"Ten-nil, ten-nil, ten-nil, ten-nil," sang my cat. She dropped her controller and did a quick victory lap of the lounge and then ran out through her catflap. A minute or so later I looked over and Patron of the Nezumi was still sitting on the sofa, controller in hand, looking glum. The TV was still on and the cat's perfect match record was sitting there as a mute testament to the fact that Patron of the Nezumi sucks at Soul Calibur.

Taking pity on him, I sat down next to him on the sofa.

"Don't bother," he remarked glumly, "you'll just end up owning me too."

"Pat," I put my arm around him, "I'm not over here to play you at Soul Calibur. I came over to check you were OK. Man, you look so glum. It's just a game. Don't play it if it annoys you."

"Meh, it's not the game," Pat put down his controller and sighed, "it's the cat. It just makes me so mad that she's better than me at everything."

"Aww, c'mon Pat, that's not fair! You're a big fat attacker, you can come into play earlier with that whole offering thing and you've even got some combo potential. What's not to like?"

"Yeah, I'm fat alright," Pat moped, looking down at the impact of a particularly hedonistic holiday season on his waistline. "I guess I just think too much about what might have been. Back when you wrote your first article on MTGSalvation the three of us were like a team. I appeared twice in the same article. I finally felt like I was someone, y'know? But then the cat appeared again and again and every time in the forums everyone was all - 'Ooh, I like the cat!'. And you win all these awards and all the hot chicks want to get in your pants. But what about me? I guess I'm nobody after all."

"Fame's not so great, Pat... and this isn't even real fame. But if it's what you want I'd be happy to put you in another article. Would that cheer you up?"

"I guess, but what could I do?"

"Draft, Pat. The cat doesn't do drafting. That could be your thing."

"Oh I dunno. I know how to draft, but I kinda suck at it."

"That's ideal Pat. That's absolutely perfect."

So that was how it started. Patron of the Nezumi and I sat down in front of the pooter and fired up Magic Online. We did quite a few drafts and after a while Pat started to get a bit better. He'd read plenty about draft on the internet before, but to begin with he didn't really know how to apply any of it. I have heard it said that Limited requires less practice than Constructed. That may be true for an experienced player encountering a new block's Limited format, but it certainly isn't true for a new player who's never drafted before. Practice matters.

That's not exactly what I'm here to talk about, though. One of our practice drafts went horribly wrong for Pat but the discussion we had afterwards touched on some important and interesting ideas. I'll come to those in a minute, but first let's go through the first pack worth of picks.

To get the most out of this I strongly recommend you note down your picks as you go. Both Pat's picks and my comments are in the spoiler cuts, but don't look in any of them until you've drafted all the packs. Let's get going!

Pick 1
Induce Paranoia
Roofstalker Wight
Torpid Moloch
Stinkweed Imp
Sabretooth Alley Cat
Golgari Brownscale
Gate Hound
Lurking Informant
Shambling Shell
Fiery Conclusion
Sparkmage Apprentice
Dimir Guildmage
Voyager Staff
Perilous Forays
Savra, Queen of the Golgari



Pick 2
Woodwraith Shambler
Drift of Phantasms
Strands of Undeath
Stinkweed Imp
Terraformer
Seismic Spike
Stone-Seeder Hierophant
Dimir Infiltrator
Last Gasp
Viashino Fangtail
Transluminant
Vitu-Ghazi, the City Tree
Supression Field
Wizened Snitches





Pick 3
Mortipede
Dogpile
Selesnya Sanctuary
Dimir House-Guard
Fists of Ironwood
Dromad Purebred
Greyscaled Gharial
Necromantic Thirst
Boros Signet
Selesnya Signet
Carven Caryatid
Festival of the Guildpact
Moroii



Pick 4
Coalhauler Swine
Centaur Safeguard
Dryad's Caress
Muddle the Mixture
Boros Recruit
Quickchange
Infectious Host
Veteran Armorer
Flight of Fancy
Oathsworn Giant
Twisted Justice
Vindictive Mob



Pick 5
Goblin Spelunkers
Woodwraith Strangler
Ordruun Commando
Tidewater Minion
Drake Familiar
Shred Memory
Surge of Zeal
Peel from Reality
Stoneshaker Shaman
Root-Kin Ally
Bloodbond March



Pick 6
Viashino Slasher
Golgari Rot Farm
Consult the Necrosages
Gather Courage
Zephyr Spirit
Lurking Informant
Surge of Zeal
Transluminant
Dowsing Shaman
Goliath Spider



Pick 7
Votary of the Conclave
Terraformer
War-Torch Goblin
Surveilling Sprite
Infectious Host
Rally the Righteous
Elvish Skysweeper
Boros Signet
Flight of Fancy



Pick 8
Stasis Cell
Viashino Slasher
Benevolent Ancestor
Surveilling Sprite
Sundering Vitae
Leave No Trace
Zephyr Spirit
Peel From Reality



Pick 9
Induce Paranoia
Torpid Moloch
Golgari Brownscale
Gate Hound
Sparkmage Apprentice
Voyager Staff
Perilous Forays



Pick 10
Woodwraith Shambler
Terraformer
Seismic Spike
Stone-Seeder Hierophant
Suppression Field
Wizened Snitches



Explanation time. I certainly confused Pat, but there's madness to my method (or vice versa). Playing Guild colors is a significant advantage. People do it for a reason. But the reason they do it is: gold cards. Now if you actually look at the Dimir gold cards the quality is not that amazing. Particularly at Common there's really not much going on. In our draft we picked up two of the best Dimir uncommons early, but a few cards is fine for a splash and Ravnica makes splashing very easy. With Black being cut off from our right we have no real reason to stay in it.

This brings me to my second point. You may think that bouncelands and Signets push you towards Guild colors too, but in fact this is not the case.

Consider these two manabases:

Example GBu Manabase 6 Forest 5 Swamp 1 Golgari Rot Farm 1 Dimir Aqueduct 3 Island Example GbU Manabase 6 Forest 6 Island 1 Golgari Rot Farm 1 Dimir Aqueduct 2 Swamp

Do you see what's happened there? The GbU manabase is actually better using the very same cards because there are fewer lands supporting only the splash color. Such lands are bad because if we see one in our opening hand we may experience color problems.

The next argument against my strange policies might be that we didn't see much Green pack 1... but this isn't necessarily a fair impression. We know that rares were taken from Picks 2 and 3 before we saw them and in fact a careful inspection of printruns (which I didn't do during the draft I might add) tells me that Disembowel is the other missing card from Pick 3. This is reassuring because it confirms our intuition that we weren't seeing much Black. So in fact the key packs didn't have much Green in them to begin with.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. There's a much more pressing reason I'm looking at Green here. Pat gets a bit lost unless you keep things simple. So I kept things simple.

"Pat, after Pack 1 how many Vedalken Entrancers do you have?"

"Uh... none."

"How many Snapping Drakes?"

"Uh... none."

"Then you are not Dimir."

Now that is an oversimplification, but I hope you see the truth of it nonetheless. We have one Moroii, but that doesn't make for a Dimir aggro deck all by itself. We have even less support for Dimir mill. Nor are we likely to see much because... the drafter to our right is very probably drafting Dimir mill. The guy to his right doesn't care about Green, so is very likely one of the table's two Boros drafters. Probably to his right we have a Dimir aggro drafter. This is fairly rough speculation by the time we get to this point, but we need to build up a picture in this way to clarify our intuitions.

Of course in this particular draft Pat went on doing his own thing. He ended up with a mediocre Dimir aggro deck splashing Green for a Shambling Shell and a Golgari Rotwurm.

With the experience of losing to a Boros deck behind him, the Patron of the Nezumi became far more receptive to the ideas I'd been trying to discuss with him.

"A lot has been written about drafting Dimir," I explained, "and rightly so because they support two of the three strongest decks in the format."

"The other is Selesnya?"

"Yup," I nodded and continued, "Now when you talk about these 'decks', what you're really discussing are deck archetypes..."

I first encountered the concept of a deck archetype back in Mirrodin block. Geordie Tait wrote an excellent article at StarCity (this was back before excellent articles were locked there) on the subject of a strategy called "Lashdraft". I say "strategy", but really it was an archetype. The way it worked was simple enough. Mirrodin Black was full of Nims. These creatures, typified by the Nim Lasher, could end up with scary power levels very quickly... but were horribly fragile. With a dangerous number of pingers around, drafters picked them very late. What Lashdraft did was to combine late picks like Slagwurm Armor and Neurok Hoversail with late-pickable Lashers to create real threats. And it worked.

Of course, every drafter understands on some level the concept of a deck that works. There is more to archetypes than that. Three key points to remember are:

1) Archetypes may have preferred early picks, but they are made viable by their mid/late picks.

2) It must be possible to determine when to draft an archetype.

3) The decks which result from drafting the archetype must be greater than the sum of their parts.

Using GbU as an example again, let's look at how it works out:

1) Flight of Fancy and Peel from Reality are the two Common cards which most go up in value. The former sends your fat Green monsters into the air for the win. The latter bounces gang-blocked fatties on the ground or your key threats in response to removal, offering significant tempo advantages.

2) This is easy: you draft it when you're not seeing enough Black for a good Dimir deck. Avoid drafting it if you have no Green fat by the end of pack 2 - switch back to Dimir.

3) Green offers a much better early game than pure Dimir and can also accelerate flyers out sooner. Golgari Brownscale, Centaur Safeguard, Fists of Ironwood and Scatter the Seeds all make things difficult for ground-based attack and Gather Courage wins air wars. This perfectly complements Blue's evasive midgame. Blue card drawing gives you a late game. Flight of Fancy and Tattered Drake both reach full potential in this deck (the latter because it comes out sooner).

But enough about GbU - the current format is vanishing soon, so it won't be relevant for long. Another example will serve us well - this time, where an idea fails to form an archetype. The concept in question is GWr Dogpile. The idea is to splash Red into a Selesnya deck with the intention of firing the late pick Dogpile at the opponent's dome for 8+ damage during an alpha strike. (I had a Sealed Deck which did this once, which inspired me to try it!) So what goes wrong?

1) We pass this test: Dogpile is normally a late pick. Also, Fiery Conclusion will be a little better than usual here.

2) This starts to look worrying. In order to draft this deck we need a Selesnya deck with lots of token generation. And then we need to draft at least a couple of Dogpiles. Since our premise is that they go late, we simply take them when there isn't anything exciting in the pack. In other words, we draft the deck if it lands in our lap. So in fact awareness of this archetype... never helps.

3) Here's where it all goes wrong. A Selesnya deck with lots of token generation is already a good deck. We're hardly going to start passing Conclave Equenauts and Siege Wurms just because we plan on Dogpiling people. As such, we end up with a choice: damage our manabase to include Dogpile? All too often the answer is that we're better off not doing so. Even worse, if we drafted a bit of Black removal we can't splash for it.

Do you see the key distinction there? We've come up with a description of a deck which one could draft, but it doesn't merit classification as an archetype in its own right because it turns out not to be meaningfully distinct from Selesnya.

"Excuse me," Pat peered over my shoulder at the monitor. I have this horrible premonition that he's going to sulk again because my article makes him look bad. But no. "Can I have a shout out?"

"Sorry, you what?"

"Put a thing in the article saying 'Hi' from me to the other Patrons? They're my friends. Did I tell you, Akki even saw some Constructed play?"

I point out that the conversation's being transcribed and Pat grins and wanders off to get a beer.

Before I go and do the same myself, we need to talk about Guildpact. This is the reason why now is the time you must understand archetypes. The fact is that anyone can look at a spoiler and pick out the cards like Last Gasp. Everyone comes up with their own take on things: "This is good", "This is nuts", "Whoa - first pick", "Windmill slam", "Freaky beatz", "WangZ00rZ!". Actually I've never seen anyone type that last one, but usually someone manages a card review so far from my native English that I can only make sense of it by knowing what they were going to say anyway. The truth is: ability to review Last Gasp is not a useful skill.

Everyone is going to pick Last Gasp early. From day one.

What matters and will win you packs and boost your rating and impress the chicks (and the other Patrons) is your ability to spot the archetypes early. Not the obvious stuff, but the under-the-radar options that other drafters will miss for the first month or two. While everyone else is fighting over the Affinity cards, you could be playing Lashdraft. While everyone else was praying for a Selesnya Guildmage you could have been drafting Thundersong.

Hopefully you've been keeping up with the spoiler. (Oh, what's that, you do read MTGSalvation after all?) So now you know what to do: get thinking. Here's hoping it'll be you singing "Ten-nil, ten-nil!" by the time the dust settles.

---

Credits
Edited by: Goblinboy
Co-star: Patron of the Nezumi