It seems like there's a whole lot of people interested in attending the $12 M11 draft at 1 P.M. on Saturday, which is awesome. At the request of some of the newer players, I wanted to post some basic information on how drafting works and how to build a good deck and have a successful draft.
First off, here's a quick rundown of how a draft works. A small group of players (the ideal number is 8, and I'll try to keep the size of each group as close to this as I can) sit at a table with 3 booster packs. Each player opens the first pack and removes the rules/token card, and then looks through the 15 cards in the pack. They each pick their favorite card from the pack and pass the other 14 cards to the player on their left. This continues until all cards are picked. This process then repeats for pack 2, but the cards are passed to the right instead. The third pack passes to the left again.
After all 3 packs have been drafted, each player takes the cards they drafted and any number of basic lands (which will be provided) to make a 40-card deck. All cards not in the deck are in the sideboard. Players then face off in matches, which are 2 out of 3. The tournament will have 3 or 4 rounds of matches, and everyone plays in every round regardless of how they do (i.e. nobody is ever eliminated). The final standings will be based on each player's performance in these matches.
What should you draft and put in your deck? It varies from set to set and draft to draft, but generally you want some combination of strong (power/toughness near mana cost) and/or evasive (flying, trample, etc.) creatures at a variety of mana costs (more on this later), ways to make your creatures stronger (such as Giant Growth and Armored Ascension), and ways to disrupt your opponent. Disruption can be creature kill spells (such as Assassinate or Lightning Bolt), counterspells (such as Cancel and Negate), enchantments you put on your opponent's creatures (such as Pacifism and Ice Cage), and creatures that interfere with your opponent's strategy (such as Blinding Mage and Prodigal Pyromancer). It's also good to be able to draw cards and destroy opposing noncreature permanents, especially their artifacts and enchantments, though not every color can perform these functions, so it's important to play to the strengths of your color(s).
It's also important to remember that sometimes the best card you can pick may be common or uncommon. Although many of the rares are awesome (and you might be inclined to pick some of them because you want them for your collection, which is understandable), your deck can often benefit the most from passing the rare and taking something more relevant. I want to emphasize that rares are not the key to being successful. Good ones help, but I've won drafts with no-rares decks and finished dead last in ones where I was playing several rares. The key is picking what's best for your deck. Furthermore, people who attend my events always receive at least 1 prize pack regardless of performance, so this should hopefully alleviate any fears people might have of possibly not getting any rares to put towards their trade binders.
Regarding deckbuilding, there are two main considerations: color and mana cost. Color is the much simpler one. Generally, people just try to follow the colors of the cards they take with their first few picks, which is usually a fine strategy. However, if the color(s) you're trying to draft disappear (usually because the person next to you is playing the same color), then you may need to move into a different one. Usually, it's best to play a 2 color deck, although sometimes it's possible to play just 1 color or to go the other way and "splash" a couple powerful cards from a 3rd color, especially if you're playing green, as green has access in M11 to cards like Sylvan Ranger and Cultivate that help you get lands of other colors.
In my opinion, the more challenging part of drafting is creating a good "mana curve," which involves the mana cost of cards you play in your deck. Usually, you want to have a well-rounded mana curve, which means you want to play a large amount 3 and 4 mana cards (with 3 mana usually having the most cards), a medium amount of 2 and 5 mana cards, and a small amount of 1 and 6 or more mana cards. As an example, here's the mana cost comparison of the blue/green deck I played in the draft a couple weeks ago:
1-mana: 3 (Brittle Effigy, Diminish, Llanowar Elves)
2-mana: 4 (Augury Owl, 2 Mana Leak, Plummet)
3-mana: 6 (2 Aether Adept, Cancel, 2 Cloud Elemental, Cultivate)
4-mana: 5 (2 Azure Drake, Foresee, Prized Unicorn, Sleep)
5-mana: 4 (2 Air Servant, Greater Basilisk, Jace's Ingenuity)
6+ mana: 2 (Yavimaya Wurm, Duskdale Wurm)
If you want to see the deck list in full, scroll down to the very bottom of the site. You can see here that I'm only playing 5 cards at 1 or 6+ mana, but I have 8 cards at 2 or 5 mana and 11 cards at 3 or 4 mana. This is a decent mana curve, and is also partly why there are so many 2-mana spells in my sideboard, as I didn't want to play any more 2-mana spells because it would throw off my curve. Of course, every deck is different, and some decks can have an emphasis on cheaper or more expensive spells depending on their strategies, but this is a decent guideline, especially if you're new to drafting.
Finally, it's also important to make sure you play the right ratio of creatures, land, and other spells. Most decks play 14-16 creatures, 16-18 land, and 6-10 noncreature spells (the deck above played 14 creatures, 10 noncreature spells, and 16 lands). Still, these are just guidelines. I'd rather play 20 creatures and 3 noncreature spells if I had that many good creatures and very few good noncreatures! However, cases like this are fairly uncommon, and the guidelines are a pretty good place to start for new drafters.
To the newer players, let me know if you have any questions about drafting, and to the veteran players, please let me know if I made any mistakes in the information. Thanks and I hope to see lots of you on Saturday!
- Dom
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