You Make The Play - Zendikar edition

I drafted last night at the Canterbury bar, and while I could write about certain people (who on past occasions have also verbally abused children at FNM) throwing hissy fits, I'll write about a situation where I have absolutely no idea what the right play is.

This is Game 1 of a draft match and he's already drawn his card.

Him (W/R, 6 life, 2 cards in hand):
5/4 Highland Barbarian (2/1 and 3 +1/+1 counters), equipped with Blade of the Bloodchief
4/4 Tuktuk Grunts (2/2 with 2 +1/+1 counters)
7 land

Me (G/B, 7 life, 0 cards, on top of deck Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet)
2/2 Oran-Rief Survivalist (1/1 with 1 +1/+1 counters)
2/2 Vampire Lacerator
2/2 tapped Timbermaw Larva
3/2 tapped Guul Draz Vampire equipped with Explorer Scope
3 Forests
3 Swamps
1 Piranha Marsh

He attacks with his two guys. How do you block?

Drafting with Zendikar: Thoughts on invidual cards

I drafted Zendikar three times this past weekend, and I really really like this format. You're almost always attacking and it seems way more tempo-oriented than M10. Your most important cards in the game cost 2 or 3, so mana screw doesn't hurt you as badly as it does in M10 or Shards either, and with landfall, you're almost never drawing dead.

There are some cards that I'm not sure how to evaluate. I've gotten mixed opinions from people I've talked to about these guys.

Scythe Tiger: Someone compared it to Mist Leopard in M10, which is pretty darn mediocre and a card I'm not really happy to have to start in that format. But if you think about how much mana you actually need in play vs. how much you need the actually land for Landfall and other effects, to me the sac a land hardly seems like a drawback. Turn 4 play a three drop and play this guy? Clear the board and now deal with a 3 power attacker and his friends? I like this guy.

Ruinous Minotaur: I had multiples of these in a Sealed pool but wasn't sure how great it was to have that many. In draft I can see building the right deck around him, but multiples in Sealed seems so awkward if this is a critical portion of your three-drop slot.

Vampire's Bite: Someone really liked this card. Seems bad to me. Your results may vary, but I think I'd only run this in an extremely extremely aggressive weenie deck.

Into the Roil: I love this card in this kind of format, it's like Temporal Eddy. I opened 3 of these in a pool, a couple of Blue evasion guys, and the Blue 5/5 flyer with Shroud, and wondered if it was worth maining the color for. I guess in Sealed they can keep you alive for a while until you get your good late game cards and then they're still good late. Good thing I saved that pool and I can try it again.

Kor Cartographer: I guess he's fine for enabling landfall, but you couldn't give him three toughness so that he impacts the board more than just trading with some dork? Don't know that I'd be happy having to play this guy in a draft.

Romanticising Magic

I wish I had someone like Rich Hagon narrating my life. In fact, probably any British sportscaster would do, since they're the only people on the planet that could make me want to watch dart throwing on TV, but I think I'd prefer Rich Hagon. If professional Magic were shown weekly like professional football, it'd sound exactly like the PT Kuala Lumpur coverage with the dramatic play-by-play.

Anyway, I don't read a whole lot of Magic articles nowadays, but I did read this one, the story of a young British Magic player who recently ended a long bout with cancer. If they ever made a movie or documentary about what it's like to be a PTQ grinder (I'm not sure how I'll feel about I Came To Game. Being a pro's a little different than driving to PTQ's every weekend), it'd go a little something like this article. And Rich Hagon would beat out Morgan Freeman for the part of narrator.

"The lands continue to burn" - Zendikar Prerelease

I went to the Seattle prerelease and played in one flight. I didn't open any power, but I'll talk about some of the cards I did open:

Harrow - Okay, I didn't know this card was an instant. How sick is it to Harrow at instant speed for your splash color and play a combat trick... not that Harrow isn't a combat trick already with landfall guys.

Punishing Fire - I made the mistake of splashing this with only 1 Mountain in my deck.

Relic Crush - Maindeckable in Sealed with all the Expeditions and Equipment and Journey to Nowhere?

Quest for the Gemblades - This card's really good, but maybe suited for a deck that actually had lots of two and three drops that want to trade early on, which my deck wasn't. It was never relevant.

Oracle of Mul Daya - Sick. Put spells to the top of my deck. Landfall twice a turn. Seems good.

Pillarfield Ox - I think this card's okay? I mean, he blocks stuff... good ol' Giant Spider.

Kor Cartographer - I don't know if this guy's that good. He accelerates and triggers landfall... but just doesn't seem exciting.

Kor Skyfisher - Awesome with a 1-drop equipment! And also awesome for bouncing lands for Landfall.

Will probably start doing Sealeds on Magic-League and stuff... anyway, that's all I've got on the Prerelease. This format seems fun!

Competitive vs. Casual

I try to make non-Magic friends. I really do. It turns out one of my non-Magic friends is actually a Magic friend getting back into it, but he's very much a casual player and just drafted for the first time at a pub that does EDH every Wednesday and a draft every month. Now why did it take so long to figure out beer and Magic together is awesome?

One night this friend offered to cover my tab if I gave him some of the unopened Magic packs I was talking about. Just mised not paying a $20 tab! Anyway, I hand over 8 packs, and of course he cracks them on the spot.

His commentary was one of the most interesting things I had heard in a very long while. My eyes immediately shot to the rare every pack, and then I started thinking "Well, first pack first pick what do I take?" But he'd make comments like "Sweet, an Oblivion Ring, this card's pretty awesome!" or "Word, an Air Elemental, that'll be good in a blue deck." He cracked all 8 of those packs, and was genuinely happy that I gave him these packs at a discount (consider MSRP is $3.99 and even a draft set is generally $8).

Moral of the story: Every time Mark Rosewater writes on the Mothership about designing cards for different psychographics, he's telling the truth. People play Magic for different reasons. The commons you throw away after a draft could make up nearly an entire deck for another person, and people are sure to value cards differently than eBay. Drafting and Type II are not the be-all end-all for Magic!

Just an interesting tidbit I couldn't get out of my head.

Walking to San Diego 2009

The Zendikar prerelease weekend is next weekend, and with that will be preparations for the upcoming PTQ season. For whatever reason, I wasn't into Standard last month... maybe it was only having one PTQ and not wanting to acquire cards that are rotating out. But now it's Limited season!

Here's the plan:
Sat October 17 - PTQ Boise
Sat October 24 - PTQ Seattle
Sun November 8 - MODO
Sun November 15 - MODO
Sat November 21 - PTQ Portland
Sun November 22 - MODO
Fri November 27 - MODO (pending)
Sun November 29 - MODO
Sun December 6 - MODO
Sat December 19 - PTQ Seattle
Sun December 20 - MODO
Sat December 26 - MODO
Sun December 27 - PTQ Rockville, MD (not sure, but I'll be on the East coast for sure for Christmas)

If you haven't heard about the MODO qualifiers, there are basically shootout tournaments that you have to 5-1 to qualify for the main event, which is the actual PTQ. These will probably be pretty difficult, but what would you be doing instead? Drafting. Seems like good practice and good way to examine your game in a high stakes situation.

Anyway, before Zendikar comes out on MODO, I'll be rocking Magic-League and reviving the M-L Sealed stats script. I'm also long overdue to look at some MODO replays of mine to tighten up my game and look for the right plays... right now I'm not taking the time to make the right play. Waaaaay too often I auto-pilot and start doing something and decide that something completely different would have been better. Probably a discipline thing.

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...