It’s draft night!
Secrets of Strixhaven Draft Night boxes provide twelve play boosters, one collector booster, lands, and tokens. Everything you need for a four-player, pick-two draft.
Play out your matches, crown a winner, and split the prizes.
Back in the day, at the end of each draft we disassembled our decks, collected all the rares and foils, laid them out on the table, and picked them as prize support based on our final standings. We usually had eight-player drafts, and first place would take three cards, second place would take two, then everyone else would get one. When everyone got their first round of prize support, first place would take another card, second another, and so on until everything was divvied up.
When drafting with three of your best friends, however, keep your decks intact! They will come in handy on commander night to pass time while waiting for the last players to arrive, finish their pizza, and wash their hands.
When a winner is crowned, open the collector booster and lay out the cards for everyone to admire. First place picks one (or two) cards, second place picks one, third, one, and so on. This way, everyone should get something for their collection while also walking away with a functional forty-card deck for future games.
A Look at the Meta
Two weeks in, the Secrets of Strixhaven meta is looking healthy.
Although Secrets of Strixhaven is a five-guild set, it was designed with eleven draft archetypes in mind—two versions of each college and a five-color converge deck. In recent conversation, Mark Rosewater and Reggie Valk discussed their vision for the colleges:
“We’ve learned this lesson when we’re doing a set with only five archetypes that we really want to make sure that there is depth and replayability and try to, you know, seed in what we hope are two specific archetypes for a given color... You could build a really lean, aggressive, very heroic Silverquill deck or a big, midrangey controlling crime Silverquill deck.”
As well as their vision for Converge:
“And we were also trying to, you know, still think about how can we add depth and replayability to the limited format. And so, one of the ways that we do that from time to time—and faction sets especially—are these five-color archetypes… We had all these colorless creatures that we wanted to include, and we’re like, what if instead of them being colorless colorless, they were Converge and they were our five-color archetype.”
The early-meta chatter among streamers and podcasters boils the eleven decks down to three dominant archetypes: 1) aggressive white-based decks with the ability to grind out into the late game with incremental advantages, 2) near creatureless blue-based decks looking to play a long control game, and 3) four- or five-color converge decks.
In this snapshot, Witherbloom is left out of the equation. In many metagames, a midrange deck with life gain would answer the white aggressive decks. But the aggressive strategies here have access to enough recursive tools that they don’t quite run out of things to do early enough for Witherbloom to capitalize on being slightly bigger.
Then, when the games go long against blue-based control or five-color converge, Witherbloom’s opponents have too much inevitability through card advantage and removal, and the Witherbloom decks crumble.
All this added up does not mean we will never draft Witherbloom, but it does mean that we are only going to try for it when the card quality and synergies we are offered are exceptionally high and we feel like the only Witherbloom drafter.
Unfortunately, when drafting with four players instead of eight, some of this deckbuilding nuance goes out the window.
Because we open fewer packs overall, the table has fewer opportunities to support narrow, build-around style cards. If we end up going for converge, on average our table will open half of the amount of good converge cards for us to take.
Similarly, if we are hoping to draft the very controlling, creatureless Prismari deck, but the contents of the packs are evenly split between tempo and control, we may not have the luxury of ignoring the tempo cards in favor of draw, removal, and bombs.
All this to say, card quality will be king at the table where focused, synergistic decks lag.
Sitting down at our table for four, if the other three players settle into a supported two-color pair, this will leave, in theory, two colleges wide open for us to move into. Let’s try to stay open and responsive to the best cards we see for our seat, while maximizing our ability to play our best cards if it feels like we are being cut.
Walk With Me
Pack one, pick one we get a relatively medium power level pack with two stand out efficient red removal spells in Abrade and Tome Blast. While Suspend Aggression, Duel Tactics, Stress Dream, and Cuboid Colony have all earned their places in their respective archetypes, Abrade and Tome Blast will perform well no matter where we end up, even on a splash.
So, let’s stay open, pick up good removal, and see where the packs take us.
Big blue is here! Mathemagics and Divergent Equation both offer late game power that the big blue decks rely on to go over the top. We can use Mathemagics for X equals five to deck our opponents and Divergent Equation to refill our hand with cheap interaction to make it to the late game.
Visionary’s Dance is another strong option, but by picking up two blue cards here, we leave ourselves open to potentially drafting Quandrix ramp if it presents itself. We will be happy to splash our Abrade and Tome Blast, if needed, but are not ready to fully commit to red.
Pack three we have Brain Freeze and Essence Scatter as strong options to stay blue.
We also have Studious First-Year as a ramp option to power out our Mathemagics, Rancorous Archaic to lean into Converge, or another Cuboid Colony as a card that fits all styles of Quandrix builds.
Getting deep into blue feels like the safest route and all of these cards are close enough in power that I’m happy to pick up Brain Freeze and Essence Scatter. These picks gain extra points given that the Brain Freeze synergizes well with the Mathemagics and that the Essence Scatter slots nicely into our cheap interaction suite if Prismari control becomes the plan.
Pack four we aren’t seeing any strong red signals, but also aren’t given any reasons to change course. This pack might just be a dud. We pick up a Run Behind as a reasonable blue removal spell and a Titan’s Grave to stay open to splashing.
Stress Dream and Cuboid Colony both wheel, giving us the impression that while red may not be open, blue certainly is, and we can expect to wheel enough Prismari gold cards to comfortably settle into a strong Prismari control build.
I ended up picking Stress Dream and Spellbook Seeker here, but should have picked up a copy of Cuboid Colony to continue bridging the Quandrix/Prismari divide. There is some merit to picking up the Spellbook Seeker to send a strong signal that blue isn’t open, but there is no chance it will make our deck and a very, very small chance that we play Cuboid Colony.
Return the Favor seems like a totally reasonable spell for our Prismari Control deck, and given how little red we have seen, it’s surprising to see it still in the pack. We will take it alongside a copy of procrastinate and ship the Witherbloom cards.
Some picks are easy.
After pack one, we are solidly blue with one creature that we don’t want to play, two late game win conditions in Mathemagics and Brain Freeze, and a black green land in the event we pick up something worth splashing. We have more than enough playables going into pack two, so we can afford to take lands highly and/or speculative picks, if offered. More than anything, we are hoping to pick up card draw and cheap interaction.
Codie! I had been recently daydreaming about how good Codie, Vociferous Codex was in original Strixhaven, hoping to see it again here. However, Codie is so, so bad with counterspells and X spells. There is no way we can justify it here, despite how good it would be in a slightly different build.
Instead, we pick up a Tablet of Discovery to power out our spells and a Spectacle Summit to smooth our mana, fully committing to a Prismari control build.
When it rains, it pours. We were hoping for card draw and are given the options of Pensive Professor, Deduce, Rapturous Moment, and Quick Study. Pensive Professor gets a small downgrade in this deck because it will be the only target for our opponents’ removal and, as an 0/2, will quickly die. However, because it offers an incredible ceiling of recursive draw, we pick it up here.
For our second draw spell, we pick up Deduce as the cheapest of the options. Yes, it ends up costing four for two cards, which is more than the Quick Study, but the reduced cost of the front half provides a smoother early game experience to help us hit our land drops and find timely removal.
We feel very good about our seat in this pack. Divergent Equation, Sleight of Hand, Tome Blast, and Spectacle Summit are all great options for the deck.
Tome Blast is a slam dunk for cheap interaction.
For our second pick, it is a very close call between Sleight of Hand and Spectacle Summit. We have plenty of playables and only one copy of Spectacle Summit so far—a second would be really nice to have in our final build. However, a one-drop draw spell that can help us power up a Brain Freeze turn, dig to early lands, and find our removal is also right where we want to be. We end up with the Sleight of Hand this time, but could have easily gone either way.
The speed of the selection rope and rush of trying to get deck progress screenshots got me, and I missed getting a picture of this pack. We end up with Blazing Firesinger as a ramp creature to power up our Mathemagics and Brain Freeze turns and a Paradox Gardens to keep our splash options open. It’s fair to say this was a relatively bad pack for us, likely full of Silverquill and Witherbloom cards. Or, with Prismari tempo cards that our control deck is less interested in playing.
Disrespect. We pick up Codie this time, even if we can’t play it, and a Landscape Painter that we will also likely not play. There’s no reason to give our opponents more targets for their removal spells.
Turns out our deliberation over which draw spells to pick didn’t really matter because we are the only blue drafter.
Chase Inspiration can protect our Pensive Professor… maybe?
End of pack two, we are also grateful that a few of the packs broke our way and left us with eighteen playables for a control deck going into pack three. We are absolutely playing control and likely will not have any need to splash.
… and then we open Quandrix, the Proof.
With slightly different packs, we can admire the potential for the Quandrix & Codie cascading-removal-converge-tokens deck that could have been, but is absolutely not where we are now.
If this were truly draft night with three of our best friends, we would pass the Quandrix with the hope that whoever picked up the converge spells could add this to their arsenal—remember that we are hoping to keep these decks intact to pass time in future weeks.
But here on MTG Arena, the only card we want from this pack is Tome Blast. So, we pick up a Quandrix, the Proof alongside it, knowing that we are unlikely to play it. If we saw a Deduce in this pack over Spell Pierce, we would have happily shipped the Quandrix for the draw spell.
Here we pick up Essence Scatter as cheap interaction and a Zealous Lorecaster to help with our inevitability. With both Divergent Equation and the Lorecaster, we can feel more confident using our Mathemagics to draw our own cards early, knowing we can recur it to deck our opponent later.
These first four picks of pack three also demonstrate how lucky we were to get so many control playables in the packs one and two. There is nothing we are hoping to wheel so far, and we would have gone a very different direction (likely Quandrix tempo) had this been our first pack.
Turns out luck is still on our side. Exhibition Tidecaller is an awesome win condition that pairs beautifully with our Brain Freeze and Mathemagics plan. We are also happy to see a Disdainful Stroke as cheap interaction that is very powerful against the mirror match and the big converge decks.
Our last new pack, we pick up a Visionary’s Dance as a hand smoother that can make some flyers in the late game and a Textbook Tabulator that we won’t play.
The chatter around Spell Pierce is divided. Some pros think it is reasonable while others think it is really bad. Our deck is already looking like it might have a harder time against aggressive white strategies, and Spell Pierce seems particularly bad in that matchup. We pick it up alongside Magmablood Archaic, but are unlikely to play either.
Notably, the Paradox Gardens went to the Converge drafter, and it they were our friend, we could have given them Quandrix, the Proof too.
And the packs round out with more cards we won’t play. We decide to play nice and pick up an Elemental Mascot and a Mountain.
Sorry Pull from the Grave and Page, Loose Leaf, not this time.
We end up with a clean, focused version of Prismari control that lands way above the bar for what we reasonably expect from a four-player draft pod. Enough packs broke our way and we were the only blue drafter at the table. As a result, we picked up a deck with plenty of card draw, cheap interaction, and ways to win.
This is a forty card deck I’d be thrilled to have around to pass time before or between commander games.
As always, Table for Four believes in fun, kitchen table Magic and passing bombs to your besties.
