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This article won’t make or break your Limited game. The picks I’m going to talk about don’t matter much. This article is about getting a very small incremental edge on picks to which people don’t devote much thought. There’s a lot of thought that can go into which barely playable card you should take, even though it won’t matter most of the time. Today I’m going to try to outline as much of that as I can.

When you’re trying to decide between a selection of cards that shouldn’t make the cut in anyone’s deck, it may look like the pick doesn’t matter, but that’s not always the case. There are a lot of factors that can go into these late picks. Let’s start with Olivier Ruel’s quote from Drafting with Olivier Ruel #17, “Which one of the two cards (which I have very little chance playing) do I pick? The one I want to face the least.”

I consider that an extremely simplistic way of looking at these picks. Yes, it is a valid consideration, and yes, it could lead to the right pick, but let’s examine this pick in more detail.

He’s a G/W Aggro deck, and in pack 1 pick 11 he’s passed Tortoise Formation, Shadowfeed, Obelisk of Bant, Cloudheath Drake, and Plains. He takes the Cloudheath Drake, citing the above. There are a number of arguments for taking the Obelisk of Bant here instead.

Point 1, Signaling: Late in pack one, I like to pass cards that will solidify or shift people into colors I’m not playing. If I’m as certain about my intent to stay G/W or G/W/r, as Olivier is, I’m happy to have the opportunity to pass a late pick Blue card that might push the person I’m passing to who could be R/B/x into Blue instead of Green as his third color, which could help me get better Green cards in pack 2. Alternatively, maybe the person I’m passing to is U/W and I’m helping to push him from an Exalted theme to an Esper/Artifact theme, and maybe that will make him more likely to take a Sanctum Gargoyle and pass me an Akrasan Squire next pack.

Point 1.5, Signaling: I’m not only missing an option to signal that the person I’m passing to should be Blue, I’m also passing an Obelisk of Bant, which signals to him that U/W/G are open and helps him move into them. I’m essentially passing a card of both of my colors (though not my archetype) instead of an off-color card.

Point 2, Don’t Give Your Opponents Options: In general, if I’m taking a card to keep it out of other people’s decks, I’d rather take fix than a more powerful card. If the guy I’m passing to is in one of a few specific decks, passing that Cloudheath Drake might make his deck better against me, but there are a lot of places he could be in his draft where passing the Obelisk or a Panorama will open up more splash options later. If I’m passing to someone who is basically U/B leaning Grixis, and I pass that Obelisk of Bant, and then he opens Battlegrace Angel and Fatestitcher, the Obelisk that makes it easier for him to splash and maybe shift into a 5 color deck may be the difference between my getting a second pick Battlegrace Angel and not.

Point 2.5, Keep Your Options Open: You never know what you’re going to open, and the Obelisk might let you play a Rafiq of the Many, or some Waveskimmer Avens that you end up taking later. This is just more of a reason to err toward taking fix over more powerful cards in Alara drafts. It should be noted that in this particular case that wasn’t much of a factor because Olivier already had an Obelisk of Bant, so he had his bases pretty much covered here, but viewing the pick in a vacuum it would often be a point to consider.

Point 3, Consider the Decks you Want to Play Against, Not Just the Cards: Rather than determining if you’d rather your opponent have an Obelisk of Bant or a Cloudheath Drake, you can consider what each of them might to do the opponent’s possible game plan and figure out which plan you’d rather play against. I may decide that Cloudheath Drake will put my opponent into an evasive Esper aggro deck that will be capable of outracing my ground pounders, while an extra Obelisk is likely to put him into a clunky multicolor deck that will have trouble stabilizing from your early pressure with exalted creatures.

When I’m making this pick, the person I’m passing to either can or can’t play the Cloudheath Drake. If they can’t, there is no cost to passing it to them; if they can, I would probably rather they have the Drake and focus on Blue cards than have an Obelisk that opens them up to moving into my colors. Therefore, I would take the Obelisk here.

That said, there are other reasons for taking the Cloudheath Drake beyond those Olivier mentioned:

Point 1, Keep your Options Open: Given that he already had an Obelisk of Bant and he was primarily White with a Wild Nacatl, a Steward of Valeron, and an Algae Gharial, it is entirely reasonable that he may end up in G/W/U and he may want the 3/3 flier, while there is almost no chance that he’ll want the second Obelisk of Bant

Point 2, Consider your Sideboard Options: Regardless of whether a relatively clunky 3/3 flier is likely to end up making his main deck, it might be a reasonable sideboard option despite not falling into the typical subset of sideboard cards like Naturalize that are obviously only good against some decks. If he plays against cards like Jund Battlemage or Necrogenesis, which can make tokens to clog up the ground and stop his plan of attacking with an exalted creature, he may decide that his best sideboard option is to side into Blue instead of Red for a few fliers to try to break the standstill that’s likely to develop. Understanding when your deck is able to shift a few cards to change toward an archetype that has a better matchup against a specific opponent is a valuable skill, and late picks that don’t have any cards that are ideal for your deck is the exact time to keep these plans in mind.

This is the main point I wanted to talk about last week in my sideboarding article. In Limited, there are a lot of cards that are potential sideboard considerations, other than Naturalize effects against Esper or Relic of Progenitus against Grixis/Esper. Consider when a matchup is likely to result in a stall, and what cards you might have that can break those stalls. Evasive cards like landwalkers or splashed fliers might be the answer, or going big with an otherwise bad card like Soul’s Might or an Enchant Creature might be the answer. Similarly, consider what your opponent’s removal suite looks like. Enchant Creatures are often very powerful when they are not likely to get you two-for-one’d, because your opponent doesn’t have the cards to punish you. Also, if the opponent is good at stopping the early aggression in your beatdown deck, maybe it’s a good idea to slow the clock a bit for some more heavy hitters.

It’s important when weighing these factors to consider where you are in the draft. In pack 1 you want to consider what the cards you pass will do to the rest of the draft for the person you’re passing to. In pack one it’s easiest to influence other decks, and he’ll be passing to you a few picks later, so it’s important to try to get him to cooperate by cooperating yourself and passing late good cards outside of your colors. In pack 2 there’s a bit of this, since the person you’re passing to is about to pass to you, but it’s much less of a concern as it’s far more likely that they’re solidly committed to a plan, and one late pick won’t change any of their picks in the next pack. In pack three it isn’t a concern at all, as they won’t be passing to you anymore and you just want to do what you can to make other decks at the table weaker when there’s nothing there for you.

When considering sideboard options, often you’ll be weighing a possible sideboard card against a card that you would be able to maindeck, but that wouldn’t be ideal, possible a Naturalize against a Yoked Plowbeast in a Naya deck that’s relatively light on the five-power theme. In this case, you need to take care to consider how your deck is shaping up, and how many playables you’re likely to end up with. If you started in a different deck and wasted a few picks changing archetypes, you need to make all your picks count for your maindeck. Similarly, if you’ve already picked several nonbasic lands, or if your mana is rough enough that you’ll need to take them aggressively in the coming packs, you’ll be more likely to be short on playables and you’ll want the Plowbeast. On the other hand, if things have been going well and you’ve been tabling playables, and you have more cards than you would expect for your maindeck already, and given how late they’ve been coming you have no reason to expect that to dry up, you’ll be more likely to want the sideboard card.

Similar concerns should be taken into account when considering flexibility versus power. You need to look at how attached you are to your deck based on what cards you have that are much better in that archetype than others. Also, the more playables you have, the more room you have to make picks that will only make your deck if it changes direction just to keep your options open. In the above Naya deck, you may want to take an Obelisk of Jund over the Yoked Plowbeast if your deck won’t really need the creature, so that you have options on splashing something like a Hellkite Overlord or shifting into a five-color deck in pack 3, but if you’re likely to have to play every card in your colors, you’ll want the card that’s better for your deck as it is, and you’ll take the Yoked Plowbeast.

To summarize, the main factors to consider when making late picks for your deck are consistency versus flexibility as informed by the number of playables you’re likely to end up with, based on whether you’ve had to (or will have to) waste picks in the rest of the draft. Cards that you expect to make your sideboard better rather than your maindeck are similar to cards that increase flexibility, in that you’ll want them more as your card pool looks to be going deeper.

When considering cards based on what they say to or do for your opponent, you need to consider not only how good the card will be in the opponent’s deck, but also what path it will set them on and how you can influence them based on where they are in the draft. Often it is worth giving them a good card for a deck that you’re not in, as bait to get them to pick up that deck, particularly if you’re pressed for cards and have to err toward consistency rather than the flexibility of taking the powerful off-color card yourself. One of the main factors in determining which cards you want to pass to them is which pack of the draft you’re in, where cooperating is good in pack 1, and drafting defensively is good in pack 3.

I hope this helps make the last few picks in a each pack feel a bit less arbitrary, as while the edge you get from careful picks at the end may be small, it’s important to maximize every aspect of the game in Magic.

Until next week!

Sam