I've played Modern and some Phyrexia/Innistrad Standard online, played with real cards ~10 years ago just with IRL friends. I went to the Dragon's Maze prerelease and it was quite fun so I'm thinking of getting into playing Friday Night Magic or something regular. Any advice? I'll probally want some kind of Boros Deck as I usually play Affinity which is an aggro deck.
I only started drafting about six weeks ago, but these tips should help:
- It's suboptimal to decide what guild/colour you're going into first. Generally speaking what's going to decide what guild/colour you go into is the cards in your first few packs combined with which guilds/colours are being taken by other players before they pass packs to you. So while you may want to go Boros, if people on both sides of you are going Boros you are only going to get the bad cards. That said, if you like playing aggro there are plenty of options for doing that in Dragon's Maze (DGM).
- Look out for bomb cards, these are cards that will single handedly win games and try to pick them up. For example, if I'm going blue/red/green and in my Return to Ravnica booster I see a Pack Rat, I will now be going black because Pack Rat is pretty much an auto win if you get him out turn two.
- It is suboptimal to hate draft except in extreme circumstances (money cards, bombs like Pack Rat). Generally you should only take cards in the guilds/colours that you're drafting. This will keep players beside you from taking cards in this guilds/colours. If you hate draft you will then send confusing signals to other people and this in turn might cause them to start drafting into the colour/guild that you're actually drafting. Plus, hate drafting means taking cards you can't use and won't improve your deck.
- Draft is creature heavy. Generally speaking I try to run with 15-17 creatures, 5-7 other spells, and 16-18 lands.
- Creature removal is very powerful in this format.
- In DGM drafts, because you will often run three or four colours, it is usually a good idea to pick up mana fixers (guild gates in particular) early.
The following is some advice I followed when drafting Gatecrash, not sure how applicable it is to DGM yet:
- Most high mana creatures are simply too slow (DGM is a little bit slower draft format so more high cost creatures are worth it)
- Generally speaking you want to take the first turn instead of drawing first so that you have mana advantage.
I'm sure some more experienced players here can chime in too with anymore suggestions or corrections.