In this article, I will walk you through some pick 1 pack 1 decisions for Strixhaven draft. I'll talk about why I picked what I did, and how the draft ended up. Let me know if the comments below if you would have picked differently.
Firstly, our rare in Verdant Mastery and our Mystical Archive in Grapeshot
are both pretty poor in draft, so I ruled them out immediately. Snow Day
is solid playable, and I like Explosive Welcome
if I am already in Prismari, but I don't want to first pick either of those. The rest of the pack are all mediocre to bad cards, with the exception of Pigment Storm
and Expanded Anatomy
. The red card kills just about anything in the format except big Fractals, and Expanded Anatomy has overperformed every time I've played it.
In the end, I picked Pigment Storm, as I felt like you can get Expanded Anatomy's later usually. To double check this for this article, I looked up the data on 17Lands.com and found I was wrong: Expanded Anatomy is, on average, taken with pick 6, while Pigment Storm is taken with pick 7. This surprised me a lot.
I ended up playing Silverquill for this deck, abandoning Pigment Storm, so Expanded Anatomy would have been the correct pick in hindsight.
This pack has some solid playables in it. Silverquill Silencer
is a nice card with a great body to mana value and a handy ability as well, perfect for a Silverquill aggro deck. We also have a Silverquill Apprentice
, which is solid, though not something I'd be happy first picking. Study Break
also goes well in this deck, and there is also a Witherbloom Pledgemage
which has been good in most games I've played it - being a 5/5, it eats all the Elemental tokens that are running around.
However, I wpuldn't be happy first picking either of those. Luckily, we have a couple of cards that are higher in power - Bury in Books
and Divide by Zero
. I felt like you often see Bury in Books go later than Divide by Zero - I double checked again and this time was proven correct by the 17Lands.com data. I picked Divide by Zero here.
For this deck, I ended up in Quandrix and went 5-3 in best of 1 on Arena.
This pack has a couple of easily first-pickable cards, with both Crackle with Power
and Eliminate
. Realistically, we don't need to look past these two cards, but the rest of the deck has some solid playables as well. Dina, Soul Steeper
is good in a Witherbloom deck that can create a heap of Pest tokens. Field Trip
is a card I like to pick up early as well, though I wouldn't be taking it in this pack; with this and an Environmental Sciences
, you can ramp and fix your mana easily. I also like Elemental Summoning
, and think that it, as well as Fractal Summoning
, are the two best Summoning cards in the set.
However, this pack really did come down to a choice between Crackle with Power and Eliminate. Both are cards I'd be happy to first pick, but I couldn't go past Crackle with Power here. This pick paid off, too - I ended up in Prismari and even got a Magma Opus
later in the draft, and went 7-2 in best of 1.
This pack was from a draft I did early in the format. The pack has quite a lot of good black cards as well as some good white ones. The three cards that stand out here are Mavinda, Flunk
, and Mage Hunters' Onslaught
. All of these are fine first picks. In addition, black has a Pest Summoning
, which is good but not really first pickable, and there is a Blood Researcher
for Witherbloom which is a card I am always happy to play in those decks.
For white, there is a Pillardrop Rescuer
, which is a fine Magic card, though again not one I really want to first pick. There is also an Expressive Iteration
, which is a card I am pretty high on - it has performed very well for me so far.
But it was out of Mavinda, Flunk, and the Mage Hunters' Onslaught here. I think Flunk is a bit better than Onslaught, and probably as good as Mavinda. I ended up taking Flunk, and ended up in a powerful Witherbloom deck sporting Poet's Quill
, more copies of Flunk and Mage Hunters' Onslaught, and went 7-1 in best of 1.
