Article ChannelFireball: Grid Drafting and Tenchester

Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Ugh... It's incredibly annoying that the images don't line up. The hands use different card pictures than the grids.

Edit: But I liked the walk through!
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Onderzeeboot said:
Ugh... It's incredibly annoying that the images don't line up. The hands use different card pictures than the grids.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm sorry, not anything can be done about that. The grids are based on screenshots (of the RL forums), and the card images are from the database they use, so there is some mismatch. Sorry submarine!
 
vennythekid

vennythekid

Onderzeeboot said:
Ugh... It's incredibly annoying that the images don't line up. The hands use different card pictures than the grids.

Edit: But I liked the walk through!
Click to expand...
Yeah, I really dislike that CFB doesn't have a consistent image size for their articles. It makes reading their sideboard guides and articles like this much more difficult
 
Kirblinx

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
Ugh, my decklist does look horribly out of place (although it does look better than the MODO lists).

Was a good read, although I skipped most of the draft walk-through. Made it to about pick 6 then decided to scroll to the bottom. I mean it was fairly obvious where it was heading. Although, I must say I haven't seen a draft walk-through in ages, was a pleasant surprise. As well as seeing my awesome(-ly terrible) RUG list I drafted. I give the article 4.5 stupid stabilizing Grave Titans out of 5.

Also nice to see there is only positive comments at the bottom as well. Who knew there were people already cutting colours from things?
 
B8R

B8R

Jason,
I am excited to try some of these new variants, thanks for the article!
I was surprised that "glimpse" drafting (burn-1 or burn-2 variants) was not mentioned or covered. Have you tried this, and what are your thoughts on this variant?

Best,
James B8R
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
B8R said:
Jason,
I am excited to try some of these new variants, thanks for the article!
I was surprised that "glimpse" drafting (burn-1 or burn-2 variants) was not mentioned or covered. Have you tried this, and what are your thoughts on this variant?

Best,
James B8R
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for the comment. Full disclosure: I haven't played it yet.

That said, I'm a little surprised Glimpse Drafting took so long to be formally named. One of my first ever cube drafts had us sitting in an apartment with 4 people, so we did 6 packs of "take-1 burn-1" to see the whole cube. There are some issues with it:
- going through 6 packs felt looooong. By the end of it the drafters weren't really all that engaged anymore. 9 packs seems like it exacerbates this. You have to make ~117 discrete choices in Glimpse Draft, which is kind of astronomical for a draft format (Grid, for reference is 16-18. Tenchester is 36, booster draft is 42.)
- seeing more cards is nice, and gets you kind of more "representative" cube decks. Glimpse will be super bomb heavy, as each player gets 9 "first picks". Personally I would do something to alleviate this (packs 5-9 you burn first and pass, before picks are taken, for example). This can be particularly problematic if you have problems with superfriends decks coming together.
- I think the cutting in Glimpse sounds very deep, but I'm not a big fan of the memory constraints. I pass a pack of 12 cards, get back 9, and I would be struggling to tell you what's missing. Reading signals seems potentially very tiring.

I've played burn formats over the years, and although I do think Glimpse sounds very deep and skill rewarding, I would be concerned about the issues listed above.
 
B8R

B8R

Hey thanks for the response! My experiences have been somewhat similar.

Just as a background reference, I built a cube last summer inspired by your article series. I had never cubed before, and my playgroup was 4 people total (fiancée, 2 buddies). I put together a riptide-ish (esque?) 540 list for us to glimpse draft. I had read on the mtgs glimpse thread that 540 was ideal for 4, and it let me be greedy and put some extra themes in that a 360 restricts. After a handful of drafts, I came away with this:

Positive-
1) Seeing 540 cards between the 4 of us indeed gave us archetype representative decks that were fun to play. Aggro, Midrange, Tempo, and Control were well represented and the decks were pretty powerful.
2) Reading signals and such was a real thing. I was routinely able to guess what the player on my right drafted and I also sensed that the opponent across from me was sharing 1-2 of my colors much of the time. This was cool.

Negative-
1) Seeing so many cards and going through so many packs and making decisions on burning AND drafting was indeed taxing and time consuming. We did 2 of these drafts one night and I almost keeled over from exhaustion.
2) The burn piles on the table were ginormous and cluttery.
3) It seemed the ratio of lands was WAY too high. I had 70/540 (12.9%) dual/fetch/shock and I remember the first draft with my Jeskai prowess deck I had to cut some on color fetches because I simply had way too many. Over the next several drafts I prioritized lands less and less until finally I just picked them last. Shocks and fetches were routinely the last 2 cards in each pack...that just seemed so wrong to me! I wanted more tension in picking the lands.
4). Picking 4 lands in the ULD seemed way too much for 4 people as well. I never played more than 1 or 2 of them and the best ones were always picked and the lesser one always went unplayed. A smaller pool and/or less picks (2?) seemed more appropriate.

The takeaway:

1) I sense that the 540 list/burn-2 style format MIGHT (idk) work better for singleton powered cubes like wtf123whateverhisnameis' cube on mtgs, as the superdegenerate-bomby-kill-you-twice-to-Sunday-before-breakfast-in-your-face-I'm-so-clever-and-powerful-decks that you could create via this method seem right up his playgroup's alley.

2) I'm going to trim down to 360, slightly shave the mana % (11ish), and shrink the ULD pool down (and reduce to 2-3 picks). I'll do 6 packs each and burn-1 and see how that goes. After mentally navigating through 9 packs and burn-2, my playgroup is going to find it a breeze! We'll see how this goes and also compare it to the updated Tenchester (thanks!) and I'll try to report back any meaningful discoveries! I don't really expect to ever get 8 to draft in the near future so optimizing my 2 and 4 player experience is a major goal for me. Thanks for the help!
 
VincePendrell

VincePendrell

Article was 10 out of 10, would read again. Aston's last pick made me think for a second that a card hadn't loaded, then I was like "I see what you did there"

I'm actually really interested in the software you made for picking the cards. How is the drafting workflow? Do you have any VODs of it working? Are you fetching metrics and comparing to decklists and match results* to analyze win-rates to balance your cube? I remember talking to you about gathering and analyzing cube data a years ago, but we didn't have any decent input on the matter, so really hoping you are doing some next level MLG shenenigans with this.

* I imagine you could probably even figure out ways to skim the MTGO replays to see if the card even shows up at all. Not sure if data-mining replays from MTGO is even a thing on our end, but man, it could be sweet.

EDIT: Seen a vod with a drafty thing, not sure if you made it or if it is the same for the grid drafting. Either way, catching up on content here.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
VincePendrell said:
Article was 10 out of 10, would read again. Aston's last pick made me think for a second that a card hadn't loaded, then I was like "I see what you did there"

I'm actually really interested in the software you made for picking the cards. How is the drafting workflow? Do you have any VODs of it working? Are you fetching metrics and comparing to decklists and match results* to analyze win-rates to balance your cube? I remember talking to you about gathering and analyzing cube data a years ago, but we didn't have any decent input on the matter, so really hoping you are doing some next level MLG shenenigans with this.

* I imagine you could probably even figure out ways to skim the MTGO replays to see if the card even shows up at all. Not sure if data-mining replays from MTGO is even a thing on our end, but man, it could be sweet.

EDIT: Seen a vod with a drafty thing, not sure if you made it or if it is the same for the grid drafting. Either way, catching up on content here.
Click to expand...

Oh, the grid draft is different. All the VoDs seem to have disappeared (my bad), but basically I have an R script that creates a thread here on RiptideLab (see Forum Games subforum), and then we get on Skype and go through the packs. Not that fancy of a thing.

Our data collection is pretty non-existent at the moment.
 
B8R

B8R

Can someone clue me in on how one would go about running a 6 person Tenchester draft with a 360 list? Thanks in advance!
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
B8R said:
Can someone clue me in on how one would go about running a 6 person Tenchester draft with a 360 list? Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Make 36 packs of 10. Give 6 to each player.

Then each player takes their first pack (at the same time), picks one card and passes the pack to their right.
(optional) When you get your pack back (from passing around the table), you may look at the remaining cards before discarding them.
Then each player takes their 2nd pack, takes one and passes left this time. Continue until all packs are gone.
 
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B8R

B8R

Cool, thank you!

I did a pick-1 burn-1 Glimpse draft a couple weeks ago with 4 and it went pretty well (better than the burn 2/@540 variant), but I wanted to expand my playgroup and also try out the Tenchester to see how it compares!
 
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