I like analyzing probabilities too. I think you did a good job choosing which simplifying assumptions to make to get reasonable ballpark estimates here. That said, I'll mention another of the factors people could use to adjust this analysis to suit their own case, which is that a given rare has different value to different people.
If your normal use of rares is to sell them to help fund future drafting, their value is the price you can sell them at (which varies depending on whether you sell to bots, or invest time to find another player who'll buy them for a bit more). If you're keeping them for collection and/or constructed, and you absolutely would have bought that rare if you hadn't cracked it in draft, then your value is the price the card sells at, which is a bit higher. This value falls off dramatically once you already have 4 in your collection (or 1, if you never play anything but Elder Dragon Highlander & other singleton formats!)
For someone like me, who keeps the rares to use and enjoy but in many/most cases wouldn't buy that rare if I didn't open one, the value's harder to estimate, and is based on some nebulous estimate of how much happiness and fun I derive from owning the card. The ratio of this value to the value of a dollar changes over time also, as my income goes up (or occasionally down - dang recession!)
One could also factor in the psychological (happiness and fun) value of winning more games/matches/prizes vs. the value of the rares. Or in my case (as some others have concluded), the value of maximizing the rate at which one increases ones skills at drafting and winning. I feel that if I sacrifice some percentage of my games to raredraft, I'm not going to learn quite as well the nuances of how I would have played that same draft had I focused 100% on winning and ignoring every card's cash value. I want to improve my skills as much as possible as fast as possible, so I usually won't consider taking a rare over a card that would improve my deck more unless it's worth at least 10 tix.
That said, or course as the amount a card increases your win percentage drops from 5% down to 1% or below, the threshhold for raredrafting gets a lot lower. In a pack full of junk, I'll often take a rare. If a pack offers me the upgrade of my 23rd playable from a 2/2 bear to a 2/3 dude, again I could happily take a rare there. If it isn't the 3rd pack, I'll likely be offered a better upgrade later anyway. Of course if it's a rare that goes for 10 or 15 cents, I might take the modest playable over it anyway, especially if I already own a playset. Though having a few extras to trade has a little value for me too.
I think the fact that you *could* come out ahead in a 4-3-2-2 or an 8-4 being so often cited by people who generally do not *actually* come out ahead in many of their drafts is somewhat comical. And another example of non-linear psychological factors. To me, getting 3 prize packs is 75% as good as getting 4, and getting 2 prize packs is 50% as good. For many people though, that "I beat the system" rush of getting 4+ boosters is a Big Deal. Even if they started out with $14+ in real cash, and converted it to a "currency" that can't buy food or movie tickets but only another draft & thus is less valuable from a realistic economic analysis.
While I think it's plausible I could "go infinite" if I abandoned my career and dedicated myself to drafting until my bank account ran dry, the loss of income would hardly be compensated by the value of my booster pack winnings. I prefer to analyze drafting in terms if it offering varying sizes of discount on my next draft. To a person saying "I can do this free, or I have to pay in money sometimes", the difference between 4 packs and 3 is huge. For me, 1 pack is a decent savings, 2 packs is better than a 50% off coupon, and 3 packs says "Your next draft is 2 bucks, unless it's a nix tix week for that format, then congrats!" 4 packs merely becomes "2 dollar draft plus 1 pack towards the draft afterwards". (Since I don't sell packs to get the tix to get a freebie).
So while as mentioned above, the 4-3-2-2 has less variance, I like the swiss drafts for even lower variance still. Though I'm probably over the 60% win threshhold where the non-swiss formats both give better EV. If you factor in that for some (many) players, the experience of playing a sanctioned match for potential prizes has entertainment value, 8-4 and 4-3-2-2 both offer 1 to 3 of those experiences, whereas swiss gives you 3 matches every time. If you come up with some estimate of the cash value of the fun you have playing more rounds, you can figure out how much that skews you towards swiss drafts. (Of course if your time is scarce and you're mostly or entirely focused on prizes, the potential to get more drafts per unit time would skew you more towards the non-swiss drafts. This is also true if you enjoy the card picking and/or deck building far more than you enjoy the gameplay of the matches.) There's also the issue of consistency of budgeting time. Having a very busy life, it's more practical for me to budget in a fairly fixed amount of time spent on a leisure activity than a random amount.
I also approach the choice as a min-maxer. A draft where I at least win something is more psychologically satisfying to me than one where I don't win anything. If I were to play in 8 mans and win 70% of my games, I'd get more free or highly discounted drafts than I'd get playing in swiss. But about half the time I'd be going back to the rest of my life thinking "I didn't win anything this time". If I want to "maximize the minimum result", in swiss drafts I almost ALWAYS win at least booster, there's been only maybe 1 or 2 times when I didn't. Then I go about the rest of my life thinking "I won some stuff", and it's usually at least 2 boosters, which lifts my spirits a bit. I also rarely hit the case where I have to pay a full $14 to play a draft, which I think is a bit of a high price to pay for that quality and quantity of entertainment, most of my drafts cost $10 or $6 or less. (I like to stockpile boosters from the release 16 man swiss too, but that's another whole subject. Great prize payouts on those, not too hard to get 10 boosters and then feed them into my drafting habits.)
I might pay less in the long term if my drafting skills are over that threshhold. But it would be more uneven, and for me that un-evenness might make the game less enjoyable overall. I still intend to try 8-4 queues eventually and see if the empirical experience matches my theoretical thoughts or not - when/if I get more serious about Magic the 8-4 queues are the place to be, if I get THAT serious about it. Time will tell. I will say that given the average skill differences one may be likely to find in different queue types, even from a simple pack-win EV standpoint, it's not as simple as comparing straight across the chart. If it were the case that I can win 65% of the time in Swiss, but only 55% of the time in 8-4 queues because of higher caliber of opponents, my EV is still higher in Swiss for the moment.
so instead of force of will you "must have" lion's eye diamond? (present in all 3 decklists).
Dredge is probably the most cost effective and competitive choice right now, being essentially a full powered vintage deck for around 150 tixs (rough estimate).
I don't play to "make money" or care about the estimated value of said prize winnings of drafts. I draft because its fun and the quickest and easiest way to play sanctioned events on MTGO.
i play in the 4-3-2-2 because I can consistently win the first match enough of the times for me that it is basically paying 1 pack and tix for me to play MTGO, which I don't mind too much.
Rather irrelevant to the reader if they enjoy reading the article. I'd say you are wasting your effort as a microtroll. Better to find a different tree to bark at.
Yeah I have found that drafting rares is very inconsistent across sets. Some sets reward raredrafting in the sense that the Rares can be bombs worth splashing for (ARB for example). Others the exemplary commons and uncommons outweigh the slight value advantage of the Rare by a good margin. It is always hard to pass a card like Fireball, Lightning Bolt, etc. Woozy head indeed. :)
i like 4322 cause my 75% 1st round win and 66% of the next draft is better than the 0% for the next draft in 8-4
swiss is time consuming but i enjoy for the first week of release or if i have the time to play three games, i would prefer leagues.....grrrrrr
i use to rare draft the crap out of sets, all the way down to a 1450 rating! now those cards are worth nothing. likewise i hve had many a draft where i am taking one rare, 4 uncs and all the rest commons and poof, 1720+ it really depends on the set of variables in front on me. i was passed a p1p2 ablaze, took it, tried to go red, thought that was a good signal, turns out i was wrong bad move for me.
Spatter with whatever lands and control elements that are remaining in the pool and Elspeth or Gargoyle Castle if they are remainibg as well. If the mana base is available Green can be added for more fog effects.
This deck is a blast to play, and would be unexpected in the field. Just something to think about :)
Im surprised that you didn't immediately have a nonFow Control deck available to prove misconception #1. It seems from your comments about Charbelcher and the other hot decks du jour that Classic is all about needing FoW to stop the combos, or flipping a coin if you are playing combo yourself to see who goes first and wins. Channel/Fireball/Lotus was not fun to play against in tourney back in the day (particularly since some people gummed them together :p) and turn 1 combo is no better now. Yes you can play Mana Drain and Daze and hope for the best (but that is still a heavy investment imho) but it is still a coin flip without FoW. Build a nonFow Control Deck, bring it to a Classic tourney and win with it to show us differently. In fact make it as budget as you can just for the fun of it.
Oh sorry ranth, Yea, minbreak trap is okay....until it gets duressed. I'm not inlove with the traps yet, I've played them and they seem just okay in situations and for chalie, Next week I promise I will build a cheap control deck that doesn't use fow. There are two realllly powerful decklists I forsee, and again this is just a beginner, it might seem boring now, but give it a couple of weeks. When you start pulling your funds together, than you'll be able to see you can afford fows after your wins :D
For the time being I don't want classic online to become vintage. It will eventually and that kinda bums me out. These two decks can just win on turn one or two and thats the point, You want to win yes? If you want to play control and win well playing these will teach you how to play against them in the future with control as you'll be familiar enough with classic. The Misconception 2 is actually one thats ment for the classic community. Almost every day people think this format will die without the power 9.
Cost is a barrier, but I think your article actually contains my biggest barrier to classic:
"This deck provides solid turn one and two victories almost every time."
This is the same thing people think of vintage. It is not all first turn wins, although it can and does happen. It is a misconception that people who do not play the format have.Watch the replays in the DE's.
Just wondering why you blantantly choose to ignore that mindbreak trap just came out?
Because it has not yet made its way into a top 8 in any of the eternal formats nor is it likely to.
Yes classic most likely will be overshadowed by the sheer numbers of legacy/vintage players in paper whom will love to be able to play their favorite formats online. The revenue for WotC is too great to deny in terms of eternal players and while classic is fun to me, it has no comparision to the eternal formats as it is now a super legacy/junior vintage format. The majority of players whom play said formats will not miss classic. I am more than sure there are more players that would rather play legacy/vintage than classic.
Any part of the P9 would find its way into almost every deck, there is simply no good reason not to run those badboys. Looking at vintage fish decks they even pack moxen and lotus for the first turn Null Rod.
Good article and i am really starting to look forward to these little rants of yours more often.
I tried getting into, Classic, cost wasnt even an issue, although I do refuse to pay $60 for FoW. Honestly, I just found it BORING! If you aren't playing Dredge right now, you aren't playing to win. And Turn 1 or 2 wins get old quick, even if its u or your opponent doing it.
Very informative article even if it hurts my head from reading it haha, i'll have to come back and read the rest when my headache is gone.
I agree with one of the other commentator that X can vary alot depending on the pack. Like in the 1st pack 1st pick, even if you open a 10% bomb ie: overrun, you still can't be sure that you'll be able to play with it because of the steep triple green requirement. Sure you can force green, but it won't be a 10% bomb if people are fighting for your color. So if theres even a decent rare in the pack, say a Ball Lightning ($1) just to stick with your examples, I think the higher EV play would still be to take the rare and ship the bomb and make a mental note that sending your neighbor a strong signal into green and allow yourself more openess to reading the signals that are coming to you. In pack 2 however, this becomes more of a coinflip, depending on the strength of the bomb vs price of the rare. In pack 3, the balance shifts heavily to the bomb, if you open a bomb in your color in pack 3, it is very likely to help you win additional games in the draft, the rare has to be at least be able to pay for a pack or 2 to be able to even worth consider taking here.
So i guess over the course of 3 packs, X shifts from 1 end of the spectrum to the other, so it kinda balances out for your analysis purposes. But still, I think it is worth mentioning that X is not a constant.
I agree with you. Over the long run, Swiss will beat out 4-3-2-2. However most players don't look at the long run. That's my point. No matter how much you tell them it's not mathematically sound, people will still do it.
I've had similar experiences with teaching students why buying a lottery ticket is a bad idea.
As for 8-4, it can burn people. Back before Swiss was an option, I played a lot 4-3-2-2 drafts and got to the point where I was just about breaking even over the long run (over 100 drafts). Then I decided to try 8-4 because the payout is better. I tried 10 8-4 drafts in a row and ended up winning a total of 4 packs.
Now I realize that if I kept at it, over the long run my numbers would improve, but losing 9 out of 10 drafts was enough to convince me to stay away from 8-4 drafts. Even though I think I've gotten much better at drafting since then, I still don't see myself going back to 8-4 drafts. I imagine there are others out there who have had similar experiences with the 8-4 drafts.
I suspect most drafters are actually aware, at least in the back of their heads, that drafting isn't as profitable as sealed deck; but even a four-round sealed represents a substantially higher investment in time than a draft does, and I suspect that many people's threshold between 'feasible to spend an evening on' and 'too much time', especially for weekday evenings, falls somewhere in between the two. (I'd put mine, for instance, at about 3 hours or so, which lets me draft occasionally but would hardly be enough for a sealed event.)
Constructed I'm less convinced of; not only is the initial outlay substantial, but my impression has been that the competition level in constructed queues is still sufficiently high (precisely because of that barrier-to-entry) that it can be inordinately hard to do reasonably well in the heavily-played-formats. (My record in constructed events outside of the handful of Kaleidoscope events I've played is something like 2-8, and I'm a solid 18-1900 level player RL.)
And the thrill that you're talking about is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right. Really, it's another facet of the well-established economic principle that people have a highly non-linear utility function for money: a ten-ticket rare has an appeal that's much more than 10 times that of a one-ticket rare. It's a major part of the reason why lotteries are so popular (along with, of course, a general misunderstanding of the math behind them).
The thing is that in the long run, your expected average payout won't always be higher with Swiss than 4-3-2-2s; the transition between the two happens at a win percentage (about 60%) that's well within most players' reach. What makes 4-3-2-2 less appealing there isn't that it doesn't beat out Swiss — it does — but that once you hit that range you're probably better off playing 8-4s. I suspect the main factor attracting people to 4-3-2-2s over 8-4s is the lower variance, but going into much detail on that topic in this article would've only made it even more complicated, and I figured people's eyes were likely to be glazing over as it was. :-)
As far as the statistical analysis of raredrafting goes, it's not meant to be a hard-and-fast formula; but I do think that it offers, or at least confirms, some useful guidelines with respect to mid-range rares. Just because X isn't wholly known doesn't mean it's 'completely made up'; MTGO even gives a pretty good means for estimating your X vs. the various queues by checking your game history.
Misconception number 2 doesn't seem so much like a misconception about classic, but avenue to address an opinion about what cards you want or do not want to see in classic. It also has nothing to do with the current format.
If you want to go down this path, the more philosophical question would be if Power 9 cards are released via MED, should classic include them or should it diverge from all available cards (sans Gleemox). Or, what is the role fo Classic on MTGO as Legacy and Vintage become closer to reality. I don't see a misconception here, if anything, the misconception is about the equivalency of Classic and Legacy/Vintage and how Classic is evolving into Vintage.
Barriers....
Cost is a barrier, but I think your article actually contains my biggest barrier to classic:
"This deck provides solid turn one and two victories almost every time."
While cost is a barrier to Classic, even if I had unlimited funds, the concept of turn 1 victories being common place would keep me away from classic.
Note to classic writers, if you want to grow the player population, provide a clear concept of what makes the environment fast and affordable methods of dealing with the speed of the format. Discussion of turn 1 victories is a turn off for the majority of players, especially since the only way I know of to stop them is to top deck a FoW. That makes for a silly format from my perspective.
Swiss has the problem that even if you win all your games, you still can't do better than you started.
With 4-3-2-2 you at least have a chance of doing better than breaking-even. That chance is enough to make it more appealing to some people than swiss. Even if it is worse in the long run.
I believe the popularity of 4-3-2-2 is more about Psychology than Statistics..
I like analyzing probabilities too. I think you did a good job choosing which simplifying assumptions to make to get reasonable ballpark estimates here. That said, I'll mention another of the factors people could use to adjust this analysis to suit their own case, which is that a given rare has different value to different people.
If your normal use of rares is to sell them to help fund future drafting, their value is the price you can sell them at (which varies depending on whether you sell to bots, or invest time to find another player who'll buy them for a bit more). If you're keeping them for collection and/or constructed, and you absolutely would have bought that rare if you hadn't cracked it in draft, then your value is the price the card sells at, which is a bit higher. This value falls off dramatically once you already have 4 in your collection (or 1, if you never play anything but Elder Dragon Highlander & other singleton formats!)
For someone like me, who keeps the rares to use and enjoy but in many/most cases wouldn't buy that rare if I didn't open one, the value's harder to estimate, and is based on some nebulous estimate of how much happiness and fun I derive from owning the card. The ratio of this value to the value of a dollar changes over time also, as my income goes up (or occasionally down - dang recession!)
One could also factor in the psychological (happiness and fun) value of winning more games/matches/prizes vs. the value of the rares. Or in my case (as some others have concluded), the value of maximizing the rate at which one increases ones skills at drafting and winning. I feel that if I sacrifice some percentage of my games to raredraft, I'm not going to learn quite as well the nuances of how I would have played that same draft had I focused 100% on winning and ignoring every card's cash value. I want to improve my skills as much as possible as fast as possible, so I usually won't consider taking a rare over a card that would improve my deck more unless it's worth at least 10 tix.
That said, or course as the amount a card increases your win percentage drops from 5% down to 1% or below, the threshhold for raredrafting gets a lot lower. In a pack full of junk, I'll often take a rare. If a pack offers me the upgrade of my 23rd playable from a 2/2 bear to a 2/3 dude, again I could happily take a rare there. If it isn't the 3rd pack, I'll likely be offered a better upgrade later anyway. Of course if it's a rare that goes for 10 or 15 cents, I might take the modest playable over it anyway, especially if I already own a playset. Though having a few extras to trade has a little value for me too.
I think the fact that you *could* come out ahead in a 4-3-2-2 or an 8-4 being so often cited by people who generally do not *actually* come out ahead in many of their drafts is somewhat comical. And another example of non-linear psychological factors. To me, getting 3 prize packs is 75% as good as getting 4, and getting 2 prize packs is 50% as good. For many people though, that "I beat the system" rush of getting 4+ boosters is a Big Deal. Even if they started out with $14+ in real cash, and converted it to a "currency" that can't buy food or movie tickets but only another draft & thus is less valuable from a realistic economic analysis.
While I think it's plausible I could "go infinite" if I abandoned my career and dedicated myself to drafting until my bank account ran dry, the loss of income would hardly be compensated by the value of my booster pack winnings. I prefer to analyze drafting in terms if it offering varying sizes of discount on my next draft. To a person saying "I can do this free, or I have to pay in money sometimes", the difference between 4 packs and 3 is huge. For me, 1 pack is a decent savings, 2 packs is better than a 50% off coupon, and 3 packs says "Your next draft is 2 bucks, unless it's a nix tix week for that format, then congrats!" 4 packs merely becomes "2 dollar draft plus 1 pack towards the draft afterwards". (Since I don't sell packs to get the tix to get a freebie).
So while as mentioned above, the 4-3-2-2 has less variance, I like the swiss drafts for even lower variance still. Though I'm probably over the 60% win threshhold where the non-swiss formats both give better EV. If you factor in that for some (many) players, the experience of playing a sanctioned match for potential prizes has entertainment value, 8-4 and 4-3-2-2 both offer 1 to 3 of those experiences, whereas swiss gives you 3 matches every time. If you come up with some estimate of the cash value of the fun you have playing more rounds, you can figure out how much that skews you towards swiss drafts. (Of course if your time is scarce and you're mostly or entirely focused on prizes, the potential to get more drafts per unit time would skew you more towards the non-swiss drafts. This is also true if you enjoy the card picking and/or deck building far more than you enjoy the gameplay of the matches.) There's also the issue of consistency of budgeting time. Having a very busy life, it's more practical for me to budget in a fairly fixed amount of time spent on a leisure activity than a random amount.
I also approach the choice as a min-maxer. A draft where I at least win something is more psychologically satisfying to me than one where I don't win anything. If I were to play in 8 mans and win 70% of my games, I'd get more free or highly discounted drafts than I'd get playing in swiss. But about half the time I'd be going back to the rest of my life thinking "I didn't win anything this time". If I want to "maximize the minimum result", in swiss drafts I almost ALWAYS win at least booster, there's been only maybe 1 or 2 times when I didn't. Then I go about the rest of my life thinking "I won some stuff", and it's usually at least 2 boosters, which lifts my spirits a bit. I also rarely hit the case where I have to pay a full $14 to play a draft, which I think is a bit of a high price to pay for that quality and quantity of entertainment, most of my drafts cost $10 or $6 or less. (I like to stockpile boosters from the release 16 man swiss too, but that's another whole subject. Great prize payouts on those, not too hard to get 10 boosters and then feed them into my drafting habits.)
I might pay less in the long term if my drafting skills are over that threshhold. But it would be more uneven, and for me that un-evenness might make the game less enjoyable overall. I still intend to try 8-4 queues eventually and see if the empirical experience matches my theoretical thoughts or not - when/if I get more serious about Magic the 8-4 queues are the place to be, if I get THAT serious about it. Time will tell. I will say that given the average skill differences one may be likely to find in different queue types, even from a simple pack-win EV standpoint, it's not as simple as comparing straight across the chart. If it were the case that I can win 65% of the time in Swiss, but only 55% of the time in 8-4 queues because of higher caliber of opponents, my EV is still higher in Swiss for the moment.
so instead of force of will you "must have" lion's eye diamond? (present in all 3 decklists).
Dredge is probably the most cost effective and competitive choice right now, being essentially a full powered vintage deck for around 150 tixs (rough estimate).
I don't play to "make money" or care about the estimated value of said prize winnings of drafts. I draft because its fun and the quickest and easiest way to play sanctioned events on MTGO.
i play in the 4-3-2-2 because I can consistently win the first match enough of the times for me that it is basically paying 1 pack and tix for me to play MTGO, which I don't mind too much.
i hope they turn lifetime rewards into the p9
Rather irrelevant to the reader if they enjoy reading the article. I'd say you are wasting your effort as a microtroll. Better to find a different tree to bark at.
Yeah I have found that drafting rares is very inconsistent across sets. Some sets reward raredrafting in the sense that the Rares can be bombs worth splashing for (ARB for example). Others the exemplary commons and uncommons outweigh the slight value advantage of the Rare by a good margin. It is always hard to pass a card like Fireball, Lightning Bolt, etc. Woozy head indeed. :)
Affordable works :) I just want to see this misconception proven to be false.
i like 4322 cause my 75% 1st round win and 66% of the next draft is better than the 0% for the next draft in 8-4
swiss is time consuming but i enjoy for the first week of release or if i have the time to play three games, i would prefer leagues.....grrrrrr
i use to rare draft the crap out of sets, all the way down to a 1450 rating! now those cards are worth nothing. likewise i hve had many a draft where i am taking one rare, 4 uncs and all the rest commons and poof, 1720+ it really depends on the set of variables in front on me. i was passed a p1p2 ablaze, took it, tried to go red, thought that was a good signal, turns out i was wrong bad move for me.
lots of math and stats, woozy head.
You guys really ought to look into running poly-progenitus. Start with a base like this:
2x Progenitus
4x Polymorph
4x Thopter Foundry
4x Angelsong
4x Safe Passage
4x Summoner's Bane
4x Luminarch Ascension
4x Fieldmist Borderpost
Spatter with whatever lands and control elements that are remaining in the pool and Elspeth or Gargoyle Castle if they are remainibg as well. If the mana base is available Green can be added for more fog effects.
This deck is a blast to play, and would be unexpected in the field. Just something to think about :)
-Jed
Give it up, the format is dead and is irrelevant to most of us.
Mindbreak could be very good it can exile the whole stack of tendrils/mind's desire better than stifle
Don't make it budget, please.
Just try to make an affordable control deck that actually works fairly well.
Im surprised that you didn't immediately have a nonFow Control deck available to prove misconception #1. It seems from your comments about Charbelcher and the other hot decks du jour that Classic is all about needing FoW to stop the combos, or flipping a coin if you are playing combo yourself to see who goes first and wins. Channel/Fireball/Lotus was not fun to play against in tourney back in the day (particularly since some people gummed them together :p) and turn 1 combo is no better now. Yes you can play Mana Drain and Daze and hope for the best (but that is still a heavy investment imho) but it is still a coin flip without FoW. Build a nonFow Control Deck, bring it to a Classic tourney and win with it to show us differently. In fact make it as budget as you can just for the fun of it.
Oh sorry ranth, Yea, minbreak trap is okay....until it gets duressed. I'm not inlove with the traps yet, I've played them and they seem just okay in situations and for chalie, Next week I promise I will build a cheap control deck that doesn't use fow. There are two realllly powerful decklists I forsee, and again this is just a beginner, it might seem boring now, but give it a couple of weeks. When you start pulling your funds together, than you'll be able to see you can afford fows after your wins :D
For the time being I don't want classic online to become vintage. It will eventually and that kinda bums me out. These two decks can just win on turn one or two and thats the point, You want to win yes? If you want to play control and win well playing these will teach you how to play against them in the future with control as you'll be familiar enough with classic. The Misconception 2 is actually one thats ment for the classic community. Almost every day people think this format will die without the power 9.
No but Gleemox does itself. It says "This card is banned."
Cost is a barrier, but I think your article actually contains my biggest barrier to classic:
"This deck provides solid turn one and two victories almost every time."
This is the same thing people think of vintage. It is not all first turn wins, although it can and does happen. It is a misconception that people who do not play the format have.Watch the replays in the DE's.
Just wondering why you blantantly choose to ignore that mindbreak trap just came out?
Because it has not yet made its way into a top 8 in any of the eternal formats nor is it likely to.
Yes classic most likely will be overshadowed by the sheer numbers of legacy/vintage players in paper whom will love to be able to play their favorite formats online. The revenue for WotC is too great to deny in terms of eternal players and while classic is fun to me, it has no comparision to the eternal formats as it is now a super legacy/junior vintage format. The majority of players whom play said formats will not miss classic. I am more than sure there are more players that would rather play legacy/vintage than classic.
Any part of the P9 would find its way into almost every deck, there is simply no good reason not to run those badboys. Looking at vintage fish decks they even pack moxen and lotus for the first turn Null Rod.
Good article and i am really starting to look forward to these little rants of yours more often.
I tried getting into, Classic, cost wasnt even an issue, although I do refuse to pay $60 for FoW. Honestly, I just found it BORING! If you aren't playing Dredge right now, you aren't playing to win. And Turn 1 or 2 wins get old quick, even if its u or your opponent doing it.
Very informative article even if it hurts my head from reading it haha, i'll have to come back and read the rest when my headache is gone.
I agree with one of the other commentator that X can vary alot depending on the pack. Like in the 1st pack 1st pick, even if you open a 10% bomb ie: overrun, you still can't be sure that you'll be able to play with it because of the steep triple green requirement. Sure you can force green, but it won't be a 10% bomb if people are fighting for your color. So if theres even a decent rare in the pack, say a Ball Lightning ($1) just to stick with your examples, I think the higher EV play would still be to take the rare and ship the bomb and make a mental note that sending your neighbor a strong signal into green and allow yourself more openess to reading the signals that are coming to you. In pack 2 however, this becomes more of a coinflip, depending on the strength of the bomb vs price of the rare. In pack 3, the balance shifts heavily to the bomb, if you open a bomb in your color in pack 3, it is very likely to help you win additional games in the draft, the rare has to be at least be able to pay for a pack or 2 to be able to even worth consider taking here.
So i guess over the course of 3 packs, X shifts from 1 end of the spectrum to the other, so it kinda balances out for your analysis purposes. But still, I think it is worth mentioning that X is not a constant.
I agree with you. Over the long run, Swiss will beat out 4-3-2-2. However most players don't look at the long run. That's my point. No matter how much you tell them it's not mathematically sound, people will still do it.
I've had similar experiences with teaching students why buying a lottery ticket is a bad idea.
As for 8-4, it can burn people. Back before Swiss was an option, I played a lot 4-3-2-2 drafts and got to the point where I was just about breaking even over the long run (over 100 drafts). Then I decided to try 8-4 because the payout is better. I tried 10 8-4 drafts in a row and ended up winning a total of 4 packs.
Now I realize that if I kept at it, over the long run my numbers would improve, but losing 9 out of 10 drafts was enough to convince me to stay away from 8-4 drafts. Even though I think I've gotten much better at drafting since then, I still don't see myself going back to 8-4 drafts. I imagine there are others out there who have had similar experiences with the 8-4 drafts.
I suspect most drafters are actually aware, at least in the back of their heads, that drafting isn't as profitable as sealed deck; but even a four-round sealed represents a substantially higher investment in time than a draft does, and I suspect that many people's threshold between 'feasible to spend an evening on' and 'too much time', especially for weekday evenings, falls somewhere in between the two. (I'd put mine, for instance, at about 3 hours or so, which lets me draft occasionally but would hardly be enough for a sealed event.)
Constructed I'm less convinced of; not only is the initial outlay substantial, but my impression has been that the competition level in constructed queues is still sufficiently high (precisely because of that barrier-to-entry) that it can be inordinately hard to do reasonably well in the heavily-played-formats. (My record in constructed events outside of the handful of Kaleidoscope events I've played is something like 2-8, and I'm a solid 18-1900 level player RL.)
And the thrill that you're talking about is a fascinating phenomenon in its own right. Really, it's another facet of the well-established economic principle that people have a highly non-linear utility function for money: a ten-ticket rare has an appeal that's much more than 10 times that of a one-ticket rare. It's a major part of the reason why lotteries are so popular (along with, of course, a general misunderstanding of the math behind them).
The thing is that in the long run, your expected average payout won't always be higher with Swiss than 4-3-2-2s; the transition between the two happens at a win percentage (about 60%) that's well within most players' reach. What makes 4-3-2-2 less appealing there isn't that it doesn't beat out Swiss — it does — but that once you hit that range you're probably better off playing 8-4s. I suspect the main factor attracting people to 4-3-2-2s over 8-4s is the lower variance, but going into much detail on that topic in this article would've only made it even more complicated, and I figured people's eyes were likely to be glazing over as it was. :-)
As far as the statistical analysis of raredrafting goes, it's not meant to be a hard-and-fast formula; but I do think that it offers, or at least confirms, some useful guidelines with respect to mid-range rares. Just because X isn't wholly known doesn't mean it's 'completely made up'; MTGO even gives a pretty good means for estimating your X vs. the various queues by checking your game history.
Misconception number 2 doesn't seem so much like a misconception about classic, but avenue to address an opinion about what cards you want or do not want to see in classic. It also has nothing to do with the current format.
If you want to go down this path, the more philosophical question would be if Power 9 cards are released via MED, should classic include them or should it diverge from all available cards (sans Gleemox). Or, what is the role fo Classic on MTGO as Legacy and Vintage become closer to reality. I don't see a misconception here, if anything, the misconception is about the equivalency of Classic and Legacy/Vintage and how Classic is evolving into Vintage.
Barriers....
Cost is a barrier, but I think your article actually contains my biggest barrier to classic:
"This deck provides solid turn one and two victories almost every time."
While cost is a barrier to Classic, even if I had unlimited funds, the concept of turn 1 victories being common place would keep me away from classic.
Note to classic writers, if you want to grow the player population, provide a clear concept of what makes the environment fast and affordable methods of dealing with the speed of the format. Discussion of turn 1 victories is a turn off for the majority of players, especially since the only way I know of to stop them is to top deck a FoW. That makes for a silly format from my perspective.
Swiss has the problem that even if you win all your games, you still can't do better than you started.
With 4-3-2-2 you at least have a chance of doing better than breaking-even. That chance is enough to make it more appealing to some people than swiss. Even if it is worse in the long run.
I believe the popularity of 4-3-2-2 is more about Psychology than Statistics..
Just wondering why you blantantly choose to ignore that mindbreak trap just came out?