P1P1 (Pack 1 Pick 1)

P1P1 is drafting shorthand for Pack 1, Pick 1, the very first card you take at the start of a draft, before you know anything about what colours are open at the table. It gets talked about constantly online because it’s the one pick in the entire draft made with zero information.

Content creators love breaking down P1P1 decisions because the “correct” answer is genuinely debatable, take the objectively strongest card and stay flexible, or take a slightly weaker card that pushes you toward an archetype you already want to play.

How to Approach P1P1

The standard advice is to take the best card in the pack and stay open on colours, since picks two through five will start telling you what’s actually flowing around the table. Committing hard to a colour pair at P1P1 means ignoring information you don’t have yet.

Some drafters deviate on purpose, taking a build-around bomb or a strong two-colour card because they’re willing to gamble on that archetype being open, which is a higher-risk, higher-reward way to draft.

P1P1 on MTG Arena vs Paper Draft

On Arena, P1P1 works the same way mechanically, but the pick happens in isolation with a timer, and you don’t get the table talk or body language cues a paper draft gives you. Some Arena drafters lean more on known set power rankings since there’s less live signal to read.

In paper drafts, comparing P1P1 afterward, “what did everyone else take” is part of the fun and part of how newer drafters learn what a pack actually looked like versus what they assumed.