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)