Drafting 101 - Draft Archetypes

By: Yuki Lee Bender

 

Limited and in particular Draft is my favorite way to play TCGs and Flesh and Blood is no exception. The card game I played before Flesh and Blood is Magic: The Gathering where I almost exclusively played draft. When playing Magic I honed my draft skills by consuming content and drafting as much as I could, with the best players I could. Coming into Flesh and Blood I noticed many players are not comfortable navigating drafts and I also noticed a general lack of draft content. With Uprising just around the corner, it feels like the perfect time to dive into some draft fundamentals.

Draft Decks, Not Cards

This is one of the most common and clichéd pieces of advice players usually receive when asking how to improve in draft. The idea is simple - by drafting cards that synergize together and all work towards a coherent game plan, your deck will function much better than if you just draft the strongest cards in a vacuum and put them in a deck. The problem with this advice is that it is easy to understand conceptually, but it is not very actionable. Exactly how one goes about drafting a deck instead of a pile of cards is very nuanced and is not readily apparent from the statement alone. The key to drafting a deck is to understand the different archetypes in a draft format.

A draft archetype is usually built around a set of key cards that play well together and form the backbone of your strategy. Generally archetypes consist mostly of commons and maybe a few rares, because those are what you tend to see most commonly when drafting. The basic strategies behind these archetypes can be very simple and can usually be summed up in 1-2 sentences. Using Tales of Aria as an example, you might draft an earth Briar deck that wants to play Bramble Spark, Earthlore Surge or Weave Earth followed by a big earth attack to swing for 10-12 each turn. This might be completely different from another Briar deck which could be focused on effects that deal 1 arcane damage and Ball Lightnings to help increase this arcane damage to slowly chip your opponent out. Lightning Lexi wants to flip up a lightning attack in her arsenal and present 2-3 attacks for 5 each turn. Fatigue Oldhim is often designed to defend with 3 blocks, pitch blue earth cards to his hero ability and swing his hammer for 3-4 each turn. Each of these are examples of archetypes or strategies that these heroes can employ. 

Generally each hero has more than one archetype they can be drafted as; this is by design as Flesh and Blood is designed for 8 player draft but only has 3-4 heroes per set. Two players on the same hero often will not be drafting the same archetype or game plan. A good check to see if you’ve drafted a deck with a game plan is to see if you can sum up what your deck is trying to do in 1-2 succinct sentences, once the draft is complete. If you’ve drafted a deck with a clear strategy you should be able to do this. 

If you are trying to maximize your chances of winning you should be drafting an archetype because you identify that it is “open”. A deck that is open is not being drafted by other players sitting near you and is very valuable to be able to identify, because it means you will have less competition for that deck which should result in a stronger deck on average. This is commonly referred to as “drafting your seat” and is done by “reading signals”. These are topics that have had many articles dedicated to them in their own right and won’t be fully looked at here. However, one of the most important parts of reading signals is understanding what archetypes exist and what the key cards for each archetype is. Usually if you start receiving multiples of those key cards, especially later on in the pack, you can assume that particular deck is likely open and there’s a chance you should be drafting it.

Archetypes as Roadmaps

As I get more familiar with a format, I usually have a rough idea of what archetypes or strategies exist in the format, as well as what an ideal version of that deck looks like. These deck outlines are something every strong drafter I know has in the back of their mind and can really help guide you during your draft. So, what does a deck outline look like?

To see an example of this in action, let’s consider one of my personal favorite's, Ice Lexi. Usually this deck wants to attack with a single dominated arrow using Shiver in order to push damage and detrimental effects. In order to fuse her ice arrows, Lexi needs to reveal an ice card which she will want to arsenal to use on her next turn. Additionally, Lexi primarily wants ice non-attack actions so she can play them from her arsenal and still attack with an arrow that turn. If you arsenal an attack like Winter’s Grasp, it ensures your next turn will be a low impact one. The perfect complement to this strategy is pump effects like Overflex, Invigorate, Weave Ice and Ice Quake which help push damage and ensure your detrimental effects connect.

 

The key to having success with this archetype, or any archetype, is correctly identifying which cards fit best into the strategy, and perhaps more importantly, what ratio to have each of these cards in. For example, if I were to build Ice Lexi I would want roughly the following mix of cards:

• At least 13-15 arrows (some of these can be blues)
• 6-8 pumps (such as red or yellow Overflex)
• 8-10 ice non-attack cards
• 8 blues

 

Having a clear image of what the ideal version of your archetype looks like will greatly improve your ability to draft it, as it informs your entire draft process and can act as a sort of road map to your draft. Usually, as I am drafting a deck I am trying to make sure I check all the boxes for that archetype. I like to take an inventory of what I have so far and how I’m doing during the review period between packs. For example, if I am drafting Ice Lexi, after pack 1 I might count that I have 4 blues and 5 ice cards already, but only 2 arrows and 1 pump. This tells me that in the future I should be prioritizing those premium arrows and pumps since I need a lot more of them, and while I do want a few more ice cards I can be less aggressive when taking them unless they also act as pumps.

 

Another reason that having a clear image of what the ideal finished version of the deck should look like, is it can help you identify which cards are the highest priority to pick and which cards are the strongest signals that the deck might be open. Going back to our example of the Ice Lexi archetype, pumps are easily the most important and the least replaceable type of card. Without them, Lexi really struggles to have sufficient damage output, especially into Oldhim fatigue. Additionally, the cards are not very replaceable, because Overflex and Invigorate are the only cards at common which offer this effect. Weave Ice, Weave Lightning, Lightning Press and Ice Quake are all rare and are often highly sought after cards for a variety of strategies and tend to get picked quite highly. Furthermore, pumps are much more effective at red than they are at yellow. For all of these reasons, you will usually see a much lower amount of pumps and so, you should prioritize taking them when you can. In contrast, while Blizzard Bolt and Chilling Ice Vein are easily your best options for arrows in this archetype, there are plenty of other arrows that can still fill your attacking and blocking needs in a pinch. 

Ratios for Draft

One important thing to consider when building decks is the optimal ratios for different card types in your decks. Jasin Long wrote an excellent article titled Numbers Game - Getting the Right Ratios in Flesh and Blood that I would highly encourage people to read, but I will summarize a few key takeaways they apply to limited here. 

 

Jasin explains that as you include more of a card type such as red, yellow, blue, lightning or ice, your odds of drawing that card type increases. However, the probability of drawing exactly 1, 2 or 3 cards of a given type peaks at 7.5, 15 or 22.5 copies of that card type respectively, in a 30 card deck. This gives us a good starting place for ratios in your limited decks, but don’t be afraid to deviate from them a little bit. 

 

As a rule of thumb your 30 card draft deck you should include approximately:

• 8 of a card type you want to draw one of per turn (ice cards to fuse with or blues in most aggressive decks).
• 15 copies of a card type you want to draw two of per turn (reds in most aggro decks, and blues in aggressive guardian decks).
• 22 copies of a card type you want to draw three of per turn, (blues in defensive Oldhim decks that want to play expensive defense reactions and pitch an earth card each turn).

Discovering Archetypes

With Uprising coming out soon, we will all be new to the format and we will have to discover the archetypes for ourselves. Usually in these early stages, I focus on identifying cards that feel particularly good or bad to play. Additionally, I try to pay attention and take note of any particularly effective card combinations as I play them or even as my opponent is playing them against me. The more experience I get drafting a specific archetype, the more refined my mental image of that ideal completed deck becomes and the better I get at drafting it.  You probably won’t have an optimal mental image of an archetype the first or even fourth time you draft it, but thinking about your outline for different archetypes and refining them is one of the keys to learning a format.

 

For those looking for more serious draft prep, perhaps for an Uprising Draft Road to Nationals event, I would highly recommend building multiple 30 card “draft” decks for each hero. When building these decks, I treat it like building a constructed deck where I put together an ideal or optimal version of the deck. In order to make sure the decks are close to actual limited decks I impose the following set of restrictions:

• 30 card decks.
• Commons and Rares only.
• Maximum 2 copies of each pitch for common cards. You may wish to limit this to 1 copy for especially contested cards like Bramble Spark or Ball Lightning.
• Maximum 1 copy of each rare.

 

This exercise is best done after you at least have an initial impression of how the commons play together. The benefit to building these decks is that the process helps solidify your mental image of what the finished deck should look like and can help you identify and discover new archetypes altogether. You could take this to the next level and compare your archetype outlines with other player’s and talk about why you both chose the cards you did. It can also be fun playing these decks against each other, however I wouldn’t put too much weight on the power level of these decks, since often more powerful decks are more contested during the draft process and tend to be balanced by having lower card quality.