If you had access to all the draft data you wanted...

what would you do with all of it?

With Limited season fast approaching, I've been toying around with idea of creating a new site for improving one's Limited game collectively. The first phase would pretty much be a Modosharks-type deal, where you'd upload a draft file from your MODO directory, insert your comments for each pick, write a post-mortem and match reports afterward, and then others can comment on your picks and deck and such.

Ideally, I'd also like to do one for Sealed pools, but if you're like me, building a Sealed deck just from a text list of a cards is pretty impossible, so the next step would be to create a nice MODO-like interface for interacting with a Sealed pool within the browser.

The part that truly excites me is learning about trends in the format with large amounts of data. For Shards limited season, I had written a script that gleans Sealed decks from Magic-League's site and computed some simple stats. I'll be looking to rewrite this script, since I lost it :(

But then for draft, I'd like to start a repository of drafts to compute any relevant data that can be obtained. The idea would be to get people to install a tool that would upload to this site all of their draft recaps, in addition to drafts people post for review. (Don't worry, a draft won't be made public unless you want it to, so that people don't heckle you for messing up or drunk drafting or whatever.) Anyway, with hopefully hundreds of drafts at your disposal, what would be the relevant stats?

Here's my rough draft (heh, get it?) of what I'd compute:

- Average pick for a card/pack (1-15): pretty basic
- % of time picked when in pick 1-45: the idea is that your pick might change in pack 2 or pack 3.

From these you could filter to situations like this:
- In color: when the color of the card is your "main" (largest portion of your pool)
- Out of color: opposite of In color
- In W/U/B/R/G: when one specific color is your main
- In X/Y: when two specific colors are your main
- In X/Y/Z: when three specific colors are your main.
- (not sure how helpful four colors would be)
- With N in your pool: When you already have N copies of the card in your pool.

Leave comments if you have more ideas. Remember, all you'd have is the draft itself, not how they'd necessarily build it. Another problem with this idea is that the draft log doesn't tell you if it's an 8-4, 4-3-2-2, or Premier Event, so either each user specifies what queue they usually play in, or just mash them all together, which may not be all that terrible.

Anyway, this will probably be a weekend project while I wait for Zendikar to come out on MODO and I really try to Q again. By the way, I really should write about why I was so dispassionate about trying to qualify this month and played mediocre decks, and also reassess why I'm bad at Magic...