Using Your Constructed Know-How

There are often a number of approaches to take into a draft. One difference in tactics relates to how flexible you are in your drafting. If you’ve decided that drafting one or two specific teams is the way to go in draft, and you almost always draft those teams, you are effectively "forcing" those teams. If you are eager to draft any team and try to take the best cards you see, you are more "open." At present, I’d recommend a fairly open approach. There are merits to forcing since you can’t necessarily hope to master drafting all the teams and all their cards. If you generally force one or two teams, you can better approximate mastery of those specific teams, and you are more likely to make better decisions when choosing between cards to draft for your deck

If you are making the jump from Constructed, or if that is your strength, don’t forget that when drafting a deck, you can often draw upon Constructed knowledge for planning out a draft. While Constructed decks are going to be able to accomplish things that are a lot more complicated, there are some simpler combinations in draft decks. Be careful when trying to emulate themes that are either inconsistent or complicated, like ones that require the interaction of more than two cards that are not very good as loners. You aren’t likely to join up two teams so you can use Pyro with Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. If you take a look at Constructed decks, you should be able to recognize a number of two card synergies or cards that happen to work well with certain teams. Finishing Move in a deck with Xavier’s School seems a lot more reasonable than the above use of the School. As for differing utility of cards in decks with various team orientations, take a look through the commons that you would want in each of the teams. Based on the team(s) you’ve drafted so far, you’ll need to know which teams will best support cards like Cover Fire.

If you’ve tried to build a Constructed deck with two teams, you’ve probably already noticed that certain teams combine better than others. I’m not talking about whether the teams have a specific team-up card like Mutant Nation, but instead how well the strength of their curves mesh together. You generally don’t want your team MVPs at the same cost. In Constructed, unless you have a good reason to do so, you don’t want Dr. Doom: Diabolic Genius and Sabretooth: Feral Rage competing for your time on turn 4. Instead, you are usually trying to fill in the weak spots in your curve by complimenting it with another team. If you are into the draft and still don’t have a hard-hitting 5-cost character, when you go looking for another team to draft, you might not want to head into the X-Men, since none of their 5-drop characters have an ATK greater than 8. Aside from curve issues, certain teams are going to be better at specific and more general abilities than other teams. For example, if you have drafted some good late game cards, Dr. Doom (or X-Men) might provide you with better cards to slow down the pace of the game than Brotherhood cards.


Drafting Pack by Pack

I’ve hit on some of these topics previously, but I’ll try to take you through the various stages of a draft now.

Pack One

I’d strongly advise that your first pick be a 6–8 cost character if there is one present in your pack. If not, you can take either a strong plot twist, like Acrobatic Dodge or Flying Kick, or a character that puts the rest to shame, such as Wolverine: Logan. I’d probably take the cards in this order of priority here. I’d take an average 6-cost character over a good 3-cost character when drafting Marvel Origins since there is a scarcity of large characters in common slots. Yes, this does imply that in future sets these specific recommendations may not still apply. I’d also usually take a strong plot twist over a strong low-cost character early on, since strong plot twists are more likely to swing the tide of the game than a slightly superior character. This holds especially true if you are open minded on what you draft. Beyond your first pick, I’d generally recommend the same set of priorities moderated by considerations on what you are passing to the left.

Monopolizing a Team

In pack one, you have the opportunity to try to ‘cut off’ a team or teams from the player on your left. Rather than keeping your options open in other teams, it may be worth it to take a slightly worse card in a team that you have yet to pass much exciting in. If you don’t pass much to the left in a team, the drafters on your left should in all likelihood be going into other teams. If they settle into those teams, you are likely to reap the benefits in the second pack, as they may select cards in those teams rather than characters in the team you are cutting off. Much of this relates to sending a good signal to the players on your left. If you take an X-Men card as a first pick and then take a good plot twist over a good X-Man in the second pack you are sending a poor signal in that the person on your left might believe you aren’t interest in X-Men. Hopefully, the player on your left won’t read too much into one card, although it is sometimes inevitable that you will pass another good card of that same team later, for example when two good cards in one team are passed to you.

An experienced drafter on your right will likely be trying to send good signals as well, so pay attention to what is being passed to you, and again, to what you are passing along.

Pack Two

Your priorities should still be about the same as in pack one. You don’t need to worry quite as much about sending signals back to the right, since those players have likely already begun to solidify their team choices.

Pack Three

It’s still not too late to get your big characters in just about any team. At this point your top priority shifts from taking the best cards to filling out your deck. You must make sure you have enough characters at each cost point in the curve. Don’t take the risk of taking yet another good 5-cost character when you still only have a couple of 3-cost characters. If you don’t fill out a deficit at one point in your curve, your games will likely play out poorly. As for an idea of what I think your curve and character to non-character ratio should look like, I refer you back to the last few paragraphs of my initial article on limited. If your curve is very well filled-out or only missing a character or two at certain points in the curve that will be easy to fill out, seize the opportunity to snatch up the best available non-character card you see. At some point in pack three, you will be choosing the cards that will bump the worst cards out of your deck. As you are drafting, it is important to be building your deck in your mind and to have a sense of what your 28th–30th best cards in your pool are so you can make improvements on those cards for your ultimate deck by drafting better substitutes.


The Unpopular Crowd

In some formats, you may find that you can frequently draft the rejects and make a very synergistic deck out of them. This requires that the synergies are between common cards or sometimes include uncommon cards that are generally not drafted very highly. For example, Puppet Master and Quicksilver: Pietro Maximoff have a nice synergy and might not be drafted terribly highly. The trick is finding other cards that might also fit in well with these characters. There are undoubtedly better examples of synergies and rejects than these, but hopefully you get the point. Cards like Psylocke: Betsy Braddock and Professor X: Charles Xavier could form the basis for a discard strategy in this set or in combination with future sets. More often than not, it won’t be the case that you are planning on drafting these synergies each time, but instead that you will open an uncommon or rare card and know that is a "gateway" card to other underdrafted cards. For example, a card like Negative Zone is an example that sort of hits you over the top of the head. Once you have it, Annihilus and Blastaar are much more playable. Once you have a Dr. Doom, I’d argue that Doomstadt goes from undesirable to exciting. And once you have a Dr. Doom, you open up all other sorts of options. A case could be made that the strengths of drafting Dr. Doom and Sentinels in draft revolve around a reject-type effect, whereby many of their teams’ cards are undesirable in a draft since you cannot reliably draft the synergistic cards. Once you get the gateway cards, however, others’ trash is your treasure. Other more subtle examples of gateway cards would be cards like Mr. Fantastic: Stretch, who makes a lot of equipment shine, especially Advanced Hardware. Most examples of synergies aren’t going to have these types of clues within their text, so it will take some experience to learn and spot them.

I welcome comments at DHumpherys@metagame.com.