How to Draft Magic: Build Good Booster Draft Decks Without Lots of Experience

Booster Draft is one of the most entertaining formats in the Magic: the Gathering card game. While becoming a skilled drafter requires a lot of practice and a fair amount of intelligence, it's possible to successfully draft a good deck and win matches without a lot of experience if you follow some general guidelines.

If you don't know how the draft format works, it's simple: you get eight players (or six, or ten, or any number, but eight is the standard) and give each player three booster packs of the current block of Magic: the Gathering cards (currently, that would be a pack each of Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight). Each player opens his or her first pack, selects one card from the pack to take for his or her card pool, and passes the remaining fourteen cards to the left. The player will then be passed fourteen cards from his right, of which he will again choose one card and pass the rest. This continues until all of the cards have been chosen, at which point each player opens his or her second pack and proceeds in the same manner, only passing to the right instead. Then the third pack is drafted, passing to the left again. At the end of the draft, each player has forty-five cards, and must build a 40-card deck from among the cards he or she has drafted and any number of basic lands.

When it comes down to choosing the best cards, there is a lot of skill involved in card evaluation (choosing the right cards to take from each pack), but you can get by without great evaluation skills if you follow a simple order and a few simple rules.

Try to choose cards in this order:

First, pick "BOMBS". A "bomb" is a card that, if you play it and it doesn't get killed quickly, will massively wreck your opponent and finish the game in a hurry. If you open up a pack with a 6/6 flyer, you should probably take it. Ask yourself questions like, "Is this 5/5 or bigger?" and "Does my rare have flying?". Think, "If I play this card, is it going to become nearly impossible for my opponent to recover?". If the answer to that question is yes, you should take that card.

Second, pick REMOVAL. Take cards that kill creatures. Spells that kill creatures are very powerful and will allow you to handle a large range of threats (after all, in the draft format, your opponents will be trying to run down your life total primarily with a horde of creatures).

Next, pick TRICKS. Cards that allow you to pump up your creatures during combat will allow you to trick your opponent into attacking or blocking and then kill his or her creature while saving your own. This will put you in a good position to start beating down on your opponent's life total, which is how you win the game. Likewise, creatures with useful abilities (like pumping your creatures or making enemy creatures unable to attack) can be very valuable.

Also pick EVASION creatures. Creatures with abilities like flying or fear can't be easily blocked by your opponent's creatures, which will give you a large advantage in dealing damage. Creatures with abilities like trample and first strike can also make life difficult for your opponents.

Finally, pick CREATURES over other spells. The general rule to follow is that the only non-creature spells you should take in a draft are spells that will kill enemy creatures, combat tricks, or spells which will directly contribute to improving your position on the board (read: spells that help you keep your creatures in play or take your opponent's creatures out of play). Most of the cards in your deck should be creatures, because in the draft format, the primary way to win games is by attacking your opponent. If you've got a tough decision, when in doubt choose the creature.

There are a lot of finer points of card evaluation, but the truth is that if you choose your picks with the right set of priorities (and use common sense - a bigger creature for the same cost is better than a smaller one), you can draft a fairly good deck without a lot of skill or experience.

One more important point. One of the primary elements of a successful draft is choosing the colors with which to build your deck. Ideally, your deck should usually be composed primarily of two colors (possibly with a few cards of a third color). Building a four- or five-color deck is not a wise decision, because you will have trouble drawing the right land to play your spells; it is also unwise to just draft "the best" cards of all five colors and only play two of those colors, because you will end up having to play some very poor cards. A one-color deck would be best for ensuring that you can play your cards, but again, you probably will not be able to draft enough good cards of one color to build a deck, unless you include some very weak cards. So try to stick to two or possibly three colors.

You should try to decide which colors you are going to play fairly early in the draft. This will allow you to focus your efforts later in the draft on picking cards of only those colors (which will give you a wider selection of good cards in those colors when it comes time to build your deck). By the end of the first pack, you should try to have a fairly clear idea of what colors you are going to play. Choose which colors you are going to play based on the cards you have already picked, and based on what colors seem "available". (For example, if you are still seeing decent red cards at the tenth pick of Pack 1, it's very likely that not many of the other players are choosing red cards, which means you will have an easy time getting lots of good red cards in Packs 2 and 3.) Don't make the common mistake of being enslaved by your first few choices. If you picked a few black cards early in the first pack but it is clear by about the seventh pick that no more good black cards are being passed to you, switch to a different color! It's more important to be able to get a lot of good picks later in the draft than to stay in your original color just so you can use a few of your early picks.

Finally, after you have finished the draft, you will have to construct your deck. You need to build a 40-card deck using the cards you drafted and basic lands. My general recommendation, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, would be to play 17 lands and 23 spells from among the cards you drafted. You can adjust the number if you have a lot of non-land mana sources, expensive creatures, and so on, but 17 land is usually a good number. For your spells, you will want to play primarily your removal/tricks and the better creatures you have drafted. Eliminate your weaker creatures and any noncreature spells that aren't very powerful. Lean your deck toward mostly three- and four-mana creatures, with a few one- and two-drops and not more than a couple of spells with costs of six more. Stick to two colors (and maybe a few spells in a third), and, if you've been following the instructions and can make the right decisions while playing Magic, you should be fairly good competition!

Good luck!