#1: So a thing you're gonna be seeing a lot is that red is the best color to draft in most of the early Magic sets. There's a couple reasons for this: their spells are extremely powerful, (They're the color for burn spells, and Beta is the home of the classics like Lightning Bolt and Disintegrate) their creatures are above-average, (even in this set. Hurloon Minotaurs, Dwarven Warriors, and Hill Giants make a good core.) and at the common level their selection is generally pretty stellar. (The only real bad choice in Beta is, like, Earthbind, or Gray Ogre when Hurly exists.) Games in Beta are slow and Disintegrate can close out stalled games very easily. All their uncommon choices are stellar as well! (Good creatures like Earth/Fire Elemental and Keldon Warlord, and then spells like Orcish Oriflamme.) I don't think you can go wrong drafting this color, even if you don't get a Disintegrate, because while it's more board-focused and boards are bad in early Magic, some of the cards here are the best cards you could ever play, nevermind in just this set.

#2: Ah, Tim. Let me tell you about Tim. Tim exists in a world where plenty of creatures have 1 toughness. Tim is readily available and able to work with others in his field. Tim can not only clean up boards but can also push damage to the face if they get the hint that boards are bad in this set. Tim, warping the meta by virtue of existing, is a good card to draft. If you want a creature. It's either him or a fish, which is a 1/1 for 1. (There's a serpent as well but blue mirror matches don't happen all the time.) No, blue doesn't have good creatures at common. Instead, blue has good spells at common like Flight, (Jump exists in the same set...why?) Power Sink, Spell Blast, Unsummon, and Invisibility. Blue has two conditional counterspells at common level, and at uncommon? Counterspell. In this set blue is the "everything" color, having ways to do plenty of things, like Psionic Blast if you want your own bolts but "cooler". Clone can copy any creature already on the field, including Tim. Phantsmal Forces is an insane 5-turn clock at maximum if your opponent has no flyer defense. And finally Phantom Monster and their Elementals for acceptable 5-drops. At rare, uhh, Ancestral Recall. That's not good enough? Okay, you could get a Braingeyser instead. Buddy refilling your hand typically wins draft matches. And then of course, cards like Time Walk, Stasis, Timetwister. ....Yeah, blue had a reputation since the very beginning that we thankfully don't deal with in limited but you can still be jumpscared by it from time to time.

#3: Black is kind of a red junior, in that it has facsimilies to Disintegrate and Fireball but they're Howl from Beyond and Drain Life, which are a bit worse off. Can still do the "shoot your opponent in the head" strategy just fine though. Drudge Skeletons is a great introduction to the concept of a weenie that will block everything simply because all it needs to survive damage and destroy effects is one black mana. You'll need Frozen Shade to be able to win with creatures because black also doesn't have creatures. So that can be a problem. But with cards like Terror and the ridiculously good card Pestilence (Just put a wall on the board.) black is a real powerhouse of spells. It's just kind of pidgeonholed into answering boards, so it can't really win on its own. Though at uncommon, we do have Black Knight, Hypnotic Specter, and Sengir Vampire. Actually, Hypnotic Specter can just win games by using Dark Ritual to have that out on the first turn, and a 4/4 flyer for 5 is insane here. Unfortunately black does have a fair amount of duds that won't help much. Rares like Mind Twist and Royal Assassin can be really miserable to see though. I'd love Nightmare in a game of Magic that didn't have faster alternatives to waiting for 6 mana.

#4: The creatures suck in this set and unfortunately that's usually green's main gimmick here. Your best creature, (which is pretty good) is gonna be a 6/4 for 6 at common. Walls and regenerators are also gonna be the worst thing to see trying to play creatures. Unfortunately outside of Giant Growth being Giant Growth their spells are really bad. Well Fog's okay, but won't win games. At uncommon we DO have Channel, which is hilarious to play with artifacts. Wanderlust is also a pretty consistent way to ensure your opponent dies. At rare we have the lovely Birds of Paradise and Force of Nature. Outside of that though oh man does green have very little. This is why it's this low. It has a very lackluster set of tools.

#5: White has two problems: Circles and Wards. Circles are commons, Wards are uncommons. All Circles do is prevent damage to you from a specific color, all Wards do is grant protection from a specific color. While on paper that sounds good, Circles and Wards only work against a specific color. There's 5 Circles and 5 Wards, one for each color. There's 15 commons in white. One third of white's options at common are, you guessed it, Circles, and one third of uncommons? Wards. Circles and Wards. In constructed the red Circle of Protection does see use because then you can not get shot in the face, but how does white win instead of say no? Uhhhhhhhh play, a, 2/2, for, 3??????? White can't win games. The best it can do is help you not lose games. Uncommon's better with Swords to Plowshares my beloved, Lance, White Knight, and not least Serra Angel, but the rest are not worth drafting, like Wards. There's some good stuff to draft and you can possibly get lucky with an Armageddon, but they're all not common so trying to make a functional white half of a deck is next to impossible. You actively lower your chances of winning trying to do so. Just don't. It's limited. Pick a better color.

Honorable Mentions:

There are so many artifacts here and they're all at least uncommon but I can go over a couple of them.

• Walls are a precious commodity because while there's a lot of walls that are good at the job of stuffing a creature, all the good ones are uncommon. Some colors even have two uncommon walls, and there's two walls that can regenerate at the snap of a single colored mana. These are what grind games in this set to a halt, and why you're better off finding alternative means to damaging your opponent.
• Sol Ring.
  Staple of commander. Really good.
• Icy Manipulator to tap down whatever you want.
• Jade Statue is our artifact creature of choice though it does need to be powered by mana.
• And, Rod of Ruin in case you want to be a Tim yourself.
• Ooooh Winter Orb, it's funny how long it took for people to realize this isn't fun to play against.
• I'm not explicitly mentioning any of the Power Nine because I don't need to talk about their absurdity. They're all banned/restricted everywhere for a reason.

Set Observations:

So Forge I don't think emulates a booster draft that isn't 1 rare and 3 uncommons per pack. And I'm pretty certain ancient sets back then did not care about the guarantee of rarities. (Also I have since confirmed that it won't be for a while until these sets are at least somewhat aware of booster draft.)

So yeah it's this set with the power nine n' whatnot but the most busted cards in draft aren't rare. They're uncommon, so you may just see them pretty often, like for example: Sol Ring's uncommon. So is Channel. Dark Ritual is common. You can just have a million mana if you want. Sure Time Walk and Timetwister is great to draft but you may just never see them since this is a set where the common-to-uncommon-to-rare ratios are 1:1:1. You know, clown shoes stuff. Also means a lot of rares are just frankly zonk prizes. (like the laces)

Oh yeah, also there is, I'm guessing, the most color hate you'll see in any magic set. (Future me: I wrote this as part of the pilot episode where I tried this out for the first time. Oh how wrong I am.) It's still around to this day but a lot of cards here only function if your opponent is playing a color. There's also cards that allow you to change colors. Some of them are even rare. They are some of the most useless cards in this set since you would need the card to change the color and then the card that cares about that color. Only such card I can be working in a draft is Phantasmal Terrain to turn one of their lands into an Island so your serpents can attack them, or so you can enable landwalking. It's not foolproof though since it's an enchantment and, failing blowing up the enchantment, you can blow up lands pretty easily in this set.

Something I've also noticed is that there are quite a few cards that, if you build around them, they're cool. But, if *they* have the things *your* cards benefit from, they get those benefits as well. And in the times I've played draft, where I get stuff like Goblin King, I fail to get Goblins, but my opponents don't. (Speaking of, there's a whopping three Goblin creatures in this set, one of each rarity. At least that's better than the Lord of Atlantis and his all of 1 other Merfolk creature in the set.)

There's also the boon cycle in this set where the only card you ever see nowadays that people think is fine is Giant Growth. This cycle included things like Ancestral Recall and...Healing Salve.

Something else I want to point out with old Magic sets in general is that they love putting the actually strong creatures not in common. As if finishing the game is meant to be something you have to buy more packs for. So, okay, this is before they understand what limited needs to be fun, but man that still honestly feels kinda scummy even when I take the time-travel glasses off. It could be worse because Serra Angel is at least an uncommon, but, well, there's no shortage of really good expensive creatures being cards you will hardly see.

I still think fondly of this set because this is Magic in its most undefined. There's no solid color identities, there's a lot of ideas that are just here for no raisin, and it's a flavor of Magic that you do not see today. There's a lot of ways to play this game and a lot of ways to win it. It somehow just works, especially when you draft this set. I mean there's some pretty big issues with it of course that I can't just say "but that's its charm" to, (Circles and Wards.) but it's pretty easy to see why people loved playing it back then, and how it managed to keep going afterwards.