The return of the Pro Tour this past weekend marks the first pro-level draft event we’ve seen in quite some time! High-level Limited is awesome, not only because you get to see the best of the best duke it out, but because there’s an interesting dynamic at play that you likely won’t encounter at most of your drafts on MTGA or your local game store.
Let’s take a look at LSV’s day one draft deck.
It’s a solid deck, but it does have a few notable stinkers like Paladin of Predation, Plague Nurse and Prosthetic Injector. Did Luis miss the memo somehow that these cards aren’t good? Of course not!
At the pro level, where no one is going to pass you good cards for free, it can be hard to draft 23 awesome playables. Sometimes you have to make do with what you have. More “bad” cards will end up in decks at a Pro Tour than they will on MTGA or your FNM drafts since competition is so stiff.
That being said, this dynamic occasionally pops up in drafts that have lower stakes than the Pro Tour. Sometimes you do end up in a pod with six or seven proficient drafters, sometimes the packs are weak or sometimes you have a draft where you switch out of a color a little later than you’d have liked to. In any of these situations, you’ll likely be a few short of 23 cards you’re happy with, and you’ll have to play some cards you’d probably prefer not to.
The difference between doing well in these types of drafts and falling on your face is figuring out which bad cards are the best bad cards for you deck. Knowing what bad cards to play is a skill that you can develop not just as a generalized skill, but one that is built upon an understanding of what cards come around late in the draft that have niche applications.
Today, I want to touch on some of the cards in Phyrexia: All Will Be One that fit that description and hopefully turn your next shaky draft into a winning one!
