Common and Uncommon Pick Lists for Edge of Eternities Draft

Edge of Eternities Draft is upon us which means its time to throw some common and uncommon pick orders together. You can think of these as tier lists for the cards you’re most likely to see when passing packs around the table at your local shop. Some lists are split by color, some by archetype, but I like to make my lists a little differently. My lists are more about where in the draft you are, how settled you should be in your strategy, and how many picks you have left to make.

The first list is arguably the most important and it’s the First Five Picks List. These are cards to take from among the first five cards you see in the first pack of the draft. You might think this is just a “best” list but it’s slightly more complicated than that because you want to make sure you send strong signals while at the same time don’t miss any bombs.

The second list is arguably the most important and it’s the Signal Switch List. Once you’re into the middle of pack one, and a bit into the middle of pack two, you still have an opportunity to switch up your draft strategy. Some cards are a clear signal that certain strategies may be open. While you might not pick them early, you shouldn’t miss these signals later in the draft.

The last list is the Rest of the Draft List which is how you’ll likely be rounding out most of your deck. This is where you need to think about your curve, your late-game, and your ability to close things out. This covers the middle of the second pack and most of the third pack, when it’s unlikely you’ll be switching.

I also have a bonus list called the Hate, Hate, Hate List which are cards specifically to hate draft if you’re playing in a tabletop environment where you have to play against the cards you pass (for Arena that isn’t the case so this isn’t as important). This list is cards that are particularly devastating but in a way that makes it hard for common and uncommon removal to deal with.

First Five Picks List

Most of you will probably just first pick your rare or mythic rare, and that’s okay. It could very well be the best card in your pack. Some of them are certainly better than every common and uncommon in the set. But, not all of them. Plenty of them have too stringent a mana cost, like Archenemy’s Charm. Sure you could build a UB control deck around it, but you may never have BBB when you need it. Others are probably never going to be relevant, like The Dominion Bracelet. Some, like Starfield Vocalist, could backfire on you pretty badly. Some require a lot of setup to see a payoff, like Moonlit Meditation, and would be better in constructed formats.

So what do you do if the rare(s) in your opening pack are just not great? Hope you have one of these bomb (un)commons instead!

One thing I want to briefly address are the 10 signpost uncommon cards. I generally think of these in the next category, the Signal Switch List, of cards. There’s one for each color pair and they’re meant to have clear synergy with the draft archetype for that pair. There are two reasons I have for not including them in my First Five Picks List. First of all, you don’t always want to commit to a color pair this early in the draft. Unless you’re forcing a certain strategy for research purposes, it’s better to stay open to switching (especially if signpost uncommons come at you as your 6th through 10th pick).

Secondly, I think the 10 cards I put on this list are just better than the 10 signpost uncommons happen to be. Is Seedship Broodtender good? Sure. Of course it is. Would I rather have Dubious Delicacy in my deck? Absolutely. I think Mm,menon, Uthros Exile, Sami, Ship’s Engineer, and Tannuk, Memorial Ensign, are probably the best the group has to offer in raw power. But I’m still very hesitant to pick them so early.

Look at the value on All-Fates Stalker. Notice how it can target your own creatures? The flexibility here is really high. If Zach Barash was still writing for the site I’d be asking him to write 2,000 words just on the design of All-Fates Stalker. No joke.

The theme of these cards is versatility, which is why a bunch of them have Warp, one of the more versatile mechanics we’ve seen in a while. But also these cards can fit into multiple draft archetypes and still be strong. Dubious Delicacy isn’t just great removal, it’s great in a Rakdos Void deck because it can trigger Void. It’s great in Dimir Control because it gives you closing damage or keeps you alive. In a go-wide deck it lets you make lop-sided blocks or attacks. And in a Golgari deck it hits all the themes.

I could talk about all these cards at great length but I want to highlight Eusocial Engineering and specifically compare it to Chocobo Racetrack, a card I was much less interested in during Final Fantasy drafts, but on the surface looks incredibly similar. First, being able to play it with warp, lets you start making robots earlier. You can rack up Lander tokens and then pay two mana to warp Eusocial Engineering into play, crack your landers to ramp, get robots, and then exile the Engineering until you need it later. Racetrack didn’t have that kind of versatility but more importantly Landers warp Edge of Eternities drafts in a way Chocobos didn’t warp Final Fantasy drafts.

I definitely could be wrong about some of these, but once we have a few weeks of data I expect to see at least a few of these cards getting picked consistently very highly.

Signal Switch List

Without listing them here, the 10 signpost cards in each of the 10 color pairs should be taken as strong signals that those color combinations may be wide open. Of course it could be due to various other factors, but by the 7th or 8th pick if these are still coming around odds are that specific color and strategy should be free to move into. So, in essence, the first Signal Switch List is the list of signposts.

The second list is the best removal spell in each color that isn’t already on the list above (First Five Picks). Obviously if you see a late Dubious Delicacy you should consider black is not being picked upstream. Here are five more removal spells to look out for:

Here are ten cards that I think are similarly strong signals that an archetype or color pair is more open than you may think. This holds true from about pick six or eight in the first pack through pick eight or ten in the second pack.

Unlike the First Five Picks list, these are mostly specific to one, or a few of the draft archetype strategies. Many of them can cover multiple strategies such as the Lander cards being good in Gruul Landfall, Simic Ramp, and Rakdos Void. You’ll need to pay attention to other signals as well, but keeping an eye out for these cards in the first and second pack can help you make a smart shift to a new strategy that will pay off greatly in pack three.

Rest of the Draft List

Lastly, you need to round out your deck. Edge of Eternities draft is a format I expect will be grinding with many games going into the later stages of play. This means you’re going to want to really make sure you look out for two different things: flexibility and inevitability.

Flexibility is stuff that gives you options, because you don’t know what may come up in the late game. Inevitability is a concept I was introduced to by a Sam Black article and its when you build your deck in a way that the longer the game goes the more likely you are to win. I think that style of play is going to pay great dividends in Edge of Eternities draft.

Here’s my final common/uncommon list, the Rest of the Draft list for flexibility and inevitability. Whereas the previous lists were mostly uncommons to take in the early-to-mid draft, these are mostly commons.

Hate, Hate, Hate List

Tezzeret, Cruel Captain – You should always pick Tezzeret anyways because it’s a colorless planeswalker. But if for some reason you didn’t want to play it, you should still hate draft it because there’s only two cards in the entire set that remove planeswalkers directly and one is a rare you’ll never play (Archenemy’s Charm) and the other is a mythic rare (Dawnsire, Sunstar Dreadnought). If you’re playing a high frequency of creatures with evasion, maybe you can rely on your ability to attack and deal damage to Tezzeret before your opponent gets to use its ultimate ability, but why would you risk it?

Adagia, Windswept Bastion – There’s also very little land destruction in the set. In fact the only land destruction is in the Stellar Sites bonus sheet if you happen to pull Strip Mine or Dust Bowl. So you’ll never get rid of Adagia once its online, and once its online it’s going to create copies of all your opponent’s best artifacts and enchantments every turn. The rest of this cycle is similarly impossible to get rid of, but less impactful that I’d hate draft it even if I wasn’t playing white.

Mutinous Massacre – Cards usually don’t say “You win the game” on them but Mutinous Massacre comes pretty close. Edge of Eternities draft is going to be a pretty slow format where it’s highly likely to end up in stalemate board states. Being able to simply gain control of half the creatures in play while destroying the other half is going to be pretty close. If you’re playing a tabletop draft and see this in a pack but you’re not playing Rakdos I don’t think you can pass it. Otherwise you know you’re going to eventually lose to it on the other side of the table.

Make sure you also check out our other guides to Edge of Eternities Draft:

Edge of Eternities Draft Tricks Cheat Sheet
Guide to Edge of Eternities Draft Archetype Tier List (Coming Next Week)

Rich Stein (He/Him) has been playing Magic since the mid-90’s when he opened his first Ice Age starter decks and forced his little brother to play with him. Since then he’s successfully failed to ever make day two of a Grand Prix and began writing about the game instead in 2012. He has been running Hipsters of the Coast since 2015.

15 Wins

Common and Uncommon Pick Lists for Edge of Eternities Draft

First Five Picks List

Signal Switch List

Rest of the Draft List

Hate, Hate, Hate List

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