General Sign up for 4-player Grid Drafting!

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
EDIT: Now taking sign-ups for 4p grid drafting.


1. Jason
2. Kirblinx
3. Dom Harvey
4.

EDIT: I can upload the file at the start of the thread. Should work, but if you have a better idea let me know.

This is a bit of a public brainstorm. So, I wanted to be able to do 4-player grid drafts via the forums. The problem, naturally, is that the packs in a 4p grid draft are changed as people make their picks. But what if.... what if we made a list of all possible packs, and a "choose your own" adventure way to find them.

e.g. if Kirblinx takes Row 1 (r1) of Pack 1, he looks up pack1r1 in the table for the next person to use.

Behold:
pack1r2r1 - James Stevenson




Row 1: (up next: pack1r2r1r1)
1 Brindle Shoat
1 Pillar of Flame
1 Temple Garden

Row 2: (up next: pack1r2r1r2)
1 Pernicious Deed
1 Angel of Serenity
1 Qasali Pridemage

Row 2: (up next: pack1r2r1r3)
1 Harrow
1 Lingering Souls
1 Man-o'-War

Column 1: (up next: pack1r2r1c1)
1 Brindle Shoat
1 Pernicious Deed
1 Harrow

Column 2: (up next: pack1r2r1c2)
1 Pillar of Flame
1 Angel of Serenity
1 Lingering Souls

Column 3: (up next: pack1r2r1c3)
1 Temple Garden
1 Qasali Pridemage
1 Man-o'-War

The code to create all of this is already in place. The problem? The resulting file is like 180k lines long. This isn't too bad in terms of file size (187 kilobytes), but I can't actually get this to paste into the forums.

Possible solutions:
1) upload the file as a file (either to the thread, or, externally somewhere)
2) ??? (ideas?)

Any and all input welcome!
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Benjamin's idea:





Then players have to manually fill in the refills.
Pros:
- simplicity (no crazy large file)
- all web-based (don't have to download anything)

Cons:
- more room for error (players have to fill out the new spoiler tags manually)
- more manual effort
- can't copy / paste your selection quickly
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Someone in skype asked for a sample file. See attached.

Was thinking of a team variant. I want it to be not a completely shared pool, but sometimes you can strategically nab a pick for your partner. What if the two of you are able to transfer a total of 10 cards between pools. e.g.
6 cards from Player A -> Player B
4 cards from Player B -> Player A

Would end up with slightly tighter decks, maybe gives aggro a bit of a bump, but you still have to primarily draft a deck for yourself, since ~18/23 of your playables will come from cards you drafted yourself.
 

Attachments

  • gridDraft4p.txt
    192 KB · Views: 4

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
So some of you may of forgotten that we did this. We finished up the draft a couple of weeks ago and have been trying to plan some games. Safra and myself got to play each other today and we had some pretty tight games. So I was on BW control and Safra was on Mardu aggro. Which lead to some awkward situations with the 'nonblack' creature removal :p

I would post my decklist, but I still need to play Jason, so I want to keep some surprises for him.

Here are the videos of my three matches with Safra. I believe they all went to three games, which shows how tight it was. The best game was probably M1G3, where I god draw myself out of a mull to 5 to make for a extremely tight game.
Match 1:
Match 2:
Match 3:
I might do another post later with some of the sick plays in text form so you don't have to suffer through my boring videos.
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
So I played against Jason yesterday in a great 5-game set. Since I have now played both opponents this was my deck:
jXBYT9P.png

I kept doing a lot of swaps during the sideboards. Against Safra I would bring in the Prowler and Inquisition and take out Karn and Thoughtseize. Against Jason I would bring in the Inquisition, Scroll Rack and Terminus and take out the Condemn, Perilous Myr and Hero of Bladehold (unsure of the cut there).

Here are my games I had against Jason:
Games 1-3:
Games 4-5:
So I managed to just beat Jason 3-2. Game 4 was extremely tense and I might write up some of the clutch plays later (even though I said that with Safra's match and I am yet to do that :p).
Also, since I didn't mention it above, I beat Safra in all three matches, but each went to 3 games. So it was 6-3 in our 9 games. My back seems to be a bit sore from carrying the team. I hope Dom manages to take some of the load off when he plays some matches.

Best card in the deck by far:

At times he felt like my only win condition. He is also one of my only sources of card advantage so I always had to make sure the coast was clear when I put him down. I don't think I lost a game where I cast him. Every card pulled their weight pretty well. Ophiomancer might have been the best card if I had ever seen it against Safra, but it still did a lot of good work to give Jason headaches.

Overall I am happy with how our decks have turned out (even though we haven't seen Dom's yet) and the drafting process wasn't that bad, only took a couple of weeks. I can see myself doing this every now and then as a forum game.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I think Sun Titan and Hero of Bladehold qualify as win conditions. I do like that you were able to field a straight-up functional two color deck.
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I think Sun Titan and Hero of Bladehold qualify as win conditions. I do like that you were able to field a straight-up functional two color deck.
They do qualify as win conditions, but due to both you and Safra having non-black removal (Shriekmaw and Malicious Affliction respectively) I knew it had a decent chance of staying on the board. Plus flying is a big boon, as the ground was always clogged up in all of my matches (what use is the mass removal :\).

I think I forced myself into the two colours pretty early with my dedication of forcing black. It seemed like a pretty good decsion since most people wouldn't want to pick them up later since there a lot of CC spells in black to make it harder to splash than other colours (which didn't stop either you or Safra I guess). Dom and Safra being all over the place probably helped us have more cohesive looking drafts instead of all of us falling down that same hole. I had enough lands to splash green, but didn't really feel the need, I was having enough trouble with cuts already and thought Dom could use the green for consistency.

I feel you could have also easily just been UG, but that Grave Titan was too enticing not to splash for and it was the only thing in your deck that really gave me fits. Having 3 main deck answers to Planeswalkers was all part of my draft plan (I hope he buys that).
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
My mana was pretty great, the splash felt fairly free. I think I played one basic swamp? My deck felt a bit light on meat and answers, and all the removal came from black. Would have had to draft very differently to get UG to function properly.
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I guess the real question is when can we run another one?

Acceptable answers:
1. Right now!
2. After Dom and Safra fight for 4P-Grid supremacy!
3. Who are you and get your grubby mitts off my cube!
 

Kirblinx

Developer
Staff member
I'm game. I do live in Europe, in case that is a problem.

If anything, that is great, as that is where Jason is anyway.

All that we ask is that you check the site at least once (if not twice) a day to see if it is your turn to pick. The draft stalling out over a couple of days gets annoying is all.
We can play whenever, there is no rush in this process. Heck, it took us 3 weeks until any of us had actually played a game!
 
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