Pick Order Methodology With Modern Horizons, Part 1

Welcome to Sealed Away MTG, the companion blog for my podcast of the same name.  Today we're going to talk about something everyone always wants to know, what cards to pick early!  Rather than do a traditional pick order, however, here we'll examine why cards should be picked in the order they should be, starting with good first picks.

1.  Raw Power

The number one thing to remember when drafting is to not overthink things, and that means taking the powerful, splashy cards that you see first.  Why are these cards so strong, and how can you identify that easily yourself?  These cards exist in a class of "unbeatables" which means that it takes unlikely circumstances to beat them in normal games.  Cards in this class always have similar characteristics, but sometimes it can take some gameplay to really see them shine.

The best cards always have some but often most of these characteristics:

• Hard to interact with, at least profitably. Serra the Benevolent, for example, is a planeswalker which is a card type most decks won't be able to answer in limited.  She also creates a large flying creature, which means there are two effective problems for the opponent to deal with when she comes down.
• Generate a repeatable or persistent advantage.  Yawgmoth is a great example of this as his ability can be activated as long as you have life and creatures to pay for it with.  -1/-1 counters will also sit on the opponents creatures forever, which will buy more time to continue using Yawgmoth's abilities.
• Nullify entire strategies or classes of cards. Hexdrinker's ability to gain protection from everything is pretty obviously hard to stop.  Sometimes you'll play against a deck heavy on instants, though, and when your opponents has no untapped mana you can play Hexdrinker, level it to 3, and the game can just end on the spot.
• Raw efficiency.  Those familiar with the "vanilla test", or the acceptable correlation between mana cost and power/toughness should be able to spot these outliers easily.  Great examples of this are a bit muddier and don't exist in Modern Horizons, but imagine a 3 mana 8/8.  The card is so individually above what you would expect for that mana cost that it puts enormous pressure on the opponent to either have some sort of answer or lost instantly.

2. High Potential Pay-off 

 

This is very similar to the above class of cards, but the primary difference is that there's some sort of barrier.  Imagine all of the above outlined characteristics with "but" tacked on the end.  Cards fall from the top class to this one for different reasons, but it's always one of the following:

• Gold cards.  Cards with more than one color in their mana costs without extreme power fall to this level.  Kess is a good example of this, as she requires a large amount of particular circumstances to happen in the draft to end up performing as expected, such as needing multiple particular colors to be open at the draft table, and needing lots of instants/sorceries.
• Requiring specific circumstances.  Cards like Mist-Syndicate Naga fall into this camp, as it generally requires a creature to be in play and to hit the opponent, or it needs to hit the opponent on its own, a tough ask for a 3/1 with no evasive abilities.
• Higher fail rates.  Cards like Ingenious Infiltrator fit this well, as when you can use the Ninjitsu ability with a one mana creature on turn two, the game is often set to snowball out of control quickly.  In many situations, Ingenious Infiltrator will just be a 4 mana 2/3, which is not an acceptable price to pay in a modern limited set. 

3. Efficient Removal

Efficient removal, after cards that generate repeatable or persistent advantages, are the best kind of cards you can have.  Mana efficiency is the number one way games of limited are won, so having the potential to trade your 1 mana spell for their 2 mana creature, especially while casting another spell in the same turn, is something you always want the ability to do.  Unlike acceptable removal, which we'll get to in the next section, efficient removal can be played in basically any number, and the more you have the better off you'll often be.  Efficient removal falls into a few camps:

• Cheap asking price, potentially deals with anything.  On Thin Ice only costs one mana, and can exile any creature.  It requires some snow basics, but it can be relatively easy to get enough for a card like this. In many sets this would be something like Doomblade or Murder.
• Doesn't kill everything, but always creates a large mana advantage when it does.  Firebolt only deals two damage, but with the Flashback ability can threaten a four toughness creature, or kill two two toughness creatures.  In many sets, this would be Shock.
• Kills anything, often more expensive with some bonus attached.  Here we have Mob, an acceptable removal spell at 5 but has the potential to be deeply discounted when combined with token creation or creatures left back to block. The usual standard allegory would be Unholy Hunger, but that's inefficient enough that it often falls into the next camp.

4. Acceptable Removal 

Acceptable removal is the number one thing I see players overvalue in drafts.  I often equate playing these cards as "be this tall to ride this ride", meaning that you need a certain amount of cards of this class so that your deck function.  As this is Modern Horizons, all of these cards have some potential upside that makes them a little bit better than acceptable removal in other sets, but this is where they often fall here.

• Inefficient, doesn't kill too much, has some utility.  Smiting Helix and Urza's Rage both fall into this camp.  Both have the upside of hitting players or sometimes Planeswalkers, giving them some nice utility.  Paying four and 3 mana respectively for the privilege of killing an opposing 2 or 3 mana creature is just not effective generally.  As I said earlier, mana efficient wins games in limited and putting cards in your deck that almost always generate a mana disadvantage is not where you want to be.
• Expensive, kills anything.  Here we have Settle Beyond Reality, a card that can certainly combo well in certain decks with the likes of Springbloom Druid or Irregular Cohort, but often just exiles a creature for 5 mana.  This only generates an advantage if it trades with a 6 mana or higher creature, of which this set contains very few.  In order to avoid situations where an evasive creature slips your defenses, playing a card or two like this is often a necessity.

Check back in a few days for the remainder of this article, where I'll go over the bottom half of the cards to take early.

Thanks for reading!!

Kevin
@sealedawaymtg on Twitter
https://sealedawaymtg.podbean.com/ for the Sealed Away MTG podcast.