5. Archetype Roleplayers
In this section, the waters start to get muddy, as which of these cards should get picked over the mediocre removal spells gets contextual quickly. Generically, the above cards are all a bit worse than a card like Urza's Rage or Smiting Helix, but a bit better than Settle Beyond Reality. In general, we're looking here for a card that will help free up a pick on a necessity later, as we're not picking up anything great for our deck yet. When you're at the point where you know you have to take a role player early, you always want that card to have one or all of the following factors:
Cheap! This is by far the most important factor when you're considering taking a below average card first. One of the most common ways for a limited deck to fail is to not have enough cheap cards. If you're an aggressive deck, you can almost never have enough cheap cards, but even the most midrange or controlling decks will still need enough cheap cards to compete. I'll reiterate it once again, mana efficiency wins games in limited, so don't get caught without enough cheap cards.
Unique. This applies most often to uncommons and rares, as you won't have a likely shot of seeing another one if you pass the one in front of you. In Modern Horizons, Faerie Seer and Changeling Outcast often make up the majority of "bad" first picks, as they're so important to the Ninja deck that they're almost a requirement, and can often be played in large numbers.
Efficient. This goes along the same lines as "Cheap" but cards that are acceptable for their costs. Mother Bear is great for this, as while the card will never excite you, a 2/2 for 2 is close to playable and the ability pushes it past that line nicely.
6. Begrudgingly Playable or High Variance
Cards in this class have an awful lot in common with the above, but are substantially less likely to work out in the end. When your pack is bad enough, picking a card that will be great 10% of the time and not make the deck 90% of the time is often a worthwhile gamble. Once you're down this far on your first pick, the other cards in the pack are universally unexciting or downright unplayable. In this circumstance, taking a risk is often the only way to make the best of things. These picks are going to be a lot more about personal preference than any other, as you're likely taking a card only good in a very specific deck here. Some factors to look out for:
High Variance, low pay-off. A card like Unsettled Mariner will be pretty good in a U/W deck, but isn't splashable or really playable at all outside of one. With U/W as weak as it is in this format, it's going to be really unlikely that you start here and end up U/W without forcing it.
Very High Variance, medium pay-off. A card like Nether Spirit ends up here, as in a deck with very few creatures that cares about milling itself it's a recursive and free 2/2. The odds of ending up in a deck like this are so astronomically low at the start, that you'd be making quite the gamble taking this first.
Good Sideboard card, good maindeck card only in a deck that's amazing already. In a deck that can easily throw lands in it's graveyard, Ore-Scale Guardian can be an incredible 2 mana 4/4 flier with haste. Once again we're in low probability territory, and we'd generally just be looking to sideboard it in against a deck that is slow and weak against flying creatures.
7. Strict Sideboard Option
It is astronomically unlikely that'll you have to take one of these cards pack 1 pick 1 in any given Modern Horizons pack, but in other formats of much lower or variable power level this does come up once in a while. Sideboard cards generally have the following characteristics:
Narrow. Cards that fall into this category do a very specific thing, usually efficiently but at worst at an acceptable rate. There are artifacts and enchantments in this set, but very few worth killing for two mana, as the most common one, Arcum's Astrolabe, both costs 1 mana and draws a card. Still worth bringing in against a deck with lots of Winter's Rests or Future Sight, just not a common occurrence. Shenanigans is a similar, more narrow effect, but has higher upside as it can be repeatedly bought back vs. an artifact heavy deck.
Weak and narrow. Weather the Storm has both a relatively low pay-off, as all it ever does is gain life, and only ever comes in against decks with cards like Goatnap, and that's only when we're already grasping for playables as is.
8. Actually Unplayable
Thankfully, there's not enough cards that are this useless in limited to make an entire pack out of them, so you'll never have to first pick one of these. In this class of cards, you generally see things that do a specific job in either a constructed tournament format for Commander, so these cards aren't even intended to get played in limited at all. Looking for these cards is really simple:
Unbelievably narrow. A card like Cunning Evasion, where you might be able to imagine a place where the ability will come up, but in actual game play is almost never relevant.
Builds storm count. Shatter Assumptions is such an unbelievably narrow card in this format of relatively few colorless or multicolored cards, that maybe you'd sideboard it in once out of every thousand matches.
Literal blank cardboard. Unbound Flourishing references X spells, in a format with exactly one X spell total. You'd need a deck that had multiple copies of Reap the Past that could somehow still afford to play a card that just existed to double it.
That wraps up this 2 part series on pack one pick ones and the methodology behind them. Tune in next time for some random article on some random limited topic.
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