Last week, I cracked my first Vs. System booster pack in over two years. I was down at Gamer’s Inn in Phoenix hanging out with my good buddies Adam Prosak, Brian Eaton, and Anthony Avitollo when, in a style akin to Indiana Jones presenting a long-forgotten artifact, Adam unveiled a dust-covered box of Vs. System which he had saved for such a special occasion. Between me and Adam, it didn’t take me long to coerce the others into a two-on-two draft.
As my eyes glossed over the blue, green, and red borders of the cards, the knowledge I had taken from the game and applied to Magic flooded back to me in a rush of faded memories. I had so seamlessly incorporated the drafting skills from Vs. System into my own Magic repertoire of 40-card skills that the thought processes seemed like second-nature. As the draft went own, I slowly began to remember the oft-undiscussed principles which I later applied to Magic.
For those that never played the game, the very, very basic idea is that you have what are essentially creatures (characters) and instants (plot twists). The good plot twists were always very high picks amongst the better players because characters were numerous and totally replaceable. Sure, you might have to play a slightly worse five drop you picked up mid-pack, but that was a small price to pay for picking up a better spell.
The same thing is true in Magic. Spells are awesome, whilst creatures are replaceable. “No, duh,” you might be thinking. “Removal is good, pick it over non-bombs, I’ve known that since BREAK and other similar silly acronyms were taught to me back in fifth grade.” Let me show it to you a little differently. You’re drafting Jund. Which of the following creatures would you rather have in your deck: Dreg Reaver or Mosstodon?
Okay, hopefully you reached the conclusion that Mosstodon is the far superior creature. It has an extra point of power and a relevant ability. But what would happen if I spiced up the offer a little bit? What if the choice was not between Mosstodon or Dreg Reaver, but a choice between Mosstodon or Dreg Reaver and Resounding Roar? Is that getting closer? What if the Roar was a Soul’s Fire? Blightning? Infest? How sweet does the deal need to be? Where is the point when having a worse creature in exchange for an extra spell becomes worthwhile?
I believe having a good spell is often worth the tradeoff of having a worse creature. Spells are hidden information that strong players can use to obtain card advantage and outplay opponents. I’m okay with casting a Dreg Reaver instead of a Mosstodon on turn 5 if it means I get a Resounding Roar in my deck.
What does all of this mean? How do you get this choice between one card and two cards? While of course you cannot technically choose between one card and two, Dreg Reaver is almost certainly going to come around in the, well, dregs of the pack. Contrarily, Mosstodon is going to gleefully be snapped up by some other Green drafter. If your pick is between Roar and Mosstodon and you take the Roar, you can surely find a late Dreg Reaver to fill your five-drop slot. Finding a card to replace Roar is going to be a trickier endeavor.
This tactic can also be expanded outward so that it encompasses the whole of a draft. Is that Mosstodon really so irreplaceable when you have Beacon Behemoth and Wild Leotau drifting around in the last pack? Of course, you can make the same style of argument for Resounding Roar by citing that Might of Alara is in the last pack. The difference between the two is that Mosstodon is just a creature, and I can find a creature somewhere that I’m not playing to make up for his absence. Even if I do end up with a Might of Alara later on, that’s still okay. It is a lot harder to find another pump spell to slot in than it is to find a decent creature.
Of course, there are obvious limits to applying this strategy. Having a deck full of Giant Growths alongside three creatures is going to make it difficult to win. How to gauge your creature versus spell picks also depends on what kind of deck you’re drafting when applying this method. For example, in a typical Limited R/B archetype it usually doesn’t matter what guys you have to clean up after you expunge their board of creatures, you just need something to do the job. In Time Spiral block, I was regularly winning Magic Online queues with R/B decks consisting of 8-10 creatures. On the other hand, I wanted my aggressive decks in Lorwyn block to have significant levels of curve redundancy so that I could curve out every game.
Going back to the Roar and Dreg Reaver versus Mosstodon situation, even if that Dreg Reaver doesn’t make your deck, it’s okay. Yes, Mosstodon would have been nice to have, but you still likely have very playable two-, three-, four-, or six-drop waiting at the benches. At the core, this theory is all about having exactly the right amount of playables: one of the most important, and yet highly overlooked, aspects of drafting.
Let me illuminate a secret about drafting: you only need 23 spells for your deck. (Yes, sometimes you actually need 22 or 24 depending on the format, but for the purposes of cohesion I’m just going to refer to it as 23 spells.) Okay, so it’s a very poorly kept secret. But really, think about what that means for drafting. Let me put it this way: if you spend a pick on a card and that card doesn’t end up in your deck or being sideboarded in, all you have effectively done is taken a card out of the draft. When your draft ends, all you need to have drafted are 23 good spells and a couple of Naturalizes or Shore Snappers for your sideboard. The rest of your picks no longer matter. Think about all of the times you’ve been forced to make excruciatingly difficult deckbuilding decisions that force you to cut perfectly playable cards simply because you drafted too many of them. Each of those could have been something different, and it would have not affected your final deck.
So then, what does only needing to have 23 spells mean during the draft? For one, it means that you should be drafting lands highly. The tri-lands exemplify this because they’re also incredible mana fixing. You usually can’t get them much higher than people already take them. The major culprits in AAC are not the tri-lands, but the Panoramas. How many times have you passed on a Naya Panorama for a Gift of the Gargantuan or similar mid-pick spell which ended up in your sideboard? I did several times early on in the season, and that’s a mistake I’m not going to be making again. Naya Panorama is guaranteed to make your deck if you are in two of its colors. It will never sit in your sideboard, longingly looking out at the field of battle with lonely puppy dog eyes. Gifts of the Gargantuan (or Ridge Rannet, or Call to Heel, or Angelsong, or…) might make your deck depending on how the rest of your draft goes, but it equally might just be one of your twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth cards that you have to cut. Why pass on a guaranteed playable which fixes your mana in a format often defined by who hits their colors for opting a card which is merely okay and might not make your deck? You’ll almost always have something else you can play over your missing Gift of the Gargantuan. That’s definitely not true of the Panoramas.
Furthermore, only needing 23 spells means that you have room to test the water and see if something is flowing. If you see a fourth pick Kiss of the Amesha after taking Green and Red cards, and there is no glaringly obvious pick that fits in your colors, you can take the Kiss. No, it’s not particularly good for your signals, but there are two counterpoints to that argument. First, I feel that signals are extremely overrated in general, and especially so in Shards of Alara. Second, if there was a strong card in your colors you would have taken it anyway, so it’s not like by taking the Kiss you’re sending them actively poor signals to switch into your colors. It may seem like a strange pick at the time, but in the event that the workings for a nice Esper deck come flowing your way you’re going to be glad you had it. If the Blue and White cards don’t come and it’s just some strange anomaly on the draft radar, then it’s not a big deal. All you lost was some middle of the pack, replaceable pick, whereas the rewards if it worked out (a Kiss of the Amesha) were very high.
Finally, since you only need 23 spells it means that you can hatedraft cards if you’re paying attention to how many “extra” picks you think you’re going to have. I do not usually advocate hatedrafting, especially if you are concerned about signals. However, especially in the middle of pack 3, if you’re confident that the card you’d take for your deck would not sneak in to the final build then by all means it’s reasonable to cut a stronger card for another archetype. In the first two packs, however, drafting a card purely to hate it out of the draft is usually incorrect. (As opposed to the above Kiss of the Amesha example, where you are taking it early in the first pack because you think you might be able to reap positive rewards from drafting it.)
To close out the article, here’s an example of a successful draft I recently did that exemplified both of the drafting concepts I have outlined:
Lands:
1 Grixis Panorama
1 Seaside Citadel
1 Plains
4 Mountain
5 Island
5 Swamp
Creatures:
2 Blister Beetle
1 Dregscape Zombie
1 Rockslide Elemental
1 Canyon Minotaur
1 Brackwater Elemental
1 Pestilent Kathari
1 Goblin Outlander
1 Zombie Outlander
1 Nacatl Hunt-Pride
Spells:
2 Agony Warp
2 Kiss of the Amesha
1 Traumatic Visions
1 Cancel
1 Cruel Ultimatum
1 Grixis Charm
1 Armillary Sphere
1 Drag Down
1 Resounding Thunder
1 Absorb Vis
1 Magma Spray
The relevant sideboard cards were two Shore Snappers and a Brackwater Elemental. What might surprise you a little more about the sideboard is that the rest of the playable cards were White and Green. I dipped my toe into Naya early on because I knew I had some picks to fool around with, but then picked up more Grixis cards and solidified myself into a removal-heavy control deck. I ended up with almost exactly 23 playables, forming a deck which was fairly strong despite giving up several picks.
The glaring hole in this deck on a quick glance is the lack of creatures. There are a whole 10 creatures, and some of them are less than capable at being efficient attackers. This draft deck kind of pushes my drafting concepts to the extreme because it has access to a plethora of removal and is capable of burning you out for 15 between Resounding Thunder, Cruel Ultimatum, and Absorb Vis, but it was drafted with the same general idea I outlined earlier: creatures are replaceable. I passed several creatures for spells because I knew I could pick up creatures later on. Even though my creatures were often weaker than my opponent’s, by cleverly using my spells, I could maintain an advantage even with the paltry creatures to which I had access.
I hope you can apply both of the practices in this article to your future drafts. Don’t be afraid to move around with your picks until the cards flow. You get 45 draft picks, but you only need to draft 23 spells. Make sure to make each pick count.
Gavin Verhey
Team Unknown Stars
Rabon on Magic Online, Lesurgo everywhere else