Making the Right Pick

Posted on June 25, 2013 by thegreatdustini

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  1. I think they replace foils with random commons, in the bigger tournaments. A replacemant with the same card, makes no sense.

    Nice article! But I think there are sometimes more then one “right pick”!
    Not only the first pick matters, most of the time it is more important to take the right second, third, forth pick.

    Sometimes all the theory doesn’t work, because not everybody drafts with the same theory. And the card values are extremly diffrent from player to player…

  2. Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding of the foil replacement process Random. For that point, the same logic works if the best pick happens to be a very good common that there are 2 of in the pack. Alternately, you could just consider a regular pack where you open a foil and a regular card, although some might say the foilness makes it a better pick.

    And I completely agree that the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. picks are also important. Most of what I said applies to the other picks as well (for example, when to abandon a color or when looking for synergies with cards you have already taken), it’s just easier to use first picks as examples.

  3. Saying that there is always a right move in a game like Magic is even less correct than saying that there is always a ‘right move’ in chess. If you believe that it’s possible to ‘solve’ Chess, then that’s probably true that a particular move will always be best, but the strategy of the game goes far deeper than it’s possible for a human brain to analyse (especially under timed conditions), so is overall *not* a helpful way to look at things.

    Imagine those situations where at an FNM you are considering whether to bluff a combat trick. You must ask yourself if your opponent is good enough to see through it, bad enough to not even notice the bluff, or likely to make the ‘correct’ response. A ‘correct’ reading of your opponent is the optimal play, but unless you are able to construct a perfect model of his brain and thus predict his actions, you cannot know how he will act, and thus what the correct decision is. This decision must be made on such a huge array of subtle and often subliminal information that it’s best described simply as ‘instinct’.

    In a game like Chess, this idea of perfect play might be more approachable, but due to the nature of draft (ie, reading signals) it’s really not appropriate to Magic. Questions like “Is my neighbor is sending me a certain signal”, whilst having a right answer, have an answer that is not, in reality, knowable for certain, and is based on too many factors for a player to do anything other than take a ‘best guess’.

    You say that the likelihood of picks having identical values is infinitesimal, but it is generally agreed that some picks are very, very close, and our ability to distinguish between any picks has limits placed on us by the nature of the game and the nature of the mind. It seems obvious that often picks will be closer to each other than we are able to discern, even theoretically, and thus it is completely meaningless in practice to call one ‘right’ and one ‘wrong’

    Until someone builds a supercomputer that can play Magic perfectly (by which I mean it is impossible to construct a scenario that it would lose to) and we can study its processes and actions, the better way to learn to draft is to take a number of general principles to heart, and then learn, through theory and practice, how they should be balanced against each other.

  4. @Fishy I disagree, I think this approach is valuable. There was great Limited Resources podcast about this a while back that formed the way i think about this.

    Intuition that comes from practice is very important to playing at high level, but high level players should be able to articulate the precise and rational reasons for their choices when asked. You have to pay your dues by learning the tendencies and doing all the math. Going with your gut from a position of experience and knowledge, by applying patterns you’ve seen and making instant correct decisions subconsciously, will bring rewards. Going with your gut without that foundation will bring ruin.

    It’s true that the best pick is uncertain to us, but that doesn’t change anything.

    The benefit of insisting there is necessarily a best pick, is to promote the habit of finding an actual reason to take card A over card B (time permitting, in hindsight after the draft if nothing else). This leads to improving your play.

  5. @raisins I agree with everything you said about having good reasons for picks, but it’s not really what I was saying. Nor what the author was saying. Of course you want to make picks based on reason rather than gut, but the idea that you can come anywhere close to making ‘correct’ picks is ludicrous. Just trying to keep track of what information you’d need to calculate to make a probability estimate of a certain picks is astronomical.

    You’d have to start with some kind of mathematical certainty about which decks were better or worse than others. This alone would be such a massive investment of computing that it’s not worth considering. Then you’d have to weigh each pick in accordance with maximizing your EV on deck building. Even if you had a perfect list of every possible deck in order, making picks to maximize chances of getting the best deck possible would require a super-computer.

    Let’s assume we can get this far though, cos this is where the calculations involved start going from merely astronomical, to exponentially bananas.

    Pick 2, you’d have to take into account what you thought your neighbor picked, and balance that against the cards in a vacuum. By pick 3, as well as considering your pick, the information that you have about your neighbor’s pick, you’re also calculating extremely niche and vague probabilities that affect your calculations based on what the person 2 seats down might or might not have taken. (Let’s not forget that we’re not only trying to draft the best deck, we’re also trying to maximize our chances of simultaneously stopping our opponents from getting good decks.)

    By pick 8 you’re looking at packs and calculating the weighted odds across hundreds of thousands of branches of a decision tree involving not only the ideas of the perfect deck and the perfect pick, but also across the decisions of 7 other players. By the end of the first pack, these trees have more nodes than there are atoms in the universe.

    Richard Garfield himself discussed these issues in his famous talk on Luck vs Skill in games (it’s on Youtube). He points out that, in games, a level of complexity beyond what the human brain can comprehend manifests as luck. There are steps you can take to maximize your chances, but the ‘correct’ approach is to recognize that the complexity is far beyond you, and that at some point you have to admit that you are making a ‘best guess’.

    You should recognise what factors can increase your chances of guessing right, but approaching it as a case of right/wrong will lead you astray much more than it will help you, since it’s just not the case.

  6. The article is pretty light in terms of content. Yes we all know that prize structure and EV issues make slamming a sphinx‘s revalation when it is out of your colors the right pick except on the pro tour.

    The article tries to form a theoretical framework and fails at that. Instead we are simply inundated with examples of why certain picks are right. Discussing turn/burn and unflinching courage does nothing to advance the discussion. Many pros feel that the card is powerful enough to justify risking a two for one and going into GW. Some disagree and we go round and round. We are no closer to uncovering general principles to evaluate picks.

  7. @Fishy

    Also the `atoms in the universe` argument sounds impressive but in practice is not useful or even an accurate description of a draft. Nobody is going to p1p1 mending touch or a whole host of other cards. The vast majority of decisions are so bonkers that it does not make sense to analyze them even if we had the computing power.

  8. Fishy, you might be confusing what philosophers call “epistemic” vs “metaphysical” issues. Epistemic in this context refers to what we can know, while metaphysical refers to how things are. The point of my article is not that we can always know the correct pick , but that there is a correct pick that we should try to discern. Even if we the complexity is beyond us, that doesn’t disprove my point. The idea is that we should move past the notion of “preference” whenever we can’t figure it out, and instead habituate an investigation of the reasons why some picks are better than others. Usually packs can be narrowed down to just a few cards under consideration, and having a framework in mind (i.e. a list of relevant factors) is helpful toward that goal.

  9. THis is an bad article! Jus take tha money > tha bombs > tha removal > other stuff.

    Thats the entire flowchart in one sentense for ya’ll.

  12. First of all, LMFAO at the three tries to spell “Sentence.” That made my week and it’s only Monday.

    I am relatively new to Magic and I thoroughly enjoy drafting online and at FNM. In fact, I just finished 3-1 for the first time last week (lost my first match when I got mana screwed and they top decked the perfect card).

    Anyhow, I brag I brag. lol… from my limited experience in drafting, I find I am having more success the more I simplify the process. Yes, last week getting a second and third pick Ascended Lawmage made my decisions easier going forward, but it also told me what the persons to my right was NOT doing. They were not in Azorious. I always heard of signals, and everyone trying to figure out what people were doing, that no one had ever told me it was far easier to figure out what people were not doing. I didn’t know if they were in Gruul or Orzhov or Simic. I had no idea what they WERE taking. But I most certainly could tell what they were not taking and I loaded up on every blue and white card I could get my hands on when there were no gates or gatekeepers (so much fun to play I just can’t help myself).

    It was… an epiphany for a new player like me. Find a simple thing to focus on, then use that to build on. For me, it was what good cards are not being taken and letting that guide me to the colors I will have the best chance to get. That may be the point of this whole article, and I may have totally missed it and all along been trying to figure out how people could figure out what I WAS taking instead of what I wasn’t. But I thought I would throw in a fairly new player’s perspective.

  13. Hey I wasn’t sure how to contact you Dustin, but I saw your balancing suspend modern deck and was wondering how much testing you had done, and what variations you have tried.

    I was thinking about changing the mana base / cascade /suspend options around and was wondering what matchups you brought in boom/bust.