Breaking Arena: Best of One Drafting

I have drafted a lot of Guilds of Ravnica. Probably not the most in the world, but easily triple digit drafts between Magic Arena, Magic Online, and real life. My drafts are also cleanly split in time. I spent the entire Pro Tour lead up testing via classic methods, then started playing Arena after.

And the two are distinctly different formats. They use the same cards, but you need to adjust to be successful. For Traditional draft on Arena that adjustment is small, but Best of One draft is as different a format from Traditional Draft as that format is from Sealed.

Hand Fixing

In Best of One matches, Magic Arena doesn't just draw your opening seven. It draws two hands, then selects the one with approximately the most average number of lands. Or something like that. It isn't quite as clean as just the average-est hand to avoid weird exploits, but it's probably close enough.

So much of good Limited practice, or really just Magic in general, we have learned over the last 25 years is rooted in the idea of mitigating early spell and land imbalance. Many top Limited players cite cycling as their favorite mechanic as it just solves all of this. Cycle your Desert of the Mindful if you drew five lands early, cycle your Rampaging Hippo if you only drew two lands (Future Topic #1: Why Hour of Devastation was really great).

Best of One has much less of this. With more optimal mixes of lands and spells, games are more based on tempo because things remain closer to that. I'm going to throw out the phrase “random walk” for people who know statistics, but here's the easy mode explanation. The most likely state of your mana balance after a few turns is approximately the same as your opening hand.

One of the deeper lessons of Traditional Draft is that you can't consistently rely on your early draw steps to un-mana flood or screw you. The odds change a bit, but they aren't drastic. The inverse is that if you start fairly balanced on lands and spells, you are really likely to have lands and action through the first several turns of the game.

Magic when both players “always” hit their fourth land and have enough spells to reliably curve out looks really different.

If someone falls behind, it's much harder for them to get back from behind. Your opponent is not going to miss a land or spell, so their plays are just going to be at parity with yours. You need ways to effectively tick ahead on a turn, like cheap tricks or removal, or plays that are impossible to match at parity, usually rares.

If you miss a turn of plays, that's falling behind. The easiest way for that to happen is drawing spells you can't cast on time or cards that make you spend mana without advancing your battlefield. Dominaria Best of One took a huge hit here. Divination and Cold-Water Snapper were amazing in Traditional draft, but both were just OK in Best of One. Six drops clog up your hand in the early turns, and Divination on turn three is a liability now. Lots of the Izzet jump-start cards in Guilds of Ravnica draft lose ground here. Maximize Altitude doesn't provide a sticky proactive advantage up the curve, is just a conditional late game breaker that could dismantle out of place draws.

This also hurts splashes or three color decks. Mana fixing costs time, as does the “mana fixing” of waiting to draw your third color. That time cost can really kill you in Best of One.

Draw smoothing also takes a hit if it comes at a cost. If you have lands and spells, why bother spending mana to ensure you have lands and spells? Divination loses ground here again because its main purpose was reliably hitting your fifth land drop. In Guilds of Ravnica draft, that punishes jump-start a ton. Radical Idea is the pinnacle of mana for filtering. Surveil is mostly incidental on already good cards, so it just drops from amazing to solid.

If both players keep making similar drops and drawing cards for mana is a real cost, card parity is hard to break. Mulligans hurt more, both on physical cardboard and because you are less likely to hit drops on curve. If my hand might miss on color but has plays I'm more likely to take a risky keep. Keeping draws that won't hit curves is worse than normal though so ship those brick draws right away. Card advantage without spending a turn not impacting the battlefield is always insane, it's just now more insane.

What gets better? Any mechanic that provides increasing advantage for battlefield presence. Mentor and convoke are huge winners in Guilds of Ravnica, not that mentor was bad. Convoke is just great when you have lands and creatures up the curve, but stalls cards in your hand if you miss a drop which just doesn't happen as often.

Sideboarding

Despite being the main thing that jumps to mind when you think of Best of One, sideboarding is one of the smaller Arena impacts on Draft. Two reasons: hand fixing skews things way too much already, and sideboarding is often specific to their exact cards.

The first one is simple. If drawing blanks is really punished, can you afford to draw a Mephitic Vapors when they curve Vernadi Shieldmate into Rosemane Centaur and not Fresh-Faced Recruit into Blade Instructor? Main decking a true sideboard card in Best of One might honestly be worse than doing it in best of three. At least then you can reasonably put a Radical Idea in your deck to fix drawing your bad card.

The second is just good Magic. Not every Boros deck is going to fold to Mephitic Vapors. They might be less Ornery Goblin, more Vernadi Shieldmate. These are things you have to evaluate based on the actual cards you see in a game, and Best of One will never let you do that. Pre-sideboarding against an archetype these days isn't 100% effective like Gloom was. 60% of the time it's reasonable, not every time.

Where I like to make up pre-sideboarding ground in Best of One is with cards that are more general purpose effective with upside against cards or archetypes. The best example of this is Hitchclaw Recluse. I rarely played Hitchclaw Recluse in Traditional Guilds of Ravnica draft because it was reactive in Selesnya and didn't trade in Golgari. In a more proactive Best of One format any three drop plays fine, and green needs ways to hedge against fliers that it can't race.

Bots

(Future Topic #2: Drafting with Bots)

No, this isn't just a place holder, it just is a whole entire new set of implications that apply to Best of One and Traditional draft. This is also going to be very presumptive. I know how bots can be programmed, I can make guesses as to how Wizards of the Coast has them programmed, but I don't have their code base so I can't say for sure.

Best of One specific guesses? The name of the game with bots is exploits, and I would assume Best of One and Traditional use the same bot evaluations. That's going to create some gaps where cards that are vastly improved in one format sneak through for the other. Do your best to figure out what cards the bots undervalue for the format you are drafting and adjust accordingly.

You can certainly learn skills that transfer from Arena to real life for a format, or the reverse, but if you want to rank up to Mythic and win a physical event you have to train for two parallel events. As I said the cards are shared, but the rankings and assembly may vary.