General Is this results oriented thinking? (I lost.)

[Hathaway]

We had a small 4-player draft last night out of the newly cut down Birthday Cube.

http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/28489

I ended up drafting what I thought was a pretty solid BG Zombies list. I was doing run stuff like Satyr Wayfinder into double Gravecrawler and Wooded Foothills and playing lots of 2/1s and using Bonesplitter and Rancor.

I won two matches and lost the third. I lost one game to not being able to race Sublime Archangel. I lost the other to Sun Titan even while having Whip of Erebos in play.

I looked at my deck list and only had three real removal spells and said, "that's why I lost." In hindsight, it looks like there were about 20 removal spells in my colors in the cube and that we saw 180/413 (43%) of the cube. I guess I should have expected to see 8-9 removal spells spread out between four players, so maybe I had the correct number.

I got to thinking that more removal spells would have allowed me to win the match, but now I wonder if hate-drafting the white bombs might not have been the much better play. Maybe I lost the match before we shuffled up?

A few questions, then:

1. How much removal does everyone run in similarly sized cubes?
2. Do I have enough? More importantly, enough of the right sort?
3. Should I look into hate-drafting cards instead of taking decent spells for my deck?

Thanks.

 

[Chris Taylor]

3. I hope not. if a card is that powerful that the only meaningful way for you to interact with it is VIA hate draft, take it out, but that is true of alot fewer cards than you might think

 

[shamizy]

I would never look to hate draft unless it was later into the draft and I clearly saw something I couldn't deal with (like Silumgar, the Drifting Death in DDF draft).

Sometimes you'll just lose to a bad matchup, it happens. There are games where there's literally nothing you can do. This won't change a bad play into a good play or vice versa. You've got to trust your gut and make as tight plays as possible. The best thing to do after a close loss is to analyze what you could have done differently or what were the turning points in the match. Could you have applied some more pressure if you had attacked for 3 more damage? Would it have made a difference to hold back that Oblivion Ring for a turn? The best thing to do is to come up with a game plan, stick to it, and adapt when necessary. You've got to realize your role in a given matchup, whether you'll be the one playing defensively or applying pressure. There will definitely be times that you just get wrecked by a bad matchup, but most of the time this is the way to go.

1. I run a lot of removal, though I prefer most of the instant speed removal to be more conditional. There are very few catch-alls in my Cube.
2. I think you've got a good removal suite. I'd look more closely at the kinds of creatures you've got all throughout your curve, make sure that nothing is too overbearing or game-warping. It's one thing to lose to a Sublime Archangel b/c you didn't draw into your outs, another thing when it just beats the crap out of anyone and everyone all the time.
3. I don't like hate-drafting unless it's something stupidly good late in the draft or a definitely roadblock. If I see a card that will straight up destroy me if I go up against it, then I'll hate it. Not necessarily game-warping cards, maybe even something like a Wall Of Omens late in a pack when I have a Mardu aggro deck fulls of 2/1's. Otherwise, you're usually better off drafting cards that will be actively good in your own deck.

 

[Hathaway]

1. I think you've got a good removal suite. I'd look more closely at the kinds of creatures you've got all throughout your curve, make sure that nothing is too overbearing or game-warping. It's one thing to lose to a Sublime Archangel b/c you didn't draw into your outs, another thing when it just beats the crap out of anyone and everyone all the time.

Looking back, I had three outs to the Angel. In one of the games, I drew four cards with Disciple of Bolas when just crashing in for 4 and either trading with a blocker or getting through for 4 would have mattered more. He was at 5 when I scooped, but those 4 damage or him losing a blocker might have been all the difference. I drew four cards, but it cost me my turn and I gave away a lot of pressure to do it. I don't guess I considered the high opportunity cost of spending a turn to draw cards instead of apply beats. I'm convinced now that it was a play mistake.

 

[safra]

Looking back, I had three outs to the Angel. In one of the games, I drew four cards with Disciple of Bolas when just crashing in for 4 and either trading with a blocker or getting through for 4 would have mattered more. He was at 5 when I scooped, but those 4 damage or him losing a blocker might have been all the difference. I drew four cards, but it cost me my turn and I gave away a lot of pressure to do it. I don't guess I considered the high opportunity cost of spending a turn to draw cards instead of apply beats. I'm convinced now that it was a play mistake.

The thing I like most about Cube is I always feel like my players walk away just a little bit better at Magic every week. also bullshitting w/ friends i don't see a lot.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I would probably just cut those cards: both of them are pretty far over the power level of the rest of the cube.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

One of the most difficult things to do when drafting is to account for the opponents' decks. When you play with a large pool of cards, the available decks in each draft are going to vary wildly between games. A deck that might be a 3-0 against one set of competition might be a 1-2 against another. One of the things I like about face-up draft variants is that is puts this information clearly on the table, so you can attempt to account for it. Particularly if you have a flattened power curve, its impossible to know exactly what decks are being built in a typical booster draft. I know I've eeked out an extra win by judging the decks being built and tilting my approach to combat what's going to be across the table.

Its a good question, though, to ask if YOUR deck was soft to those cards or if they are just over the top.

 

[RavebornMuse]

1. I run a lot of removal, and I manage it by fusing power level expectations with flavour, because I love the colour pie. (ie, black gets the cleanest, cheapest removal, but fewer wipes; white gets lots of versatile, conditional answers and board wipes; blue gets lots of counters and solid bounce; red does lots of little, flexible burn at CMC1-2 that increases in power at CMC 3+ as well as big mass burn/wipes later). My cube is high-variance since I mostly just do 2-player drafts (we only see about 59% of the cube each time), so lots of removal helps to keep it in circulation, especially with our drafting style (Glimpse).
2. You have enough removal, I think, though you pass on some easy includes (I think Murderous Cut works well at your power level, for example).
3. I draft using the Glimpse format, so we semi-hate during each draft pick. In a non-Glimpse draft, I only hate late if it's an obvious hate-pick (like Eldrazi when I'm going mill).

I would advise you like most here to just accept that the nature of the beast means you'll have bad matches here and there. Don't cut Sublime or Titan just because they beat you, though. That sort of thinking tends to amount to simply robbing midrange for the sake of pushing pauper-style beatdown. Your cube power level seems just fine where it's at (though I will say that black has more card draw and less punch than I'm used to seeing; maybe a Tombstalker would help fatten it up a bit?) In my opinion, it's a lot of fun to have little stand-outs here and there. Is Sublime Archangel your best white creature? Totally. But it can be burned down easy enough, or you can just save removal for it next game. In exchange for keeping this above-average card, you get to give yourself and your drafters the thrill of playing a surefire bomb in your format that is by no means unbeatable, and to me, that's just fine. But if you don't like that level of variance, you could totally downgrade her. Hate drafting her, though? Kind of a bad strategy most of the time.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Do you have your actual removal count? I can do an as-fan calc. for you to figure out how your cube is doing on removal density if you do.

 

[Diakonov]

The fewer the number of players in the draft, the more you should hate-draft. In an 8-person draft, you will theoretically be playing against 43% of the cards you didn't draft. In a 4-person draft, that number goes up to 67%. And for 2-player, of course, it would be 100%.

 

[RavebornMuse]

The fewer the number of players in the draft, the more you should hate-draft. In an 8-person draft, you will theoretically be playing against 43% of the cards you didn't draft. In a 4-person draft, that number goes up to 67%. And for 2-player, of course, it would be 100%.

I feel strongly that anyone drafting 2p should use the Glimpse format, which incorporates a level of hate-drafting in it without killing the power level of the field and upping diversity a lot. It obviously works best in a higher-powered list like mine, though.

 

[Diakonov]

I feel strongly that anyone drafting 2p should use the Glimpse format, which incorporates a level of hate-drafting in it without killing the power level of the field and upping diversity a lot. It obviously works best in a higher-powered list like mine, though.

How does the Glimpse format work?

 

[RavebornMuse]

Glimpse Drafting, as outlined here: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/...limpse-burnfour-draft-thread-my-and-wtwlf123s


1. Shuffle the cube. Each player makes 9 15-card packs at random from the pool.
2. Crack each pack, one at a time.
3. Take 1 card from the pack and add it to your pool.
4. Before passing the pack, remove 2 cards from it and place them into a separate pile from your picks, removing them from the draft entirely. This act of removing cards from the draft is commonly called "burning", in reference to the format's predecessor, "BurnFour".
5. Pass the pack to your opponent, and then repeat steps 3 and 4 until the whole pack is drafted/removed. You should have 5 drafted cards per pack.
6. Do this for all 9 packs. Each player should have a 45 card pool to construct a deck from.

This allows you to go through 270 cards between two people. That's a lot, and for a primarily 2-player cube like mine, it provides a lot of great information as to what isn't good enough to keep and what simply never sees play. Best of all, the mini-game it creates is intense! It's extremely difficult to tell what colours your opponent goes into even if you're counting what you pass, so the removal of cards from the pool doesn't help much in the way of allowing clear "hate drafting". You also see so many cards that it's nearly impossible to shut down a strategy even if you burn it the entire time, because your opponent can pull it out of their first and sometimes second picks of each pack. It's also really easy to both go into the same colours this way - we've played a lot of matches where we both took the same colour pair and did totally different things with em, which is hilarious! For the two you burn (remove from the draft), you have to choose thoughtfully what serves you best. You have to ask on every pick, "Do I burn the two best cards left? Or do I burn two cards in different colours so my opponent has a harder time figuring out what I'm in? Do I burn these two red spells, since I think they're in red? Do I burn these midrange cards because I want to push the early game where my aggro plan will work best? Do I burn two fetches so the better stuff in this pack is more likely to wheel?" It's a fantastically deep experience. We had several draft alternatives in mind, but since we got the cube, this has been our only way to draft. It's just so much more exciting than any of our options; we used to draft boxes together, and this has been waaaay more fun than that. The decks have more options to them and it really feels like there's more than just two people there picking every single card, which is how most formats end up feeling in two-player to us; this makes you really have to pick and burn out cards carefully, and allows much stronger decks to emerge due to the huge variety of cards you'll see.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I will defer to an excellent post on mtgs (yes! they exist!): http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/...raft/131533-the-hatedrafting-thread?comment=1

Hate drafting is basically always wrong if it means you are depriving yourself of a pick. If there really is nothing in the booster for you, go for it, but you should, imho, never hatedraft a card over a pick that has potential value in your deck or your sideboard. Remember also that picking a strong off color card might lead the drafter next to you to assume that color isn't open, and the color you are actually drafting is open, because you left in a playable card in the pack. Hate drafting really is bad practice.

 

[Aoret]

Taking a slightly different tack here than everyone else (although I think a lot of this other feedback is good stuff!) I'd highly recommend the modified 4man draft. I wanna say Wadds came up with it, but honestly I read so much about cube that it's kind of all a blur. The tl;dr is you make 36 packs of 10 cards (9 packs per player), each player drafts one card from each pack, trash the other six cards, you get to look at the pack you opened before you trash it for signaling purposes. I've only done it once before so safety not guaranteed, but deck quality was surprisingly good with this method (possibly too good, assuming that's even a thing. Needs more testing).

This would alleviate any concerns about randomly not seeing enough in-color removal when low manning drafts and, in your case, actually preserves some variety a bit better than it does in my case (running at 360).

Totally agree with above comments about running the stats on your as-fan for removal and seeing where you're at in relation to other people, but this draft tweak might supplement what you've got going on.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I will defer to an excellent post on mtgs (yes! they exist!): http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/...raft/131533-the-hatedrafting-thread?comment=1

Hate drafting is basically always wrong if it means you are depriving yourself of a pick. If there really is nothing in the booster for you, go for it, but you should, imho, never hatedraft a card over a pick that has potential value in your deck or your sideboard. Remember also that picking a strong off color card might lead the drafter next to you to assume that color isn't open, and the color you are actually drafting is open, because you left in a playable card in the pack. Hate drafting really is bad practice.

I think the whole "being open" thing isn't nearly as useful in cube where we tend to avoid unplayable cards and end up in situations where people's needs are drastically different. In retail draft, basically everyone always need non-filler creatures and removal over everything else (with some rare exceptions). However, in cube there is a very similar problem: since all of the cards are useful to someone, hatedrafting probably isn't really having much of an effect as everyone is going to find their playables anyway, its a more a matter of maximizing mana curve and synergy (and since you took a card that was useless to you, you have less flexibility in dong so). As such, I completely agree with everything you typed, just for a slightly different reason.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Taking a slightly different tack here than everyone else (although I think a lot of this other feedback is good stuff!) I'd highly recommend the modified 4man draft. I wanna say Wadds came up with it, but honestly I read so much about cube that it's kind of all a blur. The tl;dr is you make 36 packs of 10 cards (9 packs per player), each player drafts one card from each pack, trash the other six cards, you get to look at the pack you opened before you trash it for signaling purposes. I've only done it once before so safety not guaranteed, but deck quality was surprisingly good with this method (possibly too good, assuming that's even a thing. Needs more testing).

This would alleviate any concerns about randomly not seeing enough in-color removal when low manning drafts and, in your case, actually preserves some variety a bit better than it does in my case (running at 360).

Totally agree with above comments about running the stats on your as-fan for removal and seeing where you're at in relation to other people, but this draft tweak might supplement what you've got going on.

Yeah, this is a me-format, with some modifications by somebody else on the forums. I've yet to try it with passing packs, but it sounds much better.

 

[Aoret]

It left me with a really strong impression that I could basically draft whatever I wanted, which I'm not sure is what I want to create. I never felt any real struggle for cards I wanted. This could be because my playgroup is finally learning to listen to signals (decks were: UW, RB, UW, BG around the table)

Maybe it doesn't matter, because I still got the feeling of creating a deck out of an interesting universe, it was still skill testing in the sense that I had to make smart choices about deck composition (due to having fewer picks overall), and I still got to play games of magic with cube decks. I felt like it lacked the tension of an 8 man, but I think the solution for this is probably to have four more friends rather than to go super deep trying to come up with a cooler way to draft when you don't have enough bros.


...if I had to suggest further tweaks though, I guess maybe sending packs around a little bit further and reducing the number of packs probably has some mileage, but I'm too lazy atm to do the math on what that might look like. There's also the issue of destroying the elegance that is 36 packs of 10 cards with each player picking one card per pack. It's dead simple to explain and my playgroup adapted to it instantly.

 

[Jason Waddell]

It left me with a really strong impression that I could basically draft whatever I wanted, which I'm not sure is what I want to create. I never felt any real struggle for cards I wanted. This could be because my playgroup is finally learning to listen to signals (decks were: UW, RB, UW, BG around the table)

Maybe it doesn't matter, because I still got the feeling of creating a deck out of an interesting universe, it was still skill testing in the sense that I had to make smart choices about deck composition (due to having fewer picks overall), and I still got to play games of magic with cube decks. I felt like it lacked the tension of an 8 man, but I think the solution for this is probably to have four more friends rather than to go super deep trying to come up with a cooler way to draft when you don't have enough bros.


...if I had to suggest further tweaks though, I guess maybe sending packs around a little bit further and reducing the number of packs probably has some mileage, but I'm too lazy atm to do the math on what that might look like. There's also the issue of destroying the elegance that is 36 packs of 10 cards with each player picking one card per pack. It's dead simple to explain and my playgroup adapted to it instantly.

Yeah, I don't think it's perfect by any means, but it's surprisingly difficult to come up with something that tops the depth and tension of a regular 8-person draft.

I'm not sure exactly what the history of Booster drafting is, I wonder what iterations it went through, or if the first attempt (let's open 3 packs, left right left) just worked so well.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Yeah, I don't think it's perfect by any means, but it's surprisingly difficult to come up with something that tops the depth and tension of a regular 8-person draft.

I'm not sure exactly what the history of Booster drafting is, I wonder what iterations it went through, or if the first attempt (let's open 3 packs, left right left) just worked so well.

I can confirm that as far back as Ice Age (1995), people were doing the same booster draft format they are doing today. I don't remember there being any other draft format before that. Seal deck existed since the very beginning and was the first limited variant. I remember people doing Solomon draft as far back as Mirage for 1v1 drafts. I'm not sure when Rochester draft started, but people were definitely doing it by Urza's Block for team drafts. I don't remember ever doing it for Tempest but it might have been around a little earlier.

 

[Aoret]

I can confirm that as far back as Ice Age (1995), people were doing the same booster draft format they are doing today. I don't remember there being any other draft format before that. Seal deck existed since the very beginning and was the first limited variant. I remember people doing Solomon draft as far back as Mirage for 1v1 drafts. I'm not sure when Rochester draft started, but people were definitely doing it by Urza's Block for team drafts. I don't remember ever doing it for Tempest but it might have been around a little earlier.

I'd be fascinated to learn about the origin story of booster draft. You definitely helped put a time bracket around it FSR. If somebody doesn't beat me to it I may scour the internet to try to figure out who first came up with "3 packs, LRL" booster draft

 

[Eric Chan]

FSR, I'd be fascinated to know more about the history of early limited Magic play. Was Ice Age as bad as everyone makes it sound? How did sealed decks look in those days - with creatures as small as they were, was it still a midrange-fest like it is nowadays?

We should start a thread for you, "Story time with Uncle FSR".

 

[Jason Waddell]

FSR, I'd be fascinated to know more about the history of early limited Magic play. Was Ice Age as bad as everyone makes it sound? How did sealed decks look in those days - with creatures as small as they were, was it still a midrange-fest like it is nowadays?

We should start a thread for you, "Story time with Uncle FSR".

How FSR single-handedly invented cube and not that one guy who came here that one time.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Ice Age was really bad limited. For the people who drafted it, it was the first time they ever drafted, so I think people gave it a pass based on the novelty of it, but everything about it was terrible. The difference between Ice Age x3 and any combination of three packs from the Mirage block is completely night and day. I doubt they were actively trying to make it a better draft format, but the card quality was just way more consistent and there were are lot less build arounds that were pointless for limited so it worked a million times better.

Sealed deck I don't remember too well, because I didn't like it, but I remember my sister won a 32 man release tournament thanks to getting sleight of mind along with northern paladin, abbey gargoyles and white knight plus like three useful fliers and a strip mine. Nothing against my awesome sister, but she was a pretty casual player and she just stomped everyone thanks to her bomby pool. I'm pretty sure most games were like that. Just look at the setlist for 4th or revised, so many of the cards are just worthless that you could easily get a pool with almost nothing to work with. I also remember her prize for the tournament was a box of homelands (that was the release!) which as we all know is worthless and a pack of legends, which even at the time cost over $20 because that set was severely underprinted. Her rare was Killer Bees, which was already complete crap as it had been reprinted in 4th edition. In hindsight 15 years later, the pack actually wasn't that bad: one of the uncommons was Karakas, which was only worth like 50 cents at the time.

 

[Aoret]

*stares into the campfire* and THEN what happened?