General A Thought About Two Player Drafting

[FlowerSunRain]

As anyone who has done two player drafting knows, it comes with baggage. Recently inspired by conversations on gold cards and card classification, I had an epiphany.

Two player stacks should be ridiculously oversaturated with fixing and multicolor cards.

We want players to be competing over cards, right? But what happens in most 2 player drafts? Each player picks 2 colors and maybe a splash, 70%+ of the fixing is worthless because you are scraping for coherent playables the make your 2 color deck work. There is little competition over cards other then hating out your opponent's key cards.

Now, let's say you load up your stack with ridiculous amount of fixing. Like 35% of it. And then, you make every card in the stack either multi-color or multicolor matters. Now, the draft process is actually interactive because both players have a reason to want to take every single card. Being able to draft a 15 colorfixing lands? Completely possible and necessary since every card in the draft benefits (or necessitates) two+ colors.

Further, because there is so much color-fixing, you won't have a lot of wiggle room to sideboard cards, making each pick more meaningful and hate drafting come at a much higher opportunity cost.

Yeah, I know, I personally like strong color identity in cube, but two player cube is an extreme circumstance that requires extreme measures!

Thoughts?

 

[Jason Waddell]

If I were designing a two-player stack I would only include 3 colors.

 

[tomchaps]

Wait, are you talking about cube or stack? I have strong opinions about 2-player cubes, and no opinion about stacks...

 

[Jason Waddell]

Wait, are you talking about cube or stack? I have strong opinions about 2-player cubes, and no opinion about stacks...

Err.. 2 player cube, sorry.

 

[Alfonzo Bonzo]

35% fixing feels excessive - one in every three picks? I suppose if you took this to its logical conclusion, then would a good two player cube be mono coloured? You don't need the fixing as all the cards are the same colour or colourless and every pick becomes more focused and what you and your opponent are doing. It would also matter if the draft was 'public' such as grid or Rochester or semi secret, such as winston or regular drafting.

I've built my 360 cube predominantly for two players and while it doesn't have the same percentage of fixing you suggest, the fixing is more relevant to more players, through shards and vivids. This allows for the greater 'reach' of cards that can be taken, and is probably encouraged through gold, off colour kicker and flashback and multicolour split cards.

 

[Peter Angell]

My mono-plains cube doesn't have this problem, but I've still put some thought into it. Part of the issue is that most people don't want to have to maintain a separate cube or list for just two players. So I've thought up ideas that would work with minimal/no edits to a "regular" cube.

I haven't tested these, but they sound worth trying:

1) You can't add basic lands to your decks. Instead, add guildgates. Non-Basics which only fix mana are excluded from the draft. Land Destruction might need to be as well. All lands ETB tapped.
2) Draft as normal, but after X packs, each player "bans" a color from the draft: all cards that require a banned color are set aside and removed from the draft. Continue drafting for another Y packs, but when cards from a banned color appear, replace them with a fresh card from the draft pool before the pack is drafted.

The best heads up draft format ever is Solomon, hands down. Grid drafting is fun on occasion.

 

[Jason Waddell]

2) Draft as normal, but after X packs, each player "bans" a color from the draft: all cards that require a banned color are set aside and removed from the draft. Continue drafting for another Y packs, but when cards from a banned color appear, replace them with a fresh card from the draft pool before the pack is drafted.

Is there any compelling reason not to just ban two colors before you start drafting? I feel like it would be really awful to start getting invested in a draft only for your opponent to ban the color that you have the best cards in. Which would be the only logical strategy in this format. Pre-ban and you don't have to deal with that. And there are 10 different 3-color combinations, so each draft should have a different texture to it.

 

[Peter Angell]

Is there any compelling reason not to just ban two colors before you start drafting? I feel like it would be really awful to start getting invested in a draft only for your opponent to ban the color that you have the best cards in. Which would be the only logical strategy in this format. Pre-ban and you don't have to deal with that. And there are 10 different 3-color combinations, so each draft should have a different texture to it.

It adds a layer of strategy and tension to the early picks to not over-invest? And/or you do it after only a few packs? I was trying to be brief with my description, but you could go deeper: instead of each player banning a color, one player must decide to protect OR ban one color, then the other player gets to choose the fate of the rest of the colors (still ending up with 3 played, two banned).

But don't forget: in a two-player draft format, you are as equally concerned with building your deck as with stopping your opponent from building a good deck (or drafting the rock to their scissors). Feel-bad during the drafting portion could mean one of the players is just playing poorly. This isn't to say what's I've suggested is flawless (it's untested, so it's likely quite flawed); but that the strategy for heads up drafts in general is very different, which could lead to feel-bad if players don't properly adjust.

 

[Jason Waddell]

It adds a layer of strategy and tension to the early picks to not over-invest? And/or you do it after only a few packs? I was trying to be brief with my description, but you could go deeper: instead of each player banning a color, one player must decide to protect OR ban one color, then the other player gets to choose the fate of the rest of the colors (still ending up with 3 played, two banned).

But don't forget: in a two-player draft format, you are as equally concerned with building your deck as with stopping your opponent from building a good deck (or drafting the rock to their scissors). Feel-bad during the drafting portion could mean one of the players is just playing poorly. This isn't to say what's I've suggested is flawless (it's untested, so it's likely quite flawed); but that the strategy for heads up drafts in general is very different, which could lead to feel-bad if players don't properly adjust.

I understand the dynamic, but I don't know how well liked it would be. It feels like being extra-spikey just to be extra-spikey, and the system isn't very clean either. Especially when the goal is to get there to be more competition for cards. Also, one of the biggest issues with two-player drafting is that the decks aren't remotely focused with most drafting formats. Penalizing people for over-investing seems like it would compound said problems.

But I haven't tested either idea, just giving my gut reaction here.

 

[Peter Angell]

Maybe there just is too much damn complexity for what you gain. Like I said, I haven't been able to try it. But I think 2-player draft formats end up being spiky in one way or another.

 

[Rob Dennis]

I'm choosing some thread to resurrect on the subject of grid drafting, since I heard a great suggestion from this week's chatcast and did two different 2-man grids with color bannings.

Randomly ban 2 of the 5 colors
as you're laying out, skip over:

• a mono-colored card in a banned color
• a gold card in with at least one banned color
• a hybrid card that's both the banned colors
• a dual-color mana (e.g. not 5 color fixing) that produces either of the banned colors
• a fetch-land that can't fetch a land producing an unbanned color

lay out everything else as normal.
First time, G and B were banned and we ended up with UWR control versus a "Big Boros" deck with a lot of interactive play to it

Second time, R and B were banned and we ended up with UGw pod against mono-White control (sweepers, point removal, ramp, strong 5 drops and elesh norn/angel of serenity)

I'm running a 525 card list right now and I've been very happy with that it's changed the draft portion away from people settling into "their" two colors, the 5 color wastes space, and people's decks just play the best stuff that was turned over in their respective colors.

The fixing here ends up being a bit different in that there's a lot more unbanned fetches relative to fetchable dual lands, but all the decks ended up with enough fixing to make it interesting. Also, since we got really solid 2 color decks, there's less of a need to get fixing just to play enough good cards.

A+++ would not grid draft another way

 

[Jason Waddell]

Hooray for players who test my random ideas!