Since we have a lot of newer drafters coming in with Phyrexia: All Will Be One, I thought I’d share some of the heuristics that I use for drafting. To save you a Google, a heuristic is a line of thought that is the default answer most of the time. Learning these heuristics will make you a better drafter, and learning when to break them or when they do not apply will make you a great drafter. As much as I’d love to take credit for these I cannot in good faith do that, most of them come from Limited Resources (if you want to get better and aren’t listening to this podcast you are missing out.)
The main reason you want to use heuristics in your play is to relieve some of the mental load of thinking every move or pick through. If you don’t need to think about whether or not to take the two drop or the three drop that leaves more mental space open for actual hard decisions. This applies the most in gameplay, where if you know how to work most board states because you’ve been there before; when you come upon a novel situation you have more time and less stress to think the difficult turn through.
The first heuristic I want to talk about is applicable for most magic games, not just limited, but it is much more important in limited. Use as much of your mana as you can each turn. Just play your cards. If you are holding a creature back and cannot enumerate why you are holding that creature back, then you should cast it. This is also true for lands. Team Ultra Pro has a thing they do in testing for the Pro Tour, if you skip playing a land and cannot justify it to the rest of the playtest group you lose your “don’t play a land privilege” and have to play a land every turn if you can. You’re not at a poker table, you’re not bluffing your opponent. If you have 6 lands in play, haven’t played anything in two turns, and are sitting with three cards in hand I am just going to assume you have three lands in hand.
The second heuristic is for the draft portion specifically. If you have a choice between a low mana cost card and a higher mana cost card that are of comparable power level for their mana cost, take the lower card first. If you spend your first pack picking one, two, and three drop creatures in pack one then when you get passed a good five drop in pack two you don’t have to make the choice between power level and curve. This is especially true in cube, where most five drops are interchangeably powerful (the difference between Baneslayer Angel and Elder Gargaroth is not all that huge) any of them would fill the slot of your top end. Obviously this doesn’t apply to the absurdly powerful rares that show up in limited sets, like Thrun, Breaker of Silence. It doesn’t matter how many five drops you have in your deck you put Thrun in your deck.
Next is one that is becoming a little less true as time goes on, a little less universally applicable, and that is “Staying Open.” In draft staying open is the practice of taking lands and colorless spells early in order to leave your picks as open ended as possible. For example if in pack one almost every card I take is green, maybe I end up with a couple of decent red cards halfway through the pack, I am looking at playing red/green. But then in pack two I open Vraska, Betrayal's Sting. I’m not passing a $16 card for monetary and constructed reasons, but I’d also like to play this very powerful card in my limited deck. Since I am mostly green I am free to move into black and put this game winning Planeswalker into my deck and only lose out on the two or three picks I spent on the medium red cards in the middle of pack one.
Now if I had spent pack one splitting myself evenly between red and green it will be much harder for me to slot Vraska into that deck, I'm going to lose half my picks in pack one, and this goes back to the previous heuristic, if I spent my picks on five and six drops I won't be able to play all of them because I will be using my pick on this Vraska.
Now if I had spent pack one splitting myself evenly between red and green it will be much harder for me to slot Vraska into that deck, I'm going to lose half my picks in pack one, and this goes back to the previous heuristic, if I spent my picks on five and six drops I won't be able to play all of them because I will be using my pick on this Vraska.
The next two kind of fit into the same heuristic and that is fine tuning your card evaluation ability. The Vanilla Test and the Quadrant Theory. The Vanilla Test is my favorite way to judge cards I’ve never seen before. If you take a creature and remove all the rules text from it, is that card playable? As an example, let’s look at one of the most underdrafted commons from Dominaria Remastered: Stonewood Invoker.
If you take away this card's rules text it becomes a Grizzly Bear with a better creature type. While the 8 mana ability almost never matters, it doesn’t make the card worse, and you should be playing your Grizzly Bears in limited. While a 2 mana 2/2 with no abilities is a little below rate in modern limited they almost never are just vanilla 2/2. In All Will Be One, they have toxic 1 and first strike, or proliferate when they die.
The Vanilla Test goes the other way too, while it is less common for under-statted creatures to be printed any more, you still get the occasional four mana 2/3. Those types of cards need a lot more heavy lifting from their text box than a four mana 4/4. An example from All Will Be One is Annex Sentry. A 3 mana 1/4 is a failure on the vanilla test, even with toxic 1, but when you look into its text box it exiles a creature when you cast it. Even though it fails The Vanilla Test it is still one of the better white cards in the set because its text box is so powerful.
Quadrant Theory is simple on the surface when you’re looking to break down how good a specific card is, and gets far more complicated the further into the draft you go. It works best when you’re looking at first picks or looking to fine tune your pick orders for the set as a whole. You divide up your thinking into four quadrants. When you are ahead, when you are behind, when you are building, and when you are stalled. You take a card and try to find out where it stands in each quadrant, with “when you’re behind” being by far the most important quadrant; and “when you’re ahead” being the least important.
Let’s do some examples from All Will Be One, starting with Malcator's Watcher. When you are ahead: this card doesn’t add much besides an evasive body. When you are building: this card is a great two mana play, it trades with most of the one drops in the set and a couple of the twos. When you are behind: it functions about the same as any two drop when you are losing, with two big exceptions: it draws a card to dig you to an answer and it can block fliers. When you’re stalled: Cheap fliers are good at breaking board stalls. In the Quadrant Test Malcator’s Watcher comes out quite high in three of four, making it a high pick for a common.
Now for something a little harder (and something I am particularly soap box-ey about) Awaken the Sleeper. Let’s put it through the Quadrant Test. When you're behind: This card is an awful top deck. If you draw this while you are already losing you have probably just lost the game. It does less than nothing when you are behind. When you are building: You don’t really want to take a turn off to not cast a creature and maybe get three or four damage in on turn four with this card, when you are building this card hurts your board development. When you are winning: this is when Threaten effects are at their best. When you cast this card while you’re ahead you usually either put yourself so far ahead you have an insurmountable advantage or you win the game outright.
This is why people play Threatens, because when you play it correctly it wins the game. What does this card do while you are stalled out? It will sometimes kill one of your opponents creatures, whether it’s the creature you stole and attacked with or something they chose to block with. Most often, however, they will just take the damage because since you’re in a board stall their life total is not in much danger and you just spent four mana and a card to do basically nothing. The only time I suggest playing Threaten type effects is when you have lots of cheap ways to sacrifice the creature you stole.
In Quadrant Theory Awaken the Sleeper abjectly fails two of the four, excels in one, and is mediocre in the fourth. This makes Awaken the Sleeper a fine card for very, very aggressive red decks that consistently put their opponents on the back foot, and that’s about all.
The last heuristic I want to touch on is one of the harder ones to do, it is learning all of the cards in the set. Learn what they do, learn how they interact with each other, and learn the art for all of them. The faster you are able to look at a board state (especially if you play arena) and tell what is happening without needing to read all the cards the better you’ll be able to play and the less brain space you’ll need to put into figuring out how the game pieces interact with each other. If you already know what all the things do then you can use your opponent's turn to think through the lines of play for your next turn, speeding up your play considerably.
These are good starting points for limited but ultimately the only way you get better at limited is by doing it more. The reason the good drafters that you know are as good as they are is because they have done hundreds if not thousands of drafts over the course of their Magic careers. It might be disheartening but remember, every single one of those drafters have been where you are (I spent ten years getting whooped by Richard Cook every Friday at FNM) and most of them didn’t have the infrastructure and content you do to make yourself better. Watch professionals draft, listen to podcasts, watch the Pro Tour coverage, and read articles (plug, plug). All of these things will make you better at drafting and I look forward to cracking packs with new Magic players for years.
What’s your favorite draft format ever? What’s a weird or interesting thing that has happened to you in limited? Let us know in the comments and remember Game Grid drafts every Thursday at 6:30!
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