Limited Magic: BREW It Up — Blue Ink Alchemy
Art by Zoltan Boros & Gabor Szikszai
Bombs
First and foremost you want to look for finishers. Every deck needs ways to win, and since you know you're going to end up with at least a few low-cost creatures to hold off early aggression (or put some pressure on yourself!), finding the coup de grace is a higher priority. This is especially true since some (but not all) true finishers are rares. Also, not all of them are creatures: a well-timed [mtg_card]Rakdos' Return[/mtg_card] or [mtg_card]Fireball[/mtg_card] can end your opponent's game just as much as a titanic monster.Removal
You want to keep an opponent's threats from harming you. The best way to do this is to keep them off the table entirely, which is where removal comes in. A lot of this comes in the form of direct damage like [mtg_card]Annihilating Fire[/mtg_card] or focused destruction cards such as [mtg_card]Avenging Arrow[/mtg_card] but it's also worth noting that some removal takes the form of enchantments like [mtg_card]Arrest[/mtg_card] and temporary states such as those caused by the Detain mechanic. You'll tend to find more removal than bombs in a given Limited set, so they're what we look for next.Evasion
Remember those non-bomb creatures I mentioned? Most of them are going to be walking around on the ground. If you want to damage your opponent, you're going to need to avoid them, go right through them, or use yours to hold off the bad guys while your guys remain safe. That, in a nutshell, is evasion. An evasive creature is one that either gets around the enemy or makes attacking unattractive. A good example is flight: a card that flies on its own such as [mtg_card]Tower Drake[/mtg_card] or a card that grants flight, [mtg_card]Pursuit of Flight[/mtg_card] for example, are both viable evasion tactics. Unblockable creatures such as [mtg_card]Invisible Stalker[/mtg_card] are a given, as is anything with a landwalking ability. Creatures with First Strike are also technically evasive: they do their damage without taking any themselves, provided they're beefy enough to take out whatever they're facing. I'm sure you can think of other examples.Whatever
If you can't find any bombs, removal, or evaders at this point, just grab whatever supports the deck. Mana dorks, Defenders, cards that accelerate your drawing, etc. In Draft, it's important to keep in mind you may not use everything you pick, so you can pick things you'll never actually play just to keep an opponent from using them. This is called "hate drafting" and Evil Steve Sadin discusses it here. Those are the basics of Limited construction, and I'll give you a more concrete example soon, as well as giving you a run down on how to draft at 4 am on a Tuesday rather than waiting for your friendly local gaming store to hold an event.Blue Ink Alchemy
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