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Principles of Drafting for Magic: The Gathering

By Exxorcyst

What is the Draft?

One of the problems with Magic, or indeed any collectible card game, is the discrepancy between players who can afford lots of cards and those players who are stuck with just enough cards to make a deck. Though there really is no substitute for skill and strategy, players with enough money can win games by simply buying enough good cards with which to create a deck.

Enter the draft. In this type of Magic, players draft cards from a common pool instead of using previously collected cards. This starts all players on a more or less equal footing. Skill, and not the depth of ones pockets, becomes the main factor in determining victory.

The draft also differs somewhat from another popular variant of Magic known as sealed deck. In sealed deck, player open boosters and construct decks from those cards. While the deck-building strategies in draft and sealed deck are similar, the draft gives you the advantage of selecting specific cards from the collective pool. Thus, you can begin planning strategies as you draft rather than trust luck to give you the cards you want.

Draft Types and What to Look For

The decks have been opened. How the draft proceeds from there depends on what variation of the draft you are playing. Drafting is so popular that there are a multitude of subtypes, and even within each subtype there are subtle differences. For example, some drafts require you to draft enough basic land for a deck, while others simply give you a preset number of lands. I’ll try to describe a few different kinds of drafts and the strategies you may want to employ.

Straight Points Draft – Every player starts with a certain number of points with which to “buy” cards to build a deck. The way in which cards are valued varies, but one popular method involves making one large pile of all the cards and flipping a single card at a time from that pile. Below is an example illustrating how this might proceed.

- Player 1 flips a card and reveals Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt goes into position 1 of 3.

- Player 1 may draft Lightning Bolt for 3 points or pass. Player 1 passes.

- Player 2 flips a card and reveals War Mammoth. War Mammoth goes into position 1, and Lightning Bolt slides into position 2.

- Player 2 may draft Lightning Bolt for 2 points, War Mammoth for 3 points, or pass. Player 2 passes.

- Player 3 flips a card and reveals Counterspell. Counterspell goes into position 1, War Mammoth and Lightning bolt slide into positions 2 and 3 respectively.

- Player 3 may draft Lightning Bolt for 1 point, War Mammoth for 2 points or Counterspell for 3 points. Player 3 cannot pass. (You can only pass while there are unfilled positions.) Player 3 drafts Lightning Bolt for 1 point.

- Player 1 flips a card and reveals Terror. Terror goes into position 1, Counterspell and War Mammoth slide into positions 2 and 3 respectively.

Here you can see that the value of cards proceeds in a balanced fashion. Bad cards simply keep sliding in position until they are cheap enough for someone to take them, whereas good cards will be drafted early, even though they are more expensive. In this kind of draft, one must find a balance between splurging for power cards and taking lesser cards to save money. It should also be noted that in this kind of draft, there are usually around 7 positions (with cards ranging from 1-7 points). The example used 3 for simplicity.

Another strategy is to play a non-popular color, thus getting all your cards cheaper (since people will be avoiding them to play their own colors), but there are reasons why certain colors (blue, white) are not popular in drafting tournaments. Once again, this is up to individual discretion.

Valuable cards in this kind of draft include: Creatures with evasion, large creatures, direct damage, creature buffs, creature re-animation, and creature removal.

Backdraft – Backdraft is a novel variant of a straight points draft. It proceeds exactly the same as above, save for one major difference. In Backdraft, the goal is to draft the worst possible cards. Now you ask, why would you want to do that? The reason is during the tournament, opponents trade drafted cards and do their best to make decks from them. So if Player 1 is facing Player 2, Player 1 has to construct a deck from Player 2’s cards, and vice versa. After the match, players return the cards and go on to face someone else. This results in the interesting circumstance of a player facing more or less the same deck throughout the tournament while having to come up with a new deck to face it with each opponent.

Some people find this really fun because you are not stuck playing the same deck throughout the tournament and instead rely on resourcefulness and imagination. Plus, if you were really good about drafting bad cards, you can screw opponent after opponent. Unlike the straight points draft, you want to spread your cards around in all five colors so your opponent doesn’t have one particularly strong color to work with.

Since these games tend to last a long time, cards with only short-term benefits are prime targets for drafting. Anything that is only going to slow you down for a while is fine for drafting. You just want to make sure your opponent has very little offence. Also, cards that require other cards to be effective are great to draft provided you don’t draft the other half of that combo. An example would be drafting a bunch of Giant Growths but no creatures. You will probably want to avoid drafting creatures as much as you can.

Valuable cards in this kind of draft include: Anything that doesn’t appear to have a purpose, creature buffs (provided you have no creatures), almost anything that only works in the short-term (like blue cards that let you draw more cards).

Pass-it-Around – This proceeds more like a straight points draft in principle, but there aren’t any points. In this variant, players sit in a circle and each simultaneously open a booster pack. Each player selects a card from the 15-card booster and passes the rest to the next player. From this new pool of 14 cards, each player then selects another card and passes the rest on. This proceeds until all 15 cards are gone. Another booster is opened. The direction of passing is reversed, and drafting continues until all the boosters are used in this fashion. The cards you are looking for are exactly those that you are looking for in a straight points draft.

This kind of draft has several advantages over the straight points draft. First of all, your opponents have less insight into what sorts of cards you are drafting. Also, because all players are drafting at once, this kind of draft is able to proceed quite quickly in comparison, and doesn’t require any of the messy keeping track of points that you inevitably have to deal with in the other draft types.

Building Your Deck

Your draft studs are going to be your creatures. No exceptions. Games of the draft are won or lost with creatures for one simple reason. Creatures stay. Against an opponent without adequate creatures to defend, yours hit every turn. Against an opponent with many creatures, having creatures of your own is your best defense. A card that gives you 5 life is nice, but not when it comes at the cost of a blocker, or say a creature that does 2 damage every turn over many turns.

In a 40-card deck, at least 16 of your cards should be good creatures. Basic lands and any other lands you may have drafted should number in the 18-20 range. That leaves 4-6 cards to throw in whatever extra spells you want. This might seem a little harsh, especially with the number of really great enchantments/instants/sorceries/artifacts, but the value of creatures cannot be overstated. Of course, these numbers are flexible and may change depending on your drafting situation, but it is a good starting point. The 40-card minimum should be followed as closely as possible. After all, it’s not worth it to have a 60-card deck if a bunch of your surplus cards are only somewhat cool and standing between you and the really good ones.

What do you want out of your creatures? A good mix of creatures will include a few small creatures that can be cast on the first or second turn. These will allow you to hopefully get in a few hits and take an early lead in the life game. Later on, they function nicely as sacrificial blockers while your real damage dealers get the job done. The mid-game is where you want to start throwing in your evaders. These are the semi-large creatures with abilities like flying or landwalk that will let them hit your opponent for free. The end game is where the large creatures are a must, with trample being a huge bonus.

What do you want out of your other cards? Because creatures are such a big part of the game, most of your 4-6 spell cards should deal with creature removal. Cards like Terror should not be passed up ever. Direct damage is another huge bonus, and indeed, anything that lets you decide where damage is dealt can give you an advantage. This is because in creature combat, what gets damaged is really up to what blocks what. Even damage that is not really direct damage, but sort of acts that way (e.g., something that gives a creature –1/-1) is still really useful. Other cards to consider for your 4-6 extra spells would be anything that boosts your creatures, or in rare instances something that can totally bust open the game in your favor, or save you at the last second.

Final Thoughts

Even with these deck-building strategies in place, there is still no substitute for good tactics. Knowing when to attack or defend, when to cast a spell or save it, when to take damage or sacrifice a creature to blocking—these are all vital for success. Unfortunately there’s no way to teach these skills other than practice. The more drafts you are a part of, the better you will be.