How I 2-1 or better every draft

I struggled to find consistent draft results in fab for a while. Most of my drafts would be feast or famine where I would either 3-0 the pod or I would 0-3/1-2. I consider myself a pretty good drafter, it was the main format I played in mtg before I played fab. I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. It's really easy for me to say it's other people in the pod doing weird shit making the pod cursed. But that isn’t actionable or something that can help me get better, blaming others is a really bad mindset if you are trying to get better. After spending a lot of time with the team learning from others how they draft, send signals and just look at packs differently I came to realize my problem. I was focusing too hard on trying to draft my seat and get the 3-0 deck. I then came to respect the volatility of draft in fab and became what I hated most, a dirty forcer.

Forcing is when you pick a hero and put blinders on at the start of the draft and say that you are drafting this no matter what. You might decide you are forcing something before you even sit down at the table or it might be based on your early packs but regardless you generally ignore what everyone else at the table is doing and just draft that hero. The fact that I force makes me sad because I don’t enjoy forcing. I think it's boring and takes away from the fun of drafting. I never forced in all the years I played mtg, but I think it's optimal in fab if you want to see consistent results. My objective now became that I wanted to make sure I just don’t have a train wreck draft and always walk away with a decent deck. By forcing the way that I do my decks are always solidly playable where it's very easy to walk away with a 2-1 in a draft pod and if I get a little lucky I can still 3-0.

Why I force

I have trust issues. When people ask me “who hurt you?” I tell them “the guy to my right that passed me a p1p2 (pack 1 pick 2) Gallantry Gold and a p1p4 V of the Vanguard then decided that he wanted to be Boltyn on pick 5, and when asked about his first couple picks he was “staying open”. Alright so let's get this out of the way first, people have no idea what “staying open” means in fab. Most people think that means taking non committal picks like generics and armor then deciding on their hero around pick 6-9. What they don’t realize is what they are communicating to the person to their left. When you pass a pack with red Infecting Shot, Lace with Frailty and blue Spire Sniping to take a Seekers Mitts you aren’t staying open, you cut off Ranger for yourself. You said loud and clear “I’M NOT RANGER, IT'S OPEN” thus limiting yourself to only draft Assassin and Ninja because there should be a Ranger to your left now. Maybe I should do a video on this. I feel like people just don’t know better, they just hear “stay open” but don’t know what that means. Let me know if you think I should.

The next layer of not trusting people actually has to do with players that know what they are doing and know how to read and send signals and it has to do with pivoting. Pivoting is when you start off the draft as one hero but then realize that the hero you are drafting is being over drafted or another hero is very open. Either way you have identified you are in the wrong seat and should switch to another hero. A seasoned drafter will take this opportunity to abandon ship on their current deck and move into the open hero because chances are high that they will be gifted the 3-0 deck. The problem is when you aren’t the only one that sees that they should pivot into that hero. I’ve been in many drafts where someone will pivot into another hero and then the player on either side will also pivot at the same time. This will almost always wreck both of your drafts since you are already throwing away your earlier picks and now you are fighting with your neighbor for cards. God forbid the player on both sides of you see the signal and all three of you pivot at the same time, I’ve seen this happen before. This will happen because you get a pack and see a hero is open so you take a card for that hero and pass the rest. To your right the person passing to you also saw that plus everything else they have been passing you and might decide to pivot a pick later than you did not realizing you already pivoted. To your left the person you passed to they will be seeing the same signal minus one card so they might also think it's open. This makes pivoting super risky but super rewarding but I have no interest in taking risks like that when I don’t trust the people next to me.

The goal when you sit down to a draft is to communicate with the rest of the table through the cards you pick to make sure you are the second or third of a particular hero. Forcing will send the clearest signal possible to your left and usually force 3-5 people out of the hero. The person next to you should get the loudest signal of the hero you are forcing and people 3 seats away that aren’t picking their lane right away will see your signal by the time they are looking to commit to a lane. The only punish is there are two people forcing the same hero to your right which would be very unlucky but you should be able to tell that is what is going on by your third pick. So now you understand why I force but forcing isn’t as simple as just putting blinders on at the start of the draft, there is still some pregame strategy to it.

How I force

There are some things that I’m looking for in a hero when I want to force them. I want a hero that can do well with lower card quality so you aren’t punished if there are three people at the table drafting it. Benji, Arakni, Prism, and Fai are all great examples of this. Benji utilizes yellows better than any other hero meaning more of the draft pool is open to you compared to other heroes. Outsiders supported 3 assassins because of the dual class cards and you were happy with most generics as Arakni. All of Fai’s cards were good and he made very good use of the Draconic cards. On top of that you started the draft out with three Phoenix Flames so you technically only needed 27 playables. Prism needed very little to have a functioning deck, you basically just needed a couple red heralds and enough blues and you were good. A good weapon is a huge part of a deck worth forcing since it will pull a lot of weight for you when your card quality is lower than you would like it to be. This also lends itself to more consistent results as you aren’t as reliant on your hand texture being as good over the course of the game and can lean on your weapon more. Ideally I will also pick a hero that doesn’t need to “fat deck” to win since if you end up in a pod with more than two people on my hero it is unlikely to have more than 30 playables.

If the draft format allows, I will also try to hedge between two heroes that use similar cards such as Benji and Arakni. There were a lot of generic cards that both of them wanted so if I wasn’t sure which I wanted to force in a draft I could spend a pick on a card that I knew would make it to either deck like Spring Load or Wreck Havoc. If possible though I will try to take a class common out of the pack over anything else assuming there isn’t a bomb in the pack as a missing class common is the most noticeable thing to be missing from a pack. Most sets have a pack structure of like 2-3 class cards for each class so when you get a pack and there is one common for a class you know the person next to you is that class. In Outsiders I would usually lean towards being Benji but if there is clearly a Benji next to me then I will draft Arakni instead. Also If some of my early picks have like 5 ninja cards or something I’m inclined to pass all the ninja cards because I know that it is going to create multiple ninjas to my left and I don’t want to willingly be a part of that. It really depends on when I’m seeing that pack though and what the other picks before it if any were like.

Do your homework

Before you get to the draft even if you aren’t using this force strategy I strongly recommend you do this next part. If you take nothing else away from this, at least do this. Make yourself some draft deck templates with a sample deck of what you think a 3-0 deck should look like of each hero and a checklist of what cards you want and how many of them you are looking for in each hero. Here is my prism template as an example.

Could obviously juice this deck up more but this is I think a reasonable deck to get. I’ve got a good number of 3 blocks, enough red attacks, and some tech cards for different match ups.

Checklist:

Halo is a must

Minimum 4 red heralds

12-14 blues

I want as many of my blues to either be block 3 or go again attacks

As few yellows as possible

If I take a yellow I want it to be a block 3 or side board tech card

I want some tech cards for levia and the mirror

Levia tech cards include non phantasm attacks, blinding beams, aura/spectral shield cards

Prism tech cards include go again attacks, dominate, poppers, aura/spectral shield cards

You can be more detailed than this but I wanted to just give this as an example as those are the things I was thinking about the most when I was drafting Prism. Between packs I check where I was at on these. I would count up my blues and check what I had for tech cards and red heralds. I want to go into the next pack knowing what I’m still looking for, not just blindly taking good prism cards, just because a card might be good for my hero doesn’t mean it's what my deck needs right now. For example I might want to take a generic blue block 2 that I never plan on casting over a red herald because I already have 8 red heralds but only 5 blues.

I also strongly encourage you to make a pick order sheet. How I like to do it is I make one for each hero and I rank every card in every pitch in the set against each other. My ranking is based on if I know I’m already in a specific hero but you can also make one for when you aren’t sure what hero you are yet and are trying to stay a little open. As I said earlier though I think staying open is fake. Really scrutinize every card. Ask yourself questions like “is there any generic blue I would take in the set over my class blues?” or “where do red starters rank against Rupture cards?” Do not use this pick order list as a bible on what cards you should be taking out of every pack, you should prioritize following your checklist first as cards you need for your specific deck will always take priority over the better card in a vacuum. But when you have multiple cards in a pack that are close in power level and you aren’t sure which is better the pick order list is very helpful. You want to minimize how often you are asking yourself questions in a draft like “would I rather a yellow Infecting Shot or a red Sedation Shot?” Spoiler alert you want neither, ranger sucks kekw.

Closing Thoughts

This is just how to navigate the draft portion you still need to play your games. The next step is to understand how each deck wins/loses each match up. I suggest practicing with sample draft decks into each other to get reps. If you use draftfab.com look at your draft logs after and think about your picks again, try talking about them with your friends. If you found this helpful or have any questions please tell me in the comments below. Feedback is very much appreciated as I want to know where I can improve and make better content for you guys.

Thank you so much for reading, I appreciate you.