General Draft formats that can be played via forums

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I was thinking about writing code to enable 4-player grid drafting. Effectively, it involves a "choose your own adventure" style thing for each pack, with nested spoilers and other stuff, and names so that you don't have to keep track of who's pick it is. Grid is nice for a forum game because it's only 16 total picks per player, so it can go fairly quickly.

Anybody have other ideas?
 
I love that idea. MTGS runs traditional 8-person drafts very occasionally too, with a neutral party posting the packs and managing the draft.
 

Aoret

Developer
I'm kinda interested in facilitating tenchester for 4 mans, because I really enjoy that format (and the streamlined decks it creates) a lot, but I can't think of a non-clunky way that works purely as a forum game.

I've been toying with the idea of with forking the drafts.wtf codebase to add stuff like this, but I just don't have the bandwidth for it atm :/
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I didn't think nested spoilers worked on this forum (I tried to do them on the guess the magic art forum game and never got them to work).

I've been thinking about this on and off over the past week now that the Inaugural Penny Grid League has pretty much come to a close. The fun parts about that were:
  • Being able to actually play a draft, as with anything above 2 people always leads to scheduling conflicts and whatnot.
  • Only having to use the deck once (albeit for 3 matches) as it keeps it fresh. If we did an 8-man and I had to play with the same deck against 7 different people and I drafted horribly, I wouldn't be able to finish.
  • Drafts were quick. Being able to set aside 3 hours to draft and play matches was easy enough.
  • The small prize pool was enough to get people interested to play, otherwise they could've just bailed midway through
I would love to see if a 4-player tenchester draft could work on the forums. It is the easiest 4-player draft environ that I can think of, unless we come up with something new.
The only problem with tenchester is that there is going to be, lets say, 36 packs and 4 people over possibly 4 different timezones, so it is going to take a long time to draft. It could be done over a week and people could organise between themselves afterward when to play their games. Just that playing the same deck against 3 different people could be a bore, especially if you hate your deck. Still worth a try though I would think. Here are some random thoughts on how to run it:
  • Give every participant 9 packs. This will allow a person to post a pack to the forum as soon as they are the last to pick from the previous pack to save time. This could allow for cheating and knowing what is in the next packs, but if anything, that could make it more interesting.
  • Have a spreadsheet for everyone to post their picks in so everyone can see. Saves having to check previous posts etc.
I'd be game to give it a try. Even if we don't get to play any games, just to see if the process works and how long it takes.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I was wondering too what are thoughts were on rotisserie drafting or sealed?

From the experiences in our league, admining the whole thing is the hardest part, due to time zones and scheduling conflicts: and that was even with a second copy of the cube, and a fairly small number of drafters. I feel we got a little lucky, in the sense that our cross seas participants all had time openings on the weekends in question to enable drafting. I would love to streamline the process so online scheduling is focused mostly on the matches.
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I was wondering too what are thoughts were on rotisserie drafting or sealed?

From the experiences in our league, admining the whole thing is the hardest part, due to time zones and scheduling conflicts: and that was even with a second copy of the cube, and a fairly small number of drafters. I feel we got a little lucky, in the sense that our cross seas participants all had time openings on the weekends in question to enable drafting. I would love to streamline the process so online scheduling is focused mostly on the matches.


There was a Rotisserie draft that went on before I got here and it looked like it took forever. I wouldn't mind trying one at one point, but more for interests sake rather than doing it to play some competitive games.

Sealed, while easy to do as a forum game and quick to setup and start matches just doesn't have the same appeal as drafting. As Chris said at the end of the Grid League, grid drafting is like 'Super Sealed'. Considering the problems we were having with grid drafting (too bomb heavy, aggro is very loose, not enough synergy picks) it would be even worse is sealed. It would just be 3-colour midrange piles beating each other up and I can see why no one wants to do it.

Considering admin was the toughest part with a 2-player draft format, I why we can't get any 8-man drafts to fire, let alone have everyone play 3 rounds :p
What you are saying is right, I think the way to do it is to have a draft format that can be done on the forums at everyones own pace (like that rotisserie) and then get to organise matches between the players when is most convenient. Just like the league, but you keep the same deck. I still feel like getting everyone to stick to the end playing the same deck might be a bit hard to muster up the enthusiasm to play with a deck for the third weekend in a row with a deck you made 4 weeks ago (and have lost 3/3) but you never know until you try I guess.
 
Something that may help with that could be doing teams, which could be set either before or after the draft. That helps both with being invested even if you've lost some matches because they all still count, and if people don't mind using other decks within the team then it could help with scheduling conflicts and deck fatigue.

Edit: Something else I just thought of, if you do teams pre-draft it might help speed things up as you can ask your teammates to pick a particular card for you in your absence, assuming it isn't taken in the interval.
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I think on the topic of grid drafting, I would have to tweak the format to take the inability to wheel into account. In addition, because the packs are going to be patchworks, power variance means a player can get pack sequences that substantially disadvantage them, or give them a garbage pool. I support a fairly narrow power band, but I think even that might be too broad for grid drafting.

I'm thinking maybe an even narrower power band is appropriate, to maximize pick consistency and pool strength.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Something that may help with that could be doing teams, which could be set either before or after the draft. That helps both with being invested even if you've lost some matches because they all still count, and if people don't mind using other decks within the team then it could help with scheduling conflicts and deck fatigue.

Edit: Something else I just thought of, if you do teams pre-draft it might help speed things up as you can ask your teammates to pick a particular card for you in your absence, assuming it isn't taken in the interval.

Team sealed?
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Team Grid Drafting, in which the team picking first gets to pick up one additional card after the other team took their second pick. With 18 packs you get a minimum of 54 cards this way, which should be enough to feed two decks, right?
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
That actually sounds really reasonable. That recreates somewhat the feeling of wheeling cards, though maybe both set of picks should feed one pool, which the players can than dismantle and assemble during deck building?
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
That actually sounds really reasonable. That recreates somewhat the feeling of wheeling cards, though maybe both set of picks should feed one pool, which the players can than dismantle and assemble during deck building?

I was thinking you get a shared pool, because if you split pools you get a lot less than 54/2 playable cards per pool.
 
Here's some numbercrunch.

Four players probably want, let's say 60 cards per team. At 4 cards each two packs, that's 30 packs total and 15 picks per player. We could make it 32/16 for a total of 288 cards seen.

You'd draft A1B21B2A etc. and build from your draft pool together.
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I just made some code that makes tenchester drafts. It was surprisingly easy, all you need to do is shuffle the cube and format it nicely in the forums. I would have liked to done sort of even colour distribution in packs but that would take me longer than I wanted to spend on it.

Check it out here. I don't know if anyone is going to be game enough to draft it, let alone play the decks afterwards. I just thought it would be better to start implementing ideas to see if they work, rather than just throwing things at a wall.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
54 cards for two people sounds wayyyy too low for good decks. For reference, Team Sealed for 2 gives you ~135 cards. I know there's some selection process involved, but, you know.
 
54 cards for two people sounds wayyyy too low for good decks. For reference, Team Sealed for 2 gives you ~135 cards. I know there's some selection process involved, but, you know.

Two-headed Giant draft (it happens at GenCon each year...) gives each team 84 cards (assuming 14 card packs). I would imagine a team cube grid to be in the high 60s to low 70s.

I was thinking Team Rotisserie though looking at it now I didn't put that in my post.

Team Vintage Rotisserie always excited me... I tried to once as a 3v3 with just 2 people controlling the picks, and it was a blast! The downside of rotisserie is that it takes soooo much longer than grid drafting.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I figured out how to do a 4-player grid draft this way. Just need a master pack list in a spoiler for people to post the next pick from. 16 picks per person, should be pretty good for a forum environment. Let me make the code.
 
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