It may not be as exciting as seeing all your favorite comic-book characters come to Magic, but Marvel’s Spider-Man is also the harbinger of some big shifts in how we play Limited. Wizards has made it clear the set has been designed to be drafted with “Pick-Two” rules, where players get to take two cards instead of one each time they look at a pack.
It’s a ruleset which has been used before at MagicCons or to facilitate drafting with pods of just four players. But for Spider-Man the Pick-Two rules will also be used when drafting the set online, and the set has supposedly been designed to maximize this specific experience.
So how big a change is this for veterans of “Pick-One” Draft? How can you adapt your mindset to get ready for your first drafts of this new set?
DOING A DOUBLE-TAKE
In some ways Take-Two isn’t that different from traditional drafting after all. There’s actually no other changes besides that headliner – you just pick two cards at a time instead of one. However, that one difference still has some major knock-on effects.
One thing which apparently encouraged Wizards to make the change is that Take-Two rules significantly speed up the Draft process. It makes sense when you think about it. Taking two cards at a time means you only pass the packs half as many times. Considering how much of your drafting time is taken up by looking at each pile of cards and re-evaluating the choices that are left, that adds up.
You’ll also save time if you half the number of players at the table – which will be the default if you’re drafting Spider-Man at game stores or Magic events. This is the real unprecedented change; we’ve had Pick-Two drafts before in sets like Commander Masters or Double Masters 2022, but never an official four-person format.
I can definitely understand why Wizards would be interested in pushing that idea though, especially taken alongside the broader context of Take-Two. Draft has always been one of the main attractions which bring players to game stores and a reliable driver of pack sales. But needing a full set of eight players for that weekly LGS draft night or MagicCon side event to fire often means one to seven players sitting around on their hands for an hour, or going home disappointed.
Even when it comes to setting up your own draft with friends, I can tell you from experience how much easier it is to get four people in the same room at the same time compared to eight! Commander rose to world domination with a “default” headcount of four, so why not make Draft a viable alternative for all of those players?
When you factor in the shorter event duration, the Spider-Man rules are going to make Draft accessible and appealing to even more Magic players than before.
THE SMALL THINGS MATTER
The switch to Take-Two Draft wasn’t solely motivated by these big-picture concerns. To some degree this change was a necessary reaction to the smaller-than-usual card count of Marvel’s Spider-Man. With only 65 commons and 55 uncommons in the set, there’s just not enough room to design a typical Limited format with ten two-color archetypes and accompanying mechanical themes.
A four-player format means the design team only needs to make room for five archetypes across the allied color pairs. Those archetypes leverage similar mechanics and there are hybrid-mana commons so they can share cards and expand the viable card pool for each one.
To illustrate my point, Mechanical Mobster is a colorless common which has synergy with four out of five official Spider-Man Limited archetypes. If it cost four mana instead of three then it would fit in all five!
Even so, I don’t expect this to lead to more congested draft lanes in the average Spider-Man pod. The ratio of archetypes to players might be the same, but the smaller table and two-at-a-time picking means you get much more obvious and concentrated signals. It’s going to be very clear early on which colors each player is prioritizing by what goes missing from each pack.
Those lanes aren’t 100% locked in, thanks in part to those overlapping synergies which let cards fit in multiple decks. But will usually become a self-reinforcing pattern. Maybe you open an amazing rare in pack two that makes you want to pivot, but your opponents will still have taken the first and second-best picks from that color from the packs they’re passing to you.
SUPERVILLAIN SCHEMES
While it’s confronting to have the fundamental rules of drafting swapped around under our feet, I’m taking a proactive approach in my preparation for Marvel’s Spider-Man.
There’s only 9 commons per color (Edge of Eternities had 15) so it’s very easy to scan through the set spoiler and spot which combinations will interact well, or what your curve in a color pair is going to look like. I’d actually look on this smaller set as a great chance for casual drafters to try out a more “researched” approach to Limited!
There are only seven commons total which can be cast mid-combat to change the outcome – why not memorize them so you can read an opponent’s bluffs based on their open mana? If you understand the handful of cards in each color which contribute to mechanical themes like +1/+1 counters or discard, you’ll have a greater sense of when you can support a splash for out-of-color rares and bombs which synergize with them.
In fact, the Take-Two format should also shift our evaluation of synergy-dependent cards in general. If you’re an experienced drafter reading this, think of how many times you’ve picked up a pack that has both an enabler and a payoff card for the same archetype available. It’s a frustrating situation, because whichever card you leave in the pack might be tempt another player to pick it up and start looking for the pair – leaving you to fight over it for the rest of the draft!
Even when there’s just the first half of such a combo available, it can be hard to justify speculating on a possible payoff when you could take a solid playable in the same color. Especially since that also commits you to make a similar sacrifice to secure the matching enabler on a later pick. Getting a second bite at the apple in each pack really helps these cards in particular, regardless of whether you’re lucky enough to grab both halves at the same time.
In a 14-card pack it’s much less likely that you’ll find TWO other strong playables in your colors to complicate the selection. And if you do, the better-defined lanes would still give me more confidence to leave one of those in the pack and grab my potential engine, trusting that it’ll come back around.
THE HEIR A-PAIR-ANT
I think it’s absurdly early to start touting conspiracies where Wizards moves to make Take-Two draft the new default for all future draft sets. It’s only ever been used for products where some other gimmick or oddity demanded it: Commander color identity rules, “doubled” boosters, small set size. That said, the last ten years have shown an increased appetite for change and risk at Wizards HQ, especially when it’s perceived to broaden Magic’s accessibility and appeal.
Whatever you think about it personally, four-person draft pods playing faster drafts with smaller sets objectively ticks that box. So like the Universes Beyond line itself, we might as well keep an open mind and see if we can enjoy the new rather than fear or reject it. On that note, I’ll see you all in a week or two with the full Card Kingdom strategy guide to Take-Two Spider-Man Drafting!
Tom’s fate was sealed in 7th grade when his friend lent him a pile of commons to play Magic. He quickly picked up Boros and Orzhov decks in Ravnica block and has remained a staunch white magician ever since. A fan of all Constructed formats, he enjoys studying the history of the tournament meta. He specializes in midrange decks, especially Death & Taxes and Martyr Proc. One day, he swears he will win an MCQ with Evershrike. Ask him how at @AWanderingBard, or watch him stream Magic at twitch.tv/TheWanderingBard.