Commander Legends is an unusual format.
Unsurprisingly, it's slow and grindy. However, I think many people will underestimate just
slow and grindy it is.
Most importantly, boards always stall very VERY quickly, and 40 life is a heck of a lot to tear through - nevermind doing that thrice.
AOE is not nearly as scarce as usual: there are two common sweeps (they only hit creatures for 2, but being commons, they can be pretty realistically stacked), four uncommon (two require setup: either casting a lot of spells or having a really high-power creature, but they are asymmetrical; Feast of Succession hits creatures for 4, and Slaughter the Strong will kill everything sparing a few small creatues), seven rare and one mythic. All boardwipes can be recurred.
EDIT: I just crunched the numbers, and apparently, you can expect a 4-player game to have, on average: 0,07 mythic boardwipes, 0,95 rare boardwipes, 2 uncommon boardwipes, and 2,4 common sweeps; shared between the players' card pools. So, three cards that erase most opposing threats if properly played, and two cards that ping everything-not-elf or everything-not-pirate for 2. I assume people will probably play all of them unless someone hate-picks them very proactively or something.)
Powerful single-target answers are not scarce, repeatable answers to low-toughness creatures are not scarce.
Removal protection is VERY scarce and unimpressive - one mythic eqiupment gives protection from multiple colors, one white common aura/combat trick gives protection from one color, and one green rare gives Hexproof to all your stuff but under an easily broken condition, and there's a white rare that only returns stuff if your board is empty. Counterspells except for Mana Drain at mythic are quite clunky and there are very few of them. Stormtamer is a thing but it is very easily picked off by repeatable removal or boardwipes itself. There are some decent defensive combat tricks but you can't run many of those in Commander, and they can just be broken by "using more gun". There is also quite a lot of good creature recursion.
Evasive creatures with high toughness are scarce.
Evasive creatures with low toughness quite often be destroyed by repeatable answers or common boardwipes. Evasive creatures with high toughness - and, honestly, most real threats of any sort - often get shot by abundant good removal. A grand total of five creatures have ANY innate protection beyond high toughness, two of them are rares and two uncommons, and one is Sanitarium Skeleton which will not win the game for you.
Evasive creatures with low toughness are still quite useful - for seizing Monarch.
Board stalls and board wipes and repeatable removal drastically reduce the usefulness of random small creatures without evasion sitting on your board. Between you having a critical mass of creatures that makes attacking you without good evasion generally unprofitable and a you having a (much higher) critical mass of creatures that can go and overwhelm an opponent in one attack, there is a very large chasm where having additional non-evasive bodies compared to opponents jest doesn't do much. Fair creature tradeoffs are negatives and not neutral exchanges. Between there being 3 opponents and m
Card draw and ramp are quite abundant.
It's not hard at all for games to be decided by players decking themselves. There are NO cards that prevent or even delay decking, and boardstalls, removal and Kill-The-Leader strategies can trump most meaningful offense.
A Monarch emblem will usually appear by SOMEONE playing a Monarch card.
Games rarely resolve by one player being able to deploy their cards quicker. Most expensive cards are commons or uncommons that cannot affect the game drastically, and just playing multiple or particularly big bodies in a turn only pays noticeable dividends if you can reach the second critical mass of the board state, which is very hard. Ramp that accelerates you by just 1 mana is in many cases akin to just having an additional land.
The main thing you should look for in draft are cards with
sheer high impact. Not things that allow you to generate resources, but those that funnel large amounts of resources into victory. Especially important are things that are hard to block and/or hard to remove.
Card draw and ramp, though still very important, are less important than they usually are in Commander. Essentially, they mean not as much "having more stuff" as "having all the same stuff a bit earlier". It's best to prioritize ramp that ramps by 2 or more mana, and if you have fair amounts of ramp, cutting on lands more aggressively as usual is probably a good idea. It's best to avoid cards that cantrip and don't do much else unless you have good synergy with them. Particularly less good than they seem are the Monarch cards with low non-Monarch impact. They only draw you one card once which you might as well draw by attacking with an evasive creature. If a player takes Monarch for a long time, usually everyone will go against them and it's hard to conserve your ability to continue having Monarch then. What most Monarch cards do once, most evasive creatures can do repeatedly. Also, Cascade, while good, is not quite as good as it seems - the advantage of +1 card and +~4 mana IS reduced quite a bit.
Archetypes based on evasion - WU and UR - are better than they seem due to Monarch and constant boardstalls.
Cards left in library are a real and important resource. Self-mill and looting are not economical with that resource, and strategies based on them are genuinely risky of decking and are worse than they seem - this especially concerns the blue-black archetype.
Total impact of your cards is also a real resource. Strategies based on maximizing one resource by squandering others are not economical with your total impact and are worse than they seem - this applies to the BR archetype. Recursion, though, is great for enlarging this resource, allowing you to replay the most impactful cards multiple times.
Putting in random bodies just to "fill the curve" also depletes the resource of total impact, before the game even starts. Average CMC of your cards isn't a non-factor or anything, but a neat curve won't deal 120 damage. Again, cards that mostly cantrip and do nothing else deplete it too.
Commons and uncommons that are much better than they seem:
Squad Captain - a lot of power and toughness for a common, sometimes enough to break boardstalls. Farily impactful if inefficient.
Slith Ascendant - a cheap evasive flyer than can slip past wipes/removal and become a high-impact bomb they'll have to spend real removal on; also excellent synergy with 3/4 white archetypes, also it's one of the few things that CAN deal 120 damage reasonably fast.
Seraph of Dawn - cheap 4-toughness flyer with upside.
Anoiter of Valor - 3/5 flyer with an inefficient ability that can still be very good if games go for a lot of time and you're white and struggle with draw
Radiant, Serra Archangel - The best of the self-defending creatures in the set. Will win you the game with some buffing and some additional protection.
Make a Stand - ACTUALLY A GIGANTIC BOMB, because it can and WILL asymmetrically save all your stuff from a board wipe. Perhaps even your own boardwipe.
Aqueous Form - High quality evasion that can be slapped onto something big and also card-selects.
Scrapdiver Serpent - Everyone WILL run mana rocks and equipment. This is just a 5/5 that can't be blocked. The most impactful common in blue.
Azure Fleet Admiral - The best Monarch common by far.
Flood of Recollection,
Ghost of Ramriez DePietro,
Scholar of the Ages - recursion is much better than card draw, and these things can get back boardwipes or powerful removal.
Supernatural Stamina - It ain't much but it will save your 5/5 unblockables or whatever for leaving just 1 mana open.
Revenant - This'll be like a 10/10.
Cuombajj Witches - Most of the time, this won't actually ping your stuff. Just don't use it without an agreement beforehand.
Pride of the Perfect - One of the few good ways to ACTUALLY get ahead on board.
Lightning-Rig Crew - In an appropriate deck, this will add up. Actually, it will add up and deal like 30 damage even without an appropriate deck. Oh, also, it becomes truly ludicrous with
Breeches, Brazen Plunderer and/or
Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator.
Dragon Mantle,
Dragon Egg - In the lategame, Firebreathing will deal enormous damage if it ever connects. Add in
Coastline Marauders - Firebreathing for opponents' money.
Ripscale Predator - Badly needs buffs, but if you can manage, can decimate opponents.
Wild Celebrants - This actually produces quite a lot of impact, and will nearly always have a good target.
Volcanic Torren - Value-packed asymmetric boardwipe that can both prevent games from being lost and straight up win them when you're sitting on 15 mana or something.
Wildheart Invoker - Stalemate-breaker, evasion-giver.
Imperious Perfect and
Squirrel Nest - given enough time and just a bit of synergy, they will put you over the top where an efficient creature can't, and unlike other token generators, they don't eat a ton of mana, Nest is not removable by normal removal and Perfect is a lord.
Strength of the Pack - Be "greedy" with this card. Don't waste it on small boards.
Scaled Behemoth - There's a reason it's the only creature with just "Hexproof" as an innate keyword in the entire set.
Numa, Jogara Chieftain - At first I thought this card sucked. But mana and time are in such an unbelievable excess that it's ability is actually very scary.
Abomination of Llanowar - Make this a commander and build around it, and it WILL decimate boardstates. In normal commander, this would count as low-impact, here, it's unusually high-impact.
Angelic Armaments - Essentially, a big, removal-resilient flyer.
Pennon's Blade - Seems silly, can actually get you far ahead on board.
Lumengrid Gargoyle - I think you should get the idea by now.