After making the trek to Las Vegas, you decide to enter into the Modern Horizons Sealed GP. Your pool is incredible, and despite low confidence that you built it correctly you have an easy 8-1 finish on day 1. You get to the convention center the next day, nervous but hopeful. It's your first ever limited GP day 2, and your first ever competitive rules enforcement draft. You gradually scroll through the pack, passing by a Firebolt, a Snow-Forest, a foil copy of Mob. Out pops Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, the last card you in the pack, and you can't select it any faster. The next pack comes, there's some strong uncommons like Abominable Treefolk, Battle Screech, and Saddled Rimestag, but not a black card in sight aside from a singular Putrid Goblin. The pack is full of sideboard cards and mediocre white cards, so you decide these cards are the only viable choices. What do we do now?
Married to a First Pick
This is a very common statement when people talk about limited, describing someone or yourself as "married to your first pick". This refers to drafting around the first card you take, rather than reading signals and staying open. In plain English, never get married to your first pick, except when you should. As confusing as this sounds, the power level of your first pick is going to inform if it's a card worth getting married to or not, and the vast majority of cards aren't strong enough. Some cards though, like Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, my pick for the best card in Modern Horizons, are often worth it to force. If we're making the assumption that you win any game that you cast Yawgmoth on turn 4, a tad hyperbolic but not unfair, then Yawgmoth only asks us that we can cast him on turn 4 with some stability. Either we aim to cast Yawgmoth with nothing else in play on either side, or we aim to cast him with random creatures to support him. Cards this powerful will eclipse anything else going on and warp the game around them, and that's exactly what we're looking for if we want to be married to our first pick.Renewing your Vows
Our next question should be, once we've decided our first pick is this important, is "How should this affect our draft strategy in subsequent packs?". To answer this, we're once again looking at power-level over anything else, but we're also going to develop an intentional bias toward the color/colors or general strategy incentivized by our first pick. Once again using Yawgmoth as an example, black cards in general, especially cheap ones that will help us cast him in a stable board position, or to use for his ability, go way up in our rankings. Putrid Goblin especially, our sole black card remaining in our second pack, is both good with Yawgmoth and cheap, so it'd go up a huge amount in value. Once we've reached this point, we can make a much more reasonable comparison between Abominable Treefolk, Battle Screech, and Putrid Goblin. Once again, going off what we know, Battle Screech also goes up in value because of the context of the pack; we know some mediocre White card will be left over when the pack comes back around the table. Yawgmoth is also very powerful alongside Battle Screech. Abominable Treefolk is a major indication that the person to our immediate left isn't interested in drafting a snow strategy, unless they took a card like Dead of Winter over it, something we can't discern yet. All of these picks have their merit, and I wouldn't fault anyone for making either of the 3 choices. In this situation personally, I would take the Treefolk as I'd hope to be able to get it and Yawgmoth into some powerful multi color Green deck, but I also have an inherent bias toward drafting snow decks as is.
Context Matters Most
Imagine a similar situation, where rather than Abominable Treefolk and Battle Screech, we have Man-o-War and Springbloom Druid in the pack instead, and the good uncommons are weak sideboard cards instead. With this shift, I would likely take Putrid Goblin, as I don't believe that either of the two powerful 3 mana commons is as good as the Putrid Goblin with a boosted rating. Springbloom Druid could certainly be the pick here, as it could facilitate the casting of Yawgmoth in a Green based deck, and I'm not sure how close this actually is. I would never take Man-o-War here however, as I think it gives me the lowest chance of casting the Yawgmoth in the future.
Closing
- In general, expect to play your first pick about 30-40% of the time. Any higher and you're getting married to your first pick or taking weak but generalist cards too often, any lower and you're taking too many risky cards or weak cards first.
- Only get married to the best cards in the set; there's generally only 1-5 cards in a given set worth forcing, and many sets don't have any at all. In this set for example, I'm only ever getting married to Yawgmoth, there is no other card that I will first pick and instantly say, "this card will 100% make my deck". Examples from other sets would include Chandra, Flamecaller from Oath of the Gatewatch, Liliana, Dreadhorde General from War of the Spark, and Tetzimoc, Primal Death from Rivals of Ixalan.
- Getting married to a card doesn't mean drafting a deck and throwing it in at the end, you'll need a reasonable amount of cards of the same color or very powerful mana fixing, as these cards are rarely easy to splash. Keep in mind that if you take lots of mediocre on color cards in pack 1, you'll likely get enough good playables of that color in pack 2 to support casting your powerful card.
Kevin
@sealedawaymtg on twitter
sealedawaymtg.podbean.com in podcast form, Episode 2 is out now!.
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