Welcome to Four Daily Wins, your one stop reference for how to get the most bang for your buck in the Magic: The Gathering Arena Free to Play Experience.
When Should I Rare Draft?
The Bottom Line:
Only draft rares and mythics in these situations:
The card is in your colors and is good enough to make your deck.
It’s early enough in the draft to justify pivoting into different colors and the rare is enough of a bomb to be worth it.
There are no other on-color cards in the pack that are better than filler-level, and you don’t see any good pivot points, and you have fewer than 4 copies of the rare.
The pack has a specific rare or mythic that you need for a competitive Constructed deck.
If you don't care for drafting but you find yourself in a draft somehow (such as by earning a Free Draft token), just draft every rare and mythic you see, then resign from the event.
But Why?
Before Play Boosters came around, it used to make financial sense to draft nearly every rare you saw. Each pack had 14-15 playable cards, and only one of them was a rare. Being passed a rare happened infrequently enough that you would still have plenty of playable cards to make a respectable deck.
Starting with Murders at Karlov Manner, Play Boosters were introduced, and the math changed. Now, each pack only has 13-14 playable cards, and there can be multiple rares in each pack.
This means that if you try to draft every rare you see, your draft pool is likely to be an incoherent mess for a good portion of the draft. On top of that, you’re drafting fewer cards in total, and there is a real risk that you won’t have enough on-color cards for a playable deck, making a 50% win rate difficult.
So put your game face on, ignore the pressure to add that spicy rare that you don’t need to your collection, and draft a winning deck!