Drafting is a pretty wide subject — there are many things that could be said about it. Today I’m going to focus on the concepts that concern drafting in general, concepts that are not related to Shards of Alara draft specifically, but present in every draft. I know drafting is kind of a personal subject… each person has its own ideas of how it works and, like mulligans, it is not an exact science, but this is my opinion on it.
The most important thing to realize when drafting is this: you draft a deck, not cards. Each time you look at a pack and decide what to pick, your decision should be based on what you think is going to make your deck better in relation to the seven other decks at the table. That a card is better than the other is completely irrelevant — what is important is what makes your deck better. If you only absorb one thing from this article, please absorb this concept.
The second thing you have to keep in mind is that, at a draft table, there’s you and there are seven opponents. I know sometimes you’ll be in tables with your friends and such, but, to me, there can be no other way — a loss is zero points, whether it’s against your best friend or someone you’ve never met. At the draft table, they are all your opponents. Their goal is to beat you and your goal is to beat them.
I remember when I was playing in my second Pro Tour, Worlds 2004 in San Francisco. It was the first draft and I happened to be in the same table as Brazilian player Carlos Romao. At that point, he was the most famous Brazilian player, not close. He had won Worlds in 2002, something no one else in Brazil had come close to doing. I’ve always lived far away from all the other competitive Brazilians, so I didn’t really know him, but I knew who he was and I admired what he had done, and I had talked to him a little bit in that tournament. The pods came up and he was one seat after me — I was going to feed him. When we were going to the table, I asked him “so, what do you like to draft?” to which he replied “hey, you draft your deck, I draft mine.” That stuck me in a way that it’s still burned in my memory, and I can recall it vividly. There I was, offering him the chance to pick whatever he wanted and I’d try to accommodate to it, to have a cooperative draft, and he just told me to draft my deck that he would draft his.
To this day, I always see people who sit by their friends and try to agree on a color or a deck preference. Most of the time, it won’t work. I even see people complaining that this is cheating. I don’t think it is, especially since it’s not even something good. What happens when you agree on “I’ll draft Bant and you’ll draft Jund,” and you open Broodmate Dragon and 14 blanks? Are you just going to pass it? Do you honestly think that the best option in terms of how good your deck is going to be related to the rest of the table is to pass that Broodmate so you can get Bant cards in pack two? I cannot think that way — I know I would pick the Broodmate, and there goes your agreement. What’s worse, your friend might not realize you are now in Jund (or close to it) and just think the cards for him aren’t coming, so he’ll get all the Jund cards pack two and feed you all the Bant, just because you agreed beforehand that that was what you would be. Besides, the person you are passing to should be able to figure out some of what you are by the signals you send him anyway… you don’t need a previous agreement.
Speaking of signals, they are a very overrated concept. I see many people talking about it as if it’s some sort of guide for your draft — I don’t believe it is so. For me, signaling is a consequence. I often hear sentences such as “in a PTQ this is the pick, but in a Pro Tour you want to send better signaling so you’ll pick this instead.” I don’t really believe in this. It’s not that I don’t think signals are important; they are important, and part of any draft, but most of the time they come naturally and I think people give them more importance than they deserve, not unlike the “stop trying to mind trick people when you still make 5 mistakes per turn” discussion from last week.
The fundamental thing for understanding signaling is to realize that there are two people you have direct communication with — the one who is feeding you and the one you are feeding. Most of the time, I couldn’t care less what the person I’m feeding is doing — if we are conflicting, it’s their loss. They must be the one to change their strategy, not me. The real important person to read is the one feeding you, as they will pass you cards for two of the packs. The fundamental problem with signaling as I see it is that the person you want to send a signal to is not the one you are capable of sending signals to. This makes being able to recognize a signal much more important than actually sending good ones, since it’ll affect your draft twice as much.
Signaling basically means you see what is left in the pack and figure out in what archetype people must be in. Since you cannot know what the packs originally contained, it works more in an “exclusion” way — since this card is there, he cannot be in archetype Y, or he would have picked it. You cannot go the other way, though — “this card is NOT here, so he must be in archetype X” – because there is no way of knowing what was actually there.
The problem with this is that you cannot always know that, because they didn’t pick the Tower Gargoyle, they are not in Esper — what if they value Oblivion Ring higher than it? What if they picked Sharuum? What if it was a foil Tower Gargoyle? What if they picked Resounding Thunder, but then got sent Agony Warp, Executioner’s Capsule, and Sanctum Gargoyle, and are now in Esper? You have no way of knowing what actually happened from one pack — you will learn gradually, as the draft goes. This brings me to my real point — signaling is important, but it happens naturally. You should not make the wrong pick to send a signal, because signals in one booster do not mean anything. For the same reason, you cannot take an 8th pick Courier’s Capsule as a sure sign Esper is open — it might be that the people before you just took Sanctum Gargoyle and Tidehollow Sculler and they are both in Esper. I mean, what are they supposed to do to send you a signal? They cannot pick two cards.
Many times I see people talking about picking a worse card because cards of the same color are there, and you don’t want conflict. You should not worry about that — the person next to you should. If the pack has Flameblast Dragon, Resounding Thunder, Vithian Stinger, Skeletonize, Magma Spray and Oblivion Ring, I’ll still pick the Flameblast Dragon — the following packs will not be like that, and the Red will quickly dry out. The guy who is going to get the third Red card is already going to be forced out of it, or he will just splash it — that is even truer for this draft format. I know some people would say “pick the Ring and let them fight for the Red” — I cannot agree with that. They want to fight for it? Let them fight — they cannot win, you are the one passing the boosters. There is always the possibility that the next person thinks differently — in fact, with Oblivion Ring, it’s very likely that the person next to you is going to pick it and “let them fight for the Red,” but even if it is a worse card (say, Agony Warp, which I pick below Thunder and Skeletonize in most decks), they might just want to avoid trouble and pick the Warp instead of engaging in the fight, which is good for you.
I remember a long time ago, in Invasion draft, where my friend was telling us how he had shipped Shivan Wurm so to know for sure that the guy on his left was RG, and then proceeded to ship a bunch of RG cards — that way, he was able to manipulate the guy next to him to go to the colors he wanted, and avoided any trouble. In fact, what he did was just build a deck for his opponent, one he should have had himself — if there are enough RG cards to force the guy next to you in that combination, well, wouldn’t you like to be the one forced there yourself? The draft is naturally going to force them out of it if they are the same, and even if it doesn’t, that’s not a problem because you feed them.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I think sending a signal is completely useless. For instance, when you have a card you want to pick and a foil of the same card, unless it’s a very expensive rare, the usual behavior is to pick the normal and send the foil — that might enlighten things for the person next to you. It will at least send a warning that they cannot take for granted that passing the Jund Charm means you are not in Jund. This is something that is completely effort-free for you, and might give you some reward later when they pass you good cards in pack two. Basically, the whole idea is don’t hurt yourself to send a signal, but when you can send a free signal (or freely avoid sending a wrong one), you might as well do so.
Another point in which I think signaling is valid is when you do what Olivier Ruel does (and can be seen in Drafting With Olivier #30), which is to pick the land over a playable card. If you are picking the Basic Land, it has to mean you are not in the color of the good card you are passing. Most of the time I’ll just pick the card, though — sometimes you just can’t be sure you aren’t going to play it. You might be short on playables, and end up having to splash that 9th pick Cloudheath Drake that you could pass to send a signal that “Blue is open.” If they haven’t noticed Blue was open from the way you drafted, it’s not strong enough a card to convince them to move to it, and it might just backfire if they were already in the colors, or if you want to play it yourself in the end. In some instances, though, I think it’s a very valid strategy — after all, you are helping yourself at the cost of helping someone else, and since you have seven opponents and not just one, it’s not a bad thing.
Another topic I believe is important is hate drafting. Hate drafting is overrated in local drafts, but it has its uses even in the highest draft table. Hate drafting is basically when you pick a card you are not going to play, just so that someone else doesn’t pick it. You are making your deck weaker, but you are also making someone else’s deck weaker. Since drafting is about having a good deck for your table, and not a good deck period, it is a valid thing to do sometimes — except people do it far too often.
The thing you must realize when considering hate drafting is that you are going to hurt yourself to hurt one other person. Six people at the table are going to remain completely untouched by what you are doing. You might think that you’ll generate a cascade effect that will make everyone’s deck worse — that is not true. In the end, one person will not have a card they would originally have, and all the other cards will be in someone else’s deck — a different person, sure, but you don’t care about that, since you don’t know who your opponents are going to be.
So, imagine you are solidly in Grixis and you open Martial Coup and Volcanic Fallout. If we rule out any possibilities of you splashing that Martial Coup, you should definitely go for the spell you are going to play. The reasoning besides that is that, even though Martial Coup is a very strong spell (probably the strongest card in the entire block for Limited), and it will make someone’s deck that much better, there is a chance you do not even play against it.
First, you have to play against the person with Martial Coup. Second, they have to draw Martial Coup. Third, it has to matter. It might be that you play against them and they never draw it, or they do and it only helps them win a game they were already winning, or that it’s not enough to win a game they had lost. The card you picked over the Martial Coup is not making your deck that much better — it’s making your deck, perhaps, 5-10% better, whereas Martial Coup is making their deck 30% better — but it’s going to be 5% in all your matches. You know that this card is going to be present in every single time you shuffle your deck. Sure, you might not draw it and it might not matter, like Martial Coup, but it has a lot more chances to matter because you know you are playing it, whereas you cannot even be sure to be paired against the person with Martial Coup. You make your deck worse in every match so that you can make what may be your opponent’s deck for one match’s deck worse. It’s simply not worth it.
There are some situations, though, in which hate drafting is sound, mainly when you have nothing to lose. Sometimes you get a pack with nothing that you are going to play, and in this case you can get some value out of your pick by taking something away from someone else. Here, again, there are no friends, only opponents — if my 14th pick is between Banewasp Affliction and Rafiq of the Many and I’m solidly in BR, you could well be the person I like the most on the entire Pro Tour, you are still getting the Black card. The hard part of it is to decide when sending a signal is important, and when hate drafting the card is important — you can see from this article that I’m not much of a “sending signals” person, so I’ll usually hate draft it, specially if I think it has potential to be good against me in some obscure way (for example, I’d rather pick that late Jhessian Lookout that a slow deck could sideboard against me as a blocker, rather than take the land and send it as maybe a sign that Blue is open, since it’s normally not good enough a card to be understood as that), but as a general rule you could say that, in pack 1, you should often consider signaling, and in packs 2 and 3 you always hate draft.
One exception to that is not hate drafting cards that are good, but taking those that are bad against you. Sometime ago, I read about a trend to pass late cards that are good against a certain archetype, so that people might play them and beat those archetypes with cards that are theoretically bad against you. For instance, if you are neither Green nor Esper, you might want to pass that very late Naturalize and pick an irrelevant card — maybe the person next to you actually uses it. If they do, it’s going to be a dead draw when they play against you. It might even be that they beat a good Esper deck because of that, and then if you win your first round you get a worse opponent. The same thing happens with, say, a 2/2 Mountainwalker for 2R — you have no need to hate draft that, it’s not going to do anything against you, and it might make a bad Red deck (one that is maindecking it, no less!) beat a better Red deck for you.
The same thing can be applied to very good cards that are particularly bad against you. Say hypothetically you get the chance to freely hate draft (that is, at no cost for you at all) a late pick Infest, but your deck doesn’t have a single creature with two toughness — it’s interesting that you pass it, so the person next to you plays it, and whatever they would play over the Infest must surely be better against you.
Another thing that people don’t do enough is actually look at the pack, and not just the card they pick. For most of the packs, you are going to wheel something — it’s important to know what that might be. Whenever I get a pack and settle on my pick, I sort through all the cards I think someone can possibly pick. After the seventh, I know I will get something from that pack, and depending on the power level or the color of the cards, I can assume it’s going to be one of maybe two or three cards, and then pick the next seven cards accordingly. For example, if you are in pack two and you see two bombs, four removal spells, two fixers and two bears, it’s probably safe to assume you are going to wheel a bear, so you don’t have to pick them as aggressively in the next seven packs because you “know” you are getting one later. Of course, sometimes this doesn’t work. Maybe someone is left with no options from their colors and picks your bear, but most of the time it pays to take the time to think what you are possibly going to wheel.
Looking at the pack is also important to discern what the people next to you have. This part is something I’m not very good at, but I’m trying to work on it. Some cards lose a lot of their value if you know they are there, and you have the ability to know if they are there or not, because they passed through you. Even if you are solidly in Naya and you know for sure you aren’t picking a card in another combination, it’s important to take a mental note on the relevant cards you are passing — relevant being stuff like mass removal, instant tricks (pumps, instant removal, Qasali Ambusher) — and to whom you are passing to.
The last point I’d like to talk about is concerning sideboard cards. Sideboarding is often neglected during a draft; sure, it’s not as important as in Constructed, but it still exists, and you should keep that in mind while drafting and playing. Sometimes it’s better to pick a card you know you won’t play maindeck, but one that is a good sideboard choice (like Naturalize) over a marginal card that you’ll play sometimes (like Dreg Reaver). I also see a lot of people who don’t even look at their sideboard between matches — sometimes you have something to side in, even though it doesn’t look like a sideboard card. If your opponent is too aggressive, you might want to side in cheap guys to block. If he has bombs, you might want counterspells, or a discard spell you weren’t originally playing. Make sure you always check (or know) what you have there… You have nothing to lose.
I think these are most of the general concepts of drafting — draft a deck and not cards; look at all the cards in the pack and not just what you are picking; don’t worry too much about sending signals because that comes naturally; and don’t over hate draft, but always keep it in mind as a possibility to gain value out of a bad pack.
I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and see you next week!
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