Been giving a thought about starting my own business lately. Just wondering if I may be getting in over my head if I do so though.
Guess I should do some research and see what I come up with.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
On drafting
As in Magic: the Gathering drafting. Just got back from what is possibly, no, DEFINITELY the best draft I have had ever.
For those not familiar, Magic: the Gathering (or MTG for short) is a fantasy collectible card game (CCG) where one takes the role of a powerful planeswalker/mage wielding spells that correspond to various colors. Each color does different things, and there are five colors to choose from. White is the color of order and life. Green is the color of nature and power. Red is the color of fire and elemental magic. Blue is the color of control and the mind, and Black is the color of death and decay.
During normal magic, each player has a deck of 60 cards (minimum) and tries their best to get cards that work well together in order to complete a win condition. Most people choose to just go with a straight life win where they work towards turning their opponents life from twenty down to zero. There are other win conditions though, decking an opponent (making them run out of cards to draw), pulling together a combo to do something big and flashy, or use certain cards that have their own individual win condition. The most common by far is just to beat your opponent with your spells until they run out of life.
Now during what is considered a limited event, because you only need 40 cards and you don't come with cards of your own, you try to build a deck with whatever cards you get. The two limited events most played are Sealed Tournaments and Booster Draft Tournaments. In a sealed, you are given a certain amount of 15 card booster packs, usually 6, and have to make a 40 card deck out of the cards you get. Now when I give numbers like 40 cards, or 60 cards, this is usually the amount of cards needed including lands. Lands are the resource you tap in order to make the cards in your hand usable. Most 60 card decks have about 23-27 lands, and most 40 card decks have 18-16. That makes it easier to get an opening hand of cards that have enough lands to do stuff.
I know I am kind of jumping all over and for those that have no idea what this game is will be completely lost as I am kind of making things a bit to simplistic, but just bear with me, I have an end to this I swear.
Back to the other limited game played, the Booster Draft. This is where you sit at a table with 6-10 (8 is best) other players. Each player gets 3 booster packs of cards. You open the first pack, pick what you think is the best card and then pass the remaining cards to your left. You then take the best card from the pack you just got passed and pass the remaining cards to the left. This continues for the first pack until all cards have been chosen by people at the table. You will always end up with 15 cards as you are only allowed to take one card at a time before passing. This ensures that it's even and also makes you think big picture. After pack one is done, then you open pack two and repeat the process of taking the best cards, but instead of passing to the left, you pass to the right. This ensures that you see different types of cards, as if you pass all left then people will only chose certain colors and you may not get enough cards to make a viable deck. After pack two is done, you open pack three, take the best and then pass the rest of the cards back to the left. By mixing up the order you ensure that one person isn't "feeding" another player really good cards and pretty much cheating. After all cards from every pack has been picked, people then split up and create decks of 40 cards to compete with. The tough part of drafting is trying to stay with a theme and color choice as each color works well with it's own color and two other friendly colors (red-green/black, green-red/white, white-green/blue, blue-white/black, black-blue/red) Only seeing one pack of cards at a time and picking the best means you need to think big and plan a deck while you also study the cards being passed around so you know what is being picked by others. It gets complicated.
So now everyone has a 40 card deck, or more if the person is new to drafting which usually happens to the younger crowd as they are more used to 60 card decks. Once everyone is set, a tournament starts where you take on another player in a best of 3 match. The first person to win 2 games (where they either deck their opponent or take their life from 20 down to 0) wins the match and moves up in the standings. The easiest way this is tracked, at least at Outpost 2000 and Beyond, is by having numbered tables. The closest you are to the number one spot, the better you are. For every match won you get 3 points in the tournament every tie is 1 point and every loss is 0. The person with the most points after 3-5 rounds (depending on how many people have entered to play) wins it all. Prizes are then handed out starting from the first place person down to usually the fifth place person, again depending on how many people play, the more that play, the more money that can be spent on prizes to hand out. Prizes are usually handed out in booster packs starting with a high amount for first, then going lower, usually by two, for every spot after the first place person.
Now for my draft, and the reason for this post (told ya I would get to a point). It was 5 rounds with 24 people in it. we had 3 tables of 8 people and were given three boosters, Shards of Alara/Shards of Alara/Conflux.
Path change ahead!
Shards of Alara and Conflux are apart of the Alara block of cards. Wizards of the Coast release cards in "blocks" which is usually a main set (Shards of Alara) and then two mini expansion sets (Conflux, and the soon to be released Alara Reborn) that share the "flavor" of the entire block. The Alara block is about a realm that was split into 5 separate "shard" realms a long time ago. Each shard only had access to 3 of the 5 colors of magic and so each realm has grown to think that there are only 3 colors of magic, or mana. The shards are; Bant: a shard focused on knights, angels and order, and only uses green, white and blue magic. Naya: a shard focused on primal might and ancient creatures and only uses red, white and green magic. Jund: a shard focused on the primal side of life with dragons and goblins and warring tribes and uses red, green and black magic. Grixis: a shard focused on death and decay and has been cut off from the magic of life (green and white) so only uses black, red and blue magic. And finally Esper: a shard focused on methodical thoughts and order to life in the form of artifacts (think machines) and uses only black, white and blue magic. Each shard at the beginning of the block has no idea about the others but soon things change as an immortal evil begins to push the shards back into one whole plane in order to use the run off magic that happens when worlds collide. This starts showing in Conflux where the shards start merging and so people that knew nothing of the other worlds are suddenly and sometimes violently tossed into another world. Chaos ensues as the shards learn of their neighbors, and the best way to stop them from killing them. I think that's all you need to know.
Now back to my draft. I was sitting at a table with my friend Josh, a person that knows this game just as well as I do. So naturally we sit on opposite sides of the table as we don't want to help each other and kind of want to make things fair for others. Also at our table was another top rung player and a handful of mediocre players. As I drafted I found that I was being handed very good Grixis cards (you know, red/black/blue flavored cards focusing on death and zombies and decay and what not) and so went with it. I ended up with a very strong deck. BTW, a Sideboard is a selection of cards that work well with your deck or are anti other colors that you can switch into your maindeck in between games 1 & 2 and games 2 & 3 at a 1:1 basis.
My first opponent was a young man that had a 60 card deck. He was using the Bant colors but really couldn't match the speed of a 40 card deck and I ended up beating him 2-0 pretty quickly.
My next game had me move to table one where I took on a "grizzled" veteran of the game. Unfortunately he has forgotten a lot of the game and so spends a lot of time reading and rereading the cards. He also doesn't play well so things like using the "stack" and spell order and stuff get him frustrated. He had a decent green/red deck but he put to much of his deck into mediocre cards and couldn't keep up with my deck. I beat him 2-0 (after 40 minutes of play and lots of frustration by his bad temper, god he was an ass).
So after two matches I was undefeated.
My next match was against a guy playing another form of a Bant deck. The first game I won easily and he actually beat me the second game when I didn't get a good shuffle and didn't get enough of my blue mana to play my spells. By the time I did it was game over. In the final game I was again shut out of a color, this time black mana and took a pounding to his deck. He also had life gain on his side so by the time I got most of his threats taken care of he had a life total of 40, to my 8. I took out all his guys except one goblin that had evasion and so I couldn't block it. However I did get the Sigil of Distinction into play with a lot of counters and so when I finally had a threat in play he couldn't stop it. I finally top decked (getting lucky and pulling the one card needed off the top of your deck on your draw phase) and had an answer to his goblin. By then I was down to 4. I was able to take him from 40 life to 0 before he could get another threat on the board to beat me. All this with only minutes left to go.
My next match was against a guy that gave Josh his first loss. His deck had a lot of creature removal and a few creatures to take advantage of an empty board. However I had just as many answers to his creatures as he had for mine, however he ran out of removal before I ran out of threats. I was able to beat him,though not exactly easy. Plus our games took a while as we both we trying to figure counters and counter-counters to each others moves. I did beat him 2-0 to move on.
So there I was, 4-0 in my matches and 6-1 in my games. I had the best record there, but since we go by matches I was tied at 12 points with another player. So we had a fifth round to decide the winner. This was anticlimactic though as we found out that the first place winner got 8 packs, and the second place got 4. So we decided to draw our game, thus giving us 13 points and ensuring that we were the first and second place winners and just split the 12 total packs between the two of us. However, for this night there was a special prize for first place. A fat pack box (empty, just an empty box with pretty art on it) and a 20 sided dice (D20 or life counter). Me and my opponent decided to play our games out just to see who would win the two other prizes. Whoever won game one got the box, and game two got the dice.
I kind of knew what kind of deck he had as he was playing next to me during the last match so I knew to keep some cards available. It didn't save me in the first game though as he was able to get a very big mean creature into play that I had no answer for. He got the box. Game two went better as my removal was able to keep up with his threats and I was able to bounce a lot of threats back to his hand and over run him with my guys. I won the D20. We decided to play a third game to just make it an even match. He had some early threats and got me down to about 15 before I took over. He was never really able to recover and I beat him for the final game and thus the match.
Yes I know, had we played out the games, I would have won 8 packs and the box, and the dice. But this was more sporting, that, and the fact that I thought his deck might run me over made me chose the tie over playing it out.
I played 2 more matches, one against Josh and one against Twig, the other friend that came with us. I beat Josh rather easily. He had a decent Naya/Jund deck that used domain to good advantage, but was to slow for my deck. After I beat Josh I took on Twig, and he beat me pretty good. He drafted a pretty decent artifact deck that had very good synergy. I thought he had the best shot out of all of us to win first place, but I think a few bad choices on whether to keep an opening hand cost him when he got screwed out of certain colors of mana and got beat. His was the only deck though to beat me.
I wish I had more people to be happy with me, but my friends we kind of tired and upset at their showing, and The Wife doesn't really care about Magic, so she kinda shuts it out when I talk about it.
Sigh...
Oh well, it's like 4am. I better get to bed.
For those not familiar, Magic: the Gathering (or MTG for short) is a fantasy collectible card game (CCG) where one takes the role of a powerful planeswalker/mage wielding spells that correspond to various colors. Each color does different things, and there are five colors to choose from. White is the color of order and life. Green is the color of nature and power. Red is the color of fire and elemental magic. Blue is the color of control and the mind, and Black is the color of death and decay.
During normal magic, each player has a deck of 60 cards (minimum) and tries their best to get cards that work well together in order to complete a win condition. Most people choose to just go with a straight life win where they work towards turning their opponents life from twenty down to zero. There are other win conditions though, decking an opponent (making them run out of cards to draw), pulling together a combo to do something big and flashy, or use certain cards that have their own individual win condition. The most common by far is just to beat your opponent with your spells until they run out of life.
Now during what is considered a limited event, because you only need 40 cards and you don't come with cards of your own, you try to build a deck with whatever cards you get. The two limited events most played are Sealed Tournaments and Booster Draft Tournaments. In a sealed, you are given a certain amount of 15 card booster packs, usually 6, and have to make a 40 card deck out of the cards you get. Now when I give numbers like 40 cards, or 60 cards, this is usually the amount of cards needed including lands. Lands are the resource you tap in order to make the cards in your hand usable. Most 60 card decks have about 23-27 lands, and most 40 card decks have 18-16. That makes it easier to get an opening hand of cards that have enough lands to do stuff.
I know I am kind of jumping all over and for those that have no idea what this game is will be completely lost as I am kind of making things a bit to simplistic, but just bear with me, I have an end to this I swear.
Back to the other limited game played, the Booster Draft. This is where you sit at a table with 6-10 (8 is best) other players. Each player gets 3 booster packs of cards. You open the first pack, pick what you think is the best card and then pass the remaining cards to your left. You then take the best card from the pack you just got passed and pass the remaining cards to the left. This continues for the first pack until all cards have been chosen by people at the table. You will always end up with 15 cards as you are only allowed to take one card at a time before passing. This ensures that it's even and also makes you think big picture. After pack one is done, then you open pack two and repeat the process of taking the best cards, but instead of passing to the left, you pass to the right. This ensures that you see different types of cards, as if you pass all left then people will only chose certain colors and you may not get enough cards to make a viable deck. After pack two is done, you open pack three, take the best and then pass the rest of the cards back to the left. By mixing up the order you ensure that one person isn't "feeding" another player really good cards and pretty much cheating. After all cards from every pack has been picked, people then split up and create decks of 40 cards to compete with. The tough part of drafting is trying to stay with a theme and color choice as each color works well with it's own color and two other friendly colors (red-green/black, green-red/white, white-green/blue, blue-white/black, black-blue/red) Only seeing one pack of cards at a time and picking the best means you need to think big and plan a deck while you also study the cards being passed around so you know what is being picked by others. It gets complicated.
So now everyone has a 40 card deck, or more if the person is new to drafting which usually happens to the younger crowd as they are more used to 60 card decks. Once everyone is set, a tournament starts where you take on another player in a best of 3 match. The first person to win 2 games (where they either deck their opponent or take their life from 20 down to 0) wins the match and moves up in the standings. The easiest way this is tracked, at least at Outpost 2000 and Beyond, is by having numbered tables. The closest you are to the number one spot, the better you are. For every match won you get 3 points in the tournament every tie is 1 point and every loss is 0. The person with the most points after 3-5 rounds (depending on how many people have entered to play) wins it all. Prizes are then handed out starting from the first place person down to usually the fifth place person, again depending on how many people play, the more that play, the more money that can be spent on prizes to hand out. Prizes are usually handed out in booster packs starting with a high amount for first, then going lower, usually by two, for every spot after the first place person.
Now for my draft, and the reason for this post (told ya I would get to a point). It was 5 rounds with 24 people in it. we had 3 tables of 8 people and were given three boosters, Shards of Alara/Shards of Alara/Conflux.
Path change ahead!
Shards of Alara and Conflux are apart of the Alara block of cards. Wizards of the Coast release cards in "blocks" which is usually a main set (Shards of Alara) and then two mini expansion sets (Conflux, and the soon to be released Alara Reborn) that share the "flavor" of the entire block. The Alara block is about a realm that was split into 5 separate "shard" realms a long time ago. Each shard only had access to 3 of the 5 colors of magic and so each realm has grown to think that there are only 3 colors of magic, or mana. The shards are; Bant: a shard focused on knights, angels and order, and only uses green, white and blue magic. Naya: a shard focused on primal might and ancient creatures and only uses red, white and green magic. Jund: a shard focused on the primal side of life with dragons and goblins and warring tribes and uses red, green and black magic. Grixis: a shard focused on death and decay and has been cut off from the magic of life (green and white) so only uses black, red and blue magic. And finally Esper: a shard focused on methodical thoughts and order to life in the form of artifacts (think machines) and uses only black, white and blue magic. Each shard at the beginning of the block has no idea about the others but soon things change as an immortal evil begins to push the shards back into one whole plane in order to use the run off magic that happens when worlds collide. This starts showing in Conflux where the shards start merging and so people that knew nothing of the other worlds are suddenly and sometimes violently tossed into another world. Chaos ensues as the shards learn of their neighbors, and the best way to stop them from killing them. I think that's all you need to know.
Now back to my draft. I was sitting at a table with my friend Josh, a person that knows this game just as well as I do. So naturally we sit on opposite sides of the table as we don't want to help each other and kind of want to make things fair for others. Also at our table was another top rung player and a handful of mediocre players. As I drafted I found that I was being handed very good Grixis cards (you know, red/black/blue flavored cards focusing on death and zombies and decay and what not) and so went with it. I ended up with a very strong deck. BTW, a Sideboard is a selection of cards that work well with your deck or are anti other colors that you can switch into your maindeck in between games 1 & 2 and games 2 & 3 at a 1:1 basis.
My first opponent was a young man that had a 60 card deck. He was using the Bant colors but really couldn't match the speed of a 40 card deck and I ended up beating him 2-0 pretty quickly.
My next game had me move to table one where I took on a "grizzled" veteran of the game. Unfortunately he has forgotten a lot of the game and so spends a lot of time reading and rereading the cards. He also doesn't play well so things like using the "stack" and spell order and stuff get him frustrated. He had a decent green/red deck but he put to much of his deck into mediocre cards and couldn't keep up with my deck. I beat him 2-0 (after 40 minutes of play and lots of frustration by his bad temper, god he was an ass).
So after two matches I was undefeated.
My next match was against a guy playing another form of a Bant deck. The first game I won easily and he actually beat me the second game when I didn't get a good shuffle and didn't get enough of my blue mana to play my spells. By the time I did it was game over. In the final game I was again shut out of a color, this time black mana and took a pounding to his deck. He also had life gain on his side so by the time I got most of his threats taken care of he had a life total of 40, to my 8. I took out all his guys except one goblin that had evasion and so I couldn't block it. However I did get the Sigil of Distinction into play with a lot of counters and so when I finally had a threat in play he couldn't stop it. I finally top decked (getting lucky and pulling the one card needed off the top of your deck on your draw phase) and had an answer to his goblin. By then I was down to 4. I was able to take him from 40 life to 0 before he could get another threat on the board to beat me. All this with only minutes left to go.
My next match was against a guy that gave Josh his first loss. His deck had a lot of creature removal and a few creatures to take advantage of an empty board. However I had just as many answers to his creatures as he had for mine, however he ran out of removal before I ran out of threats. I was able to beat him,though not exactly easy. Plus our games took a while as we both we trying to figure counters and counter-counters to each others moves. I did beat him 2-0 to move on.
So there I was, 4-0 in my matches and 6-1 in my games. I had the best record there, but since we go by matches I was tied at 12 points with another player. So we had a fifth round to decide the winner. This was anticlimactic though as we found out that the first place winner got 8 packs, and the second place got 4. So we decided to draw our game, thus giving us 13 points and ensuring that we were the first and second place winners and just split the 12 total packs between the two of us. However, for this night there was a special prize for first place. A fat pack box (empty, just an empty box with pretty art on it) and a 20 sided dice (D20 or life counter). Me and my opponent decided to play our games out just to see who would win the two other prizes. Whoever won game one got the box, and game two got the dice.
I kind of knew what kind of deck he had as he was playing next to me during the last match so I knew to keep some cards available. It didn't save me in the first game though as he was able to get a very big mean creature into play that I had no answer for. He got the box. Game two went better as my removal was able to keep up with his threats and I was able to bounce a lot of threats back to his hand and over run him with my guys. I won the D20. We decided to play a third game to just make it an even match. He had some early threats and got me down to about 15 before I took over. He was never really able to recover and I beat him for the final game and thus the match.
Yes I know, had we played out the games, I would have won 8 packs and the box, and the dice. But this was more sporting, that, and the fact that I thought his deck might run me over made me chose the tie over playing it out.
I played 2 more matches, one against Josh and one against Twig, the other friend that came with us. I beat Josh rather easily. He had a decent Naya/Jund deck that used domain to good advantage, but was to slow for my deck. After I beat Josh I took on Twig, and he beat me pretty good. He drafted a pretty decent artifact deck that had very good synergy. I thought he had the best shot out of all of us to win first place, but I think a few bad choices on whether to keep an opening hand cost him when he got screwed out of certain colors of mana and got beat. His was the only deck though to beat me.
I wish I had more people to be happy with me, but my friends we kind of tired and upset at their showing, and The Wife doesn't really care about Magic, so she kinda shuts it out when I talk about it.
Sigh...
Oh well, it's like 4am. I better get to bed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
