With GP Vegas in two weeks, I hope that this will help you prepare and/or provide a context to this fantastic format before it is gone from Competitive Play.
The first pick of the draft is not extremely important but it’s fun to think about. It doesn’t always get played and it’s the pick with the least amount of context. At this point in the draft, you don’t have any idea what any other player is doing yet. Your goal when you’re first picking should be, in general, to take the most powerful card.
If you have never read a ‘what’s the pick?” article before, I will be showing you a few pack one pick one (P1P1) scenarios and I will tell you what I would take and my reasoning behind it. I will also give an honorable mention. So let’s get started!
My pick: Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis
Honorable mention: Changeling Outcast
In my experience so far, Hogaak doesn’t just feel broken in Modern. It also doesn’t take much work to make him very good in limited. Sometimes all you need are some Winding Ways and/or Ransack the Labs. It’s not going to be an early play in limited but it is always a powerful one. An 8/8 trample in this format is huge! It will always be the biggest creature and it demands an answer yet there aren’t many removal spells in the format that can actually deal with it forever or even temporarily. I probably wouldn’t take it this early but this is definitely a weak pack. The next best card is probably Changeling Outcast not on raw power level but it is a wonderful enabler for the Ninjas archetype which in my opinion is one of the best decks.
My pick: Ingenious Infiltrator
Last loser (second place): Force of Virtue
There are definitely two cards that really stick out to me here. The gold card and the rare. Generally it’s not good to take gold cards super early because your chance of it making your deck is so low or you can end up pigeon-holing yourself early. It’s relatively close but this time I am making an exception for the Infiltrator because it is a bomb in it’s archetype and also the the rare is in the worst color, white. After picking this up I am looking to play about as many Changeling Outcast as I can. I hope that this one comes back to me. However, I doubt that it will because the commons here are pretty weak otherwise.
My Pick: Serra the Benevolent
Honorable mention: Snow-covered Island
Conversely to the last pick, we are taking the white rare this time. It’s generally accepted that white is the worst color in the format by a decent margin. However, Serra the Benevolent is a low-key bomb and this pack is quite weak. The reason that I would take her here is because there really isn’t any other card here besides the Snow-Covered Island that my deck is likely to miss. Everything else here is either filler or merely good in a single archetype.
Drafting with players is self-correcting. Because of that, I am happy to be white in this format if I can identify that I am the only one playing it. Serra is the most powerful when she is coming down in the early stages of the game, usually as a 4/4 Flying, Vigilance with upside. A common play pattern with her is to play her on turn four, make a token, tick up turn 5 if she survives and then make another token if she isn’t extremely likely to survive after that. That’s really powerful and enough for me to take a chance on white this early coupled with the low power level of the rest of the pack.
I hope that you all enjoyed or at least learned something from this first installment of The Opener. There are more to come and other formats to explore. If you have any feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.
Thank you, and I hope to see you all in Vegas!