MTG Salvation

Bateleur returns with a thing or two to say about what goes into a good Draft format.

We all love Magic most of the time, but its roots as a casual pastime have left us with a bizarre legacy of unwanted randomness. Ladies and gentlemen, today I present the solution to these woes and more! An excellent and yet hitherto underpublicised Magic variant. The game is Five Card Blind, known to players and fans as simply 5CB.

"You read it somewhere else, but you heard it here first!"

The question of how good a removal spell is does not constitute an end in itself. We care about it only as a means to an end: deciding when it is correct to pick a removal card over some other attractive card in the same pack...

"You read it somewhere else, but you heard it here first!"

You see here the classic paradox of drafting. A color (or, equally, an archetype) can only be good or bad depending on how many players are drafting it. This is a topic well known to most good players, but seldom discussed. And the main reason it isn't discussed is because it's very hard to get enough information about what everyone at a draft table was doing. Particularly since most drafts happen online. I realised if I really wanted to take a closer look at the whole matter of color selection and (by extension) color forcing, I was going to have to analyze a real life draft. With real cards. And real people.

I logged on to Magic Online and scrolled down the list of users in the draft room. Quite a few of the usual suspects were there. Apparently Americans aren't just insomniacs; they get up in the night and draft because, like badgers, they live in a different timezone. (Check it on Wikipedia if you don't believe me.) So anyway, I saw this one username that looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't think who it was. So I went to click on 'info', but accidentally hit 'download'. And that's how I ended up downloading Dave.

Hopefully, you read Part One? I say this not only because it's a splendid article that everyone should read, but also because today's article will make far more sense if you've read it.

Last time I talked mostly about my own team. Now, it's time to take a look at the whole table...

I love drafting. Drafting is fun. But if one day my doctor tells me I have to eat less chocolate, drink less alcohol and cut down on my stress for the good of my health... I'll ignore him and die drafting. Maybe somewhere in the world there's a player so frosty cool that no matter what happens in a draft they are completely unfazed. But if so, one thing's for sure: that player isn't me.

Does anyone still play Kamigawa block draft? No. But the principles of limited sideboarding are universal, and bateleur's cat is funny. Enjoy this, one of our first articles that's remotely relevant to this day, and we'll be back with more new content after our writers stop melting!

The cat was teasing me, of course. It knew I didn't plan on drafting. After a hard day at work, a guy's got to relax, right? You might think there's a hundred games in town - and you'd be right - but the gentleman's game of choice has never been in doubt: Two-Headed Giant, Extended, Timed.

I logged on to Magic Online and scrolled down the list of users in the draft room. Quite a few of the usual suspects were there. Apparently Americans aren't just insomniacs; they get up in the night and draft because, like badgers, they live in a different timezone. (Check it on Wikipedia if you don't believe me.) So anyway, I saw this one username that looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't think who it was. So I went to click on 'info', but accidentally hit 'download'. And that's how I ended up downloading Dave.

"Insulting me eh?" the cat fluffed up its tail in irritation, "How about a little bet then? You play ten games of casual multiplayer and if the result of even one of those games owes more to playing skill than the decks people have brought to the table, I'll concede your point."

"What? What point? What does that challenge even have to do with the definition of casual?"

"It's obvious," the cat gave me a superior smile, "If the idea of a casual game really means anything, it should be possible to actually play one. Right? If the results of games never depend on interesting play, that proves that casual is nothing more than constructed with bad decks."

The format is Ravnica-Ravnica-Guildpact draft, or "RRG" to its friends. Now I wouldn't want to give you the wrong impression here. It's a huge amount of fun, but it's hard. Not since Onslaught block have I come out of so many drafts with decks worthy of being called unplayable. The art of signalling has become a strange and complex beast - it's not that I don't understand it, just that the fools sitting to my right don't understand it! And I don't know what to pick when anymore. I draft decks full of castable but underpowered stuff or powerful stuff in four different colors or a deck with a mana curve starting at four plus half a dozen Signets.

In this May 2005 Article of the Month nominee, bateleur looks at several casual multplayer games and duels to explore the unwritten rules of unsanctioned Magic.

And his cat has a few comments on the price of cards as well.