Technically these are three simple (and awesome) ways to improve qualifying for the Pro Tour, but its the same idea. The PTQ scene has exploded in the last two years, making the dream of qualifying and playing in a Pro Tour harder than ever before. With many PTQs now going to nine rounds of swiss, it would be very nice if there were some simple and better ways to get to the big game. Here are some that I've been mulling over for a while:
1) Turn all Specific Grand Prix trials into Generic Grand Prix Trials. This is done at PTs and GPs, why not do it locally also? It's frustrating to see Grand Prix trials in your area, only to have them for a GP that you can't attend, when there might be one you could attend later in the year. It would create a market for GPTs to be held FAR more often, and encourage people to play in them far more. And more opportunities to play Magic is a good thing.
2) Have Grand Prix award generic invites - Again, one of the worst part about Grand Prix is that you can end up qualifying for a Pro Tour that you can't afford to attend. Getting $500 for 16th is nice, but if that ticket to Japan is 1,100, you could easily be priced out. It would also let Wizards hold Grand Prix with different (and more varied) formats than just Qualifier Season with a few Legacy events thrown in. I, for one, would LOVE to see another 2HG or some other team format Grand Prix without requiring WotC to figure out how to make a Pro Tour mixed format teams. (Though, I would love to see a Teams PT as well) I'd even argue that it would be better to vary the Grand Prix season formats from the PTQ season formats just to give people a break. Limited in the middle of the standard season? Yes, please.
3) Qualify the top 25 unqualified "PTQ Road Warriors" a season. WotC could work this out through some kind of point system similar to that of PT points. You get 6 points for a PTQ top8, 8 points for a top 4 and 10 for a finals (for instance). If you didn't make GPs generic, you could include points for top 32/64. You could also add some number for playing PTQ or GPs (though this might require a lot more record keeping). Maybe more, maybe less on the exact number of points (you don't want to make one finals better than two top8s), but you get the idea. The people who are going blood, sweat and tears to qualify, hitting eight, nine, or ten qualifiers per season and doing consistently well can be rewarded. No ticket, no hotel, just the opportunity to play in the Pro Tour. You can even track this weekly on The Week That Was and get people excited about grinding out PTQs. And let me tell you what, making to early top8s is going to convince a lot of people to get fired up about the season.
A lot of people might think that rating invites do the same thing that the Road Warrior awards would, but that just isn't the case. It's basically impossible to get up to a qualifying rating playing in PTQs alone. You need a strong run at a GP or PT to get over the 2020 hump (which is where you really stop gaining any kind of meaningful points per win at PTQs) and up to the 2050s-2070s to qualify.
There would be a lot of details to work on out this. Ideally there would also need to be some kind of balance to make up for region (otherwise it could easily become an extra 25 slots in the Midwest/northeast that have a disproportionately large number of PTQs compared to other regions of the US/world). But it would be awesome to REALLY reward the PTQ grinders who might be good enough to play on the PT, but can’t handle the variance of needing to go something around 10-1-1 in a tournament to qualify.
What do you think? Would these suggestions or something like it inspire you to work harder at the game? What small changes to the qualifying system would get you to go to a few more PTQs/Grand Prix a year?
Friday, March 5, 2010
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
In Contention #4
In Contention Podcast #4 - PTQ Discussion w/ Adam Yurchick and DJ Kastner. http://mtgcast.com/?p=2778
Friday, October 2, 2009
In Contention #3
In Contention Podcast Episode #3 is up - http://mtgcast.com/?p=2698 Zen Limited and a BDM interview.
Friday, September 25, 2009
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.
http://mtgcast.com/?p=2642
Please leave comments here or on MTGcast.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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.
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.
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