How to Draft Pack One

By Liam Etelson

The first few picks of a draft are pivotal. As a result, much of the skill expression and edge to be gained in draft occurs in pack one. While packs two and three primarily test deckbuilding fundamentals and format knowledge, pack one tests raw draft navigation. I’d like to share my approach to the start of every draft, which I’ve developed over the years and has served me well. Prepare to get into the weeds!

Pack One, Pick One

It’s time for the most exciting part of every draft: the legendary, endlessly controversial, p1p1! By far the single largest factor when weighing first picks is raw strength. Card evaluation is an important skill early in the format, before community consensus and 17lands data have settled. That being said, most first picks I’d consider mistakes are known weaker cards taken with sketchy justification. There are four common principles players cite to justify taking a weaker card, some of which have merit, but are overused across the board.

I took the weaker card because…

1. It keeps me more open.

2. It’s a good build-around.

3. It’s in a better color.

4. There are other good cards of the same color in the pack.

Let’s take a look at each of these, the reasoning behind them, and when (if ever) they could actually be good advice.

“It keeps me more open.”

There are indeed spots where I would trade small amounts of raw power for versatility, and I commonly use it as a tiebreaker between otherwise close picks. However, the phrase “it keeps me open” implies that first picking a gold or otherwise narrow card “locks us in more” than picking a more versatile one. I’d like to step away from this paradigm, because when I first pick a gold card I don’t feel locked into those colors. My goal is to find the best deck for my seat, which is influenced by what my first pick was, but even more influenced by the cards I’m passed later down the line. So really, what we lose by first picking a narrow card isn’t the ability to “stay open,” but a certain percentage that the specific card doesn’t make it into our final deck. You can apply this coefficient (which I call “playability”) to the power level of the card, but don’t apply it to your draft as a whole.

It’s easy to look at a pack of fantastic cards and say “I’m happy with any of these so I’ll take the versatile one,” while overlooking the fact that one of them is actually substantially stronger. Let’s assume the classic Limited Resources grading scale is roughly linear with respect to win percentage improvement when drawn. It’s generally understood that you should first pick a gold B over a mono-colored C+. So, you should also first pick a gold A over a mono-colored B+. Here’s a recent pack from @Calm_Mirror on Twitter:

For me this pick is extremely close between Far Fortune and Rangers’ Refueler. I think Far Fortune is an A and Refueler is generally around a B+, so by the above heuristic, Far Fortune is the pick. What makes it so close, however, is depending on your exhaust count, Refueler could potentially get into the A range. This is yet another coefficient to attach to our power level evaluation. If pressed, I think I’d still take Far Fortune, but wouldn’t fault either pick. Haunt the Network isn’t unreasonable either, but is easier to compare to Far Fortune because it’s just as narrow and a little less powerful.

This pack spurred endless debate at the PT testing house:

Once again the best card is the gold card, Oildeep Gearhulk. Notably, however, the UUBB mana cost makes it extra narrow. Not only is it gold, but you realistically need a 9/8 manabase or better to support the color requirements. After starting with a gold card, sometimes one of the colors ends up being open and the other doesn’t. When this happens, I often end up splashing it as a second or third color, which Oildeep doesn’t allow you to do. It truly requires that exactly UB be open, and its strength as a first pick should be discounted even more than Far Fortune’s as a result (that being said, the rate is high enough that I’m not unhappy picking it). The next best cards, in my opinion, are Fang Druid Summoner and Grim Bauble. At the time, I was the sole advocate for Grim Bauble, partially because I thought green would be more over-drafted at the PT than black. The rest of the team was fairly split between Oildeep and Fang-Druid, both of which are reasonable picks. We never quite reached a consensus, which goes to show how difficult some packs can be!

“It’s a good build-around.”

More specifically, it’s often argued that build-arounds are good first picks because you can prioritize the cards that support them in the draft more highly. While that can be advantageous, build-arounds are inherently narrow cards. “Wait,” you may be saying, “doesn’t that mean they should be worse first picks, by the logic in the previous section?” Yep! Well, mostly. It turns out that build-arounds don’t all share the same properties. The most common type of build-around is what I call a “critical mass payoff.” These are cards that do their thing if and only if you take enough cards that support them: exactly the cards we were discounting the p1p1 strength of in the previous section. Gold cards, for example, can be thought of as critical mass payoffs, for which the “building around” consists of picking enough playables to make a deck with those colors. Some cards may be critical mass payoffs for multiple things. For example, Haunt the Network needs a density of artifacts while requiring that UB be sufficiently open in general. Luckily, these axes aren’t orthogonal; UB decks inherently tend to have high artifact density, so Haunt the Network’s playability hit shouldn’t be double counted.

This card happens to be a power outlier, but I usually look to pick up critical mass payoffs a bit later in the draft. My goal is to make sure that I’m the only one building around them, and whether I can get them late is the perfect litmus test.

So what could make a build-around a better first pick relative to its strength? There are two perfect examples in Aetherdift: Transit Mage and Fang-Druid Summoner.

First of all, they aren’t actively bad first picks because they don’t require a critical mass of cards that synergize, just a few. It doesn’t really matter if someone else is also doing the thing, because it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up enough support.

Now, they’re actually extra good first picks because the cards that synergize with them the most are high priorities anyways. If you wait to get a Transit Mage until later (pretend it was weaker and this was possible), by the time you know that you’re getting it, you’ll have missed one of your opportunities to pick up its strongest synergies. Taking Transit Mage early allows you to adjust your pick order in a beneficial way.

As we can see, being a build-around can affect p1p1 strength, but in differing ways depending on the nature of the card.

“It’s in a better color.”

First, we have to define what it means for a color to be stronger than another. You’ve probably heard the term “self-correcting” thrown around to express that sometimes it can be right to draft strategies you deem somehow “weaker,” depending on your seat. This is because a draft has an equilibrium state for how many players should be in each color, given the preferences of each player. My opinion of a color’s strength is quantified by how many decks per pod it supports, on average, if each drafter has my exact preferences. In other words, what is the equilibrium state when I draft with seven clones of myself?

Color preference means something very different to me than color strength. Color preference is an opinion on color strength relative to the aggregate opinions of the rest of the pod. Crucially, it isn’t constant across pods. In an Arena draft, the commonly accepted best color is likely to be a color I prefer, since many drafters aren’t in touch with community sentiment. This could change over the course of the format as the playerbase catches up. At the Pro Tour, I might not prefer the consensus best color, or maybe I still would if I think it’s even better than my peers do. Lastly, while mastery of each archetype is ideal, it’s also valid to prefer colors you’re more comfortable drafting than others.

I believe that color preference, not color strength, should affect p1p1 decisions. This means if you’re drafting with seven clones of yourself, you shouldn’t factor color into your decision making at all. In game theory, an equilibrium is defined as a state where no player is incentivized to change their behavior. We can see this playing out at the draft table. You’ll naturally end up drafting the stronger colors more often, because those colors have more good cards. But you also have no incentive to force your way into them.

Notably, preferences can apply to things other than color. In a high-level draft pod, I tend to prioritize two things particularly highly: cheap creatures and fixing. Two drops, for example, are naturally in high demand because strong players know to prioritize them. As for fixing, I find myself splashing more when playables are harder to come by, which is the case when everyone in the pod has strong card evaluation.

In practice, this means when you sit down to draft, assess the table and calibrate your preferences. All set? Now you open your first pack and have to decide between Greasewrench Goblin and Hazard of the Dunes.

If it’s week one of the format on Arena, Hazard is easily the pick. At the PT, I didn’t have a strong preference disparity between green and red, so I would’ve taken Greasewrench (which I think is slightly stronger overall). Context matters!

There are a couple of exceptions in which a facet of color strength does matter in a p1p1 scenario. My argument was based on the assumption that the number of first pickable cards is proportional to how many decks a color supports. Suppose a color is shallow, but is composed of only horrendous and excellent cards. The red commons in Foundations are a perfect example of this, all quite weak except Burst Lightning and Gorehorn Raider, which clear the first-pickable threshold. Usually, a weak color wouldn’t have commons like this. In this case, equilibrium isn’t quite being reached after the average spread of first picks at the table. As a result, you may have wanted to deprioritize red in p1p1 slightly. On the other hand, when an exceedingly deep color lacks fantastic commons (this is often true for green), you could bump them up a tiny bit in your pick order.

The other exception has to do with gold cards. There are certain color combinations in every set that are either more or less than the sum of their parts. For example, I found Simic Frogs in Bloomburrow to be the best blue deck by quite a bit. As a result, I’d prioritize Pond Prophet a bit more highly, because I’d get the benefits of being one of the only blue drafters and in a strong archetype simultaneously. On the flip side, red and green were fantastic colors in Wilds of Eldraine. Gruul was nothing special, however, so I devalued Ruby, Daring Tracker slightly. It often wasn’t worth it to fight over those colors just to be a Gruul deck, which lacked synergy.

I can’t emphasize enough that even in extreme cases, such as red in Foundations, these are very small considerations. Color preference, too, should never overrule significant power disparity. The rest of the examples in this article won’t take into account color preference at all because there’s no way to do so without the context of who’s at the table.

“There are other good cards of the same color in the pack.”

The reasoning goes something like this: There are three great red cards in the pack and one decent white card so if I take the white card then the rest of the table will fight over red and I’ll have white to myself whereas if I take a red card I’ll be super cut in pack two and my draft will trainwreck and aaaaaaaaaaa!

This is an unproductive line of reasoning. There’s way too much that goes on in a draft for the cards you’re passing in this one pack to make a meaningful enough difference to swing any needle. Sure, the other two good red cards won’t make it back to you, but who’s to say the folks who take them stay in red (especially if you start cutting it for the rest of the pack). Most people know about drafting the hard way; they aren’t going to be married to those picks, especially the third person in the line who will be double cut! Or, maybe they started with a red bomb and are tunneled into red anyways. Many cards are opened at the table every pack and a few extra red ones won’t matter. There are too many variables and too many unknowns. Take. The. Best. Card.

As a side note, when doing team pod draft practice for PT Aetherdrift, I noticed something interesting. In quite a few drafts that I thought went well, there was someone to my left (usually Jeff, for some reason) in the exact same archetype. My takeaway was that your colors being open at the table matters much more than the location of the other people drafting them. If there’s someone in your lane to your right it’s a bit tougher, but even that isn’t inherently a big deal.

The Rest of the Pack, in Theory

Ok, it’s finally time for the rest of the pack. As it turns out, the same philosophies I use for the first pick of the draft can be applied to the later picks. To decide what to take out of any pack, not just p1p1, I first assess the strength of each card, and then apply these modifiers to each:

1. Preferences.

2. Likelihood to make the final deck, or “playability.”

3. Synergy with cards already taken or expected to wheel.

The card with the highest final score is the pick! This makes it sound simple, but there’s a lot that goes into each modifier.

Preferences and Playability

We covered these pretty thoroughly in the last section, and the concepts are the same for picks after the first. However, both playability and color preference gradually begin to matter less the more certain you are of your colors. Once you’re locked into your archetype, you can ignore them completely. After all, it’s clear that any card in your colors can go in your deck and anything else can’t. It also doesn’t matter what color you think is underrated at that point. Other preferences begin to matter less too. As you fill out your deck, whether you pick a two-drop becomes more about what you already have and less about what you expect to be able to find later.

Playability depends on what’s already in your pool. In a p1p1 scenario, we viewed any mono-colored card as having approximately the same likelihood of making your final deck. But say it’s pick three and you’ve taken two red cards. Now, future red cards have higher playability because you’re likely to be a red deck. Also, the strength of the red cards you’ve taken affects this. Let’s say I first pick a Riptide Gearhulk.

This card is so immensely strong that future blue, white, and UW gold cards will have much higher playability. Furthermore, UW gold cards will now have close to the same playability as mono-blue and mono-white cards, which wasn’t previously the case.

Synergies

This modifier, on the other hand, is almost exclusively a factor for picks after p1p1 (although not entirely, because we could expect some cards to wheel). Later in the draft, we want to prioritize cards that work well with what we already have. Technically speaking, two cards sharing a color could be thought of as a synergy in its purest form, but I’m more talking about synergy packages within archetypes.

Knowing synergy packages is some of the best prep you can do for a format. At the PT Aetherdrift testing house, a large percentage of our limited meeting was dedicated to this! This is where Fang-Druid Summoner (funny how it keeps coming up) bumps up Terrian in your pick order, or Haunt the Network bumps up Pactdoll Terror (and vice versa).

Not all synergy packages are only two cards, of course. In Constructed, your entire deck is effectively one big synergy package. The closer you can get your draft deck to that, the better.

The synergy modifier also takes into account anti-synergy. This is where knowing what your deck needs is important. The most common anti-synergies are overloading one spot in the curve, surplus of one card type (i.e. combat tricks or removal), and cards that are bad in multiples. There are also more explicit anti-synergies, such as aggressive creatures with wraths.

A Formula for Success

So there you have it! Raw strength, preferences, playability, and synergies are the main variables I consider when deciding on a pick in a draft. If you’re math-brained like me, this expression may help you visualize how the variables relate to each other. Where x := raw strength, f := preferences, p := playability, and s := synergies, the card with the highest value of (p+f)(x+s) is the pick! In words, playability is a multiplicative modifier to the aggregate strength/synergy score, and preferences can provide a (small) boost or hit to playability.

The Rest of the Pack, in Practice

Ok, but how does everything actually play out in practice? Well, this phase of the draft is all about finding a balance between leaning into signals and respecting the strength of the cards you’ve taken. There are three different buckets that my drafts tend to fall into, which are largely determined by picks 2-4.

1. I first pick a mono-colored card and get passed strong enough cards to stay in that color for as long as possible.

2. I first pick a gold card and get passed enough strength in those colors to hard-commit early.

3. The first couple picks are strong cards that pull me in different directions and I need to figure out what’s open.

There are some strategic implications of each path, which we’ll discuss next. Keep in mind that not every draft can be cleanly categorized like this. Rather, this is a generalization of the more fundamental concepts introduced in the previous section.

Starting in One Color

In an ideal world, every draft starts like this. The longer you delay moving into a second color, the more information you’ll have to decide what it is. In the extreme case, your starting color is so open that you’re mono-colored going into pack two. This is a great spot to be in because you can now snap up any bomb you open, or more importantly, are passed. More often, you move into your second color later in pack one, when your first color finally dries up. When this happens, here’s what you can expect:

• The color you started in should flow when the direction reverses in pack two, since you cut it for many picks in a row.

• The color you move into later should be open again in pack three, or potentially in general if it’s been flowing after the wheel.

So, the question now becomes: how far out of our way are we willing to go to achieve these benefits? Well, if we draft according to the philosophy in the previous section, they’ll occur naturally! As we accumulate more and more black cards, the playability of future black cards goes up, making them stronger considerations.

After taking just one card of a color, we shouldn’t be too attached to it. I started my day two PT draft with a Perilous Snare, and didn’t take any more white cards all draft. It would’ve been easy to tunnel vision in, but UR ended up being wildly open, which I would’ve missed.

A common pitfall when staying in one color is not taking note of what you’re passing. Even if some decent red cards are getting by you, this is valuable information. If they appear around picks 3-6, it likely means red is open in that direction. This means that you shouldn’t necessarily expect red to flow in pack two, but may be interested in taking a red bomb p2p1 anyways. If the strong red cards appear after the wheel, it means that the color is probably open at the table as a whole. In this case, I wouldn’t hesitate to start pack two with some solid red.

Starting Gold

First of all, a card doesn’t have to be the literal color gold for me to consider it gold. As part of my format prep I always identify “secret gold cards,” which are mono-colored cards that only go into one or two archetypes. Voyager Quickwelder was my favorite example from Aetherdift: fantastic in UW Artifacts, nearly unplayable elsewhere. For our purposes, these cards act the same as gold cards. I could’ve replaced the Pond Prophet example from earlier with Sunshower Druid, because it was effectively a UG gold card too.

It’s important to know about these cards ahead of time because it helps with reading signals. For most packs, tabling a Voyager Quickwelder is just as good of a litmus test for UW being open as a Voyage Home, but might not be as obvious. In Bloomburrow, I’d often reference the “Sunshower Druid Test” if I saw one p1p1 or p1p2. If it wheeled, it was a very good sign that frogs was open.

Secret gold cards that have potential to wheel like Sunshower Druid are never first picks, but some, such as Salvation Engine, are.

If I start with a strong gold or secret gold card, I approach the draft a bit differently. I’m now primarily interested in my specific archetype being open at the table, more so than the actual colors. Even if the colors are dry, I can likely wheel more gold cards if I’m the only one in the archetype. To achieve this, I take subsequent gold and secret gold cards higher than I otherwise would, to avoid other drafters passing their “Sunshower Druid tests” and moving in.

Starting in Many Colors

It’s often correct to just take the strongest card in the pack in the first couple picks, even if it means dipping into a bunch of different colors. In these spots, it’s important to keep an eye on the splashability of any bombs you’ve taken. If I start with Aatchik, Emerald Radian into Aether Siphon, I’m not particularly interested in being base UG, even if that’s one of the color pairs represented on my cards. If I take a few more blue cards, I’m now thinking that I’m UB splashing green if possible, or Ux, abandoning Aatchik.

As you accumulate cards of different colors, keep in mind the viable directions you could go at all times, and update them with each pick. At the bare minimum, you should go into pack two knowing one of your colors and it should be a color you have a decent pool of cards in already.

Wrapping Up the Pack

While the end of future packs are often spent gathering enough playables, I view the end of pack one primarily as a time to speculate on synergy packages. If you see a land sharing one of your colors with three cards in the pack, you may as well take it in case you want to splash a bomb. If you see a Push the Limit, may as well take it in case you get passed a bunch of cycling vehicles later.

Don’t take a bad card just because it’s in your colors when you could speculate on something that could actually be powerful. It’s still pack one, so dream big!

Conclusion

If you’ve made it to the end… I’m honestly surprised. But I hope it helped you develop a solid foundation for approaching a draft. I’d love to know what you found useful, disagree with, or would like me to elaborate on, so don’t hesitate to reach out.