The Ravnica Allegiance Pick Order Guide

I now have over 100 drafts of Ravnica Allegiance under my belt: around 70 on Magic Online, 30 on Magic Arena, about 10 in paper, and I’ve gone 3-0 – or seven wins on Arena – in over 30% of them. I’m on the front page of the Magic Online Competitive Draft leaderboard and am also Mythic on Arena. Needless to say, I feel that I have a strong understanding of this Limited format.

My goal today is to package everything I know into a format that you can digest quickly and easily. Pick orders are useful to an extent, but they fall apart once you solidify into an archetype. How about instead ranking every single card in the set according to their value in all seven common archetypes to go alongside a Pack 1, Pick 1 order?

If that’s what you want, that’s what you’re going to get! But first, a couple of notes and caveats:

1. Draft is fluid. Sometimes you need a two-drop over a removal spell in Pack 3 to fix a taxonomical hole in your deck. This comprehensive table does not take this into consideration.

2. Some cards require others to work. Archway Angel can range from a 4/10 to an 8/10 depending on the number of Gates you have. Therefore, you’ll see Archway Angel have a very high rating in the Gates archetype and Dovin’s Acuity archetype, as those decks almost always have lots of Gates and additionally value the lifegain highly. I assume around three or four Gates for the evaluation of cards like this in normal guilds.

3. I give build-around cards grades as a function of how easy it is to build around them alongside how powerful they can be. Therefore, I give both Dovin’s Acuity and High Alert a 7.5/10 in Azorius, even though they range from bomb-tier to unplayable. They’re fairly easy to build around at a low cost.

4. The ratings of these cards are not from a power-level vacuum. While I believe every archetype can be very good, my current ranking is Esper > Azorius = Orzhov > Gates > Simic > Rakdos = Gruul. Some of these ratings reflect this bias because I believe taking those cards higher puts me in the best position to end up in the best decks. It’s a marginal change, but one to be aware of.

5. This is tailored for drafting with people, not bots. The information is absolutely useful and applicable to Arena, but there would be slight changes. For example, I rarely start the card Bring to Trial in paper or on Magic Online. However, on Arena, because the bots pass Gate Colossus so frequently, I start Bring to Trial because it seems that the majority of my opponents have that card.

Remember – there are always multiple ways to approach a Limited format. You may disagree with some, or many, of my evaluations, so speak up! Discuss why you think I’m wrong in the comments.

Happy drafting, and hopefully this helps you crush wherever you’re drafting this weekend!