Hi! You’re absolutely right that while bombs and removal are essential, limited decks nowadays are almost always more than the sum of their parts.

Two good resources are the limited resources and the lords of limited podcasts. Check them and see if they suit your style. I would also recommend watching streamers playing the specific format as you can learn a lot about what work and what doesn’t. There’s a metagame in limited, and often, you’re just drafting a bad deck because it’s open more frequently. In any case, it takes some time to learn: you have to keep studying and playing, and eventually, the results will improve.

If you’re a total newbie, as you say, sticking to the basic principles will already help you a lot (usually playing 17 lands and always playing 40 cards, for instance). Also, if you want to draft more often on Arena, it’s a good idea to have multiple accounts as it’s easier on the gold.

Along with the other resources everyone mentioned, I’d recommend two further things.

1. Use sites like Draftsim to get in “reps” without the pressure or cost of a real draft. It will help you familiarize yourself with each set, and get a feel for a reasonable pick order, even if a real draft will be messier by nature of drafting with real people.

2. Recording your drafts will do a lot to help you figure out where you made mistakes and how you can improve, either by watching it yourself or asking others to critique it for you. You can use either a screen recorder or something like 17lands, which will make a record of the draft itself and each match that you can step through turn-by-turn. Personally, I would caution against using 17lands for much else as I feel obsessing about those sorts of stats really diminishes the whole experience, but that is me. A lot of people find it very useful, so do with it what you want.

Also, specifically regarding the Limited Resources podcast, I’d suggest focusing on the “Level Up” episodes if you’re looking specifically for general advice on drafting. Those will be about general drafting concepts as opposed to set-specific conversations.

And good luck! Drafting is a complicated format, but imo, it’s also the most enjoyable way to play Magic. I hope you find some things that will help you improve! ^.^

I’ll echo the other poster and say you should look into podcasts/streamers and try to imitate what you see them doing. Definitely what helped me the most when I was learning.

I would also say head over to a local game store that does draft nights if you can. I learned quite a bit from having other people look at my decks after a match, often getting advice and reconfiguring based on their input.

Finally I would say check out this article by Ben Stark. Some would say it is out of date but I think a lot of the mindset still applies and can get you thinking in the right way. You should check out his youtube as well, he hasn’t drafted since brother’s war but he talks about each pick he makes and why he made it. Can be very useful for learning what to look for as you put your draft deck together.

Good luck and have fun drafting! It is my favorite way to play mtg by far.

One thing I want to add that I don’t this has been mentioned, is that there are some misconceptions during drafting about which “lane” to be in. Certainly one of the primary skills in draft is to read the picks coming upstream to see which colors or “lanes” are open to draft in. By picking cards of a certain color you can signal that the color is being picked and for others to go elsewhere.

The misconceptions I think are that you have to always adapt to what you see every draft, but really you have much more control over the colors you play than you might think. There is much more control in a Cube draft where the overall card quality is high – every card is pretty good so you end up with playables no matter what color pair you select. However, if the set has a high amount of playable commons or if every color is viable then you can usually play whatever color pair you feel most comfortable in. This is called “forcing” a color or pair or deck archetype.

In short, I think it’s easier to force a color pair in a normal set draft than people think. And by extension, if you have a color pair or archetype that you particularly enjoy playing or are good at, then my recommendation is to force that as much as possible and get good at it and building that type of deck in the draft environment. I personally think that will help a player become better at drafting more than anything else, outside of the basics.