Practice · the golden rule

One pack, three worlds. First mana does not exist and every card is free; then every land makes two mana, so a cost is half the wait it was; then the ordinary draft you actually play. Take the best card in the pack under each rule, and watch which card the answer moves to.

The three worlds, and how each answer is worked out

• The first world: no mana at all. Infinite mana in all five colours; a twenty-card deck with no lands; an opening hand of three; one spell a turn. Nothing costs anything, so nothing about a card matters except what it does once it is down.
• The first question is answered by the creature’s effect alone: power plus toughness, plus its abilities, less its drawbacks. That is the whole calculation when mana is free.
• What an ability is worth is the creatures chapter’s own exchange rate: an ordinary ability is worth 1, a good evasion ability — flying, unblockability — is worth 2, and trample is worth 2 on a creature with power 4 or more and 1 below that. On the other side of the ledger, a defender costs 1, a creature that cannot block 2, one that must attack every turn 3, and 1 more when power and toughness are three or more apart.
• The third world: the ordinary draft, where that same number is measured against what the card demands. The Double Standard chart names, for each mana cost, the power plus toughness that makes a creature good: 3 at one mana, 5 at two, 6 at three, 8 at four, 10 at five, 13 at six, 15 at seven.
• The second world: two mana a land. Mana is still there and still costs you something — it is simply half the price, because every land you play is worth two of the ordinary kind and the board you would have had on turn six arrives on turn three. So the bar a card must clear is halved: a six-drop owes 6½ instead of 13, a four-drop 4 instead of 8, a one-drop 2 instead of 4. It is the same rule as the ordinary draft with the price cut in half, which is why its answer sits between the other two — sometimes the free pick, sometimes the ordinary one, and now and then a card neither of them wanted.
• So the three answers are one calculation with the price turned down. Full price, half price, free: that is the entire difference between the three columns you are shown, and it is the reason the exercise exists.
• The pool here is creatures only, so the chapter’s note about counting X as nought to six does not come up.

This exercise practises MTG’s golden rule.