Does Dimir Like Me or Does it Just Want to be Friends: A Guide to Reading Signals

For Limited players there’s nothing quite like the thrill of sitting down for a draft and opening your first pack. You tear open the wrapper, thumb through 15 cards and select the best of the bunch to be your coveted pack one, pick one. You’ve trained for this moment, you’ve read all the set reviews, you feel confident in your pick order. But then a pack is passed to you with one card missing and you begin the treacherous journey of reading signals: uncovering the clues to what the players on your right are doing as each subsequent pack arrives with fewer and fewer cards. This is, in my opinion, the most exciting and most daunting part of drafting. And it's what I’m going to attempt to illuminate for you today.

As I have often said on my stream and podcast “staying open” in a draft can mean one of two things. It can mean taking the best card out of the pack, regardless of power level, in order to find the open color pair for your seat. It can also mean staying nearly mono color in pack 1, sacrificing some power level in your picks for flexibility, to leave you with the most options based on what you open or are passed in pack 2. Walking the tightrope between these two options is one of my favorite things about limited. I like to refer to it as “bobbing and weaving”. In a set like Guilds of Ravnica where the decks are a bit more restricted and the archetypes more clearly defined, identifying the correct deck for your seat is often the difference between a 3-0 and a complete train wreck. 99% of the time these decisions happen in the first pack of your draft, which is what we’re going to focus on today. I believe that navigating pack one can be broken down into three sections.

Section 1: Picks 1-3 “The Power”

The first three picks of your draft are where you hope to find your most powerful cards. It’s when the least number of players have had the opportunity to look over the cards so your options are wide open. Having a clearly defined pick order is so important for pack one of a draft and picks 1-3 are where you can use that pick order in its purest form. This is where you should be taking the most powerful or flexible cards. By powerful I mean the strongest card in a vacuum, and by flexible I mean the card that is most likely to make your deck at the end of the draft or leaves you open to the most choices down the road. For example, I would consider Niv-Mizzet, Parun

I often treat these as three distinct first picks. A recent draft I had started with Lazav, the Multifarious

Now, I am not advocating completely ignoring what you’ve already selected when considering subsequent picks in the early part of your draft. When the power level of the cards is flat or roughly equal, I would certainly lean towards taking the card that matches up best with what you already have in your pile. If I start the draft with Erratic Cyclops

Power and flexibility, that’s what the first three picks are all about.

Section 2: Picks 4-8 “The Signals”

The reason I draw the line after pick 3 is it is very difficult to read signals before then. Being passed a Murmuring Mystic

Let’s take the following draft as an example:

P1: I select Expansion // Explosion

P2: I select Goblin Cratermaker

P3: Firemind’s Research

Before we get to the next pick, I want to really hit this last point home as I believe it's a crucial tenet to navigating the middle section of packs. If you hedge on open colors (or guilds in the case of GRN) and that ends up not working out, that’s totally fine. Here you miss out on a gate or a solid player in Capture Sphere

P4: Status // Statue

As you continue to take cards in this middle section of pack one, you will probably stop seeing the windmill slam powerhouse cards and instead start selecting the role players for your deck. These are the better non-removal commons and guild specific uncommons. If I think I’m BG then I’d be looking for Burglar Rat

The hope is that by the middle of pack one you will have identified the open guild and be ready to settle in. There's also the possibility that you could be primarily one color and straddle either guild to which it belongs. Having five black cards and two Dimir and two Golgari cards at the end of pack one is a great place to be since you are very flexible for what happens in pack 2. In a less restrictive format this kind of strategy is often best. If you can be primarily one color and have your toes dipped into a couple others you will be able to jump on a bomb you open in pack 2 or a second color flowing from your left.

Section 3: Picks 9+ “The Wheel”

The final section of pack one is the cards that have made their way around the table. This is your chance to not only see cards which may be going criminally late, but also evaluate what other people at your table may be doing. If a Glowspore Shaman

Staying open, reading signals, and navigating a draft are incredibly difficult things to do optimally. Pick orders vary from player to player, and knowing when it’s time to jump ship or when the ship has sailed and you’re better off sticking with what you’ve got often boils down to instinct more than hard and fast rules. I believe that thinking about pack one in these three sections, coupled with a clear pick order is the most helpful way to get the best deck each and every draft. There's so much more to discuss here with each new set bringing about its own challenges for drafting that I look forward to future articles on this topic.

But for now, I wish you clear signals and open colors. Until next time!