General Lessons Learned

[Aoret]

I thought it might be cool to have a thread to post little tidbits learned from our cube sessions. These can be more on the design side or on the draft/play strategy side. More and more I'm realizing that if I want to get better as a designer, I also need to improve as a player.

I'll start us off: in my last grid draft session versus Safra I tried to build a synergistic BR sacrifice deck, starting my draft with a few early enablers for the archetype. Unfortunately, I didn't end up opening packs with many incentive cards and ended up getting trumped by a more generic value deck. This kinda reminded me of what's good/possible in grid draft as a format. What I was trying to do was almost the equivalent of drafting ramp in a modo cube; had I been successful, I would likely have crushed, but the strategy I chose was inherently high variance.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Grid as a whole requires you to pick broader archetypes. In a regular draft, you pick 45 cards one at a time, giving you plenty of precision, but 16 picks of 2-3 cards is unlikely to give you the tools for a deck whose strength comes from synergy over raw power.

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

Not removing important packages like reaniamtor and fixing prior to shuffling up a 360 for 6 people and then seeding (shuffling in) the packages leads to lopsided drafts. One player was super unhappy about my reaniamtor support until he found out it had all ended up in the 90 cards we didn't draft.

 

[Eric Chan]

Not removing important packages like reaniamtor and fixing prior to shuffling up a 360 for 6 people and then seeding (shuffling in) the packages leads to lopsided drafts. One player was super unhappy about my reaniamtor support until he found out it had all ended up in the 90 cards we didn't draft.

I've taken to making my six-mans use slightly more cards these days for this exact reason; I was first prompted to make this change by attempting to draft U/R Delver, and realizing later that two of my three Delvers weren't in circulation. Now I give people three packs of sixteen cards apiece when we only have six drafters, which opens up slightly more of the total card pool and reduces the risk that all of one archetype's key cards are still in the cube box.

Giving people access to more cards has the side benefit of increasing overall deck quality, too, to something more akin to an eight-man draft.

 

[Aoret]

You can also just add a 4th pack to each drafter in a 6 man, and burn the last 4 cards in the pack. This gives you 44 cards instead of 45, with the added benefit of seeing all 360 cards from your cube. Deck quality should end up slightly higher than an 8 man with this method.

 

[Laz]

I've taken to making my six-mans use slightly more cards these days for this exact reason; I was first prompted to make this change by attempting to draft U/R Delver, and realizing later that two of my three Delvers weren't in circulation. Now I give people three packs of sixteen cards apiece when we only have six drafters, which opens up slightly more of the total card pool and reduces the risk that all of one archetype's key cards are still in the cube box.

Giving people access to more cards has the side benefit of increasing overall deck quality, too, to something more akin to an eight-man draft.

I do 4 packs of 15, burn the last 4 cards of each pack. That uses 360 cards, but dramatically increases deck quality (mostly because less people are fighting over fixing).

Lesson Learned: It doesn't matter how innocuous it looks, Sword of the Meek + Thopter Foundry is too strong, though bizarrely, probably not if you aren't supporting other artifact themes (though then answers are even thinner on the ground). Cards like Tezzeret or Academy Ruins just make it too reliable and resilient.

 

[Eric Chan]

I did four packs of twelve cards for a while myself, and while it solves the problem with deck quality, over the years I gradually realized that it introduces another subtle problem: signalling. When you have the same number of packs going left versus going right, you're more liable to get away with forcing a colour pair or a deck theme. Because you now have two packs going to the right in which you can impose your will, rather than just one, players get into bad habits of ignoring the signals sent to them in packs one and three, putting their blinders up and doing their thing, and still being rewarded with a passable to good deck.

I didn't like the draft dynamics that an even number of packs introduced, so I'm now back to three packs of slightly larger size.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Why not just pick some numbers that let you use all 360 cards, but each player only gets ~45.

4 packs of 15. Last two packs: whenever you take a card from the pack, burn a card from that pack. Players end up with 15 + 15 + 8 + 8 = 46 cards, and you see the whole cube, and it's easy to explain.

If you wanted an odd number of packs, you could do the same thing with 5 packs of 12. Then.... 12 + 12 + 12 + 6 + 6 = 48 probably works.


OR

Go more extreme with the burning, play six-player Tenchester where you pass the packs instead of having them face up on the table.

 

[Eric Chan]

"Seeing the whole cube" isn't necessarily the goal here, at least, not for me - I'm okay with a small amount of random variance in the available card pool when we're not at a full eight players. If I have five reanimation spells in my cube, I'm comfortable with variance eating one or two of those spells in a six-man.

You could argue that giving players access to the entire cube is a little too good, because there's inherently less competition for each archetype - if I'm in white aggro, there's a lower chance that someone else is fighting me for those cards when there's two empty seats. Not having the entire card list at your disposal brings back some of the jostling for good cards that's healthy, in my opinion.

The fun part about three huge packs is that there's way more signalling going on for everyone to read, too - with fewer players at the table, packs come back to you with a full ten cards or so, and you can plan out your draft strategy more.