It really is a thing of beauty. I studied this day and night when I first learned how to play the game. It still has some of the old Post-It notes I used to annotate it when I last read it. Its pages are covered in a rainbow-like coat of different highlighters from many late-night cram sessions. It even has that old book smell. You know the one I mean. The kind of smell you get from a book in a library that hasn’t been taken off the shelf in years. It’s like a combination of dust, paper, and stale air that warms your lungs when you breathe it in. It smells like knowledge. Knowledge that I am here to pass on to you. Let’s open it up and take a peek inside.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction...............................................................................i

2. What to Take First......................................................................1

          First Pick, First Pack...............................................................1

          Changing It up Based on What You Already Drafted…....................3

          Exceptions............................................................................5

3.Plot Twists..................................................................................7

          Stat Modifiers........................................................................8

          Team-Ups.............................................................................11

          KO Effects............................................................................13

          Other...................................................................................15

4. Characters.................................................................................19

          Broken Characters..................................................................20

          Quality Bodies........................................................................22

          Filling in the Curve...................................................................25

5. General Strategy.........................................................................29

          When Does My Deck Want to Kill?...............................................29

          Building My Deck.....................................................................30

          Hidden Gems..........................................................................35

6. FAQ...........................................................................................37

As you can see, it’s a pretty long read. I no longer have the attention span to read the whole thing in one sitting, so I’ll do everyone a favor and feature excerpts from the manual. I’ll skip the introduction, since most of you probably already know how to draft, and move straight into the section entitled “What to Take First.” Here’s how it goes:

“The hardest picks to make in a draft come at the very beginning. They have to be made with no extra information. There’s no way to tell whether or not a player is planning to draft the same strategy as you. You’ll have to decide that later as you get more information. Your first picks also set your pace and direction for the rest of the draft. Early on is also when the packs have a higher percentage of good cards in them. Often, early mistakes are made due to poor evaluation of a card’s power.

“Since these picks are so hard, it’s important to know what to look for first in a draft. Here’s a general rule to follow while drafting: good plot twists are better than good characters. This is the first and most common mistake most players make. In Green Lantern Corps draft, for example, if you see a No Man Escapes the Manhunters in the same pack as a Kilowog, what do you take? Following this logic, you’d gladly scoop up the blue card and move on to the next pack. There will be bodies later, but good plot twists come very infrequently.

“Another important thing to think about is what your deck will look like when it’s finished. Generally, you will have ten to twelve plot twists in your deck to go with the eighteen or so characters you pick up. Since there are three packs in Draft, you can start picking characters over plot twist of the same value around pick five. This will give you four good plot twists per pack, which adds up to the twelve you’re shooting for. However, if an extremely powerful plot twist comes along late in the pack, you can feel free to add it to your pile.”

It pretty much goes on like that for a couple more pages, mostly giving more examples. Eventually, it gets to the part about thinking about what you’ve already drafted. This is really an essential section to read because many cards change value over the course of a draft, and it’s important to take that into consideration when drafting in the later packs. Don’t worry too much if I skip around a bit; I’ll get to all of the stuff I have highlighted. Anyway, back to the manual.

“By now, you should have a pretty solid base from which to build. You should have a few strong plot twists and the beginnings of a curve. Your deck should have some focus—you should be able to tell what team(s) you are drafting, what your weak spots are, and what you need to pick up.

“Certain cards force you into a specific affiliation. Goldface, Kilowog, and Rocket Red all force you rather heavily into an affiliation. At the beginning of a draft, cards like this are fine because your draft plan hasn’t yet been finalized. You could very easily pick up an early Goldface and start drafting Emerald Enemies. However, later in the draft, the value of these cards can change. If you have put yourself solidly into Green Lantern and only have a few Emerald Enemies cards as support, Goldface looks much less appetizing. You must have the characters in your hand to recruit him, and if they only make up a small percentage of your deck, the possibility of him not making it to the table on turn 4 is too great to make him worthwhile.

“. . . It is also important to pay attention to the places your deck will need help. If your deck is a very aggressive build, you should probably be looking to take offensive ATK pumps more than any other type of plot twist. This fits perfectly into your strategy and means that if you open your third pack and notice a few excellent plot twists in it, you should go for the most aggressive one to make sure that you aren’t weak in that area. Also important is paying attention to your curve. This subject will be covered in much greater detail later, but for now, it’s important to know that if you are getting toward the end of a draft and are missing a few characters of a certain cost, try to pick up those missing characters over anything else. Unless you are drafting an off-curve strategy, having a curve is the most important thing in the game.”

Hopefully, you see pretty much where this part is going. It just goes on and on about how important it is to make sure that you know what your deck wants. Certain cards are better in some decks than others. It’s a matter of changing your card evaluation based on the cards you’ve drafted and are planning to draft in the future. It emphasizes the importance of having a good idea of what you want to draft ahead of time while still staying flexible. You get the idea.

I’m going to skip ahead a bit. On page five, the manual starts talking about exceptions. I hate exceptions, but they are all over. These rules are more like guidelines, and very basic guidelines at that. One thing I learned after reading through this a few times was that you should try to learn the basic guidelines it lays down for you and make them the base for your drafting strategy. Exceptions are everywhere, and it does you no good to know what not to do if you don’t first know what to do. Learn the basics well, and then ingrain the exceptions in your brain. Anyway, on to an overview of the exceptions.

“Unfortunately, it’s not always this clear cut. There are always exceptions. The biggest exceptions are what to do when you open an extremely powerful character, when you open a powerful location, and when your pack is terrible. These decisions are much easier when your card evaluation skills get better. It’s something you will have to figure out and practice as you draft more. You will learn what cards are game-breaking and when to take them over plot twists.

“Opening an extremely powerful character is the first major exception. Sinestro, Green Lantern of Korugar is an example of one of these overpowered characters. His presence in a game is enough to turn the tide and snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. The main reason that plot twists are drafted over characters is that characters come and go, and most of them are of relatively the same power level. Plot twists, on the other hand, usually have a game altering effect when they are played. Something that was previously impossible becomes possible. Characters like Sinestro, however, have abilities that are so strong that they create the same type of effect that plot twists do. Impossible things become possible. You should look for characters like that when you’re drafting.

“. . . Another thing to look out for is opening an incredibly powerful location. Locations can be viewed like continual plot twists. They can be used more than once, and in some instances, that makes them better than plot twists. On the other hand, they lack the surprise factor of plot twists after the first time. On top of that, most locations are underpowered compared to most plot twists. Occasionally, though, a true gem will slip through. Oa is a perfect example of this. Uppercut is a powerful offensive plot twist; Oa mimics Uppercuts ability and even allows breakthrough endurance loss. Add to this the fact that you can use it every turn, and you can see why it would be considered over most plot twists. In general, most locations are too underpowered or narrow in focus to warrant picking them over a solid plot twist, but gems do exist. A general rule is that if the effect generated by a location mirrors a plot twist that you would want for your deck, it’s probably worth drafting over a plot twist.

“. . . Occasionally, the pack you open will have no good plot twists, overpowered characters, or strong locations for you. In these rare situations, the first thing to do is to look at your curve. If you have a particularly weak spot and there is a decent character in the pack at that cost, you should probably just bite the bullet and pick the character. If this is your very first pack, it poses a much larger problem. The good thing is that the next pack should be substantially better than the awful collection of cards in front of you, but you are still left with a decision now. Usually there will be at least one solid, if not exceptional, character in the pack. I would probably take the solid body and move on.”

It has a few more things to say, but they are mirrored later on in the manual, so I won’t bore you too much with the details here.

This looks like a pretty good place to stop for this week. We managed to get all the way through the part devoted to what to pick first. Hopefully, you picked up on the fact that plot twists are generally better than guys, so they should be the first things to go from a pack. Other than that, there was a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that was mostly trying to make you understand why plot twists are so good. It even gave a few exceptions. I’ll review my notes in the upcoming week and abridge the section on plot twists for you in my next article. Until then, read this a few times and try to incorporate these methods into your own drafts. If you have any questions or situations in draft that you need help with, feel free to email me at the_priceis_right@yahoo.com. I’ll try to include a few of the questions I got during this week at the end of the next article.