New Podcast

Out goes the joke name, in comes the real name - "In Contention". Zen Spoilers and Online PTQs.

http://mtgcast.com/?p=2642

Please leave comments here or on MTGcast.

Podcasting

Reuben Bressler's Little Urban Achievers, the Magic podcast I am on with Nick Dies, Colin Casto, and featuring Andy Cooperfauss and Dan McCartney is live on iTunes and MTGcast. http://mtgcast.com/?p=2458

The first episode is pretty rough. I knew that just sitting down and attempting to podcast without too much preparation would be hard, but it was harder than I thought. I did plenty of "Uhs" and "Ums" too, which is something i'm trying to work on. Take a listen though, and give us any feedback you might have.

Looking at the Window of Opportunity

This article is about a concept relating to drafting that I have been mulling over for a while. I’m sure there are some kinks in the idea that I need to work out, but I think it will provide for some insights on how to view the draft as a whole, not as a simple series of picks.

Until you can figure out how to magically will card into packs (see Maverick) there is no way to guarantee that you will open an individual card in a pack, or you can automatically go into a single draft strategy. In each pack, you have about a 10% chance of seeing a specific common, a 5% chance of an uncommon, a 1.5% chance of a rare, and .75% chance of a rare. There is more to the story, in the entire draft 2.4 of each common will be opened, 1.2 of each uncommon, .2 of each mythic rare, and .4 of each rare. Of course a single doom blade, or 3, does not a deck make. You shouldn’t be planning on what to draft before you open up a pack, but let’s say you first picked a doomblade. A solid first pick. Now you need other cards. For simplicity’s sake, let’s look at all the cards you’d want play in black in m10:
Common:
Assassinate
Child of Night
Doom Blade
Dread Warlock
GraveDigger
Kelinore Bat
Looming Shade
Mind Rot
Tendils of Corruption
Sign in Blood
Warpath ghoul
Uncommon:

Black Knight
Bog Wraith
Consume Spirit
Diabolic Tutor
Howling Banshee
Rise from the Grave

Rare:
Cemetery Reaper
Hypnotic Spectre
Mind Shatter
Nightmare
Royal Assasin
Xatharid Demon


Mythic:
Lilliana Vess
Vampire Nocturnus

That’s 11 commons, 6 uncommons, 6 rares, and 2 mythics.
There will be variances due to common runs, but before it’s opened, a pack will have 1.1 of these commons, .3 of these uncommons, .1 of these rares, and .016 of these mythics. A total of around 1.5 cards. That puts around 36 of these cards being opened up in a single draft. Going mono is going to be very hard, which is why you generally pick up two colors in draft. The pack you receive from your right will have a card missing, hopefully not in black (we’ll go over the importance of knowing common runs in another post), and you will have to begin to make value judgments based on what is left in the pack and what is already in your stack of drafted cards.
First pick , first pack, with no bias yet for the colors you already have, or the strategy of your deck, chances are you are going to pick what you believe is the best card in the pack. As the packs go around the table and you begin to fight with the players around you for resources and the dwindling number of good cards.
Every card in the set has a window of opportunity where you have a good chance of seeing that card. The window of opportunity is directly tied to the raw power of the card, and, generally, how much it’s worth. A card like Baneslayer Angel has a base WoO of 1. Baring a foil Baneslayer, you will never see this beyond your packs in a draft. Jitte and Masticore had a base WoO of 1, as would Wrath of God and Broodmate Dragon as well. Looking at some of the traditional 1st pick cards, something like Mind Control, Fireball, or Overrun have WoOs around 2. If a rare or another uncommon is missing, then someone could have taken a better card over this. If you see a card after its WoO should have closed, then it is a signal that the color, or strategy, is open. Doomblade has a WoO of around 3, Lightning Bolt around the same, and Pacifism around a 4. In m10, mana fixers like Teramorphic Expanse, Rampant Growth and Boarderland Ranger have WoOs of around 5-6.

These numbers are probably not totally accurate, but here are some estimates on the WoOs for the black cards above:
Common:
Assassinate (5)
Child of Night (6)
Doom Blade (3)
Dread Warlock (4)
GraveDigger (4)
Kelinore Bat (6)
Looming Shade (5)
Mind Rot (6)
Tendils of Corruption (4)
Sign in Blood (4)
Warpath ghoul (7)
Uncommon:

Black Knight (4)
Bog Wraith (6)
Consume Spirit (4)
Diabolic Tutor (5)
Howling Banshee (3)
Rise from the Grave (4)

Rare:
Cemetery Reaper (2)
Hypnotic Spectre (2)
Mind Shatter (3)
Nightmare (4)
Royal Assasin (2)
Xatharid Demon (3)


Mythic:
Lilliana Vess (2)
Vampire Nocturnus (3)
Some of the cards with higher color commitments, even early in the first pack, have disproportional WoOs to their power levels. Tendrils and Nightmare are great cards, but they require a very heavy, sometimes mono, black commitment. In a set like m10 there are a lot of bomb rares and bomb uncommons, so seeing a 3rd pick Doomblade isn’t out of the ordinary.
Your goal, in any draft, is to be at the right place in the draft where you will receive as many cards as possible beyond their standard window of opportunity. This will maximize your chances of having the highest quality deck possible. You can do this by dumb luck (going mono black next to people who independently decided to go g/w and r/u), or by engineering your spot through what you pick and what you pass. This often means passing
During the second pack, these numbers change significantly, both depending on what has been opened and on the colors around you. While someone playing blue/green may 1st pick a Fireball, they will not first pick a Royal Assassin. In fact, if you have successfully signaled the players downstream from you, and they are locked into colors, you can easily increase the WoOs of these cards by 1 or more. It would be not uncommon to get a 3rd or 4th pick Doomblade if the two players next to you are Blue/White and Green/Red. You are getting all the black picks from those players. However, if you first picked a Royal Assassin over Doomblade and Howling Banshee, you can count on reducing those WoOs by at least one if not two for pack 2. This should give you an idea of why it’s often a good decision to take the less powerful card in your opening pack if it means passing the two players left of you out of at least one of your colors.
Tied to that, if there were no mana fixers opened up in the first pack, you should expect to see the mana fixers in pack 2 and 3 valued higher. This isn’t as significant for m10, but it should impact how high you take them in packs 2 and 3 in an ACR draft.
WoOs also should speak to how you value the types of cards in a draft. Let’s look at just the commons and uncommon above, and divide them into what role they serve in your deck:
Creatures
Child of Night (6)
GraveDigger (4)
Looming Shade (5)
Warpath ghoul (7)
Black Knight (4)
Bog Wraith (6)
Evasion Creatures
Dread Warlock (4)
Kelinore Bat (6)
Howling Banshee (3)
Removal
Assassinate (5)
Doom Blade (3)
Tendils of Corruption (4)
Consume Spirit (4)
Card Draw
Sign in Blood (4)

Other
Mind Rot (6)
Diabolic Tutor (5)
Rise from the Grave (4)


The latest pick you will probably be seeing removal in black is around 5th pick. The same can be said for removal in most colors – the WoO is much lower than that of your average creature. Take removal first, and creatures second. Within the creatures, let’s look at it by casting cost:

2
Child of Night (6)
Black Knight (4)
3
Looming Shade (5)
Warpath ghoul (7)
Dread Warlock (4)
Kelinore Bat (6)
Howling Banshee (3)
4
GraveDigger (4)
Bog Wraith (6)

As you can see, the three drop in Black is overloaded. With only two good two-drops, you should be taking them earlier than you might normally unless you pair it with a color that does have a number of good two-drops (like white). Being aware of how late you can expect to see cards at each casting cost lets you prioritize two cards of fairly similar power level early on based on how you can find similar cards to fill in the gaps for your deck later on.
One last thing to mention about WoOs. Let’s say you see a Tome Scour in your 1st pack, one in your 2nd pack, then you get passed a 3rd pick Traumatize. Do you go into the Tome Scour deck? Well, what gets opened in the first set of packs has no real bearing on what gets opened in the following set of packs, especially with the rares appearing twice on the rare sheet. It is very common now to see the same rare multiple times in a draft. Still, the odds of you seeing another Traumatize is low, but if you know you will see another two Tomescours (that card has a WoO over eight so you will probably see every one that is opened) in this pack. There is also an 80% chance of any given common being opened in one of the next round of boosters, so you should see between one and two more Tomescours in the subsequent packs. Should you go into it? Probably not, but you are very likely to end up with a draft deck that would include a Traumatize and four Tomescours. If that is enough for you to draft the wacky deck, then by all means do so. If you choose to go red, Burning Inquiry also has a WoO over eight, so you will see every one of those as well.

This idea is still pretty early in its development for me. I’m still trying to work out numbers, the kinks, and figure out how to apply it to improving my own drafting. The cards that most interest me in regard to them right now are the allies in Zendikar, which will probably require two main card types – allies and mana fixing. Figuring out how to prioritize those properly will probably spell the difference between a good Ally deck, or one that is overloaded with mana fixing, or one that has to stretch its fixing too thin to support the great allies you have.

Swiss Drafting, and why you should be doing it

As Zendikar spoilers keep coming in, I want to take a look at the limited environment and talk about how to win PTQs.

As the majority of cards spoiled so far are rares, and we don't have a real grasp on that format yet, I'm going to start off with better ways to test limited.

The PTQ Top8 format is slightly different than normal drafting. Not mechanically, but in the risk/rewards. While most drafts from FNM to the Pro Tour encourage you to have a winning record, the PTQ top8 doesn't care about anything but a win. It's all or nothing every game. And it isn't just six packs you're going for, it's a spot on the Pro Tour and a plane ticket.

The MODO 8-4s get close to this, but it's still not quite the same. You are still looking to make the finals with your deck, and possibly split. You can have a moral victory of making the finals of a PTQ, but in the end, it doesn't matter if you went 0-1 or 2-1, all that matters is this loss. You need to be prepared to play for 3-0.

Part of that means playing at your highest level, but it's also your strategy in how you draft your deck. You need to be aware of the popular decks in the format, especially whatever deck is regarded as the best. In m10, if you think mono black is the best deck, you should either be drafting it, or actively looking for sideboard cards against it. Those cards are most obvious with the color hosers in m10, but in a block like Alara, it may mean taking the Fracture Filagrees higher than normal because Esper is the best deck, and you need to be able to beat it. You should be sideboarding a lot more in a top8 draft than you are used to.

In formats with linear deck strategies (say a tribal block), you want to be focused on one of those strategies. That may mean making a commitment to a strategy far earlier than you are used to, but you aren't playing it safe. You are playing to win.

You also need to work very hard on reading signals and being very aware of the cards you pass. A train wreck in a team draft isn't usually that bad because you end up hurting the two people next to you as well. If it is a total disaster, and both you and the two people next to you 1-2, your team is up +1 matches. That can be a good thing. A train wreck won't prevent you from 2-1ing, but going 3-0 is going to be hard, if not impossible.

As I learn more about the Zendikar format, I will be able to talk better about the individual pitfalls of that format, but for now I just want to go over how to do a swiss draft.

Swiss drafting

The set up is pretty simple. Get eight people together (seven works too, which is nice, since this is the only legitimate draft format I know of that can handle seven people without too much of a problem. Seat people randomly and draft. At the end, play the person across from you.

The most common way to do it would be to pair randomly with people with the same record as you. You will play three rounds, then divide the rares up like this:

1st place - 2 picks

2nd place - 1 pick (lost in finals)

3rd & 4th - 1 pick (roll to determine who goes first). Then repeat the rare picking with the 1st place only getting one.

In this situation, you are heavily rewarded for winning, and somewhat rewarded for making 2nd. The advantage of this system, especially early on during a set's release, is that you get to play a lot more magic and learn the cards. The down side if you are still being rewarded for going 2-1. This would be perfect for testing for PTs and GPs, but not PTQs.

Once you are familiar with the format, if you want to get really ready for the top8 draft, play a swiss draft out as single elimination with the winner getting everything. No take-backs, no mercy. The winner walks away with 24 rares. The losers have to wait for everyone else to finish. It seems pretty draconian, but it helps you get used to the pressure of the situation. If you are in the top8, you are there to win, not to put up a respectable performance. You need to get used to paying for your mistakes and really reaping the rewards for your successes. You need to get used to fighting for every win and making the tough decisions in both drafting and playing that are required to get there.

I wouldn't play hardcore drafts all the time - 3v3s are just more fun - but doing a few to practice for the PTQ season will get you in the mindset you need to win once you make the top8.