Limited Report: Innistrad Midnight Hunt

A lot of players are curious about how good you need to be in draft in order to profit from MTGA draft events. In response to this, I am writing this article as part of a series where I provide details of my limited run every set.

Context

As I discussed in a previous article, part of what makes playing MTGA efficient for the FTP or almost FTP player is being decent in limited. Having enough clout in this format will make the entire experience of collecting cards much more pleasant. How much clout? The following figure provides a good idea.

As shown in the figure, you need at least a 30% win rate in Quick Draft in order to make it more efficient on average than just buying packs with your gold. On the other hand, you need a higher win rate, about 53%, to say the same about premier or traditional draft. Furthermore, if you do have a high win rate in Premier/Traditional, you are better off playing that than Quick Draft on average. As for choosing between Premier or Traditional, that is a more complicated question. However, I have chosen Premier over Traditional since ZNR.

MID Limited Run

For Innistrad Midnight Hunt, I did 15 Premier Draft runs. The goal was to get to at least 120 in terms of number of packs won + number of rares opened from draft packs. This gives me enough packs to get at least some of the rares I might need. Then, I try to win about 70 or so packs from the Metagame Challenge. In combination with the free packs from the mastery pass and end of season rewards, this strategy leads to almost completing all the rares by the next set while minimizing your draft costs (depending on your performance, of course).

My limited run started fantastic with an early 7-2 with UB, followed by a disappointing 2-3 and an even more disappointing 0-3 (I tried to draft UGbrw flashback). Following this slump however, my runs suddenly caught fire. I didn’t lose more than 100 gems again until the 11th run where I went 3-3, and then the final run where I also went 3-3. Overall, in 15 runs, I went 7 wins 4 times, 6 wins thrice, 5 wins twice, 4 wins twice, 3 wins twice, and 2 and 0 wins once each. This translated to a very nice 67% match win rate, which is much higher than my typical draft win rate which is around 56%. This is my highest win rate in draft since perhaps, Ikoria, when premier draft was first offered. As a result, the total cost of 15 drafts was…. 0 gems. It took 15 hours, spread across the days from release to the Sunday after. I won 60 packs and pulled 80 rares from draft packs. This leads to a rare completion percentage of about 56%. I expect to win more packs from next week’s metagame challenge to fill the rest of what I need to complete MID. This run was definitely an outlier, and I don’t expect to be able to replicate it consistently, but I like to think that I’m getting better at drafting.

Impressions about MID draft

I streamed all of my drafts in Twitch and ported them to Youtube if you are interested in watching them. Here is a summary from untapped.gg.

The most success that I have had in the drafts were with UB and BW. Black has an awesome removal suite, and common removal is plentiful with Defenestrate, Olivia's Midnight Ambush, and Eaten Alive. For blue, Organ Hoarder is insanely good and usually plentiful. I drafted at least two almost every time I went blue. An important element of this draft set is knowing what do with the decayed zombies. The zombies are perfect sacrifice fodder, so it’s important to make sure you pick both decayed producers and sacrifice payoffs. They can also be used to trigger the cards that care about damaging your opponent, like Arrogant Outlaw. Finally, one thing that I tried to experiment with a bit was using Jack-o'-Lantern to splash third color bombs. 

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