Let’s Play Magic Online: AVR Draft

Posted on June 18, 2012 by ChrisKool and PlanetWalls

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  1. The decisions were mostly good but at the end you multibloopered it all away =(

  2. good to see the two of you making a video together again, these tend to be my favorite videos on the site and this was no exception

  3. If you’re looking for where you went wrong in the last game it’s when you didn’t attack into the Wildwood Geist with your Soulcage Fiend. Your opponent was at 5 life and you were at 20. He has to block or he’s dead the next turn (maybe the turn after if he can bounce your Soulcage Fiend). Trading off your 3/2 for his 3/3 (which becomes a 5/5) is a nice advantage. On top of that, you’re about to play the hound, which the geist can actually block and trade with at the moment. Getting the geist out of the way is a big advantage (in this case he would have been stuck chump blocking with his 2 and 1 toughness guys). Finally, it means that he has no creatures on board and if you top deck the Pillar of Flame he’s simply dead. Letting him keep a 5/5 creature (on his turn) on the board was just such a big mistake when you’re up 20 life to 5.

  5. Good work, I like the collaborative drafts allowing some debate over which card to pick. As a side note, I have never seen Gang of Devils kill a creature ever.

  6. I once lost two dudes to one Gang of Devils, and so maybe I rated it higher than I should. In the interest of frankness, I haven’t spent as much time with this format as others, and the logic behind advising us to consider not attacking with the 3/2-lose-3-life dude into his green 5-drop was based on my own forgetting that the 5-drop was a 3/3 on our turn and not a 5/5. I think the sort of thing that happens when card interactions aren’t in your muscle memory was what plagued us. We’ll try to play other interesting formats in the future, and play better, but the feedback is always appreciated.

  7. The first time you were thinking about taking Kruin Striker or something else, you did the right thing and grabbed Stonewright which I think after this draft you would agree is very powerful.

    However, taking Silverheart over Striker was the only terrible descision I have ever seen you make. You passed one of the best, most aggresive two drops in the format just to cut a bomb from another deck? seriously? I think you need to reconsider doing such things in the future. taking a solid, very playable card that is essential to your decks’ plan to win is better than cutting something from someone else 99% of the time.

    I mean, I get that you don’t have a ton of answears to Silverheart, but:

    a) you do have a couple, including searchlight geist, bone splinters, some combination of blocking and death wind, barter in blood…. Silverheart is dangerous and kills very fast but there are outs in the format.

    b) if your plan of winning the draft goes well, you will play more game with your deck than you would play against the deck with the Silverheart (because you will play 3 matches, each with at least 2 games, non of which is even guranteed to be against Silverheart Guy because he might just as well lose before facing you), so each card in your deck is much more important to you than any card in any other player’s deck. if you can consistently make your deck work, you have much better chances of winning than if you randomly sabotage an unkown opponent.

    there is a term in game theory called a “zero sum game”, a game where whenever one player gets an advantage, another player gets a disadvantage of the same “size”, thus keeping the total “score” of all players 0 at all times.
    so let’s say that you damaged a single opponent in the draft so that now he has X% less chances of winning. that dosen’t mean that you get x% more to win, not at all. that is, drafting is a zero sum game with 8 players, not 2.

    so, what I am saying is, it is never a sound idea to hatedraft instead of upgrading your own deck with a card you will play.

  8. Carrotus, I agree with your assessment of our decisions in this particular draft, but I can’t assent to the claim that “it is never a sound idea to hatedraft instead of upgrading your own deck with a card you will play.”

    I actually rarely hate draft on my own because I tend to value the integrity of my own deck and presume that my opponents are opening bombs anyway. Sometimes I’d even rather the person to my left hatedraft something rather than have to do it myself if I think doing so would be useful. But the blanket claim that it is never a sound idea to hatedraft instead of improve your deck seems to fall apart at the point where the improvement to one’s own deck is smaller than the value of simply never having to see a particular card played against you. For instance, if there were a card that cost BBBBB, the rules text of which read, “Win the game,” a card which, in a non-black deck couldn’t reliably be cast, I would strongly consider hatedrafting it. I recognize, though, that this wasn’t the situation Chris and I were in, and that we should have almost certainly taken the Striker.

    Drafted again last night in an 8-4 and didn’t lose a game (with a highly flawed RG aggressive Humans list). Sadly, didn’t record it, but learned that Zealous Conscripts is pretty good in aggro. Even still, I felt like I didn’t learn much about this format.

  9. @PlanetWalls,

    of course, it was not my intention to imply that exceptions to the rule (to any rule) aren’t possible. But when calculating if it is worthy to hatedraft over picking a solid addition to your own deck, you have to do the math. in the “worst case scenario”, you will play 3 games against the guy who took the bomb you hatedrafted. Let’s say you won the draft (because if you didn’t the calculation dosen’t matter) and let’s say you won evrey single game outside of the match against the Dude With The Bomb, so you played a total of 7 games. The card you can take for your own deck will be with you for evrey single one of these games, but the Bomb you can hatedraft will be there for only 3 of them. So right off the start the card for your deck has twice the impact because you have twice the chances of it coming into play during the draft.

    then, you have to also consider the option that you will never have to face the opponent who took the Bomb. in the first round there is a 1/7 chance of playing against him. if you didn’t, there’s 50% chance he lost the first game, and then only a 1/3 chance of fighting him the next round. let’s say you didn’t, then there’s a 50% chance he lost and you never have to face him at all.

    so the total chance of facing him in a game are (1/7) + (6/7)*(0.5)*(0.33) +(6/7)*(0.5)*(0.66)*(0.5) which is exactly 3/7, let’s round that one to 1/2.

    so, in addition to being twice as relevent in case you actualy face the opponent who took the bomb, the card that would be added to your deck has another thing going for it – there’s a little less than a 50% chance that you will even encounter the Dude With The Bomb.

    so, I think that establishes that the card you take for your deck is already 4 times as relevant as the one you can hate draft.

    so only in the very extreme cases where the card you plan to hate draft is about 4 times as powerful as the card you want to take for yourself should you even consider hatedrafting. Also, note that the calculation above never considers the option that someone would take the bomb as a hatedraft himself (like you suggested is possible) thus eliminating the entire chance of having to ever deal with it.

    P.S, just realised the calculation above was much simpler than I made it out to be, if you play 3 matches you will play against 3 diffrent persons from the 7 other in your queue so obviously it’s a 3/7 chance. still nice to know I had the calculation right :P

  10. During the last game, why didnt you bone splinter either of his guys and stayed alive for another turn?

  11. At least Gang of Devils can be sacked to bone splinters for decent synergy. Its probably only playable in red black anyway.

  12. any chance we could see another try at the modern hatebears deck? i thought that deck looked like a lot of fun and really enjoyed those videos.