It should come as no surprise that in a core set like Magic 2011 the best archetypes use friendly colors. Wizards of the Coast uses "core" sets to introduce/reinforce central themes in Magic. One of these central themes is the color pie. First, each color has things that it does different than the other colors and some things that it just does better than the others. Second, each color has "friends", colors that sit adjacent to it in the color pie and with which it has synergy.

As I play more and more M11 drafts, my preferences for one archetype over another slowly evolve. Here are my current preferences:

1. Blue/Black
2. Black/Red
3. Blue/White
4. Blue/Red
5. Red/Green

While Blue/Red is not a pairing of friendly colors, I think this is more about my love of Blue in M11 and my disdain for Green in the format. My girlfriend Rada probably does even more M11 drafts than I do. She has formed some preferences for cards and color combinations that dovetail with mine and some that contrast starkly with mine. While we aren't on the same page on Blue/Black currently, we're in lockstep about the wonders of Red/Black and Blue/White in M11 draft. This was especially helpful when we drafted as a team recently.

Rada and I draft at our local game store once or twice a week. While there are usually several tables of drafters and we're rarely at the same table, it's possible that we will eventually be stuck next to each other. This could be a little bad since neither of us likes Green, so if it ever happens I will probably draft Black/Red and she will probably draft Blue/White.

This week we went spent a wonderful day at the beach in Rhode Island, but as a result were too late to join the Friday Night Magic booster draft. Instead, we challenged two players to a team draft. I sat with Jeff on my right and Bill on my left (the names have be changed to protect the innocent.) I decided to force Red/Black since I figured Rada would force Blue/White.

I was pleased to hear Jeff say to Bill as we sat down, "in team draft, it's extra important to counter-draft." So not only would Rada and I not waste any picks, but it was our opponents' plan to waste picks.

Here is the deck I ended up with:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Black Knight

1 Reassembling Skeleton

1 Bog Raiders

1 Liliana’s Specter

1 Nether Horror

1 Berserkers of Blood Ridge

1 Manic Vandal

1 Fiery Hellhound

1 Vulshok Berserker

1 Ember Hauler

2 Goblin Piker

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Crystal Ball

1 Doom Blade

1 Sign in Blood

1 Diabolic Tutor

1 Quag Sickness

1 Fling

1 Fireball

2 Lightning Bolt

2 Thunder Strike

[/Spells]

[Lands]

9 Swamp

8 Mountain

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

1 Demon's Horn

1 Jinxed Idol

1 Sorcerer's Strongbox

2 Bog Raiders

1 Unholy Strength

1 Incite

1 Goblin Balloon Brigade

1 Lava Axe

1 Goblin Tunneler

1 Garruk's Companion

1 Greater Basilisk

1 Brindle Boar

1 Hornet Sting

1 Dryad's Favor

2 Goldenglow Moth

1 Ajani's Mantra

1 Jace's Erasure

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

As I expected, Rada went Blue/White. This is the deck she drafted:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

1 Ajani's Pridemate

2 Wild Griffin

1 Assault Griffin

1 War Priest of Thune

1 Cloud Crusader

1 Blinding Mage

1 White Knight

2 Stormfront Pegasus

2 Palace Guard

2 Azure Drake

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

1 Safe Passage

1 Mighty Leap

1 Jace's Ingenuity

1 Sleep

1 Unsummon

2 Foresee

1 Preordain

1 Mind Control

[/Spells]

[Lands]

9 Plains

8 Island

[/Lands]

[Sideboard]

2 Maritime Guard

2 Ice Cage

1 Alluring Siren

1 Armored Ascension

1 Squadron Hawk

1 Ajani's Mantra

1 Silence

1 Disentomb

1 Pyretic Ritual

2 Hornet Sting x2

1 Sacred Wolf

1 Back to Nature

1 Greater Basilisk

1 Wall of Vines

1 Giant Growth

1 Hunter's Feast

[/Sideboard]

[/cardlist]

As you can probably tell, Rada and I didn't counter-draft, which led to us having plenty of playables and decent sideboards. When we had packs without playables in our colors, we took Green cards. Despite this, several things went wrong. First, Jeff drafted Red/Black right in front of me. Second, Bill drafted White in front of Rada. To make matters worse, Bill opened two Day of Judgments. In the third pack I opened a pack with a Garruk Wildspeaker and a foil Garruk Wildspeaker! While I got two good cards out of the pack (including a Fireball,) it was painful having an opponent with two planeswalkers and two Day of Judgments.

In the first round, I played against Bill and Rada played against Jeff. Bill had two Llanowar Elf and a Birds of Paradise. As a result, he frequently had explosive draws that included a Garruk Wildspeaker. After getting crushed in game one, I quickly fell behind the eight ball in game two. Fortunately, I drew my Crystal Ball and slowly fought my way back to a victory. My burn helped against the Wildspeakers and the Crystal Ball made me less vulnerable to Day of Judgment, but I still succumbed in game three. Bill 2-1.

Fortunately, Rada smashed Jeff 2-0. I was a little concerned about my match-up with Jeff, one would expect his deck to be better than mine, since we drafted the same colors and he was feeding me. My concern lifted after I won a game of attrition and then sideboarded in two more Bog Raiders and a Sorcerer's Strongbox. I'm not a big fan of the Strongbox, but I think that Red/Black on Red/Black is often such a removalfest that any card advantage can be a big deal. After I finished Jeff off, it was down to Rada versus Bill.

Rada's match-up with Bill was much better than mine. Her two Foresee and Jace's Ingenuity helped shrug off Day of Judgment and she had a huge advantage in the air, which made the Wildspeakers much less of a big deal. Rada won 2-1.

While I think Rada and I are formidable players, I also think our draft strategy helped us secure the win. Yes, they got all the Green, including two planeswalkers, but that meant we got all the Blue! I'll take that trade any day. We got all of the best color in M11 and they got all of the weakest color. One of the reasons I got such a good Red/Black deck behind Jeff was because they wasted picks counter-drafting. Jeff first picked a Mind Control in pack two (he already knew he wasn't drafting Blue at this point.) Bill counter-drafted two Aether Adept, including taking one with a second pick (this may not have been a counter-draft, but it was at least a wasted second pick.) Sure, Rada's deck would have been better with another Mind Control and two Aether Adepts, but she still had the best deck at the table. So who cares, as long as she still beats both of them?

Some formats are mainly tempo oriented, such as Zendikar Block draft. In Zendikar draft my only goal was to push my opponent off the table in as few turns as possible. Missing one's two drop was often fatal. You can build a good tempo deck in M11, I particularly like Blue/White or mono-red for this purpose. Despite this, I believe M11 draft is more about card advantage than tempo. This is one of the reasons Blue is so powerful, not only does it have card drawing, it has card selection in the form of Scry. Making sure you draw good spells instead of unneeded land or vice-versa is its own form of card advantage.

One of the reasons I like Red/Black so much, even though it doesn't include Blue, is because of card advantage. Black has blatant card advantage in the form of Liliana's Specter, Gravedigger, Mind Rot and Sign in Blood. Red uses removal for card advantage. Cards like Fireball, Prodigal Pyromancer and Pyroclasm can be used to kill multiple creatures.

One of the greatest forms of card advantage in Red/Black is just playing lots of individual creature removal, like Lightning Bolt, Assassinate and Doom Blade. This allows you to remove key creatures. If I have a life advantage and a big creature in play, I don't care if my opponent has a small creature in play. Sometimes you can have good enough creatures in play that some of your opponent's dudes can be ignored. Being able to remove relevant ones or keeping them away from a relevant quantity of creatures is a form of card advantage. There are other common ways to gain card advantage through removal. If your opponent double blocks and you can destroy one blocker with an instant and your creature stomps on the remaining blocker, for example. Another way is to destroy a creature with an enchantment on it. My favorite may be making equipment into dead cards by killing all of my opponent's creatures.

Keep these things in mind when drafting Red/Black:

1. Take creature removal over pretty much anything.
2. Use high picks on creatures with built in card advantage like Gravedigger, Liliana's Specter and Prodigal Pyromancer.
3. Try to avoid being pulled too heavily in both directions mana-wise. Are you going more with Ember Hauler and Fiery Hellhound or Quag Sickness and Black Knight?
4. Try to find synergies. I like Act of Treason with Bloodthrone Vampire, for example.

My favorite commons when drafting Red/Black are:

1. Lightning Bolt- Duh.
2. Doom Blade- Deals with the big creatures that Red has trouble with.
3. Chandra's Outrage- Great by itself, awesome with Fire Servant or Chandra's Spitfire.
4. Assassinate- Bad Doom Blade that also kills Black creatures.
5. Gravedigger- Card Advantage.
6. Liliana's Specter- See Gravedigger.
7. Quag Sickness- More removal.
8. Fiery Hellhound- Powerful when you can kill most potential blockers.
9. Child of Night- Best common two drop in these colors.
10. Nightwing Shade- It's no Serra Angel or Air Servant, but it's still the nasty five drop flyer for these colors.

If you keep these things in mind when drafting Red/Black, whether it's in an eight man or a team draft, you will be in good shape even if you're behind another Red/Black player. It doesn't really matter how bad your creatures are or how few of them you have, if your opponent can't keep any of their own alive because of your onslaught of removal. If you are aspiring to power draft M11, you could do very well just always drafting some combination of Black, Red and Blue.