One of the things that surprised me when I started working here was that development really doesn't work on balancing the individual decks the way I'd imagined. I'd expected a lot of work going into planning out which decks would be making up the real-world metagame, but that isn't the goal of the Future Future League. The goal is to have individual cards that are at around the right power level, and let the players in the real world build the metagame that those cards will allow.

As I’m writing this, there are thirteen articles on the front page of GatheringMagic.com, with eleven different types: infographic, Standard, a few casual (which in and of itself is completely subjective) articles, Commander (video), Standard on a budget, an article on how Ravnica is an allegory to the United States, Commander (text), a writing roundup, a deck roundup, an interview with a former Magic developer, and a financial article. I mention this because the simple fact that a game has a player base of twelve million doesn’t necessarily mean that twelve million people are going to want to watch a Pro Tour. Because Magic is so inherently expressive, everyone does something different with it. If you asked seven different players, “What’s the overall goal in Magic?” you’d probably hear seven different answers. What I’m getting at here is that the majority of Magic players are simply unlikely to care about the Pro Tour at all.

Further complicating matters is that while outsiders may not understand the text goings-on of the game, they grok the art and form their own opinions of the game from it. Descendants' Path gives a different impression from Macabre Waltz. As Boss Tweed is said to have lamented, "My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!" Tweed was talking about political cartoons, but Magic players are judged from afar by the packaging for the game and the art on the cards—right or wrong, that's the way it is.

There's a lot of pressure riding on each piece of art. With settings, that pressure is turned up dramatically: one shot, pass/fail in the marketplace, the future of Wizards of the Coast as a relatively autonomous company.

No pressure, R&D.

Another thing about Return to Ravnica draft is that it wasn't usually worth splashing a third color. Each guild had a huge amount of synergy amongst itself that it was rarely a good idea to mess up your manabase to splash. If you had a bomb in another guild and the guildgates to support it, then splashing was indeed possible, but for the most part it wasn't worth it, especially because some decks were simply too fast for you to find your third color.

This is not true in Gatecrash. I find that the decks are overall slower (except maybe in Boros), making it possible to actually have the time to find your splash color in a game. There is also more fixing in Gatecrash than in Return to Ravnica. Of course there are guildgates, but there is also Prophetic Prism at common, which is a nice fixer that can go in any deck. Keyrunes are also great for splashing. In Return to Ravnica draft, you would never splash a card with only a Keyrune as fixing because the format was just too fast. Wasting your turn three to cast a mana accelerator was a pretty bad play. In Gatecrash you actually have the time to use your turn casting an off-color keyrune.

I'm going to cover each guild one by one with how to draft it and what kind of cards you want to be looking for. Let's start with Boros.