Practice · card categories
Sort the booster into the four categories, then see where the ranking puts each card and why.
The four categories, and where they come from
- Take a colour and rank it. The chapter’s method: score every card in one colour by cost against benefit, put them in a descending list, set the rares and mythics aside — their quality is spread differently — and cut the list into quarters. The top quarter is A and the one under it B. The half below them is C, except for the cards that do not belong in a deck at all, which are D wherever the ranking puts them: a letter is a place in the ranking, and the last of the four is a judgement about the card. The list is one set’s, so every card is placed against the cards it was printed with, not against the whole history of the game: an A of 1997 is an A among the cards of 1997.
- A — high quality. The top quarter. At the top of it are bombs, cards that win a game on their own, though not every A has to be one. These do not come round twice.
- B — playable. A good score on cost against benefit and no more. Almost always in the deck.
- C — filler. The half of the colour below A and B. It does not score well, and it is not bad enough to leave out when there is nothing better: you play it and you would rather not.
- D — not playable. A card that does not belong in the deck at all, not even as filler: too dear to cast in a limited game, or waiting on conditions that rarely come, or needing a combination you cannot build in forty cards. This one is not a place in the ranking. A card is D when its own line says it does nothing in a sealed deck, or when the set’s catalogue grades it D — and then it is D wherever the ranking puts it, while a card low in the list that nobody calls unplayable stays C.
- Why it is worth being right. Players do not have to agree on what a card is worth. They have to agree on its group — that is what makes a signal readable, and a player who cannot do it cannot hear one.
- The boosters come from one hundred and twenty-eight real sets, Legends to The Hobbit, each with its own ranking, and a category is a place in the ranking of the set the card came from. A different set each booster, or one set, as you choose above the booster. One rare, three uncommons and ten commons, as a booster opens. The rare is not in the ranking — the chapter sets rares aside, their quality being spread differently — so its category is the one the set’s sealed catalogue gives it, A, B or C, and the reveal says so.
This exercise practises The Art of MTG Drafting, Part I. The ranking you give a card here is what the opponent values cards by in the two-player draft.
