Simulating Draft Strategies

There have been a few different styles of drafting proposed over the years. Ben Stark’s Drafting the Hard Way is the seminal article on reading signals in draft by trying to intuit what your neighbors are drafting and why that leads to better results over the long run. He also introduces the terminology of drafting “the easy way”: holding onto your first pick for dear life. A few years later, Ondřej Stráský introduced a middle ground concept in his article Drafting the Medium Way, which was later reinforced by Ryan Saxe in his article Maximizing For Your Own Preferences and on Lords of Limited as Drafting with Preferences. These takes suggest leaning into a subset of archetypes in a draft, either because you know they generally result in stronger decks, or perhaps because you’re just more comfortable with them. If there are any of these articles you haven’t read, I’d strongly recommend reading them as they present very helpful concepts useful to any drafter - the descriptions I’ve provided are vast oversimplifications of the information they provide.