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Ten Ways To Overcome The Limited Plateau

Bob goes to a lot of tournaments, and usually goes 3-3 or 4-3, but rarely makes the Top 8 except for occasional lucky days. He’s trying everything he can, but he just can’t seem to make that next big leap… And it is now far harder for Bob get help. Most articles on the net won’t help him get any better. But there are ten facets of his play that Bob can look at in order to help him leap ahead, as I have.

In competitive sports, people talk a lot about plateaus. The keen club golfer whose handicap has been stuck at nine for two years, the good pool player who is not quite good enough to win money in tournaments, the athlete who can’t get his 100-meter time below 10.5s… All are on plateaus.


Plateaus are situations where you have reached a certain level of play, and no matter how hard you try you can’t seem to get any better. It is a frustrating place to be, and it normally means you need to change something fundamental to get over it. The golfer might need to change his swing, the athlete may need a new coach to improve his running technique.


Plateaus also exist in Magic – and, like in other sports, you will need to change some fundamentals if you want to get over them. For example, Bob is a casual player. He has been playing with his friends for a while gaining confidence, and now feels he is good enough to play in a sealed tournament at his local store. After three rounds, he is 0-3 and wonders where he is going wrong so he asks the person who has just handed him a beating. Because the other player is a friendly and helpful soul, he gets the following reply.


“Well, Accursed Centaur and Goblin Lookout are both a pile of poo; don’t play with them. Also attack before playing creatures, use tapping effects at the end of your opponent’s turn, and for God’s sake don’t play with forty-seven cards.”


This is an information overload of stuff that Bob never knew and had possibly never considered before. He drops from the tournament, and spends the rest of the day talking to other players and finding out more. Why are these cards bad? What other cards are bad, and why? Why should you play cards in your second main phase? Why should you play only forty cards? He goes home armed with a lot of new information that he uses to trounce his friends. Eventually, they catch on and start doing the same things. He and his friends have gotten past the plateau at which they were all residing.


After that, Bob goes to more and more tournaments and starts doing better. Eventually he is one of the best players at the store and newbies are asking him the same questions that he used to ask. Buoyed by his recent streak of wins, he goes along to a limited PTQ expecting to clean up. Although he holds his own Bob ends up 3-3 – quite a long way off the top 8. He returns to your local store and carries on winning but every time he tries to take his game to the next level, he ends up disappointed. Bob has reached another plateau… And this one is going to be harder to overcome.


Does this sound familiar? This is a position that thousands of Magic players round the world face and some never overcome it. There are probably people like this that you know, who spend years putting in average performances at every PTQ they attend. Sometimes they do well in the odd tournament thanks to luck or a fantastic card pool, but they very rarely make the top 8 and never win. You see them on Magic Online, too. They all have ratings of about 1650 and populate the draft queue in large numbers, hoping to get good enough so they can”go infinite.” Some players have been at this level for years. For the rest of this article, I will refer to them as Some Consistently Average Limited Players – or”SCALPs.”


(It’s quite a fitting acronym really – at least it’s better than my previous idea of”Consistently Really Average Player”….)


The reason that so many people get stuck at this point is that it is now far harder to get help. Most articles on the net won’t help you get any better. You can already parrot which cards are better than which others in each color, all so you can draft what is technically the best card in your colors. Similarly, in Sealed you know which cards are playable and which aren’t. To improve your game now, you are going to have to take a different approach. Maybe challenge what you think to be”facts” or work on areas of your game that you have previously taken for granted. That is going to be the focus of this article. It will be specifically focussed on Limited play although many of the factors I will present will apply to Constructed players, too.


Before I begin though, one quick note on why I feel qualified to write this article: I am not a pro who has done it all before, just a regular Joe trying to become a better player day by day. My most recent challenge has been overcoming this plateau. For a long time I was stuck there, but recently my rating has started to go up as I now win a higher proportion of my games. Most of this has been down to the fact that I have been concentrating on improving certain areas of my game – the ones that I’m talking about here.


Although many of the things I will say here may seem pretty obvious to some people, no two people are the same and different people are weak in different areas. Hopefully there is something here for all new and improving players. So without further ado, here are ten things you must do to overcome the Limited plateau.


1. Get Over The”Luck” Thing

This has to be number one because until you get this one sorted, nothing else is worth telling you. How often do you hear the following from SCALPs as an excuse for losing?


  • “I got mana screwed.”

  • “I got mana flooded.”

  • “I got color screwed.”

  • “My opponent got a God draw.”

  • “My opponent had (insert bomb here).”

  • “I never drew my (insert card that would have won the game here).”

Now I’m not saying these things don’t happen; of course they do. Sometimes luck will lose you games, matches, even tournaments. However, while you blame most or all of your losses on luck you are never going to develop as a player for two reasons.


Firstly, luck averages out in the long term. There will be games you lose to mana screw, but also there will be ones you win to your opponents’ mana screw. Sometimes it will be you who pulls the bomb. The problem is that players seem to attribute their losses to bad luck, but attribute their wins to good play. That’s hypocritical. Therefore most players feel that, on average, they are unlucky and that they would win more tournaments”if only they got a bit of luck.” This is not a way of becoming a better player, because the first step in improving your play is realizing that it needs improving.


Secondly, maybe you are overestimating what is”luck.” Maybe your opponent got a God draw because he has an excellent mana curve. Maybe he has a bomb because he clearly signalled his colors in the first pack of a draft, and as a result got it passed to him in pack two. Maybe you are color screwed because you are playing three colors, or the wrong amount of each type of land. Lots of things that seem like luck can actually be manipulated through good play and until you recognise this, you won’t be able to use this fact to your advantage. Legendary golfer Gary Player was once asked to comment on whether he considered himself”lucky.” He laughed and replied,”It’s funny, it seems the more I practice, the luckier I get.”


2. Master The Rules

This may seem obvious. Most players consider their grasp of the rules to be good but how good is it really? Take this little quiz.


a) You have a Morph in play, as well as an Astral Slide. You opponent has a Lightning Rift. At the end of his turn you cycle a card. You both choose the morph as targets for your triggered abilities. Assuming you don’t have the mana to unmorph it, does the creature die?


b) Your opponent unmorphs a Towering Baloth. Can you Swat it in response?


c) You are at three life. Your opponent attacks with Silvos and you block with Exalted Angel. Do you die?


d) Can you cycle a Lonely Sandbar revealed with Future Sight?


e) Can you target your opponent’s Silver Knight with your Contested Cliffs and Tephraderm?


Did you know the answers to all these? Are you sure? Check at the end of the article to see if you were right. If you didn’t get them all right, your knowledge of the rules needs to be better. Even if you got them all right, do you know why the answers are what they are – or is it just what you’ve been told? If it’s the former, your rules knowledge could still use work.


Knowledge of the rules is an important factor that can win and lose you games. Maybe you have lost games because your opponent has called you on something you thought was legal that wasn’t. Maybe you have lost games without even knowing it by not noticing something your opponent did wrong or by missing a trick that could have won you the game. Learning the rules of Magic well is a fairly effortless way to become a better player. Although all the questions above are Onslaught Block-specific, the principles behind the answers are largely derived from the same rules that govern every other card in the game so what you learn now will still be valid in years to come (or at least until they overhaul the rules again).


By the same stroke, learn the rules that aren’t covered in the comprehensive rulebook itself. Read relevant entries in the StarCityGames’ daily”Ask The Judge” column, Oracle, the DCI Floor, and tournament rules and any relevant FAQs. You never know what you might need to know one day – and you don’t want to give your opponent cheap wins.


3. Stop Making Mistakes

This is also huge. At the top level they are well publicised. From Gary Wise Shock to Kai Budde recent morph problems, if the pros make a mistake – especially in a feature match – you bet it’s going to get noticed and put up for the world to see. Of course, the reason that this happens is that the pros don’t make mistakes very often. In fact, one of the reasons they are pros is because they don’t make many mistakes. Individual mistakes can cost games and have almost certainly cost every one of us games in the past. Common mistakes often made by SCALPs include the following:


  • Tapping mana incorrectly leaving the wrong colors available

  • Forgetting to use a tap ability (like Wellwisher) on any given turn

  • Forgetting an ability of an opposing creature when working out combat maths

  • Missing a no-risk road to victory (like sacrificing your whole army to a Nantuko Husk when your opponent is tapped out)

The problem is how to stop making mistakes and this is not an easy one to answer. Jamie Wakefield suggested keeping a die next to you when you playtest; whenever you make a mistake add one to the die. If the dice ever reaches six, then consider it a game loss regardless of whether you actually lost or not. This method can be surprisingly effective, as it puts more of a cost on each mistake. At the moment, this is one of my biggest Achilles’ heels – I shrug off too many mistakes by saying,”I would have lost anyway.” It is important to get out of bad habits as quickly as possible, and the way to do this is not to tell yourself that the mistake was not important.


Magic Online has given us a great new tool in this department. You can look over all your old games with the luxury of time and try to pick up all your mistakes. A lot of people have said to me that doing this has improved their play considerably. Just recently, while waiting for the next round to start, I was watching a replay of my previous round and noticed that in two consecutive games I had failed to use the”destroy creature enchantment” option on Piety Charm when it would have been advantageous. In one instance it may have cost me the game. Those of you who don’t play Online may be able to get similar help by asking your opponent after the match what mistakes you made that he noticed. This is less than reliable, though, and obviously relies upon having a friendly opponent.


4. The”Best Card” Is Situational

Card evaluation is one of the fundamental skills of sealed play. Every time a new set is released, dozens of writers rush to ship out”Limited reviews,” breaking the set down by color and ordering the cards therein according to how good they are for Limited play.


…And we love it! We like being told which cards are the best so we can draft the best possible deck, and pick the best possible cards for our deck in Sealed. Sometimes the writers disagree and this gets people excited enough to write big articles about whether a particular card is better than another. Remember the [author name="Ken Krouner"]Ken Krouner[/author]/[author name="Nick Eisel"]Nick Eisel[/author] debate about whether Elvish Warrior was better than Krosan Tusker in triple-Onslaught draft?


So was it Eisel or Krouner who was correct? Well, neither of them. Elvish Warrior is a two-drop that provides excellent early tempo, while Krosan Tusker is an early game mana fixer and a late game fatty. How can you really compare the two? Might as well argue whether Donovan McNabb is a better football player than Warren Sapp. If you have loads of fat and no early game, then Warrior is clearly the better pick. If you already have several other two-drops and a Contested Cliffs, then the Tusker is obviously better.”But,” the writers would argue,”What if it were the first pick of a draft and these were the only two good cards in the booster?”


Well, here is where I admit the analysis has some value – as obviously you will have to decide which is the better card.


Eventually most people agreed that the Warrior was the better pick due to the lack of two-drops in triple-Onslaught. Now we get to the bit where people go wrong. Even if every player in the world agreed on it, it doesn’t mean that the Warrior is unilaterally better. Assuming it isn’t the first pick in the draft, you will have to make a judgement on which is better for your deck. A lot of players try to remember blindly which cards are good and which cards are bad – and as a result, they often pick the wrong card for their deck. This is why you often look at decks that go 0-2 drop in Sealed events or get eliminated in round 1 of drafts and see nothing blatantly wrong with the cards in them. It’s just that they have a poor mana curve and lack synergy. They have clearly just drafted GaryWise.dec, and expected card evaluation alone to make their deck good.


This is something that you will have to get over to become a better player. You need to start drafting and building decks not just on the strength of individual cards but with the overall deck in mind. This means looking for synergies between cards (tribal elements in Onslaught especially), as well as taking care of your mana curve. It is not a skill you will develop overnight, but rather is something you will have to get better at over a long period of time. Most players know that Lavamancer’s Skill is only really good with blue, for example – but how many have informed opinions on how many soldiers you need before it’s worth picking Daru Stinger over Aven Redeemer? There are lots of things to think about when faced with many card picks and to optimise your chances you will have to take more than a list of card strengths into account.


5. Land Count Does Matter

It still amazes me how often I ask someone how much land they put in their Limited deck and get an answer like”eighteen, the usual” or”I can’t remember – why?” It’s like the question doesn’t matter to them.


And yet… It does. It is land that holds your deck together and too much or too little could severely weaken it. To illustrate this, here are a few figures. With 16-19 land, here are the odds of making your third and sixth land drops on turns 3 and 6 respectively. I chose these numbers because, in Onslaught Block Limited, your third land drop is vital while your sixth land drop is where your bombs and big creatures will likely start coming out. Apart from that, the figures are fairly arbitrary although similar patterns follow for any drops you choose.






















Number of land


16


17


18


19


Chance of making 3rd land drop


79%


84%


88%


91%


Chance of making 6th land drop


30%


38%


47%


55%

Bear in mind that with a fast deck, while you still want to make your 3rd land drop on turn 3, you actually don’t really want to make your 6th drop on turn 6 unless you have a high casting cost bomb in your hand. You would be better off having the extra spell instead to make sure the game doesn’t reach the stage where your opponent’s larger creatures will dominate. As you can see, just adding or removing one extra land to your deck can make a considerable difference to your chance of getting mana screwed or mana flooded. For example, going from eighteen land will mean you get mana screwed 33% more often. So why do many people just put in their”magic number” of lands, and then just pick spells to make their deck up to forty?


Well it’s probably because it’s an aspect of Magic that is rarely debated. Nobody seems to want to write articles on whether you should put seventeen or eighteen lands in your deck, probably because they perceive it would be rather dull. As a result, those people who mainly get their tech from StarCityGames strategy articles will probably just put in the currently-accepted eighteen land and leave it at that. However, as we saw above, the number of land makes a discernable difference to how your deck plays – and as a result, you can make a marked improvement to your deck by having the correct number of lands in.


But how do you know what is the correct amount? Well this is where good players shine and lesser players can not have a clue. In Odyssey Block Limited, the most commonly used number was seventeen. This was because mana curves were flatter and missing your 3rd drop was not such a disaster. Onslaught Block, however, practically demands that you make your third land drop – and as a result, most players go with eighteen.


However, there are many situations where this would be wrong. Let’s take a U/W birds/soldiers deck, for example: Most of your key spells can be played and unmorphed for three or four mana, and you should have multiple one- and two-mana creatures. Every land you draw beyond the fourth is really just one less spell you are drawing. You certainly don’t want to be hitting land drops six and seven in a hurry. In this case, seventeen land would almost certainly be better for you.


Now, let’s look at the other extreme. You are playing a Sealed deck and have Mythic Proportions and Dragon Roost as your bombs. However, you have no accelerators and are splashing black for extra removal. It is certainly not inconceivable that you would want to play nineteen land in such a deck.


So where do cycling and fetchlands fit into all this? Both of these are special, because they count as somewhere between zero and one lands each, but with a drawback. Cycling lands count as a land when you need one, but not when you don’t – the drawback is that it costs one colored mana if you want to replace it and you can’t use it for a turn if you play it as a land.


Fetchlands have the advantage that they thin the land out in the remainder of the deck once they are sacked (and obviously if you are lucky enough to be playing both colors, they prevent color screw). The disadvantage is the same as the advantage. If you are forced to use one when you are already mana-light, they will certainly not help the situation, as they effectively reduce the land count in your deck by one.


So how many lands should they count as when you are building your deck? Well, there are no hard and fast rules but I consider fetchlands to be half a land and a cycle land three-quarters if you cycle them aggressively in the early game (more if not). Therefore, a deck with sixteen land and two cyclers probably plays like a deck with about 17.5 land. This is not a hard and fast rule, though; the important thing is that you are now thinking about how many land to put in your deck rather than going on autopilot.


6. Your Mana Base Is Important

This is related to the above but is also a separate issue, related to the color of mana required for your deck. This has to be dealt with both from a supply side (how much mana of each color must I put in my deck?) and also from the demand side (how can I make my deck less prone to color screw?)


Most people understand that in limited it is normally better to play two colors than three (obviously one is even better, but that’s almost impossible to do effectively in Sealed). However, even in a two-color deck, you may be hurting your chances by playing a bad color base. Let’s consider a B/G deck with Elvish Warrior and Infest. Both of these spells are very worthy additions to your main deck. In fact, if going second, turn 2 Elvish Warrior, turn 3 Infest could be a very strong play if your opponent has played a Morph and one other creature by then. However you can’t play this because playing the Elf requires forests to be played on turns 1 and 2 while Infest requires two Swamps in the first three turns. Unless you are lucky enough to play a turn 1 Grand Coliseum, you are not getting this combo off.


This is an illustration of how you have to watch double (and triple) colored mana in casting costs. This the lower the casting cost, the more critical this becomes; the double black casting cost on Prowling Pangolin is rarely a problem because, in a two-color deck split roughly 50/50, by the time you hit five mana, at least two of them will likely be black. The double blue on Callous Oppressor, however, can be demanding if you want to play it turn 3.


So what can you do to help your deck out of color problems? Well, you have to look at your deck objectively and try to reduce conflicting color demands as much as possible The easiest way of doing this is to make sure all your double-colored mana spells are in the same color especially those at the lower end of your curve. If it is possible to also make this color hold the majority of your spells, then all the better, as this will allow you to play significantly more land of that color.


Secondly, think hard about what proportions of each colored land you are using. Nine forests and nine Mountains is not the optimal mana base for every G/R deck you play. Most people realize that they should play land according to how many spells for that color they have… But a lot of SCALPs stop there. Consider when in the game you will need the mana. If you are playing a G/B Zombie/Beast deck, it is more likely you will need Black mana early and Green mana late. Therefore you can get away with playing fewer forests, as by the time you need the green mana, you will probably have drawn one.


7. You Need Win Conditions

This is an error that is pretty easy to make and I myself have made it on a number of occasions. You can put together a deck made of sixteen good creatures and six good spells – but if you don’t have a good plan to actually win the game, you can find yourself losing to far inferior decks who just find the card they need at a bad time.


You will certainly win games just by using”good cards”; sometimes you will come out much faster and beat your opponent before they can stabilize. Sometimes you will make a steady sequence of favorable trades using Morph tricks and Instants until eventually your superior board position wins through. Other times, however, the board will degenerate into a stalemate where nobody can attack without making unfavorable trades. In this situation, it is the player with the most win conditions who is most likely to win.


A win condition is a card or combination of cards that should be able to win the game for you without asking favors from your opponent. There are 3 types of win conditions for you to consider.


One-Shot Win Conditions:

These are cards that suddenly steal victory against an otherwise locked-up board. Examples are:

Note: Not all of these are astonishingly good cards. Wave of Indifference, for example, may be a dead card if the board is not locked up or you can’t alpha strike. It is worth inclusion in nearly all decks, however, just for this narrow application.


Inevitable Death Win Conditions:

These are cards that don’t win the game immediately, but put your opponent on a clock whereby they must deal with the card within a fixed number of turns or die. Examples are:

Intangible Win Conditions:

These are not individual cards, but more methods of victory. The difference between these and other win conditions is that you generally need less of them because they are not reliant on certain cards coming up. This is where the theme of your deck and your win conditions can overlap. Examples of these are:


  • Quick beats backed by removal

  • Multiple flyers

  • Multiple provoke creatures and ways to pump them

It is important that you include at least a couple of win conditions in your deck. Sitting there and waiting for your one bomb to come out is a risky prospect. In the average game, you will get through under half your deck, so having two cards at least that can win you the game is more or less a must. If you can be sure of this, maybe next time it will be you grabbing victory from the hands of defeat.


8. Get The Most From Your Bombs

Everyone wants to crack open a bomb when they open their sealed deck or their first pack in a draft. However when you are fortunate enough to do so, you need to make the most of it – otherwise, you risk becoming one of the guys who tells the”if only I drew my Rorix” story. If you manage to get a bomb for your deck, think about how you can optimize its use. If it’s the type of bomb that will probably win you the game if you play it (like Rorix, Visara, Insurrection, Mythic Proportions), the important thing is to play it. As often as possible! The way to do this is to minimise the chances of something happening that will stop you playing it. Here are the reasons you could not play your bomb in any given game.


  • You don’t draw it

  • You die or the game is effectively over before you get to play it

  • You don’t draw enough mana to play it or you get the wrong type

Therefore, when building your deck around a bomb, we need to play a lot of early defense, any library manipulation we have, and as much mana (preferably in the bomb’s color) as possible. (Obviously, this depends on how much your bomb costs and how color intensive it is.)


Obviously these objectives are a little bit conflicting. Having too much mana in your deck can inhibit your ability to put up a strong early defense, as can playing cards that don’t affect board position much, such as Fierce Empath. The other problem is that you have to remember the all-important factor that your deck should still be able to win if you can’t get your bomb into play or if it dies. Scourge has provided a number of common ways to kill or immobilize any bomb creature except for Jareth, so be careful where you place all your eggs.


The key is not to base your whole deck around your bomb but to play an otherwise-solid deck that makes the most of it. For example, if you first-pick Insurrection, building a W/R deck around it will probably be a bad idea. W/R decks like to win quickly with a tempo-based assault. They certainly don’t like prancing around trying to get to eight mana, and if they try to they will almost certainly lose. G/R is the best deck for Insurrection, where your mana base has to already support a number of high costing cards and you have plenty of fat to stall the ground until you can get to where Insurrection will win. On the other hand, W/R is an excellent deck for Menacing Ogre, as your early beats will mean your opponent will be unable to spare much life and are unlikely to have many blockers by this stage. For any given bomb, try to work out its optimal conditions for use and build/draft your deck accordingly.


9. Use Your Sideboard Properly

Most SCALPs after game one will have a quick flick through their sideboard for anything that might be of help in the following games. In Sealed deck, this normally means any cards that didn’t make the cut to your main deck. In draft, maybe you picked up some good sideboard cards when you could get nothing else good in your colors. You bring in the Anurid Murkdiver against black and take out the Severed Legion. The Fever Charm comes in against blue, Nantuko Vigilante against bomb enchantments like Call to the Grave. Most of this is pretty obvious stuff but could you go further? Well as far as I see it, most people are held back by two things. Firstly, they don’t think deeply enough about what to sideboard in – and secondly, when drafting, they don’t pick sideboard cards highly enough.


Let’s deal with the former first. Sideboarding is not just reactive; it is a toolbox for you to improve your matchup in a number of ways, just like it is in Constructed. As well as obvious individual color hosers and direct hate for stuff in their deck, you also have to look at your opponent’s deck and try to work out how best to hurt it. Does he seem to have an unstable mana base? Bring in Lay Waste. Is a Gourna shutting down your entire flying offence? Maybe Sandskin could be a makeshift solution. Exalted Angel or Silent Specter getting you down? Try Backslide. Many cards that you wouldn’t maindeck can have useful applications out of the sideboard. In sealed deck, you may even be wise to side out your entire deck and play a completely different color combination if you think it will make the matchup better. For example, you may want to ditch your U/W fliers deck if your opponent shows you a couple of Gournas game one.


However, there is a flip side to this: Firstly, if you want to sideboard something in, you had better make sure you have something you want to side out. Sometimes (such as in the case of swapping a Swampwalker for a Fear creature), the choice is pretty obvious. Other times it is very difficult to know what to take out. You certainly don’t want to damage the integrity of your deck in order to fight a card that your opponent may not even draw. If you have a twenty-second card in, then that is obviously a good choice for removal. Otherwise, you will need to critically evaluate each card against what you are bringing in also paying attention to what the change will do to your mana curve and color base. You don’t have too long to do this, though, so ideally you’ll want to have sideboard plans made before you start round one.


The other issue is how highly you should pick sideboard cards. A lot of people are reluctant to waste a pick on a card that they know won’t make their main deck unless there really is nothing else in the booster that might even possibly make their deck. This is almost certainly the wrong attitude. I find that when I am building my draft deck, I nearly always have to deliberate for a while about the last card (or actually, because of the way I build decks, normally the last card to remove). You can normally be pretty sure that if you are playing twenty-two spells in your deck, numbers twenty through twenty-six will be pretty interchangeable in terms of card quality. Now consider sideboard cards. Lets say you have a sideboard card that hoses a particular color that probably wouldn’t make your main deck otherwise. (Anurid Murkdiver and Fever Charm are good examples). If you look at it that most people will be playing two-color decks, that gives you a 40% chance that any given opponent will be playing that color – hence, a 40% chance you will be able to bring that card in to good effect. Now, if the card you bring in is excellent against their deck (such as the two cards mentioned can be) then you have to ask yourself if it is worth picking over those twenty-second cards.


Chances are, you won’t be hurting the quality of your deck in any significant way while you may make some matches a lot better for games 2 and 3. Like most things in Magic (especially Limited), this is a judgement call but it is one that is sure to make a difference at some point in your playing career.


10. Work Things Out For Yourself

This is the last and probably the best piece of advice I can give. While reading strategy articles on the web can be a great help to starting and improving players, they can only take you so far. Too many players take everything they read on the internet as gospel without evaluating for themselves. I imagine if a misprint on sideboard yesterday caused Kai to say that Coastal Watcher was the best blue common in Scourge, thousands of players would be first-picking them within hours. To truly progress as a player, you need to not only know”what is” but also”why it is.” If you draft against Kai Budde, Gary Wise or Tim Aten, they will be more than happy that you memorized all their pick lists. In fact they will probably happily give you a copy at the start of the match if you request one, because they know that while you are picking the mathematically best card, they are building the best deck they can and are drafting every card for a purpose.


This article has been deliberately low on tech. It is not designed to give you facts, but to open your mind to a whole world of facts that you can discover by yourselves. This is not to say that such articles have no value, of course they do. However, they should be used to influence you rather than dictate to you. Don’t worry if you disagree with the pros; they all disagree with each other anyway.


Until next time, enjoy the game,

Piemaster

[email protected]


Oh yes! I almost forgot the quiz answers. (Me too – The Ferrett)


  • No

  • No

  • Yes

  • No

  • Yes