I misread the OP. I do agree that there is a significant amount of skill in drafting (although not as much as people tend to think because sets are intensely analyzed for how to draft them and given a fixed card pool you can achieve an understanding of what cards to draft). I was commenting more on sealed, which I think is far more luck based than any other format since you have zero control over your card pool.
I was at GP Philly which was sealed, and it was ridiculously biased as to what random cards you got in your packs. Look how many top decks had a pack rat in them, for example.
In constructed, you know the metagame well before walking into the venue. You know the in and out of your deck. You know the general stretegy against the major archetypes, and which cards need to play around.
In draft, these strategies all break down. Due to booster rotating between players, the power level of decks will be much closer. You no longer have "free win" or "auto lose", and a lot more critical decisions present in the playing part.
I have won several FNMs and game day, but I have just won 1, only a single, 8-man-draft, despise drafting at least 2-3 times per set since SOM! And I admitted that I made a lot of mistakes in both deckbuilding and playing in the last limited GP i went, and just went 0-3 drop! Limited is just a lot more skill-intensive.
To highlight the sitational value of otherwise unplayable cards.
Excellent answer. The majority of the cards in every set are only good in Limited or Block Constructed formats. So of course they want these formats to be played at the highest level in order to showcase more new cards. If all they ever played was Standard/Modern/Legacy then very few of the new cards in each set would be played on the pro tour.
Additionally when pros play Limited and care about Limited, it creates more interest in playing Limited in the larger community. And Limited is a big money maker for WotC.
It also just happens to be a very fun, challenging, and also accessible format.
It also just happens to be a very fun, challenging, and also accessible format.
I love draft much more than sealed. It is just such a rewarding spend of 14$. Doing two of my Favorite things cracking packs and playing cards. WHat's their not to love.
I remember my first draft back in Zendikar. I got passed three Gatekeeper of Malakirs took them all got passed two Soul Stair Expedition took them and literally went to town. I remember the one game I made my opponent sacrifice 5 creatures with all the Gatekeepers I was recycling. Top it all off with that Emeria angel and wow was that some good times.
I guess it was the draft after the pre release so that is probably why I got passed all that goodness but still pretty fun.
Really only answer on this is anyone can get on a website and copy a deck exactly how it is. It takes real skill(which I don't have yet) haha to actually put cards together that you get in a draft.
The reason is because limited is far more skill intensive than standard. I'd be willing to bet at most LGS for the most part you'll see the same group of players doing well in draft. There's a reason for that. Whereas in standard it can be a random array of people that do well.
I hate limited, so much. I'm just not good at it. It's a very hard format.
hahaha, I am sooo much better at limited, and I hate standard
That's not true, I do keep up with standard, and I do ok in dailies, but I would almost always rather enter a draft queue than a standard daily on mtgo. The exceptions being when I'm bored with drafting a set, or I have playsets of every card I want in the set, or the sets worth nothing (ie: RTR for the past 2 months).
The things I dislike about standard: Guessing your opponents full list correctly after 4 cards hit the table (yay for netdecking), How much the luck of what decks you get paired against influences tournaments, and the need to keep up with the shifting metagame every single week/day. I very much like building decks in constructed, but I refuse to play a netdecked list, which probably hurts me, but I would rather win with a rogue/tweaked deck that I came up with than with whatever list just took down a SCG open or something.
As a result, my limited rating on mtgo is almost always decently over 1800 (at least for the past 3 months) and my standard rating hovers between 1650 and 1750 usually. womp womp.
Limited is far more skill intensive than constructed. It's not particularly close. It was probably different before the internet and MTGO, but those days are gone. The format is solved incredibly quickly, and it then basically comes down to matchups.
Over the course of an entire year at the Pro Tour, the players (if they attend all events) have played every competetive format. Limited, Standard Constructed, Legacy Constructed, and recently Modern as well.
Theoretically, it is to identify the most well-rounded players as well as the ones who are best at a given format.
Oh, I thought he was talking about playing a spell that is countering a spell with counters on it as it comes into play, but I see you guys were just discussing whether he was flashing a creature with flash in order to flash a flashback or just flashing a creature with flash but not needing flash in order to flashback a spell without flash.
I mean, take Protour Gatecrash for example, you play 6 rounds of limited a really random format you either open well or you have to fight, I don't know its just weird seeing the top players of the game playing in a format that is mostly luck based. Why couldn't they play 16 rounds of standard?
lolololololololololololol!
You think limited is luck based? Limited - draft in particular - is the most fair and skill intensive format in Magic. I can understand Sealed being kind of dumb in the PT, but draft is the format where the best players can prove that they are the best without spending more than $12 on cards.
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Decks:
Legacy: RWBG Goblins RRR Burn WBU Affinity UBR Sac-Land Tendrils! BBBPox
Next possible deck: D&T, but that just wouldn't be right.
Modern: R Goblins (work in progress)
Standard: I only care about standard when Goblins is a deck.
Limited: I only care about limited when Goblins are in the set.
Pretty much this. It's harder to notice at lower RELs because good drafters can be, and typically are, screwed over by poor drafters sending bad signals and misreading their packs.
This is some of the worst logic I've ever seen, that good players are at a disadvantage playing against bad players. Or that you can somehow be a good player and not realize the person next to you is not capable of sending signals. If you lose its its your fault, take responsibility.
You realize they have different drafting rules at the Pro Tour level right? I'll admit that the first time I did a time draft at a GP day 2 I was blown away by how much more skill intensive it is than even regular drafting. When you sit down for a timed draft with 7 other highly competent drafters, then you will understand how skill intensive limited can be.
If you're worried about variance, at high level events they sometimes remove the foils from the packs and replace them with commons. This prevents high-impact double mythic packs and such.
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Currently playing:
Standard: N/A
Modern: AffinityWR, Delver WUR
Legacy: High TideU, ZombiesWBRG, 12post UG, Delver UR
I agree, limited is the hardest format to master and the only reason I don't do more of it is due to my LGS's affinity for doing rare drafts at the end which discourages new players, for the fact they will ultimately not be able to keep their foil Gideon they cracked.
That is literally the one thing that, as a total newb, makes me hesitant to start going to booster draft nights at my LGS.
It just sucks to me intrinsically...
I understand the reason for it, really I do. But I just can't drop the mentality of wanting to keep what I pull.
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"The Blessed Sleep? Ha! Wake up my lovelies, there's work to be done!"
This is some of the worst logic I've ever seen, that good players are at a disadvantage playing against bad players. Or that you can somehow be a good player and not realize the person next to you is not capable of sending signals. If you lose its its your fault, take responsibility.
Believe it or not, cases do exist where making the correct choice is punished by others making extremely suboptimal choices. Have you ever tried to play poker with people who don't know what hands are good?
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Quote from ButteBlues18 »
OMG you stupid ****ing n00b... stfu and stop playing mtg because youre t3h suck!oneone
That is literally the one thing that, as a total newb, makes me hesitant to start going to booster draft nights at my LGS.
It just sucks to me intrinsically...
I understand the reason for it, really I do. But I just can't drop the mentality of wanting to keep what I pull.
As someone who drafts literally every single day (on mtgo mainly), I can't stand rare redrafts. Its a FNM, not a GP. If kids want to raredraft, let them raredraft. The one time I played at a LGS store that redrafts at the end was RTR release friday, and I pulled a Jace and a Temple garden. I was furious. Never again.
Raredrafting is a form of hedging your bets, sometimes variance ruins your day no matter how good of a deck you drafted, but if you manage to pull a $20 card out of it, no harm no foul. I just pulled a JTMS in a ZEN/WWK draft yesterday, was I in blue? No. Is there any way I'm going to pass a 55 dollar card for any reason? No. There's a price to pay for raredrafting, you have to decide if the money card you're not going to use is worth picking based on how strong your deck is already, and what you're passing up to pick it. That's all part of drafting.
This is some of the worst logic I've ever seen, that good players are at a disadvantage playing against bad players. Or that you can somehow be a good player and not realize the person next to you is not capable of sending signals. If you lose its its your fault, take responsibility.
I think that's spoken like someone who's never drafted with bad players.
I recently won a swiss draft at an lgs. 5 rounds I went 5-0. we had two draft pods. The problem was I was passed on color rakdos bombs for all of pack 1. In pack two after only 3 picks I literally didn't see another red or black card. Now I was being passed first pickable azorious cards.
After pack two? you guessed it no more azorious. I spent all of pack 3 panic drafting guildgates, and any mana fixing available.
I went on to win with my 4 color aggro deck. I shouldn't have won. I got lucky, made a risky call, and barely barely made a playable deck because of it.
I find drafts highly entertaining and challenging. The cost can be a factor, if packs aren't in the prizepool.
Other than that, I think each pick is an interesting choice. It is more than picking the best card in a vacuum. It determines not just your deck, but also each other drafter's deck. I often find I'm drafting an archetype more than just 23 playable cards.
It also requires a sense of the format you will be playing in. And I like finding interactions otherwise missed in normal evaluations.
Believe it or not, cases do exist where making the correct choice is punished by others making extremely suboptimal choices. Have you ever tried to play poker with people who don't know what hands are good?
Yes, I played online as my sole source of income for two years after college. When you play against bad players you play good hands and you jam them. Them making loose calls only makes you more money if you play accordingly. Yes, they get lucky sometimes and you lose a big pot, so what? You're profit margins and variance both go up. The worse the opposition, the more your profit. By definition worse means makes more mistakes, and the more mistakes someone makes the more you benefit in a zero sum game. If you use a strategy designed for a specific type of player (good opposition) against a newcomer, then YOU are making the mistake and giving up that edge directly to your opponent.
By you assuming the newcomer in draft is sending you signals and then adjusting your draft strategy to that, the only thing you accomplish is becoming the worst player in that scenario. If you were actually as skilled as you think you are then youd adjust to a strategy designed to maximize value vs unskilled opponents, and not use a strategy designed for skilled opponents and then complain how bad they are after you lose.
In any zero sum game any mistake an opponent make directly benefits you. Sure, its possible them making a mistake that results in a scenario where they win by making the right play for the wrong reasons. However, the fact that they make that mistake is an edge for you every time that scenario comes up, even if they occasionally roll a natural 20.
I agree with all the others who say that draft is the most skill-intensive.
You also have to make a lot of important decisions during the actual draft in terms of signaling, reading signaling, knowing what colors are being cut, what your deck needs, and weighing that information against what cards you have picked so far. Then have to build a deck on the fly, as opposed to simply netdeck whatever tier 1 deck is being played in Standard at the moment.
I played casual and competitive for almost a decade before trying draft, and BOY did I get destroyed at draft my first couple times. Nowadays, it's rare for me not to get 1st place at my LGS.
Draft is by far my favorite format and in fact is the only format I play anymore. The experience is always fresh because I get to play with a brand new deck every time.
This is how drafts usually work, regardless of player skill.
Your so wrong I'm not even sure we can find a middle ground to continue discussing the issue. Maybe go back, reread my post, and then tell me how it is that "most" drafts you get 8-9 bombs on color and then don't see a single card of those colors again?
I don't need a lecture on the side to side pack passing, I know how it works. Would it help if I further explained that out of my pod one guy dropped as soon as we were done drafting, saying, " I just wanted to open packs" without even playing a game, and ALL the others were drafting 5 colors?
The point, is that you can in fact get screwed by inexperienced players. A draft is a cooperative event. Every pick I make is based on the assumption that more picks of those colors are coming to me, when people start "breaking" the drafting rules it's anarchy, and then it comes down to luck, and playskill during the game.
Where this really matters is with large events, where you have multiple pods competing against each other.
Because limited is the only format where you don't just copy a list that someone far better at you at Magic won with so that you can attempt to pilot it to victory, riding their coat tails.
Luck is an inherent part of the game, whether you're in constructed or limited. Luck in constructed is minimized through testing and finding how to build around a strategy that offers the most consistency. Consistency is found in limited by having an eye for what cards are weak and what cards are strong when building a deck and finding a balance. Unfortunately, people who play almost exclusively constructed aren't that great at limited because cards that they don't want to play in their constructed decks that they consider "bad", can often times be amazing in limited. This is why I laugh every time spoiler season starts and the waves of whiners about limited "filler" come out of their holes. The majority of players on the internet are copying lists of far better players whereas it's far more of a test of skill to play limited where you can't just copy a list from the latest Grand Prix or PTQ winners and go to town.
(As a side note, I'm not a "rogue decker" nor against net decking; I just find find it amusing how full of themselves some players are. I remember when posters in the Rumor Mill said Tarmogoyf was bad, that Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite costed too much mana, or when Tooth and Nail was terrible. Glad I picked up a set of Norns when they were $4 each, before they hit $20+ when she was Standard legal. Just a few examples of the masses not really knowing good cards until someone tells them, ie. a top 4 list somewhere.).
If your opponent opens a dozen removal spells and you open two, that's not a test of deckbuilding skill. Luck plays a huge roll in limited, with sealed being far more luck based than draft.
I have no idea why they do it, and I think it's silly. It's like a baseball game where innings 5-9 are decided by playing BINGO.
Creatures are more important than tons of removal. Creatures will win you the game while removal will keep you from losing the game. I had a friend who drafted a lot of removal and very few creatures in a GTC draft and he went 0-3.
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I was at GP Philly which was sealed, and it was ridiculously biased as to what random cards you got in your packs. Look how many top decks had a pack rat in them, for example.
In draft, these strategies all break down. Due to booster rotating between players, the power level of decks will be much closer. You no longer have "free win" or "auto lose", and a lot more critical decisions present in the playing part.
I have won several FNMs and game day, but I have just won 1, only a single, 8-man-draft, despise drafting at least 2-3 times per set since SOM! And I admitted that I made a lot of mistakes in both deckbuilding and playing in the last limited GP i went, and just went 0-3 drop! Limited is just a lot more skill-intensive.
Excellent answer. The majority of the cards in every set are only good in Limited or Block Constructed formats. So of course they want these formats to be played at the highest level in order to showcase more new cards. If all they ever played was Standard/Modern/Legacy then very few of the new cards in each set would be played on the pro tour.
Additionally when pros play Limited and care about Limited, it creates more interest in playing Limited in the larger community. And Limited is a big money maker for WotC.
It also just happens to be a very fun, challenging, and also accessible format.
I love draft much more than sealed. It is just such a rewarding spend of 14$. Doing two of my Favorite things cracking packs and playing cards. WHat's their not to love.
I remember my first draft back in Zendikar. I got passed three Gatekeeper of Malakirs took them all got passed two Soul Stair Expedition took them and literally went to town. I remember the one game I made my opponent sacrifice 5 creatures with all the Gatekeepers I was recycling. Top it all off with that Emeria angel and wow was that some good times.
I guess it was the draft after the pre release so that is probably why I got passed all that goodness but still pretty fun.
hahaha, I am sooo much better at limited, and I hate standard
That's not true, I do keep up with standard, and I do ok in dailies, but I would almost always rather enter a draft queue than a standard daily on mtgo. The exceptions being when I'm bored with drafting a set, or I have playsets of every card I want in the set, or the sets worth nothing (ie: RTR for the past 2 months).
The things I dislike about standard: Guessing your opponents full list correctly after 4 cards hit the table (yay for netdecking), How much the luck of what decks you get paired against influences tournaments, and the need to keep up with the shifting metagame every single week/day. I very much like building decks in constructed, but I refuse to play a netdecked list, which probably hurts me, but I would rather win with a rogue/tweaked deck that I came up with than with whatever list just took down a SCG open or something.
As a result, my limited rating on mtgo is almost always decently over 1800 (at least for the past 3 months) and my standard rating hovers between 1650 and 1750 usually. womp womp.
Standard:
RW Boros devotion/Purphoros combo
RGB Jund Midrange
Modern:
WB Martyr.proc
Legacy is not a PT format.
-regarding Snapcaster Mage.
lolololololololololololol!
You think limited is luck based? Limited - draft in particular - is the most fair and skill intensive format in Magic. I can understand Sealed being kind of dumb in the PT, but draft is the format where the best players can prove that they are the best without spending more than $12 on cards.
Legacy:
RWBG Goblins
RRR Burn
WBU Affinity
UBR Sac-Land Tendrils!
BBBPox
Next possible deck: D&T, but that just wouldn't be right.
Modern: R Goblins (work in progress)
Standard: I only care about standard when Goblins is a deck.
Limited: I only care about limited when Goblins are in the set.
Pauper:
RGoblins
URCloudpost
other decks
Goblins.
To answer the question:
Keep in mind what tournaments are. Tournaments are giant ads for the game. They are ADVERTISEMENTS.
Big names playing limited? That's like seeing your favorite celebrities endorsing a product.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
This is some of the worst logic I've ever seen, that good players are at a disadvantage playing against bad players. Or that you can somehow be a good player and not realize the person next to you is not capable of sending signals. If you lose its its your fault, take responsibility.
If you're worried about variance, at high level events they sometimes remove the foils from the packs and replace them with commons. This prevents high-impact double mythic packs and such.
Standard: N/A
Modern: AffinityWR, Delver WUR
Legacy: High TideU, ZombiesWBRG, 12post UG, Delver UR
That is literally the one thing that, as a total newb, makes me hesitant to start going to booster draft nights at my LGS.
It just sucks to me intrinsically...
I understand the reason for it, really I do. But I just can't drop the mentality of wanting to keep what I pull.
Believe it or not, cases do exist where making the correct choice is punished by others making extremely suboptimal choices. Have you ever tried to play poker with people who don't know what hands are good?
When I 3-0'ed 11 drafts in a row, they mostly shut up about that.
Quite a few of them improved, and as they got better I started to lose drafts.
As someone who drafts literally every single day (on mtgo mainly), I can't stand rare redrafts. Its a FNM, not a GP. If kids want to raredraft, let them raredraft. The one time I played at a LGS store that redrafts at the end was RTR release friday, and I pulled a Jace and a Temple garden. I was furious. Never again.
Raredrafting is a form of hedging your bets, sometimes variance ruins your day no matter how good of a deck you drafted, but if you manage to pull a $20 card out of it, no harm no foul. I just pulled a JTMS in a ZEN/WWK draft yesterday, was I in blue? No. Is there any way I'm going to pass a 55 dollar card for any reason? No. There's a price to pay for raredrafting, you have to decide if the money card you're not going to use is worth picking based on how strong your deck is already, and what you're passing up to pick it. That's all part of drafting.
Standard:
RW Boros devotion/Purphoros combo
RGB Jund Midrange
Modern:
WB Martyr.proc
I think that's spoken like someone who's never drafted with bad players.
I recently won a swiss draft at an lgs. 5 rounds I went 5-0. we had two draft pods. The problem was I was passed on color rakdos bombs for all of pack 1. In pack two after only 3 picks I literally didn't see another red or black card. Now I was being passed first pickable azorious cards.
After pack two? you guessed it no more azorious. I spent all of pack 3 panic drafting guildgates, and any mana fixing available.
I went on to win with my 4 color aggro deck. I shouldn't have won. I got lucky, made a risky call, and barely barely made a playable deck because of it.
Other than that, I think each pick is an interesting choice. It is more than picking the best card in a vacuum. It determines not just your deck, but also each other drafter's deck. I often find I'm drafting an archetype more than just 23 playable cards.
It also requires a sense of the format you will be playing in. And I like finding interactions otherwise missed in normal evaluations.
This is also why I love chaos drafts.
Yes, I played online as my sole source of income for two years after college. When you play against bad players you play good hands and you jam them. Them making loose calls only makes you more money if you play accordingly. Yes, they get lucky sometimes and you lose a big pot, so what? You're profit margins and variance both go up. The worse the opposition, the more your profit. By definition worse means makes more mistakes, and the more mistakes someone makes the more you benefit in a zero sum game. If you use a strategy designed for a specific type of player (good opposition) against a newcomer, then YOU are making the mistake and giving up that edge directly to your opponent.
By you assuming the newcomer in draft is sending you signals and then adjusting your draft strategy to that, the only thing you accomplish is becoming the worst player in that scenario. If you were actually as skilled as you think you are then youd adjust to a strategy designed to maximize value vs unskilled opponents, and not use a strategy designed for skilled opponents and then complain how bad they are after you lose.
In any zero sum game any mistake an opponent make directly benefits you. Sure, its possible them making a mistake that results in a scenario where they win by making the right play for the wrong reasons. However, the fact that they make that mistake is an edge for you every time that scenario comes up, even if they occasionally roll a natural 20.
You also have to make a lot of important decisions during the actual draft in terms of signaling, reading signaling, knowing what colors are being cut, what your deck needs, and weighing that information against what cards you have picked so far. Then have to build a deck on the fly, as opposed to simply netdeck whatever tier 1 deck is being played in Standard at the moment.
I played casual and competitive for almost a decade before trying draft, and BOY did I get destroyed at draft my first couple times. Nowadays, it's rare for me not to get 1st place at my LGS.
Draft is by far my favorite format and in fact is the only format I play anymore. The experience is always fresh because I get to play with a brand new deck every time.
Your so wrong I'm not even sure we can find a middle ground to continue discussing the issue. Maybe go back, reread my post, and then tell me how it is that "most" drafts you get 8-9 bombs on color and then don't see a single card of those colors again?
I don't need a lecture on the side to side pack passing, I know how it works. Would it help if I further explained that out of my pod one guy dropped as soon as we were done drafting, saying, " I just wanted to open packs" without even playing a game, and ALL the others were drafting 5 colors?
The point, is that you can in fact get screwed by inexperienced players. A draft is a cooperative event. Every pick I make is based on the assumption that more picks of those colors are coming to me, when people start "breaking" the drafting rules it's anarchy, and then it comes down to luck, and playskill during the game.
Where this really matters is with large events, where you have multiple pods competing against each other.
Luck is an inherent part of the game, whether you're in constructed or limited. Luck in constructed is minimized through testing and finding how to build around a strategy that offers the most consistency. Consistency is found in limited by having an eye for what cards are weak and what cards are strong when building a deck and finding a balance. Unfortunately, people who play almost exclusively constructed aren't that great at limited because cards that they don't want to play in their constructed decks that they consider "bad", can often times be amazing in limited. This is why I laugh every time spoiler season starts and the waves of whiners about limited "filler" come out of their holes. The majority of players on the internet are copying lists of far better players whereas it's far more of a test of skill to play limited where you can't just copy a list from the latest Grand Prix or PTQ winners and go to town.
(As a side note, I'm not a "rogue decker" nor against net decking; I just find find it amusing how full of themselves some players are. I remember when posters in the Rumor Mill said Tarmogoyf was bad, that Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite costed too much mana, or when Tooth and Nail was terrible. Glad I picked up a set of Norns when they were $4 each, before they hit $20+ when she was Standard legal. Just a few examples of the masses not really knowing good cards until someone tells them, ie. a top 4 list somewhere.).
(Also known as Xenphire)
Creatures are more important than tons of removal. Creatures will win you the game while removal will keep you from losing the game. I had a friend who drafted a lot of removal and very few creatures in a GTC draft and he went 0-3.