The start of a new year is an exciting time – people are full of hope and nothing seems impossible! This often inspires a desire for self-improvement that manifests itself with people making commitments to getting in better shape, starting a diet or trying to improve their lifestyle in some way. Since you’re reading a CFB Pro Limited article, I know you want to get better at draft, and I’ve got the blueprint for how you are going to do it. So without further ado, here are the Top 8 Ways to Improve at Draft in 2022!

You need to be able to cast your cards to win games of Magic. That’s it – that’s the tweet.

Seriously, get those 7/7/3 or even 8/7/2 mana bases out of your vocabulary! If you want to splash a single card, or especially multiple cards, you need to be willing to invest picks on fixing like Evolving Wilds or whatever dual lands are available in the format. The rule of thumb is that you want at least three sources for one colored pip on a splash card, but you would hope to be running a mana base with a 7/7/1 split along with two Evolving Wilds. This gives you nine sources of each or your primary colors along with the requisite three sources of your splash.

It is extraordinarily rare that you would find a card that is powerful enough to want to splash off of two or three basics. The cost to your mana base is just too high in draft with the current power level of common-rarity threats. Even something like Halana and Alena, Partners isn’t quite worth mangling your mana base for because it’s best when it’s cast on turn four, which is way less likely if you’re playing it as a splash card.

If there is one thing that 17lands data has driven home for me in normal sets, it is that decks that splash have a much lower win rate on average than decks that don’t. Sometimes it is a necessary evil, but in my opinion, you should be looking to play a normal two-color deck and only splashing in emergency situations with good fixing.