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Starter's Guide: Playing Limited

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Whoever invented Draft and Sealed is a genius. At the end of this article you will want to buy a booster box and get started. I used to work in local gaming stores and there is no better sales pitch to someone who wants to start playing Magic events with their friends or in a store, than explaining to him or her the basics of these fantastic ways to play Magic: the Gathering. Draft
This is based off the idea of a sports draft. Instead of recruiting players to add to your team, you’re selecting cards to make your deck.
To get started, you’ll need a total of 8 players seated around a table with 3 packs each. You can do drafts with 4 or 6, but 8 tends result in the most interesting decks. Each player opens a pack, selects a card, and then passes the remaining 13 cards to their left. Everyone does that until there are 0 cards left in the pack. Then it’s time for pack number two, everyone does that same as pack number one except they pass the cards to the right. For pack number three, same thing, but we go back to passing to the left. At the end of this process everyone should have 45 cards, likely including one basic land from each pack. Then deckbuilding starts using the cards you selected and any basic lands you want to add. Players should have a deck of 40 cards total including basic lands. I’ll cover how many spells and lands you should aim for later.
Play three rounds. Add prizes if you wish. Personally, I like putting back all the rares, mythics and foils and then having the players who won the most keep them. This makes it so you don’t have to take the rare you want but can’t play over the common you really need to make this draft deck awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhOVfR0gslA
Not to say I haven’t done that before…..

What packs do I use? Technically, you could mix any sets, still, I recommend using the official ones as Wizards of the Coast works very hard to make them fun and balanced for limited play. The most recent being 2 packs of Hour of Devastation and 1 pack of Amonkhet. When the new set comes out, the draft format will become 3 packs of Ixalan. Mixing things between the formats they designed often leads to more cards not making sense in decks. If you mixed 1 Aether Revolt with 2 Amonkhet, you would have a bunch of Energy-focused cards in one pack and nothing to make energy in the other packs. In what order do I draft them?
In official drafts you always open the most recent pack first. Currently, you would start with Hour of Devastation, then Hour of Devastation again, then Amonkhet. If you want to mix this up at home feel free to do so and see what happens. How many colors do I play?
A two color deck is one of the more common archetypes to succeed with. Corner cases will allow a single color (if you’re very lucky) or 3 colors (if you’re feeling a little greedy). There are often cards or lands you can draft that tap to add any color of mana or search for basic lands. If you have these cards, you can start looking as “splashing” in one or two cards from a third color that aren’t too difficult to cast.

What’s the ratio of lands and spells do I play in a 40 card deck? The simple answer is 17 lands. Then approximately 15 creatures and 8 other spells. The complex answer is that you can play as many as you want. More often than not 17 is a reasonable choice, but there will be decks with very low converted mana costs that wants to play less, like 15 to 16 lands. Similarly, decks with higher converted mana costs or more colors have very powerful cards they want to make sure to cast, so they will play 18 or 19 lands.

What do I do with the rest of my cards?
The cards you’re not playing in your main deck is now your sideboard. People often dismiss them with the logic being ‘if they weren’t good enough to make my deck, why would I want to sideboard them in?’. The reality is that you might play against a super aggressive deck and you want to add more early plays to your deck to stop them, or if your opponent has a threatening enchantment like Sandwurm Convergence you can swap in enchantment removal for it. Don’t discount it so quickly! Complexity On the surface it may seem relatively easy and simple to play a draft, yet it can actually become more and more complex.
During the draft part, one of the most common skill to learn is ‘’Signals’’. That refers to which cards are being passed left and right. You can analyze the packs that are sent to you from your right and assume that if a certain color dries out, it probably is because your neighbours are taking them, meaning you should try and avoid those colours if you want to end up with better cards. Alternatively, if you see a really good card after a couple picks that can mean everyone who passed it didn’t want that color. The way sets are designed gives birth to what we call ‘’Archetypes’’. That refers to combinations of cards that are meant to be together and create synergies. If you know what kind of archetypes there is in a set, that makes it a lot easier to know which cards to pick without even knowing exactly which cards will be in the draft. For example, Blue-Red in Hour of Devastation has lots of bonuses for casting non-creature spells with cards like Bloodwater Entity. When in doubt, look at the multicolored cards in a color pair for hints as to what types of cards that archetype is looking for.
The speed of the format is another key factor, yet, perhaps the most complicated to assess. Even the best professional players disagree on this relatively often. What makes the speed of a format is how quickly game ends, how do they end, are two mana creatures good or are they getting outclassed by bigger creatures too quickly? These things help knowing what makes a good card or even a good archetype. You can try to guess by looking at the cards, but usually the only way to really learn this is draft more. Sealed If you want to play Limited with less logistics or less people, Sealed is the easiest way. Instead of using 3 packs each and sitting with 7 other players, you will need 6 packs each and however many players you have. The process is much simpler: open your 6 packs and build a deck with those cards and basic lands. Try to use the same land-creature-other spells ratio as mentioned for draft. This cuts down the organization of the drafting part, which makes things easier if you’re just a group of 4 or 6 players, or literally any number above 8 because logistics for that many players aren't reasonable. What packs do I use? Similarly to draft, official Sealed deck uses the most recent set. If you played a Sealed today you would use 4 Hour of Devastation and 2 Amonkhet. Essentially the same ratio as draft times two.
One interesting thing to try is building Sealed decks from more than 6 packs. If you open enough packs you can try to build multiple decks from the same cards. It isn’t the official format, but it can lead to some really interesting decks popping up. Some Team Massdrop members have played Booster Box Sealed, where they use a whole box to build three decks and face off against someone who did the same! If you were going to open the packs anyways, you may as well try something fun!

That’s it? Absolutely, it can’t be simpler than that. If you’ve read the draft part, you now know how to play Sealed.
Complexity
Most of the theories from Draft applies here too except, decks will be a little more disjointed because you don’t control any of the cards you’re getting so that makes synergies harder to achieve.
Therefore, decks are typically slower, they aim to play the best cards available in the pool, to the point where they often splash for them, adding another color just for a single powerful card. My favorite aspect of Sealed is how many sideboard cards you have. Because you have a total of 84 cards and are only using approximately 23 of them for your maindeck, that gives you a ton of options for game two and three.
You can even sideboard entirely into a different deck, different colors! Nothing stops you from adding extra basic lands. That can be useful if you were debating between two different color combinations and you think the other will do better against your opponent’s cards.

Bonus: Cube!
This is a twist to the usual Draft format, that was made by players who don’t like playing with suboptimal cards. Cube at its core is a collection great Magic cards in a box. These cards are, hopefully, sleeved and at the beginning you shuffle those cards to give 3 packs of 15 cards to each of 8 players. It’s a really nice experience as it lets you combine cards that would usually not see play together in Constructed formats. Wild Mongrel and Jace, the Mind Sculptor in the same deck? Yes please. One of the most fun parts of Cube drafting is building the collection of card
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Blake.S
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Sep 7, 2017
Great writeup!
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