Sligh

In drafting 101 I advocated a very specific mana curve for drafts, and I thought that I would explain my reasoning a bit more in this post. But first, a shout out.

Like a lot of players my age, when I was learning to play magic in the late nineties I cut my teeth reading thedojo.com. It is sadly out of commission, but you can read lots of the archived articles at classicdojo.org, and you should read them. The tourney reports may not matter anymore, and you might not get all the Tolarian Academy jokes, but the theory articles are awesome.

Anyways, let’s look at one typical sligh build that I found on Classic Dojo.
The mana curve for this deck is:
           0            4
           1           13
           2           14
           3            7
           4            2
(I’ve counted Fireblast as zero CMC since they will almost always be cast by sacrificing two mountains.)
The Sligh archetype (named after its inventor, apparently) came out of nowhere because it used a lot of cards that were thought to be terrible. Ironclaw Orcs, for example, is a like a grizzly bears that can’t chump block big creatures – making it worse than a card that no one plays. But it fit the mana curve.

The Sligh deck was successful because it focused exclusively on having an efficient mana curve: every mana should be spent every turn until the opponent dies or your attack loses steam. Ironclaw orcs isn’t included based on its merit as a card. Instead, a slot existed in the mana curve and Ironclaw orcs were deemed the best card to fill that slot at the time.

The mana curve I put in drafting 101 isn’t a sligh curve, I don’t think it’s realistic to get enough direct damage or efficient creatures to try for a sligh deck in limited, but I’m taking the same approach when making card choices. Instead of simply picking the best card out of every pack, I’m trying to fill slots in my mana curve with the best options that present themselves.

As an aside, sligh decks are still around. Here’s the mana curve for a vampire deck that recently featured at the Pro Tour Paris.
        1             15
        2             14
        3              8
Does anyone really believe that Viscera Seer is an independently good card? The deck needs a one drop vampire to power Kalastria Highborn and Captivating Vampire. Like ironclaw orcs ten years ago, the seer gets picked up solely because of its mana cost.

Hate Drafting

After you’ve finished drafting and building your magic deck using 24 or 25 cards out of 42, what purpose do the other cards serve? Technically they’re sideboard, and maybe three or four of them are actual sideboard, but that still leaves a lot of wasted cards. Put these cards to use by disrupting other players deck building strategies, otherwise known as hate drafting.

Most players intuitively know that they shouldn't pass that Massacre Wurm along, even if they aren’t playing black; it’s just too powerful to have floating around the table. But effective hate drafting should go further than this.

Let’s start with some numbers. You’re going to draft 42 cards. I like to consider the last three picks from each pack to be completely random when planning a draft strategy, so we actually choose 33 cards. If 25 of those go into our deck that still gives us eight picks to use against our opponents. Clearly, we need to extend our hate drafting into uncommons and commons.

First, it’s important to take cards that will hose your deck. If you play red/blue you might want to take Glissa's Courier out of circulation to protect yourself. This strategy is straightforward once you have an idea what your deck is going to look like.

Second, identify key commons and uncommons that other archetypes use a lot. R/W battle cry decks love to get Goblin Wardriver, so take him if you can. Any green deck is happy to get Viridian Emissary, one of the few forms of mana ramp in Mirrodin Besieged, so snag those too even if you don’t play green. By depriving your opponents of their most efficient late picks you make your own deck that much stronger relative to the field.

Magic Drafting 101

In the last month we’ve had a lot of new players come to our weekly limited tournaments, and I’ve found myself giving them the same handful of tips each week to get started. The main thing to keep in mind when drafting is that you do actually need to end up with a playable deck at the end.

This seems pretty obvious, but most players don’t follow this strategy. Instead, they try to choose the best card from each pack, eventually restricting themselves to a few colors. This leads often leads to decks that are slow, or lack punch or simply play inconsistently.

A good draft deck needs to build steadily, deal with your opponent’s primary threats and then drop a win condition within the first ten turns. To do that you need a good mana curve and a couple of bombs.

I aim for a mana curve that looks like this:

Converted Mana Cost                      Frequency

                 0, 1, 2                                  12

                 3                                           7                                    

                 4                                           4

                 5                                           2

                 6                                           1

A better player would probably keep a separate tally of 1 and 2 drops, but five categories is all I can keep in mind while I’m looking through cards. As a practical matter, missing your one drop doesn’t usually cost you more than a point or two of damage. Missing your first and second turn is a bigger problem. From experience, the above curve results in smooth game play and very few missed turns out of the first six. Keep a mental tally of each category as you draft and actively look for cards that fill gaps in your mana curve.

But this crescendo has to lead to something. Mathematicians, please skip the next sentence. Having three bombs in your deck means about one per 13 cards, and at turn six you will have drawn at least 13 cards, so you would expect to pull one of the three bombs. Statistically this isn’t quite right, but you should consistently pull one of the three in your first ten turns.

Most of the great, overpowered cards are going to be rares, but between junk rares and rares of the wrong color, you can’t rely on these. The presence of common and uncommon bombs should affect your draft picks even if you don’t have them since there is a good chance one will pop up.

For example, when drafting Scars of Mirrodin, I often end up drafting blue. Partially this is because blue is one of Scars of Mirrodin’s stronger colors, but the presence of Scrapdiver Serpent is a huge factor. I have been able to get one of these every time I wanted one during a Scars draft, and it has proven to be a brutal finisher. I wonder if Fangren Marauder will have the same effect on green in Mirrodin Besieged, but I’m not sure at this point.

It all looks basic, but when I manage the above curve with 3+ bombs I always come away with part of the winnings.

The 61st Card

One of the most common problems I see among players who are starting to become strong is playing with more than 40/60 cards in their deck. I’ve seen this in different countries, different formats and different competitive levels. Every magic community has that guy who insists there is nothing wrong with playing 75 card decks; I’m not talking about this tender soul. I’m talking about the otherwise strong players who see nothing wrong with playing 62 or 63 card decks.

Whenever I comment that someone’s deck is too large, the inevitable response is that, “they’re all good cards.” But whether or not they are good is beside the point – they aren’t equally good.

The source of the problem is a common deck building technique: many players put everything they like into a deck, sort the cards according to relative strength and then cut the weakest until they are down to 60 cards. But what happens when the bottom two cards are equally good? Figuring that they would be equally happy to draw either one, players simply leave both in.

And now we’ve found the mistake: even if these cards are just as good as each other, neither is as good as the strongest card in the deck.

Imagine, for instance, that your U/B control deck is 61 cards, and you don’t know what to cut. You have narrowed it down to dropping mana leaks from four to three or into the roils from three to two. Your friends give you different advice about which card is stronger, and you find both of them useful during playtesting. The bottom line is that neither card is as strong as your frost titan, so one of them must be cut.

Ironically, this mistake is most common in limited, where the decreased deck size actually increases the damage done by the extra card. In constructed that extra card represents 1.6 percent of your deck; in limited it is 2.4 percent. Over the course of a single game it might not matter, but if you are playing to win a tournament you can’t afford to be so lax.