How to Draft Pick-Two Spider-Man / Omenpath

I've talked about the Spider-Man Pick-Two Draft the past few weeks. I have shared my opinions and a few tips. This week, I want to dive deeper into actionable, how-to advice.

Pick-Two Draft is a format that's easy to solve for a variety of reasons, the most of which is the set's size and what archetypes it supports.

I have a high degree of confidence about the colors' pecking order. However, you can't "force" an archetype in this format. You will get buried if you do.

Bear in mind that I will use Omenpath names for this article, as that is what the majority of people interested in this topic will be familiar with, myself included, but the advice applies to Spider-Man all the same.

Here's my rank order for the color pairs:

1) Azorious

Wonderweave Aerialist is one of the strongest commons we've ever seen in Limited, flat out. I'm not sure if it's in the top 10 or 20, but it's in that range. You can play it in other archetypes, but white supports it best, and it's much worse in Selesnya than a Dimir deck. I take Aerialist aggressively and try to pick up a second copy if possible to draft around it.

Generally, with Azorious, you want to get on board and play an up-tempo game, dumping counters onto small fliers.

2) Dimir

It may be surprising to see Dimir over Selesnya, but I'm confident that it's the overall better deck. Dimir is the only real deck you can draft as control, but it can also play a self-mill midrange package. Both of these deck versions are good. Dimir can break up synergies with key commons like Scorpion's Sting, Damning Caress, and Snatch Back.

3) Selesnya

Selesnya was the talk of the town through week one. It's since fallen off hard for me. It's a combination of being more heavily contested than other color pairs, as well as its reliance on opening hands and a lack of good late-game options. Sometimes you can Enweb chain as an engine, which is powerful, but you likely won't have time to do this because people are mostly trying to get you dead ASAP in this format. The Enweb chains are great when you come out fast, run out of gas, and need to generate some value to pull ahead to close. Enwebbing early is powerful with City Pigeon, which is one of the key commons in the format. Leyline Weaver also plays nicely in this deck.

4) Gruul

Red is just bad. The cards don't line up well, they're awkwardly designed, and Mayhem doesn't work as smoothly as Madness did. Green, however, is quite good, and there are some nice supplements in red for green, such as Shock. Shock breaking up Aerialist and City Pigeon synergies is a reasonable draw to a bunch of green fatties taking over the game later. Leyline Weaver plays nicely in this archetype, but a lot of the Mayhem stuff has no green support, making the color combination awkward.

5) Rakdos

I could be convinced that Gruul is worse than Rakdos, but in general, the black cards don't supplement the red cards well. This is the color combination I tend to avoid the most; however, if I receive a strong signal and/or a strong rare, I'll follow the flow of the draft. Rakdos' biggest issue is its underwhelming signpost gold cards. While the two-drop is a fine card, it's worse than two-drop commons like Aerialist and Leyline Weaver. Nu and Sumi, Career Criminals are playable, but they're inefficient in a set full of efficient plays. It's a serviceable five-drop at best. At worst, it can die for a single mana to a card like Knife Trick.

Here are some general tips for drafting this format.

1) Don't rule out anything, and follow the draft.

Your first picks have never been less important. Because the format supports several archetypes, the idea of this Pick-Two Draft is to communicate what you're doing with your table. You need to be flexible and adaptable. Sometimes you'll bounce between two or three archetypes because a color combination is so open. Other times, it's because you're fighting for colors with someone else, and you're both bobbing and weaving. When you get clear opportunities to cut colors you're playing, do it. It's more important not to open the door to people you're passing to than it is to take a card with a win rate that is one or two percentage points higher.

In this pack, for example, I open Neach, a powerful mythic that is extremely splashable but is best in straight Dimir. Along with it, I have a choice to take either a Scorpion's Sting or Carlo. While I'd prefer the Sting in a good Neach deck, I take the Dimir gold card in order not to open the door for a fight with my neighbor. Sting will lead to a more prolonged game, giving my seven-drop more chances to show up and impact the game. However, it will be easier for them to end up in Rakdos if I give them a mono black card than if they already have a black card and take a Dimir gold card. If that happens, then we have to dance around each other to figure out who's going to lose the game of chicken. This is less important the later in the draft it happens. If early in the draft, it dictates the rest of their picks. Once players are settled, you should be doing almost the opposite and trying to wheel the gold cards on close picks, rather than cut off signals.

I go into drafts avoiding Rakdos, but sometimes I take a Dimir gold card and a Scorpion's Sting with my first two picks. If I get passed two good reasons to be in Rakdos, then I'm diving in. Identifying the first open lane and closing the door on it is the best way to end up with a higher-powered deck. Use your first pick to cater to biases when it's close. After that, you don't get to force a deck. If you want to win, listen to what the other players are communicating with the packs they pass you.

2) The person on your left matters A LOT.

In a typical eight-person draft, you don't need to worry about the person on your left so much. They're drafting behind you for two-thirds of the draft, and the colors can settle in a weird distribution next to each other. For example, if you're playing a traditional format and green is the best color, even if two players are drafting it side by side, and they're the table's only green drafters, both decks will likely end up very strong. A big reason for that is you're opening 24 packs. In Pick-Two Draft, we're opening 12 and distributing evenly among four players. When we halve the player pool, we're also halving the card pool, making it more important not to share a color combination or, ideally, a color with a neighbor.

3) Tracking a single color can tell you everything.

Let's say you notice that all the black cards are missing from the packs early in a draft. Normally, that means that black isn't open. In Pick-Two Draft, it can tell you exactly what lane you should take.

If black is overrepresented at the table and there are two drafters, then it means one of three things: two people are sharing Rakdos, they're sharing Dimir, or there's one of each. By realizing this as early as possible, we can position ourselves to be in the other decks and use the gold signposts to tell us where we should be. If black is overrepresented, I want to be in Selesnya or Azorious. I do not want to share red with anyone. If there is no red drafter at the table, I'm happy to take all of it, but I do not want to share. If black is overrepresented, then there's a good chance one of the players will eventually dip their toes into red.

For typical draft formats, staying open can be a detriment because the good rares are much better than the commons, and the power level is so flat that it's hard to get pushed out of a deck. In Pick-Two Draft, we need to adjust to account for the lack of cards in the card pool. There are not enough cards to support two of the same archetype well. Sometimes there is, of course, but that's an outlier.

Since that is true, I'd rather focus on white decks, which can support more players at the table. Because Orzhov and Golgari aren't supported, you will rarely find yourself being forced out of your color pair.

Let's pretend I wasn't in the perfect color pair in this spot. Instead, assume I was waffling and had a few different color cards. Looking at how this pack is broken down, I know that every other player at the table is eyeing Grixis colors. It's more important to identify this and pivot into a white or green deck before it's too late. In this specific spot, it may have been wise to take the Pastry and the Darval because they fit better into other color pairs with the missing cards, further digging my opponents in for a fight while I reap the rewards.

Spider-Man/Omenpath Limited is getting a bad reputation, but a majority of the issues could have been solved with a bit of tweaking to the card design and a larger set. Pick-Two Draft is fun, and I hope the myriad of variables they introduced with this set doesn't scare them off from trying stuff like it again. I'm still enjoying it, but I am pacing myself more than usual because I know the set's shallowness will make it go stale faster. This is not the set to hunker down and play ad nauseam until the next one is out. Rather, it's an appetizer of what I hope is a banger set in The Last Airbender coming out next month.

Regardless, I started out "doing what I wanted" and got punished for it. I did poorly in my first few days of this set until I decided to take a more disciplined approach and not force anything, especially cool-looking rares that I opened.

This may be the last time I discuss this Limited set, but it's worth playing if you haven't and are interested, as I know many people skipped it due to the new stuff that was introduced simultaneously.

Regardless, I'll be streaming frequently and preparing for the next time we see Pick-Two Draft.