But you also have to think about something else: availability. For each card you could pick to play in your deck, think about both its raw power level and its power level as part of your plan. If you have a normal deck in M14, then a random 2/2 with vigilance isn’t that useful.Īs you draft, constantly ask yourself what tools you need to execute your plan and look for those cards. If you first-picked a Bonescythe Sliver, then Sentinel Sliver will be a key cog in your machine. But what about a Sentinel Sliver? The power of that card depends on your plan. If a creature costs five mana, has four power, and evasion, it is going to be first-pick quality in most draft formats. For the strongest cards, this makes sense. Many players like to rank the power level of cards in a set in the abstract. You will still look for powerful cards to anchor your plan, but you need to properly evaluate the available cards so that you can assemble a deck that can make your plan come to fruition. If you open a Jace, Memory Adept in pack one, then you have a plan in a box, but very few cards in any draft format are as powerful as big Jace. You open your first pack, see what you get passed in the next few packs, and start forming a plan in response to the cards you see. In most situations, you won’t have a specific plan before the draft begins. When you are choosing a plan, you need to know this. Casting a bunch of Grizzly Bears is not going to get it done. You need to open a powerful rare, like Thorncaster Sliver or Bonescythe Sliver, and plan your picks around assembling a makeshift Myr Battlesphere. It is possible to draft such a deck, but in M14 it is not easy. If you plan to kill your opponent before she can cast her bombs, you will need a strong deck with a lot of synergy and evasion. In fact, most games will be long enough to cast Garruk’s Horde. That means most games will last long enough for both players to cast Sengir Vampire, Air Servant, or Woodborn Behemoth. The creatures that cost one or two mana are generally weak, and the three- to five-mana creatures have been spending a lot of time with the toughness fairy. Many, many, many games of Magic have been lost by players who’ve chosen plans that are not strong enough to succeed.Ī Limited metagame is controlled in large part by the speed of the format, and that speed is mostly controlled by the quality of creatures available. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Limited metagame! I’m not going to go into detail here about what a Limited metagame is, either generally or in the context of M14 draft, but I will say this: Not only do you need to have a plan that you think can win the game, you need to be correct. Her plan probably involves beating your plan. You want to have a plan that is powerful enough to win-not just in the abstract, but when facing an opponent who has her own plan.
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If your goal is to win your matches, however, then you need to have a plan that can actually succeed.
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When you have a plan, you can evaluate your available cards based on how well they advance your plan, rather than simply on raw power level.
![elixir of immortality m14 elixir of immortality m14](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/lNkAAOSwH75fEya-/s-l300.jpg)
Or you can assemble a powerful combination of cards that overwhelm your opponent’s resources, at which point your opponent is either dead or powerless to stop you from making them dead. You can stall the game and stay alive until you draw and are able to cast a game-winning bomb. You can curve out with efficient, aggressive creatures and attack until your opponent’s life total is no longer positive. In other words, you want to know what type of deck you are trying to build as you build it. So how do you actually build a Limited deck? You should have a plan. Instead, you just pick a couple colors and scoop up the most powerful cards you can, add 17 lands, and submit your list. Because your options in Limited are constrained by the semi-random cards available to you, many people don’t think in terms of building a Limited deck the way you build a Constructed deck. The difference, of course, is that in Limited you don’t know what cards you can use to build your deck until minutes before you play your first match. Constructed formats get most of the attention regarding deckbuilding, but how you assemble your deck is just as important in Limited as it is in Constructed. Whenever you play a game of Magic, you sit down with a deck of cards that you’ve assembled before the game begins.
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Hunter asked me to share my thoughts on Limited with you, so I will discuss an interesting M14 draft I played at Friday Night Magic at Twenty Sided Store on August 16. Howdy! My name is Carrie and I like to draft.