Practice · drafting mechanics

You draw a seat among five drafters. Take one of the twelve pools, then the order reverses and you take a second from whatever is left — and it has to work with your first.

What makes two mechanics fit

• One supplies what the other is waiting for. Madness wants a discard outlet; threshold, delirium and flashback want a full graveyard; storm wants a stack of cheap spells. A pool that hands another pool its missing piece is a fit.
• Something has to win the game. Mechanical synergy rarely includes a win condition of its own, so two pools of pure set-up make a deck that never arrives anywhere.
• The cards cannot be substituted. A mechanic split across half a deck is a mechanic that mostly does not happen — which is why affinity, the most demanding of them, is close to unplayable beside anything that is not an artifact.
• What is on the table decides. The whole point of drafting the pools in this order is that your second choice is made out of what is left, not out of what you wanted.

Which set’s mechanics do you want on the table? Choosing one deals a new draft.

This exercise practises Mechanical Synergy.