Also I think it's worth noting that none of the rare we've seen have been picked (except for the possibility of foil rares to our right, but we can't be sure about those). Not sure what that means, just wanted to point that out.

Those rares were either mediocre or required some earlier commitment to be considered. Noone's going to pick the Horse early, because only control decks can make really good use of it. Same goes for Nykthos, where only monocolored decks or decks with heavy one color commitment can abuse it. And for this land, well, you can't be sure about being G/R this early, unless you first picked Xenagos or Polis Crusher. and even then, you might just end up splashing one of those colors. There is also a chance that those lands will table.

We can take comfort from the fact that at least 3 other teams didn't open bomb rares, well, non-foil bomb rares :P

If we get passed a freakin Prophet of Kruphix and we are UR, we'll force the green in lol.

That being said though, it's generally better to plan around commons and uncommons then get too hopeful for the bomb rare.

In terms of commons and uncommons running BG does let us use Agent of Horizons as mentioned above who is a pretty strong card that we have a decent chance of seeing.

The problem? We don't really have a good idea what the person second down to our right is running as a splash yet. If he's running blue it wouldn't be that unreasonable for him to head into green, and we don't have any good information about who is near him and what he will might switch into.

While you are correct that UR hybrid cards generally rely on instants and sorceries we don't necessarily have to be too reliant on them. If we are getting passed blue and red bombs all day it'll be more then capable of blowing matches right out of the water, hybrid cards or not.

It's WAAAAY too early to pretend we're committed to a certain color. We have 2 good blue cards, but nobody is forcing us to use them yet. We still need to slow down and pick the best card in the pack.

+1 Stoneshock Giant

He's absolutely nutty, and immediately wins the game. And red has a lot of good commons and uncommons.

Votes so far:

+1 Leafcrown Dryad
+5 Stoneshock Giant

No votes yet from: RussischerZar, Riceeman and VRonin.

Been thinking it through all day and I do agree, Stoneshock is very strong and would be awesome to play it.

+1 Stoneshock Giant

The votes seem clearly in favor of the Giant and I don't expect them to change. Sending our pick to Caley.

So we seem to have started on an American build... hoping there's an Elspeth in the next pack.

Yeah, I know that the picks aren't set in stone, but the potential seems amazing.

The thing I like the most about are picks so far is that we indeed have room to go anywhere with this. We're still in a very flexible position. We can basically go with the flow.

Speaking of cards that we would like to see in the next pack lol...

Pack 5 has arrived and... well... wow. Really, just wow. What the heck is happening? What is Heliod's Emissary doing here?! First the Giant and then this? There's gotta be a logical explanation but I don't see it.

This suggests openness for white up to four players away to our right. All Emissaries are very powerful, first-pickable cards. I would never expect a pick 5 Emissary, regardless of its color.

+1 Heliod's Emissary

What else is there to say. We need creatures at this point and one of the best emissaries falls right into our lap?

+1 Heliod's Emissary

This'll put us at 2/15 creatures and 3/7 non creatures.

We should keep our eye out for mana fixers that we can run and give them higher priority over other lower priority cards since it looks like we may very well be running 3 colors at this point.

Things to note, no mono black and only one subpar blue (who wouldn't be THAT terrible in our deck and has a chance at tabling). I think we can take this as black and blue definitely being the biggest colors to our right.

We need creatures and Heliod's Emissary is too good to let pass.

+1 Heliod's Emissary.

I was looking through the pack, thinking about all the options...

And then realised Heliod's Emissary was in the pack. How has it got this far? If that doesn't signal a slight openness of white, I don't know what does.

+1 Heliod's Emissary

I don't even think the TappedOut's drafting bots would pass a pick 5 Heliod's Emissary and I've gotten some pretty retarded things from them.

Either the quality must have been INSANE in this pack, or people are getting locked into colours quite early.

@Dallie: I was thinking the same thing, but I lean towords the theory of them being locked into colors. Really, I can't imagine what cards would need to have been here to have been taken over the Emissary.

3x SGR and a PW?

+1 Emissary

So go Boros and splash blue? :P

USA USA!

Another interesting article to add to the pile

http://puremtgo.com/articles/ars-arcanum-theros-draft-overview

Czech Republic! Czech Republic!!

I don't know how this got passed to us. Maybe the four groups to our right are all playing black.

For all reasons mentioned above,

+1 Heliod's Emissary

Also, America!

I had an idea once that I really wanted to try out on MTGO for fun. I called it "Absolutely No Idea About Magic Girlfriend Draft". The idea was to let my girlfriend pick all the cards, most likely based on their art. Unfortunately, she didn't care enought to even try. Maybe those guys to our right had the same idea and had better luck with their girlfiends...

Ok, ok, now I'm being unnecessarily sarcastic. But I'd really like to know what's going on. I'm looking forward to hearing their side of the story.