None of your testing has provided you the answer for this exact moment.

Sure, you know the power level of all the cards and archetypes – you know that the Blue card is better than the Red card, and you know that Blue/White, Blue/Red and White/Red are all reasonable archetypes of similar power levels.

But, for this particular decision, you can’t know the answer beforehand – you’ve never been faced with this exact scenario, and you will likely never be faced with it again.

This is one of the most important – and hardest – decisions you will make in this draft, and it appears in almost every draft, sometimes multiple times per draft.

At the same time, navigating the draft from here will be harder.

What if the next pick is the same, except the best card is Green? What if you then follow it up with a Red card, then another White card, and you think you’re Red/White again only for another Blue card to show up?

Giving up one playable in your colors is never going to be the end of the world, but do it enough times, and it’s death by a thousand cuts. At some point you need to find the moment where you stop speculating and commit to something, and finding that moment can be very hard as well.

So, in the end, do you take the Red card or the Blue card? Do you draft the Easy Way or the Hard Way?

The reality is that you should draft the Correct Way, and sometimes that’s going to be the Easy Way, sometimes it’s going to be the Hard Way. Pigeonholing yourself to either of these strategies upfront is inevitably going to lead to failure, because the correct way to draft changes, depending on a variety of factors that are unique to each specific format and situation.

Which factors?

That’s what I’m going to talk about today!

Some formats have so many playable cards that the last pick of the draft is always something you would be OK playing – there are no “bad cards”. We call those “deep formats”. In contrast, there are formats in which by the time a pack wheels, the best card of the six remaining is “4R destroy a non-basic land”. These are “shallow formats”.

The amount of playable cards in a format directly corresponds to how much speculating you’re allowed to do.

In the thread I quoted, Jason talks about how the current MTG design lends itself to sets that have an abundance of playables most of the time, which is something I agree with. Jason then says that the logical consequence of that is that “drafting the hard way” is outdated, because the goal of the strategy is to avoid trainwrecks, and trainwrecks simply do not happen when every card is playable.

This is the part I do not agree with. To me, being flexible is not about avoiding trainwrecks – in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

The more flexible you try to be, the more picks you spend on future gains that will likely not be realized. If at the end of pack one you have three cards in each color, then that’s probably around nine picks that you spent on cards that you will definitely not play – it’s impossible for all of those bets to pay off.

This is why, as a general rule, the more playables you have in a format, the more you are allowed to speculate on picks, because the chance that you will end up without a card to replace whatever you didn’t pick is very low.

If you usually end up with 23-24 playables, then throwing two or three of those away will mean your deck ends up with a very bad card in it, which is something we’re always hoping to avoid – therefore, the cost of speculating is high.

If you always end up with 28-29 playables, then the cost of throwing two or three of those away is minimal, because you wouldn’t be playing them anyway.

Cards don’t have value in a vacuum – they are always inserted into your deck, and depending on what else you have other cards get better and worse.

For example, a two-drop that might ordinarily have a value of 6 might be a 7 in your deck because you don’t have many two-drops. Similarly, a removal spell that’s ordinarily an 8 might become a 6 for you because you already have a lot of other removal spells.

Therefore, it’s not only a matter of how replaceable the intrinsic value of the card is, but also how replaceable its role in your deck is.

For example, imagine a card that’s a 5 mana 6/6 trampler.

That’s normally a good card, it’s aggressively costed, you want to play it – it might be worth picking. But say that the format also has two other five mana 6/5 tramplers with assorted irrelevant abilities, all common and in your colors.

In this spot, it’s likely that, if you want these cards late, you’ll be able to get them – no one wants to play a million five-drops.

So what you are gaining by picking the 6/6 is not the full value of the 6/6, but the difference between a 6/6 and a 6/5 trampler (plus whatever it costs you to make this pick later on, which will usually be minor in this case). While a 6/6 for 5 might be good, its value “above replacement” is not actually that high, because the difference between a 6/5 and a 6/6 is low.

In this scenario, there being a lot of other good 5-drops means you should lower your 5-drop priority for this particular format, even if the intrinsic value of the card has not changed.

However, if there are a lot of 5-damage removal spells in the format, then all of a sudden the difference between a 6/6 and a 6/5 might become quite high. In this spot, the value above replacement of the 6/6 is now big, which might make it worth picking over a speculative pick.

As a general rule, the more synergy based a format is, the more it pays off to speculate, because that’s when you really reap the rewards of being in the open colors.

Imagine, for example, that the best Black cards are all removal spells that can be played in any Black deck and can often be splashed for.

In this scenario, even if you identify that Black is relatively open (say, two drafters out of 8), you’re still not going to get all the best Black cards, because there is someone else fighting for them and because other people might splash them.

Even if you read the table well, you’re still not going to be wheeling a premium removal spell. The reward for your gamble is smaller, which means you should not pay a big cost for the speculation.

Now, imagine that this is a tribal format, and there are Black Cleric decks and Black Zombie decks.

Now, the best Black common might not be a generically powerful removal spell, but a Cleric lord that only Cleric decks want. This means that, if you identify that “Black Clerics” is open, the rewards can be tremendous, because no one else wants that card – the other Black drafters are not interested, because they aren’t Clerics Tribal, and the multicolored Green drafters obviously don’t want to splash it.

In this scenario, the potential payoff for speculating correctly can be so big that it can be worth giving up a solid playable for the chance of getting the big reward.

This is also true for formats that are heavy on powerful multicolored cards. You’ll never be the only Black drafter at the table, but you could be the only Black-Green drafter, and if there are a lot of powerful cards that only Black-Green drafters want, you will be able to get all of them if you identify the right spot, which makes the rewards for correctly speculating bigger.

This is a bit obvious, but the stronger the cards you already have are in the context of the set, the more you should attach yourself to them.

If the four red/white cards you already have are amazing, then the benefits of finding another open lane are diminished – you already have everything you need, so there’s no reason to be looking somewhere else. If you have a motley crew of Red/White cards and there’s a lot of power to be found in the rest of the format, then giving yourself flexibility becomes more attractive.

This is especially pronounced in formats where the rares are strong and the rest of the format is relatively flat and weak.

Imagine, for example, that you open a RW multicolored card that’s a 9.

In a format where several uncommons and some commons are 8s, it might pay off to take a monocolored card and leave yourself open to the rewards of very late uncommons and commons in that color. If most of the commons and uncommons are flat at 6, however, then you should just take the RW multicolored card, because the upside for identifying the open colors just isn’t there – you will get a bunch of 6s anyway, which is the same you’d get if you stayed in Red/White.

Normally, we might be wary of the scenario where you pick a multicolored card and can’t play it. However, if the power level of everything else is the same, then that scenario will never happen. Once you pick the RW bomb, you know you will play it, because there’s no reason not to.

The reward for staying open is that you can get strong cards in other colors, but you already have the strongest card right now, and everything else is pretty much the same – even if Blue is more open than Red/White, all that this means is that you will see more Blue cards, but not necessarily better Blue cards, because the power level is flat, so the Red/White cards you see are going to be equally as good even if there aren’t as many of them.

In this spot, you just first pick the bomb and put the blinders on – pretend the other colors don’t even exist.

When we open a pack, our first priority is to figure out what we’re picking, but after that, we also need to pay attention to what we’re sending our neighbors.

If a pack is particularly strong, then there are good chances you will table a good card (which means you will get a chance to take a card that you opened the second time around).

Paying attention to what might be coming can help you make a speculating decision.

One example of this was my draft at the World Championship a couple of years ago. I’m not going to go into much detail, since no one even remembers the format, but we can note that my first pack of the draft had a card called Seize the Storm.

I didn’t take Seize the Storm, but I made a mental note of it. It’s not an incredibly powerful card, so I’m never going to first pick it and no one might actually want it, but it can be strong in the right deck, usually if you have multiples and can build around them. Instead, I took the more generically powerful Borrowed Time.

After this, I took a Black card, then another, then a Black/White multicolored card, and by pick 7 I had the shell of a strong BW deck. I also had a Blue and a Green card, because I am me, but these colors dried up pretty early, and it looked like Black/White was likely the place I was going to end up. I had no Red cards at all.

Then, I saw a pack that had a playable but not great White card (Celestus Sanctifier), a reasonable Black sideboard card (Duress) and another copy of Seize the Storm.

As a general rule, you should speculate MORE if:

• The format is deeper (has more playables).
• The format is synergy-based or has a lot of multicolored cards (meaning not everyone wants the same cards even if they share a color, and the payoffs are usually powerful).
• The card you’re giving up has an effect or role that can easily be replaceable by other cards you expect to see throughout the draft (such as one of many 5-drops).
• There’s a lot of variety in the power of the commons and uncommons, with some of those approaching the rares.
• You have reason to believe a certain deck might be up for the taking, depending on what you passed.

You should speculate LESS if:

• The format is shallow (meaning you might scrap for playables as is and therefore can’t waste picks speculating).
• The best cards are all generically powerful (meaning they will be picked by anyone in those colors, and even by some people outside of them).
• The card you’re giving up plays an important role that is not easily replaceable (such as a removal spell in a removal-light color).
• The rares are very strong but the power level after that is flat, and you first picked a rare.