Foreword
I am in the process of writing a large article explaining all of my thoughts on Dark Draft at the moment. Since I expect it will take a while to finish, I will be consistently putting out previews to keep me on track. Below I talk about one of the 7 distributions I watch for while drafting.
Preview
Distributions
While Dark Drafting, I currently keep track of 7 generic groups: board clears, card draw, burn/health gain, targeted removal (off turn specifically), threat champions, faction commitments, and strategy-dependent cards.
The relative strength of an individual card in a group is dependent on the amount of other cards in that group that are already in the draft. Some groups’ value increase with fewer cards in the draft and decrease with more cards in the draft. Other groups are the reverse (value increase with more, value decreases with less).
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Card Draw
(Increased Value: Less, Decreased Value: More)
Card draw is incredibly important for every deck in limited. If you can’t/don’t draw cards, you won’t be able to play as many 0-cost cards, and you won’t be able to play a card on your opponent’s turn.
Therefore, if you get late into the draft and you don’t have many cards that can draw 2, every card that can draw 2 (or recall) becomes more valuable. If you have a lot of card draw already, you can bypass cards that are weaker or out of faction but have a draw 2 effect (Dark Offering for instance).
Also, if you have passed very few cards with the ability to draw 2 cards, each of those cards become more valuable as a counter-pick. If your opponent can’t draw consistently and runs out of cards in hand (especially if you help with cards like Psionic Assault for discarding), that is great for you. I have counter drafted draw cards to great effect in previous drafts. This does become weaker as a strategy if you don’t have significant threat champions or removal + Amnesia/Heinous Feast though. You can’t win a game exclusively by drawing cards.