Drafting Five-Color Gates in Guilds of Ravnica

I always try to draft five colors.  Guilds of Ravnica makes it very easy.  I've done this 5 or 6 times now, and I always go 2-1 or 3-0, so I wanted to describe my strategy at a high level.

Most of it's pretty simple; you're going for gates and gates-matter cards.  In Guilds, take any of these immediately:

• Guild Summit.  This is a complete bomb.  While playing, if you get a Guild Summit early on, you might shift your strategy to playing non-gates first just to get it out sooner.  That's fine.  Playing gates after it's out is just as good as having them around untapped when you first play it.  Get it out sooner.
• Glaive of the Guildpact.  Seriously, all my opponents have to read the Glaive multiple times, and then they forget about one of the three abilities it grants.  It turns anything into a 3-turn clock... with menace!  It often turns Garrison Sergeant into a 1-turn clock.
• Gatekeeper Gargoyle.  This is awesome, but I might take Glaive over it.  Maybe.
• Garrison Sergeant.  This is a common bomb.  It will always have double strike.  I usually get 2.  If you can get 4, go for it.  It's so good.  And, as mentioned above, wrecks house with the glaive.

Aside from these, you're going to want to draft gates very highly.  This is easiest to get away with in pack 1; often the other people at the table will settle in to colors in packs 2 and 3 and start to take gates then.  Beat them to it by getting lots the first time around.  You'll want at least 8, but I find that 11-12 is fine.  You won't need many basics.  As far as Gateway Plaza is concerned, I would only take 2, maybe 3, of these.  That should be plenty.

Aside from gates and gates-matter, grab any cards that are normally bombs.  I played tonight with Trostani, Swathcutter Giant, and Nightveil Predator.  (The predator was one of only two black cards in the deck.  No problem!)

I've been playing heavy in Selesnya/Boros and being very creature heavy, which tends to work well.  In addition to meaning you should always have the colors for Garrison Sergeant, this plan pairs well with these cards:

• Guildmages' Forum.  This is obviously good because you're going 5-colors, but it's often worth it to spend the extra mana on a creature.
• Centaur Peacemaker.  Don't let the game end early.  This one plays double duty by slowing down the pace and being a big roadblock for 3 mana.  A ton of these will come around at the end of packs.  Snap them up!  If you're winning on the board, you don't have to cast them.  If you're not winning, this will help tip the scales in your balance and stave off death a while longer.
• Sumala Woodshaper.  Go cycle through to another creature.  No problem!
• Rhizome Lurcher.  These are often taken by other players, but if they go untouched, grab them.  If your deck is full of creatures, you can just wait to play these later, which only makes them better. 
• Rosemane Centaur:  I always undervalue this while drafting, but then am really happy to see it show up.

Lots of little efficient creatures are good too.  There are tons of Mage-Bears and lots of efficient Boros creatures. 

Finally, choose to go first.  I know that may be obvious, but when running 5-colors in other formats, it can be best to choose to draw to get a higher chance at mana fixing.  If you take tons of gates, though, you won't have to.  And if you're playing only gates for the first 3 or 4 turns, that can effectively put you a turn behind.  Choose to go first to help keep up.

Here's my deck from tonight:  (Note: I got 11 gates, and there were only 6 people in the pod, so more is definitely doable.)

Gates:

• 2 each of Boros, Dimir, Golgari, Izzet, and Selesnya gates.  (I did not plan that!)
• 1 Gateway Plaza

Other land:

• Guildmages' Forum  (I never even saw it, but I've played with it before.  Awesome!)

Gates-Matter: (I got real lucky to get one of everything, but having any 5 is not uncommon)

• 1 Guild Summit
• 1 Glaive of the Guildpact
• 1 Gatekeeper Gargoyle
• 2 Garrison Sergeant

Creatures:

• 1 Boros Challenger
• 2 Centaur Peacekeeper
• 1 Hammer Dropper
• 1 League Guildmage
• 1 Nightveil Predator
• 1 Rosemane Centaur 
• 2 Sumala Woodshaper
• 1 Swathcutter Giant
• 1 Trostani Discordant
• 1 Watcher in the Mist

 Other:

• Direct Current
• Integrity/Intervention
• Invert/Invent
• Urban Utopia  (I should probably like this better, but I almost never draft it!)
• Vivid Revival

I hope to have the same sort of success in Ravnica Allegiance!

Emperor Draft (with Battlebond)

Three weeks ago, I got together in a group of six and we did an Emperor Draft with Battlebond packs (3 packs per person).  (Background on Emperor; background on drafting Emperor.)  It was extremely fun, mostly because we deviated a bit from the usual plan for Emperor Draft. 

Normally you sit in the same spots you're going to play, except that the two emperors swap places so they're sitting between the two opposing generals.  Then everyone drafts cards, just as though it's a six-person draft pod.  (Although this is a limited team format, teammates cannot share pools during deck-building.)

I was really excited to try this format out with the Battlebond set.  The importance of teammates in the cards promised to be really cool.  I mentioned this excitement to my friend Phil who lives across the country, and he agreed.  Then he suggested a Battlebond-relevant change that made a world of difference: sit with your team.

Part of the fun of Emperor Draft is that you have to balance your picks against taking things your opponents want.  Each lieutenant is sitting next to their opposing lieutenant and the opposing emperor, so if they're passing to the emperor, they may have to take something to prevent the emperor from getting it.  Part of the problem, however, is that it would be really nice to know what your team is doing so you can plan around that a bit.  This is especially relevant in Battlebond because if you see one partner card in a pack, you don't know who has taken the other one.  (Even though Battlebond is designed around taking two cards per pick, for Emperor Draft, you only got one pick each time.) That could be pretty frustrating.

So, for drafting we wanted teams to both sit with each other so they could collude and be alternating with their opponents so you can't just stack three picks each round.  Phil suggested that we just include a semi-confusing passing sequence on top of the team seating.

We did it.  It was great.  It was so fun to talk to the team about every pick, and working together, we could deduce exactly what others were taking.  One of the players, Don, suggested a cool method of placing packs in between the players using rules cards that we flipped between draft rounds.  I put together some arrows that you can put down on the table to help organize things.  I highly recommend using zone drafting to prevent confusion; there should only be one pack of cards on the table between two players at any time.

Here's the printable PDF.  The first page has the arrows with spots for the cards; the second has a diagram to show how people should be sitting.

Happy Magicking!