Limited Options

Today we’re going to tackle the second element of Draft, Deck Construction. It’s important to keep in mind that everything I’m discussing here should be considered guidelines. It’s a sound place to start, but after you’ve gained some familiarity, don’t feel like they’re rigid rules that you always need to follow. There’s cases where almost all of these can be changed. ALMOST all….

Around the Draft in 40 Cards

The minimum deck size in Limited is 40 cards (Limited refers to either Sealed or Draft, or some other variant where your card selection is limited by the rules of the format, like Cube). Also, despite the fact that it’s not a formal rule, the maximum deck size you should build in Limited is 40 cards. This is the one “rule” that I’m going to give you that’s not just a guide. 40 is where you should always be.

So why not more than 40? Consistency is the short answer. The typical Draft deck only has a handful of really impactful cards, only about 10-20%, and sometimes not even that much. Most of your deck will be “C” level cards, typically medium to low powered creatures. These are the Pawns of Limited. Not particularly powerful, and largely interchangeable with other cards at that same mana cost. Draft is also not unlike a Singleton format, where you can have only one copy of any named card in your deck. The fewer total cards you have in your deck, the more frequently you'll see those powerful cards.

Some decks, like the current Dimir decks, will be more focused on synergy than on singular, powerful cards. Even in those cases, the improved consistency of your draws is very important. Having a handful of “Surveil matters” cards (like Whispering Snitch) without any Surveil cards in hand is no good either.

Golden Ratios

The starting ratio is 17 Land and 23 Spells (a “Spell” in game terms is any card that's not a land - Instants, Sorceries, Creatures, Planeswalkers, Enchantments, and Artifacts). In a Limited deck, of those 23 Spells, roughly 15-17 will be creatures.

These numbers are a lot more flexible than the total deck size, although you want to be careful about adjustments to the land count. You're probably never going to go up or down by more than 1, to either 16 or 18. The most important part of adjusting your mana base is this - have a reason for making the change. For example, maybe you've drafted a Boros deck, and your Mana Curve (more on that below) is really low. Then you might want to go to 16, or even 15 lands.

Notice I didn't say have a “good” reason for making your deck building choices. You'll learn over time which reasons are sound and which aren't. Also, a reason which is sound for one deck, might be poor for another. The most important takeaway is learning to ALWAYS have reasons for the choices you make, both in deck construction and play decisions.

Dead Man's Mana Curve

Mana Curve is a term which refers the number of spells you have at each of the various Mana costs. Arena gives you a handy graph you can look at in the deck construction scene

I'll be doing a deep dive on Mana Curves at some point, but here's we're going to do a quick primer on how they apply in Limited.

Typically, you'll want 0-1 spells at 1 Mana, 2-3 spells at 2 Mana, then the majority of your spells at 3-4 Mana, with a few at 5+ Mana. Again, this is just a starting place, and can vary greatly depending on the deck. Boros decks, for example, are very aggressive, and may not want any spells over 4 Mana, with the bulk of them being between 2-3. In GRN Draft, there's also a *much* higher amount of playable 1 drops, and those 1 drops are more meaningful than is typical for Draft.

What you're trying to do is find a balance between powerful cards and having plays early in the game. As a broad generality, low-cost cards are not as impactful as more expensive cards. The creatures are smaller, and lack value-adding abilities such as evasion (like Flying) and ETB (Enters the Battlefield) effects. But you can't build your deck with just 5-6 drops, because you'll have lost long before you get a chance to cast them.

“Curving out” refers to casting spells, typically creatures and/or removal, on each of your turns in the early part of the game. If you're not casting anything before turn 3, you'll often be too far behind on board state at that point to be able to make it up (“board state” refers simply to the number and type of permanents you have on the Battlefield). Again, this varies from format to format, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb. If you're not casting anything early against Boros, they're just going to mow you down. If you're not casting anything early against Dimir, they're going to have the opportunity to set up a modest board state, and then sit back behind counterspells and removal to prevent you from establishing yours. Remember, even a 2/3 can win a game if left unchallenged.

Color me Purple

Knowing what types of each land to run, and how many dual lands (lands which produce multiple colors of Mana) you're going to want, if any, is a skill that's going to take time for you to develop. There's no simple formula for this. A good starting place is to count the colored Mana symbols on the cards in your deck, giving a little extra weight to cards with two or more colored symbols. For example, the Citywatch Sphinx is 5U, while the Watcher in the Mist is 3UU, so that might suggest that you'll want to run an additional Island in decks with a Watcher.

We're lucking with GRN to have easy access to the Guildgates, so you'll probably always have access to one or two if you need them. But you may not always want them. Boros decks are very aggressive, so the “Enters Tapped” drawback often will be more detrimental to the consistent operation of the deck than the possibility of occasionally getting cut off a color by not running them.

That seems like a good introduction to Limited Deck Construction. If you think I've missed something important or have any questions, feel free to comment, or catch up with me in the MTG Arena Facebook Group.

Search for Azspecificard

Navigating the Arena client can be difficult at times. Especially in the current, and very incomplete deck builder scene. It can be hard to filter and find the cards you're looking for. So here's some tips and tricks. 

Let's start with some basics, and the "Collection" view in the deck building scene.

On the top left, we have a search box where you can enter card names, or rules text.

How the text is entered in this box is very sensitive to the actual text on the card. It cannot search for similar terms, or recognize possible misspellings. So if you're having trouble finding a card, a good first step is to double check your spelling. If you're missing a hyphen, the search will not return a name which contains a hyphen. One good tip is to search for partial names or words. For example, if you search for “kin”, and filter for only Red cards, it will return cards like Runaway Steam-Kin, and Rekindling Phoenix.

Next to the search box is a row of symbols. For starters, we have the five Mana symbols in their usually WUBRG order - White, Blue, Black, Red, Green.

“U”  is used for Blue, because B was taken for Black, and L was taken for Land, so the next letter in order was U. Checking these on will restrict your search to those cards containing the checked color(s) in their mana costs, and in their rules text box. 

After that, we have the diamond “Colorless” symbol. This was introduced a few years ago with the Battle for Zendikar block. Prior to that there was no specific colorless symbol, only the generic mana symbol. When you see this symbol on a card in the casting cost, or as part of the activation cost of an ability, it represents colorless mana specifically. If it's just a digit in a gray circle, that's a generic mana cost, and can be paid with colorless or with any color of mana. You'll also see it on artifacts and lands which don't produce colored mana. Lands are considered colorless cards, regardless of the mana they produce. 

Next is the Gold ring which denotes multi-colored cards.

This can include cards with multiple mana symbols, along with the hybrid mana symbol. Why a Gold ring? Because when multicolored cards were first produced in Legends, they wanted them to really be distinctive, so they gave them gold borders. When you hear players referring to “Gold” cards, they're referring to multicolored cards. 

After the Gold ring, is the Lotus icon.

This is for your Wildcards. Why a Lotus icon? Well, as some of you I'm sure can guess, it's because the most iconic card in the entire history of the game is the fabled Black Lotus. 

After the Lotus icon, is the button for “Advanced Filters”, which we will come back to in a moment. 

Below the icon bar, you'll find all the cards in your collection. Above each card, is four small diamonds. Each blue diamond indicates a copy of that card in your collection, up to a maximum of 4.

You cannot have more than 4 copies of any card in any deck, so in Arena you'll never have more than four copies in your collection. As of the writing of this post, whenever you acquire a copy of a card that you already own four of, it is converted into “Valut” progress. The Vault contains Wildcards - 3 Uncommon, 2 Rare, and 1 Mythic Rare. If you own no copies of a card, the default settings will make it not visible at all in your collection. You can change this in the Advanced Filters, which we'll look at next. 

When you click on the Advanced Filters button, a window opens with the various search options. 

Across the top of this window, we again have the Mana symbols, along with the Colorless, Gold, and Lotus symbols. 

Below that is a string of numbers. This selects for the “Converted Mana Cost”.

Calculating the CMC is very simple, it's just all of the Mana costs added together, regardless of color. So if a spell casts 2R, then the CMC is 3. If it costs 3UU, then the CMC is 5. The Converted Mana Cost is different from just the Mana costs, which looks at the colored mana. Any X variable in a Mana cost will be counted as 0 for search purposes. 

Below the Mana costs, we have the Rarity check boxes. You can check these on and off in multiples, so you can search for Rares and Mythic Rares, for example. 

Below the Rarity, we have the various card types.

Below that are two very important buttons - Collected and Not Collected.

If you are searching for a card, and do not have one in your collection, then the default settings will have it not showing at all in your collection. This is one of the most common reasons why searches will fail to show cards, so going in and checking this box on will help rectify that. 

When all else fails, just go into the Advanced Filters window and hit the “Reset” button to clear out any existing filters you might have on. From there, you can check the Not Collected if you need to. 

I hope folks found this guide helpful. If there’s anything I missed, feel free to let me know and I’ll add it in. If you have any questions, you can often find me hanging in the Magic Arena MTG, and MTG Arena Players groups on Facebook. I’m also doing some occasional streaming at twitch.tv/MagicChatDan. 

Limited Information

There’s been some questions about Drafting popping up lately, so I thought this would be a good first topic for Entering the Arena. This is meant to just be Draft primer, to get you started. There’s plenty of great information available, and I highly recommend checking out the Limited Resources podcast. It’s the single best place to get information on drafting, including going deep on fundamentals, and “level up” lessons. I’m going to include a list of “essential” episodes at the end of this post.

To clarify the language a bit, anytime you’re playing Draft or Sealed Deck, it’s considered “Limited” instead of “Constructed” because, obviously, your card pool is limited to what is opened at the event. The Draft format on Arena is known as “Booster” draft, but there’s other types of Drafts you can do IRL like Rochester and Cube.

I was thinking about how to approach this article, because Limited Magic play is a huge topic. I decided that there’s two major components to the draft – Card Selection and Deck Construction. I’m actually going to break this up into two posts, because it’s a lot of information to do in one.

Card evaluation and selection is one of the most skill challenging aspects of Magic. Cards are evaluated differently in Limited events than they are in constructed, and the same card can have wildly varying power levels from set to set.

1. Prioritize impactful cards. You’ll hear the BREAD acronym tossed around frequently when it comes to card evaluation for Drafting. It’s a decent starting place, but it’s only a very loose guideline. Don’t use it for more than that. I actually prefer the BREAST acronym, which stands for B-Bombs, R-Removal, E-Evasion, AST- And Synergistic Things. I’ve found this to be useful, because while your latter pics in a draft will often be “filler” (cards which aren’t particularly impactful, and largely interchangeable) it’s good to keep an eye out for ones which synergize with the more powerful cards in your deck.

Bombs are just that, cards which impact the game or board state, or are undercosted for what they do. They’re the kind of card which will help you recover if you’re behind, or put you so far ahead when you resolve them, that it’s almost assured you’ll win the game from that point.

Removal is pretty straight forward. Most Limited games are won by creatures attacking. Most Bombs are big, powerful creatures. Having enough removal is essential. The cheaper the casting cost, and the fewer the restrictions on that removal, the better it is. Depending on the nature of the set, different forms of removal will rise or fall in value. The classic example of this are the Instant spells Terror and Shatter. 

Terror is 1B: Destroy target non-Black creature. Shatter is 1R: Destroy target Artifact. In almost any set, Terror is clearly the better card, and Shatter is a sideboard card. However, in the Mirrordin Block, where both were printed, Shatter was actually the better card, because of the heavy (to put it mildly) Artifact theme of the set. You not only could kill many of the creatures your opponent played, but you’d also have the opportunity to destroy a land sometimes.

Be mindful also, that there’s a difference between hard removal and tempo. A card which says “Return target creature to its owner’s hand”, is not really removal. It’s only getting that creature out of the way for 1 turn, and it’s Card Disadvantage for you, because you’ve used a card to remove their creature, but they still have that card in their hand, and so can replay it.

Because most Limited games come down to creatures attacking, having a way to push that damage through is important. Flying is the clearest, and most common form of evasion. Trample is another way to get damage through, along with Menace. Occasionally there’s creatures which “Can’t be blocked” or can’t be blocked by some specific subset, like “Can’t be blocked by Walls.”

2. Have a plan. I can’t stress this enough. You can’t always just take whatever the best card in the pack is, because it may not be working toward the goal of your deck. For example, a Tezzeret Planeswalker card will typically work very well in an Artifact-heavy deck, but is not worth much outside of that deck. So if you open one in pack 3, while it might be a “Bomb” in a vacuum, if you haven’t built an artifact deck in packs 1 and 2, then it’s not working with the plan of our deck, so you should pass it.

3. Draft what’s open. This seems obvious, but it’s so easy to fall into the trap of trying to draft a deck you’re familiar with, or one that you’ve come to believe is the “best” deck/color in the format, or, conversely, avoiding a deck or color that you’ve read is the “worst” in the format. This is especially true with sets like Guilds of Ravnica, where the synergy of the color pairs is a major theme to the draft.

4. Don’t fret about sending “signals”. This isn’t super relevant at the time of this writing in Arena, because we’re drafting against bots, but it’s worth mentioning, especially since drafting against live opponents will probably come to Arena at some point. “Signaling” is being aware of what cards you’re passing to the next player, and allowing that to shape your picks. Oddly enough the place where this would be the most relevant, which is pack 1, is also the place where it’s the least impactful. In IRL drafting, you’re passing pack 1 to the left, then pack 2 to the right, then pack 3 back to the left. So you’re only getting one pack of cards being passed to you from the player(s) to whom you’re “signaling”. It’s much more important to pay attention to what’s being passed to you, so you can get a sense of what might be open, then to try and put the player to your left in or out of any given color.

5. Read set reviews, but don’t take them as Gospel. It’s good to familiarize yourself with the cards in a set before attempting a draft. Typically looking at the Gold Uncommons will give you some idea of what the various color pairs are trying to do (“Gold” is Magic slang for Multicolored cards, because older sets printed them with gold colored borders). Keep in mind though, that even the very best pros are only making educated guesses about pick orders, and card power. These absolutely will change as the set is drafted and they figure out what works and doesn’t work. Be aware especially of what kind of combat tricks and removal exists at Common. Along with the Limited Resources set review, I highly recommend Luis Scott Vargas’ personal review, which can be found on Channel Fireball.

Well, I think that’s enough to start with. My next post will cover some basics of Deck Construction. Feel free to comment, or hit me up on the Magic Arena MTG Facebook group.

Limited Resources starter episodes: http://lrcast.com/

Limited Resources 56 – Back to Basics: Card Evaluation

Limited Resources 64 – Breaking Bread

Limited Resources 65 – Bread Crumbs

Limited Resources 95 – Card Evaluation Revisited

Limited Resources 113 – Limited Deckbuilding Primer

Limited Resources 184 – Card Evaluation With Brian Wong

Limited Resources 189 – Mana Bases

Limited Resources 198 – Brian Wong Level-Ups

Limited Resources 214 – Common Mistakes

Limited Resources 226 – ROTTY And Application of Tools

Limited Resources 248 – Quadrant Theory Revisited

Limited Resources 273 – Have a Plan

Limited Resources 286 – Top 10 Traps for Limited (And How To Avoid Them)

Limited Resources 296 – A Fundamental Approach to Limited

Limited Resources 301 – UBER Theory and Exclusive BFZ Preview Cards
Limited Resources 482 – A Fresh Look BREAD (And Why You Shouldn’t Use It)

Welcome to the Arena!

So you’ve downloaded Arena and discovered Magic: the Gathering. My condolences on your new addict– Oh, I mean, Welcome to the Greatest Game ever Made!

Magic is a great game, and there’s a lot to love about it. I’ve been playing for around 20 years. I’m not exactly sure when I started, but it was around Tempest or Urza’s Saga. I do remember Capsize being out, because my friend who taught me the game just wrecked me with it, LOL. For most of that time I was a kitchen table player, but about 10 years ago, I started playing more competitively and I’ve played in several GPs and larger SCG events. I’ve also been certified as an L1 Judge.

If you’re coming to Magic for the first time through Arena, then this blog is being written with you in mind. I’m sure many of you are coming from Hearthstone or other online CCGs. While there are similarities between Magic and these other games, you’ll find some notable differences as well, as I’m sure you’ve discovered.

I want to dedicate this blog to helping folks learn those differences, understanding how the rules work (they are very complex), discovering the depth of play, getting a handle on some basic strategy and concepts, and most of all seeing the wider world that Magic has to offer. Seriously, if you’re enjoying Arena, I can’t encourage you enough to check out Magic IRL. A great place to start is by watching coverage of major events, especially StarCity Games events. There’s also a fantastic community around this game, so take a trip out to your Local Game Store and look around.

Thanks for taking the time to pop by my humble little blog. I often hang out in the Magic Arena MTG group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/148868719089138/) if you want to chat, or if you think I got something wrong in this blog. I’m always up for some friendly dialogue.