Reminder that this info is mainly for use in drafts against humans, and needs adjustment for Magic Arena bots.
The second part of a good Mythic Championship pick order is establishing a Pick 1, Pack 1 ranking of the better cards. This is then used to rank the rares, which is important because even over fifty or sixty drafts you are likely to have not played with or misevaluated one or two of those due to small sample size.
Let's skip ahead and here is mine, with credit due on some rare opinions to a lot of other great people like Eric Froelich and Andrew Elenbogen.
For comparison, here is Limited specialist Ryan Saxe's pick order.
I personally think a well done pick order is one of the best tools for a draft format, but historically people have rallied against following a strict pick order.
Why Pick Orders Are Bad
It's hard to launch my counter-counter argument for pick orders without covering the classic argument against them. Especially because that argument is right.
Pick orders have been called bad for a long time because Limited is about building a cohesive deck. You need specific combinations of cards to create specific profitable scenarios to win the game. You need to be dynamic in a draft, understand the typical issues you need to resolve, look at your cards
and identify possible new issues to resolve, and pick according to that.
A strict pick order is vulnerable to a lot of contextual pitfalls, but flying loose goose is vulnerable to not just making the theory-optimal play.
To repurpose a Patrick Chapin classic: If you aren't half pick order, you aren't using your head enough. If you aren't half context, you aren't using your heart enough.
Why Pick Orders Are Great
How can you make dynamic decisions about your deck before you know what deck that is?
Pick orders are absolute musts for the developmental stage of the draft, where you are evaluating multiple non-overlapping choices. Sometimes you have to decide between Frenzied Arynx and Imperious Oligarch and knowing which is better is likely the most important context.
The goal of a pick order should be allowing you to evaluate difficult decisions that will determine the direction your draft take before you really lock in on a framework to build within.
The Importance of Grades
So you have some context. Maybe you have a Blade Juggler, then see Frenzied Arynx or Imperious Oligarch. How do you make that decision?
That's where grading has to come in. Let's say you think Frenzied Arynx is better than Imperious Oligarch here. How much better you think it is matters a ton, as does how you compare it to the Blade Juggler you already have.
When you assign cards a grade like B+ or C, you are trying to cluster things beyond a raw pick order so you can weight semi-informed decisions.
In this case, you are looking at a B level Arynx and B- Oligarch while your already picked Blade Juggler is a B+. That puts Juggler at not quite the level that it's worth a huge concession to stick to, and Arynx is solidly better than Oligarch to the point I would take the Gruul card.
This is where I think Ryan Saxe's pick order is lacking, though it might be due to the cleaner presentation format making it harder.
How People Grade Wrong
Grades as an abstract rating of how good a card is are stupid.
The purpose of grades is to help you quantify the relative difference between early picks.
Too often people use grading scales that are better at delineating between late picks, where context often overrides raw power. There's a couple key breakpoints defining whether a playable is slightly above or below average, but once you get into the D-level cards I don't really care that much. If you are ranking D+ vs D-, you are really just ranking the odds of wanting a conditional effect in the sideboard.
Or maybe they spend a bunch of time grading rares and mythics A+ vs A- and only put the best uncommon in the set at B+. What’s even the point of all those grades ahead of it? You aren’t going to be picking one rare over the others, and at most you are looking at whether a card is so broken you warp your deck for it or not.
Or maybe they just grade 20 cards at B and you have no clue how to rank those relative to each other, so if you see Orzhov Enforcer versus Sauroform Hybrid you don't really know how much better the Enforcer is. Or the reverse case from a pick order, where the fact that fifteen cards are between those two overstates the difference between them in quality.
This issue I solve with the subgrade clusters. Orzhov Enforcer is a B, Sauroform Hybrid is a B, meaning they are both fine early picks but not worth a huge commitment to, but Enforcer is multiple clusters ahead and distinctly better. But if you see Orzhov Enforcer and Enraged Ceratok, technically I like Enforcer more but if you take Ceratok it's about the same. Or if you already have a Trollbred Guardian and see Orzhov Enforcer and Savage Smash, it's a fairly small cost to stick with your first pick.
In the end, you want to end up with something that is an overlap of a pick order and grading. You have all the cards ranked, but with clear breakdowns of where power level gaps occur. Grades slapped on cards have a distinct meaning about the kind of power they offer.
The Pick Order
Again, here's the link.
Some notes on everything:
As I said, grades are being used to somewhat indicate what that section of the pick order is.
A : Rares I first pick over all non-rares. The top batch is kinda A+, where I drastically skew my picks for them, and the second batch is more A where I only moderately skew for them.
A- : Uncommons and rares I P1P1 that I actively bias my next picks to play
B+ : All good cards to first pick, where power uncommons/rares start colliding with the best commons due to various caveats about the cards (CCDD costs, etc)
B: Cards I first pick but am not attached to when I do
B-: The bottom barrel of first picks, in this case the last things I take over a Gate
I’m much higher on good red aggressive cards than a lot of people, and I’m not budging on that. People had mixed opinions on Rix Maadi Reveler and the card has been nothing but busted for me. They had Skewer the Critics much lower, and I wonder if they have ever cast Skewer the Critics and a three drop on turn four. I have Vindictive Vampire and Fireblade Artist really high up as I like the semi-burn Rakdos decks. Feel free to downgrade these cards a bit if that’s not your jam.
Similarly, I’m willing to take Savage Smash over generic removal because it is so much less replaceable if I end up in a Savage Smash deck than Lawmage’s Binding is in a deck with Slimebind access.
I’m very willing to take a heavily committed multi-color card early, hence why Rakdos Firewheeler is just on the border of my top 10 uncommons.
Trollbred Guardian is my favorite card to cast in the set. It honestly makes games too easy. How did they let me play Molder Slug as a common?
Running late on my pick order blog, so here's some RNA draft hot takes:— Ari Lax (@armlx) March 1, 2019
Quench is legit good in almost every blue deck. If you are slow you probably have enough Gates you want two drops that trade up on turn 3 or 4, and the card often still works on turn 7.
Some more specific takes from my Twitter, closely related to this and the notes.
If you have any questions or want to ask about adjustments for Magic Arena, feel free to reach out to me @armlx on Twitter.
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