MTG Salvation

A week or two ago old man EDH himself Sheldon Menery posted an article about starting a commander league on Starcity.
http://www.starcitygames.com/article/32709_Starting-Your-Own-Commander-League.html

Basically 5 of his folks slot into a 3 color combo and then Rotisserie draft from every card in commander until each player gets 100 cards to work with (+basics for free). I think each player can use any commander of their choosing in their color combo. So 1 Sol Ring between the whole group and other silly stuff like that.

Has anyone else done this? I am thinking of trying it out for my group. My big worry is Rotisserie heavily favors older players with encyclopedia knowledge of the format and my group is a mix of those folks and some newer folks. Would making a pseudo cube be a good idea as opposed to opening it all up. The cube could be purely Rotisserie'd or you make packs and do a rochester style draft. I am still researching this and want to know who else does this kind of stuff.

Thanks

I love the idea, but it really does favor people who know all of Magic history. So new players will undoubtably get screwed over as they don't know much outside of the current set or two. I would love to do it, but I am in an awkward state of flux as I plan to move soon. Hopefully I can find another good group of players to play with as I would LOVE to do a bit of a slow build commander league or something like this.

My only issue with such a draft concept is keeping track of all the cards needed to build everyone's decks. Obviously, this is more/less of an issue depending on what your playgroups' collection looks like, and how often you share cards to begin with. Considering my group and preferences, I'd aim towards a more Commander-centric cube since it's easier to maintain/keep track of once it's constructed, and could be used in multiple styles of draft. Of course, this comes at the cost of potentially neglecting cards/archetypes that certain players might want to try, so either way I'd probably try and get a fair amount of group involvement in the project.

The best way to even the field is probably giving the new people time to research between picking their color and doing the full draft. If you know your color combo a week or two on this site should give you a pretty good list of cards to go after. I think it would be half the fun to spend time researching your color combo, finding cards that will be highly contested like Sol Ring or Eternal Witness and narrow cards you can leave until late in the draft.

Doing a full Rotisserie there would have to be someone on a laptop recording all the picks. It would be time consuming but if you are doing a league over a couple months its probably worth it. Also making that list available would help with trading/releasing cards from your pool.

Anyway i'll chat with my group tonight and try to figure something out. Also if we go through with it i'll post results if people are interested.

So here is likely how it is going to go down. We have decided to split the draft into 2 parts due to time constraints but also it adds a bit of strategy and gives people a chance to pivot half way through if their Plan A does not work out.

Week 1 - Color drafting.
We draw straws to determine color pick order. Winner gets to choose where they sit in the order.
Color Round 1
ABCDE
Color Round 2
EDCBA
Color Round 3
ABCDE

In the last round you cant pick a color that will shut someone out of a color combo. Wedges and Shards are allowed. You'll get to select 3 generals from your color combo that you can swap in/out between games. At this point we all know each others color combo and which colors are going to be hotly contested. We break for a week to prep for the draft.

Week 2 - Draft Part 1
We draw straws again to determine sitting order. First pick can lock in Sol Ring, but there is value to being on the wheel.
Step 1
Each player reveal their 3 potential general.
Step 2
Draft.
order is
ABCDDCBA (then repeated until each player has 40-50 picks)
30 seconds to make your pick.
Someone will be recording picks on a laptop. At end of first drafts the picks will be organized and each player will get a complete list of who picked what. We will break for a week so people can develop a strategy for the last half of the draft.

Week 3 - Draft Part 2
Same as week 2 but with enough picks to put everyone up to 100 cards.

Then we build decks and play some games.

So my group decided to give this a whirl and have picked our color combos.
Each player picks 3 colors (one at a time) with a wheel while drafting.

Here was the order

B$ - G
J-Dawg - G
Nate - G
Deep Woods - B
Dean - R
Dean - W
Deep Woods - U
Nate - B
J-Dawg - U
B$ - W
B$ - R
J-Dawg - W
Nate - U
Deep Woods - R
Dean - B

So the final combos
B$: GRW - Naya
J-Dawg: GUW - Bant
Nate: GBU - Sultai
Deep Woods: BUR - Grixis
Dean: RWB - Mardu

So it ended up with each color getting split 3 ways and each player has a guild all to themselves which should make for a good Rotisserie. I was thinking of going Mardu before the color draft but when Dean wheeled boros i decided to move into blue as it was wide open.

Now we are finalizing the banned list. Standard banned list applies but with some additions. Each person gets to pick a single card they can ban from the format. Also 6 cards are banned or at least frowned upon in the group.

cyclonic rift, insurrection, demonic tutor, tooth and nail, enlightened tutor and Sensei's Divining Top are all house bans.

Here are the individual bans
B$: ????
J-Dawg: Sol Ring
Nate: Purphoros, God of the Forge
Deep Woods: Gaea's Cradle
Dean: Maze of Ith

One of my playgroups is talking about doing this same thing, any suggestions you've noticed so far?

Basically we are at the point where we are about to do the draft. One of our group is in exam season so it will be a couple weeks.

The most important thing you want to do is get lots of overlap between players so they will have to make tough choices during the draft. Our group ended up with each color being split between 3 people which is pretty nice. So i would encourage you to go 3 color combos like our group (and Sheldon's) did. If you have 5-7 people then it should be good. The color drafting was interesting and i would do it that way again. People were strategic and i personally shifted my strategy after the first wheel.

The choose 3 generals as a your starting rotation seems to work as well.

The round of free banning was something our group liked, but not every group would like.

I'll post more when we do the real draft.

Your group should try this too.

Also you'll have to allow proxies.

My group got together late last night (or early this morning, it was 5AM when we did so) and set up the following ground rules:

* traditional EDH ban list
* point system for weekly play (10 for 1st, 8 for 2nd, 6 for 3rd, 4 for 4th, 2 for 5th)
* play will last 6 months
* waiver wire picks up- four per player per month based on the reverse current standings (first will be based on the reverse order of the draft)- when you pick one up you must drop one

We then rolled three 20 sided dice to determine the draft order: Mick 1, Jason 2, Me 3, Smokey 4, DJ 5. Snake draft order so DJ will pick 1st in the 2nd, then Smokey 2nd, Me 3rd. I really liked the draft order because it put me in the exact middle and a good spot to react to try to get what I wanted. And then we drafted.

Mick ended up with Temur, Jason with Esper, Smokey with Bant, DJ with Jund, and I ended up with Mardu.

We're going to draft the first 70 cards each this Saturday, just before the draft we'll announce our three potential commanders. I don't have a ton of choices since there's only 5 possible Mardu commanders (Alesha, Kaalia, Oros, Tariel, & Zurgo).

I have Boros all to myself so that gives some angel possibilities for Kalia and a ton of aggressive creatures as possible targets for Alesha so those two I'm definitely including in my three. The third spot I'm torn on but am leaning towards Zurgo since he'd give another direction I could go.

I initially wanted Temur to do a different take on Animar but I already have an Animar deck so I decided to do something entirely different and went Mardu.

The one round of additional bans seems like something I like, I'm going to mention it when we meet up tomorrow to play Modern at the LGS.

Boros is a nice one to have for yourself. There are some big hitting angels that are great with Kaalia but also nice with other decks. Alesha was a general i was eyeing when i wanted to go Mardu because random 2 power creatures are bombs in that deck but useless elsewhere.

The whole waiver thing we haven't worked out yet but it will probably be similar to what you guys have. Pool of free agents that the lowest people get to pick from.

As for scoring we will probably do something like 1 point per kill (only 1 point a turn if you combo kill everyone at once) and 2 points per last man standing.

We set our draft date for next Friday so we are in list building phase. We settled on the attached drafting order which will end up with everyone getting the same number of times in the wheel position.

One thing we haven't figured out is the whole waiver thing but i am going to suggest after deck building each player gives up 10 cards from their pool. Then each week the lowest 2-3 players can swap out 1-2 cards from their pool for whats available in the free agent pool. When a new set comes out we will draft 10 new cards and people will give up 10 picks out of their pool.

But i would be interested in how other people do this. I don't do the in depth sports pools with picking players so i don't have much experience with that stuff.

So for the draft i am in Grixis and will probably lean toward big spell madness. Also i am a huge fan of Pyromancer's Goggles and might pick it very high.

That's similar to the order we're using, our draft is set for Saturday evening/Sunday morning depending on what time someone gets off work.

I have a list of about 200 cards that I'd like to draft, ranked in order of where I want them with the Boros & Mardu cards that I have to myself ranked separately in 32 spots off to the side as they'll be my last picks after I get whatever I do for my first 67.

I've focused in on Kaalia as my commander with Tariel as one of my other 3 potential commanders with Alesha as the third. My reasoning for doing so is I have no doubt that Smokey is going to try to build a human tribal in Bant (he's obsessed with it lately and has all but said that's the direction he's going) so instead of fighting for the stronger W humans I'll go with Kaalia and have most of those creatures to myself. I don't expect anyone to go angels or dragons at all, but I may have to fight for demons with the guy that has Jund (he's been fascinated with my Karador Shadowborn deck and I had offered to help him build a Kresh Shadowborn deck which he's totally dropped doing since we drafted for colors...what a coincidence he drafted Jund haha).

My plan (and we know how plans always fall apart) is to focus on ramp & removal early while battling for the demons as I don't expect anyone be focusing on dragons, or angels; then move into those and finally hit the handful of MLD I plan on including before moving into the Boros & Mardu cards that I have no competition for.

I'm expecting that the others will focus on mechanical enablers, card advantage, and ramp early.

One thing we haven't finalized is how to handle new sets which is something we need to address since at least Eldritch Moon & the first set of the next block will come out while we're doing this (along with Conspiracy).

The new sets will be interesting. Really it would boil down to how much good stuff is in the sets. I doubt more than 10 cards will be useful in any give set. But you could open it up and say with the new set you do a couple rounds of drafts and people can pick anything so they can grab stuff they may have missed the first time around.

Did y'all get a chance to draft yet.

I am in Grixis and am debating taking two paths.

First is the easiest path of doing a Grixis Spell based deck which will stay out of most peoples way and i'll be able to get some pretty good late stuff. Problem is the deck will probably be pretty dull.

Second path is do grixis creature based and fight everyone for good creature stuff. Good thing is i'll be able to snipe powerful creatures really high and mess with the Mardu and Sultai players. But the overall power will be lower and it will be higher risk. But the draft would be more interesting when i start attacking other peoples draft strategy.

What should i do!?!?!?!

We drafted this past weekend. It went almost exactly how I expected. The only other player thinking removal or ramp early was Jason (Esper) but we pretty much stayed out of each others way. He went keyrunes while I went signets, and he went more Cyclonic Rift and straight control type spells. DJ (Jund) didn't go the direction I thought so I didn't have to battle him for demons, he seemed to be going more +1/+1 counters, which was interesting because it seems like Smokey (Bant) was trying to go that direction to with Jenara- which did make me have to pull the trigger for Archangel of Thune earlier than I had expected. I did end up only taking 9 strictly Mardu/Boros cards which surprised me.

Here's the cards I drafted...http://deckstats.net/decks/6217/484075-cards-for-commander-rotisserie/en

I think I'd have to go Grixis spell based, it would likely have the higher floor and be easier to make adjustments after the draft to though creature based would be more fun in the draft as far as battling for cards.

Nice land d package.


The more i have been kicking around the more i want to be disruptive in the draft. Also i would most overlap with the 2 most experienced players so my spitefullness with have maximum impact. And if it all blows up i can cobble together a Grixis good stuff deck in the last 50 picks if need be.

My ace up my sleeve will be picking targeted wraths like Perish and Virtues Ruin that will always hit some opponents and leave me unscathed.

Thanks! Not sure how many land destruction cards I'll end up playing but I wanted to make sure I had multiple to pick from. If I decide I want to play around with land more, Blood Moon is still available (which surprised me, it's one of the guys favorite cards). Overall it's been pretty fun so far. Everyone appears to be building around new commanders from anyone they've done before...at least in this group. I've had a Kaalia deck before but it was years ago.

Oddly enough, if I had to do it again I'd probably have went a way that would be more disruptive in the draft. In my case I'd have went the Alesha route and battled for the good white creatures with Smokey for his Bant deck, which would have put him in a weird spot of having to battle me for the white ones while also battling DJ for green ones.

Ok i think im going disruptive. I think the key is use wheels to grab two card combos and just high pick the best utility guys. Spells i can wait until the end but Shriekmaw is going to go high.

We did the first 60% of the draft then had to pause due to drunkenness causing too many myojin picks.

Here are the first 40 picks. Nice mix of solid utility and big whammy bombos.

There are a few guys over in the Cube subforum who have a thread about their EDH/multiplayer cubes. It's a good sized thread, so you might find something useful in there.

http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-card-and-archetype/193777-the-multiplayer-edh-cube-thread