORMAT SPEED 
Key Point:  You need to be able to interact in the first few turns of the game.  It doesn’t matter if your hand is full of Dragons if you are burned to a crisp. 

How aggressive is the format?  What kind of pressure can you expect, what will you need to race against?  How good are the average creatures in this format?

No matter the answer to these questions, while drafting and deckbuilding, you need to keep in mind your mana curve, based on the converted mana costs of spells (particularly creatures) in your deck. 

[Converted Mana Cost:  A card’s converted mana cost is the total number of mana the card costs, no matter of what colors.  Grizzly Bears costs 1G, so its converted mana cost is two.  Hill Giant costs 3R, so its converted mana cost is four.  These two creatures also happen to be why people call a 2/2 for 2 a “bear”, and a 3/3 for 4 a “hill giant”]

More expensive spells are generally more powerful than less expensive spells.  A 2/2 creature may cost less mana than a 5/5, but it also has less impact.  So why shouldn’t you just draft as many big, expensive creatures as possible, since they will outclass the little guys?

There is a caveat.  A 5/5 creature outclasses a 2/2 creature ONLY WHEN THEY ARE BOTH IN PLAY.

An army of little guys plus a removal spell or two will kill you before you reach enough mana to start playing and attacking and blocking with your huge 6-or-more-cost guys, no matter how many of them are still in your hand.

This is where the concept of a “mana curve” comes from – you need to balance your deck such that you are guaranteed to have relevant spells to play in the first few turns, and then have a smaller number of bigger spells that you can play later in the game after you have drawn more land.

How to balance your mana curve varies by the format. In Zendikar draft you wanted lots of 1, 2, and 3 mana creatures, because the format was very aggressive. In Shards of Alara, the games were generally much slower, so you could buy time to reach six mana and play huge beasts and dragons more reliably.

However, even in a slower format, you still can’t have something like nine 6+ mana creatures in your deck. They will get stuck in your hand, and once you reach the mana to play them, you’ll be under a lot of pressure. On the flip side, you can’t afford to have too many one mana 1/1’s, or you will get stalled and then overrun. Against an empty board, your threats should be able to put your opponent on a clock – a one-power creature rarely does this. They are too low impact, unless they have a powerful utility outside of just attacking and chump blocking. Prickly Boggart, Judge’s Familiar, or the Black or Red Denizen’s just don’t do enough to justify a slot as one of your 40 cards.

6) YOU NEED ENOUGH LANDS AND CREATURES 

Key Point: You need enough lands and creatures for your draft deck to function.  As a rule of thumb, you want 16-18 lands, and at least 15 creatures.  Stick to EXACTLY 40 cards for your deck – if you run more, the odds you draw your best cards are lower!

Sometimes you will have too many good cards and won’t know what to cut.  This is a good thing, and means you have good sideboard options.  Make a call, and cut some cards.  Remember, sometimes you are scrambling for playables and have to play a few sub-optimal cards to reach a full 40.

Ideally, you want to do what is called “curving out”.  This is where you play a land and a guy each turn that uses up all of your mana.  A two-mana creature on turn two, a three mana creature on turn three, four on four, etc.

Notice how I said “creature” in the previous paragraph, and not “spell”?  Creatures are the most important type of card in draft.  In general, if your deck ends up with less than ten creatures, you have made a very serious error.  15 creatures can still be rather low in some formats.   Also note what I said about needing to play a land each turn – if you don’t have enough land of the correct colors, you can’t play your spells!

As a rule of thumb, if you don’t know what else to do, run 17 lands.  Your deck should be two colors, so you probabally want somewhere between 6-8 of your lesser color, and the rest of your main color.  If you have any splashes, you’ll need 1-3 mana sources that can support your splash color, and any fixing you get makes casting your colored spells easier.  You can run 16 lands, if your deck has no cards that cost more than four mana, or 18 or 19 if you have lots of big spells and abilities to spend your mana on, but 17 is an average you’ll be happy with.

7) HOW TO EVALUATE CREATURES 

Key Point:  Not all creatures are created equal.  Bigger is better, but only when they cost the same amount of mana.  Evasion (such as flying, intimidate, trample, or unblockable) or other abilities (lifelink, deathtouch, first strike) are valuable, and sometimes worth an extra mana or two for your creature.  If the creature costs more than 4 mana, it had better have a big impact on the game for you to play it in your draft deck – otherwise you could be better off with a cheaper creature.

Mana cost, ‘french vanilla’ or evergreen keywords, block/set specific traits (such as creature type in a tribal block, or color in a hybrid block), and power/toughness all are important in how you evaluate your creatures. Also, unique abilities – does the creature change the games rules, or provide a comes-into-play effect that can prove beneficial? A five mana 1/3 is bad in the abstract – but Viskopa Confessor can be pretty valuable to a dedicated Orzhov drafter. Try the Vanilla Test to help you evaluate cards.

Again, I can’t stress enough, pay attention to the mana curve of your creatures. How to evaluate creatures varies wildly by what sets you are drafting, and I recommend you google articles to help you with that. But in any format, if you make efficient use of all your available mana every turn, and your opponent does not, you should be winning. This could mean playing a 2 drop, 3 drop, and 4 drop, or it could mean playing a removal spell, a card draw spell, a blocker, and then two aggressive three drops (or one big flyer) on turn six. To do this consistently, you need a lot of 2, 3, and 4 drops in your deck, or a lot of good removal spells.

8) MULLIGANS 
Key Point: Mana curve, manascrew, manaflood, and colorscrew all come together when drafting and building your deck, and how you need to design it.  Mulligan decisions (and the order you play your spells) should be shaped by the contents and curve of your deck, not merely by “do I have lands and spells”.

You need to sculpt your deck such that you minimize the chance you will need to mulligan.  If your opening hand is 4 islands and 3 black cards, you may have enough land, but can’t cast any spells.  If your deck is very aggressive, but your opening hand has five lands, you might need to mulligan to a hand with more cheap creatures.  If your deck has a lot of big spells, or more than two colors, and all you need is to buy time to cast them?  Keeping a two land hand might not be a good idea.

You need to design your deck with mulligans in mind.  You need to know what kinds of hands you won’t be able to keep because your deck can’t function.  You need a goal for your deck, and it better not be one that exists in Magical Christmas Land where everything goes perfectly.  You need a clear gameplan for your deck, and that plan has to stand up to an opponent.

9) BUILDING AND PLAYING YOUR DECK
Key Point: Let’s put it all together.  We have to think, how are our games going to play out?  Based on that, what kinds of hands would I want to mulligan?  How do I want to build my deck?  Finally, what cards do I have to draft to get that deck?

What goals do I have for my deck?

Here are some common archetypes, and the kinds of cards you want to prioritize:

An aggressive deck that tries to overwhelm your opponent.  This deck would love to play cheap (2-3 mana) and efficient (high power for the cost) creatures early and start attacking, and then make sure they can keep attacking every turn.  You want to prioritize drafting lots of cheap creatures to flood the board (playing 1-2 creatures each turn), and some tricks like Giant Growth, or Bloodrush, to help you win combat with a superior board position.   Your goal is cheap cards that help you keep dealing damage with your creatures.  Burn spells or removal spells are invaluable for this kind of deck, because they can clear blockers out of the way, or deal your opponent that last few damage to finish them off.  You want to keep your mana curve as low as possible in this deck.  You might want to mulligan hands with too many land, or ones without many creatures, or no cheap creatures – because those hands are low on early threats. 

A midrange or controllish deck that tries to overpower your opponent.  This deck will prioritize big 4 or 5 mana creatures much higher than the aggressive deck.  This deck tries to play blockers and attackers scary enough that the opponent will eventually succumb.  3/3’s, and 4/4’s or bigger are ideal.  This deck is more likely to save its removal spells for your opponent’s biggest threats, whereas the aggressive deck just wants to kill whatever is in its way to keep attacking for damage.  Sometimes these decks like cards that accelerate their mana, to deploy large threats faster.  This deck expects the games to go a little longer, so it can afford a higher mana curve.  You want to mulligan hands that have too few lands, as you must hit your land drops to reach your bigger spells.

A deck that tries to stall the ground and win with flyers or evasion.  This type of deck a 4 mana flying creature would be highly valued, because it can keep attacking over the top of many threats.  Cheaper flyers, and bigger ones, are just as important.  This deck can use creatures with defender, or even just with low power/high toughness, to serve as important roadblocks on the ground while its evasion gets the damage in.  Tricks to keep the evasive guys dealing damage can be important if you are low on removal.  This strategy can be aggressive, midrange, tempo, or even controlling, and the power of cards along its curve will reflect this, as will mulligan decisions.

10) Further Tips

Read this article, "Reasons".  I found it useful for getting into the right frame-of-mind for draft card evaluations, and going into each pick with a plan.

Also this article, "Who's The Beatdown", may help you think how to play.  It's old, but still relevant - you have to know and properly evaluate the matchup and how aggressively you should be playing.

Do the math before attacking or blocking - don't run a 2/2 into a 2/4, or a flyer into a creature with Reach. Read the cards your opponents play. I'll repeat that last one, in caps - READ THE CARDS YOUR OPPONENTS PLAY. Remember the concept of card advantage - creature boosting auras are bad because they generate card advantage for your opponent by putting all your eggs in one basket.

As a final point, remember to prioritize average creatures higher than average spells. An okay creature is always a reasonable topdeck; a highly situational spell is not. You also never want to find yourself going "jeez, I really wish I'd drafted more creatures" - it's far better to have too many than too few!

11) DURING THE DRAFT (TL;DR): 
Remember to take care of yourself!  Read all the cards in advance, and know how the abilities work and interact.

• Keep in mind what you have learned, and why it’s important:

• Stay as close to two colors as possible

• Pay close attention to your mana curve when making your picks

• Do you need more removal, cheap creatures, or evasive creatures?

• 40 cards exactly.  16-18 lands, aim for 15+ creatures.

• Pay close attention to your mana curve when mulliganing.  Seriously folks, think about your mana curve!

• Read all cards your opponent plays - and read all the cards you play!

These skills are useful in any draft format.  ANY.  My friends and I got a box each of Guildpact, Shards of Alara, and Eventide for cheap, and drafted the combination three times.  Despite never having played the format before that weekend, I dominated drafts two and three. None of my matches were close. (If you want to know, Blue/Red was "pretty good" in that format).

I hope you found this helpful!  Good luck, and have fun!

Questions or Comments?  Hit me with a tweet (@dasbif) or post on my Facebook Page (Facebook.com/DasbifOnline)