Zvi Mowshowitz
5/21/2002
Click here to see the Classroom!

Looking at the numbers, there are two things that become very clear. The first is that the best way to crash and burn is to end up with a deck playing a lot of colors. This however is likely a symptom and not the disease. Those players who have no deck are forced to play three colors to find playable colors, so their decks stand out as being horrible. Playing more than two colors is to be avoided in most situations, but here what I think the data is telling us is that drafts that fail end up as three color decks out of desperation. The other thing that becomes clear is a very surprising statistic. Half of the winless decks are Red/Green! Red/Green’s overall percentage was not impressive, but it wasn’t that far under 50%. If you don’t count the third and fourth losses these train wrecks were receiving, the deck actually goes back up over 50%. In the fourth pod, one Red/Green deck in five won its table outright. That’s impressive.

Faced with these surprisingly strong numbers, I went looking for additional explanations and came up with several possibilities. One is that the better players tend to prefer drafting blue decks while weaker players like to be aggressive. With the additional differentiation from four more rounds of play, that gave us tables of good players and tables of relatively bad players. At the bottom tables, Red/Green was overdrafted, and crashed and burned. At the higher tables, it was underdrafted and rose to the top. It may be a contributing factor, and it’s definitely worth keeping skill level in mind when thinking about the balance of the colors, but I think bigger things were also going on.

First, there is the question of what happens when a deck fails to come together. As I touched on earlier, very specific things happen when a deck fails to come up with enough cards that it wants to play, and battles between failed decks and battles between successful decks often look quite different from each other. I think one thing that is happening is that red decks that fail to come together are much worse than the average failed deck. There are multiple reasons. First, red counts on its removal to compensate for its poor creatures. If a blue deck fails to get its tricks its creatures can continue the fight. If a red deck doesn’t get its removal, its creatures are not going to get the job done.

If a blue deck fails to get its tricks its creatures can continue the fight. If a red deck doesn’t get its removal, its creatures are not going to get the job done...

Red is trying to use its speed and removal to compensate for its lower overall card quality. When it doesn’t get those removal cards, what it is left with can be a disaster. Even more than that, there are a lot of red and Red/Green cards that are only good if the rest of the deck can support them. Think about cards like Mad Dog and Blazing Salvo. In a top red deck those are scary cards. In a bad red deck they’re bad cards.

That's because speed is a tricky thing. If you aim for speed and try going to the head, it better work. If it doesn’t work, what you’re left with will be a pile of junk. That’s what was probably happening to a lot of the Red/Green decks. They failed to fill out their curves, and their decks had no way to win. A blue deck in the same situation would be slow and would lose to a good fast deck, but it wouldn’t be dead in the water.

The other problem with Red/Green is that it gets very little from Torment. From green it wants Basking Rootwala and not much else. From red it wants Fiery Temper, and again not much else. There are other commons they can use and some very nice uncommons, but there are also a good number of packs where a Red/Green player will be counterdrafting with his first pick. A drafter who falls behind may not find a way to catch up for the time he lost earlier, and even entering pack three with seventeen good cards can be risky. Combine that with the inability of a ‘failed’ Red/Green deck to use many of its top commons to their full potential, and you have another formula for disaster.

In short, Red/Green is actually a very good choice for a player who wants to win a draft and is willing to risk ending up with a horrible deck. I expect that this should remain true in Judgment if the players are drafting all five colors in roughly correct ratios. Instead of getting nothing from pack three, the deck now will get little from pack two. That will make a Red/Green drafter dependant on cooperation from the players on his right, who will likely decide his fate. By the time he gets that verdict, it may well be too late. But if he gets what he wants, he will likely be in very good shape to win it all.

Compared to this type of effect, I think worrying about who will end up in the best black position or that one of the black drafters will get an outrageously good deck is at best a secondary concern in a format like Odyssey/Torment. I wouldn’t worry about it. Then again, Judgment may turn black into the riskiest color of all time. Dealing with the dynamics of OD/TO/JU draft is another article and I don’t feel I have the knowledge I’d need to write it yet, but consider that your fate is almost completely in the hands of the players on your left. Then consider that you can’t threaten them with anything at all in pack three, because there will be no black cards to take away. That’s definitely food for thought.

The next question is how an all-or-nothing position changes when you should commit to a color or color combination. The first instinct is that you should choose a color and stick to it. If you abandon your initial picks, you’re at a disadvantage, so even if things go reasonably from there on in it’s still going to be trouble. Then again, abandoning one or two cards at the start of the draft doesn’t mean that the draft is going down the drain. Picking up on an unusually good position can more than make up for an early loss. This, as always, is the ancient dominant vs. submissive argument in booster draft. I would say that you should keep your eye out for unusually good opportunities. If you get the chance to execute an effective force of a color, go for it. If you can’t, don’t try to do it anyway.

While losing one or two cards at the start is acceptable, losing more than that is not. Be prepared to gamble on the signals being correct. Normally, I wouldn’t consider anything short of a broken uncommon or rare a clear signal by itself early in the first pack. In these situations you have no choice. In short, if you’re going to be submissive, you have to do it aggressively. If you guess right, you end with the kind of position you need. If you guess wrong, so be it. At least you got a chance to at least try and cut off some of the color before it was too late. Obviously, the ideal situation is for you to guess colors correctly with your first pick and never look back. When in doubt, you should stick by your initial guess in these situations, because the potential rewards are excellent.

Individual card choices are another issue. First, you must be prepared to accept potential holes in your deck. In a normal draft, as early as four or five picks into the draft I’ll start to adjust my picks to match what I feel my deck is missing and what it has enough of. You should still do that, but again you must be willing to gamble. Taking the abstractly stronger card puts you in a better position, since it sends a better signal, and gives you a better potential to get a very good deck. It’s also risky, since failure to fill the hole you’ve created can be fatal. But early on, I’d be much more willing to take the best cards for whatever deck I have in mind without worrying too much about having the correct mix yet. It’s the same principle: You must at least partially abandon those strategies whose purpose is to prevent a disastrous draft. Later on when time is running out things return to normal, since there will be no second chance to fix things.

Then there’s counterdrafting. Counterdrafting would seem to become far more important in all-or-nothing situations. The important thing to remember is that counterdrafting cards that are good against you is important, not taking away cards that are good in general. In particular, often there are cards that your deck simply cannot deal with. It can be a traditional bomb like Iridescent Angel or Cabal Patriarch, or it can be something like Chainflinger. Either way, this is something you really don’t want to pass. Taking away solid cards is only worthwhile when there’s nothing else to do. The reasoning seems obvious: If you have to win the table, then taking away cards from the one deck that can beat you, or taking away some of the few cards that can beat you, is suddenly ultra important. The problem is that it’s very hard to know if you’re going after your competition or just going after someone else at random when you take away a solid card. Rochester draft is another story, but for now I’m only concerned with booster draft.

Counterdrafting is risky, because it means you have a better chance of not getting enough good cards for your deck. If you’re so far ahead of the game that counterdrafting doesn’t have this cost, then you do it regardless of what your situation is. This is a good reason to counterdraft more: You want to take risks. The other question is whether, all things being equal, hurting one deck out of the seven hurts you more or less than it would normally when you’re only out to win it all. Instinct says it matters more, but that’s the same instinct that was wrong before.

And the shocker once again is: The opposite is true. Why? Because you can’t play against the same deck twice. Suppose, to keep things equal, that your chance of winning an individual match doesn’t change, sacrificing a little bit against the other six opponents to strengthen yourself against the seventh. If you play against the deck you’ve hurt, you’re more likely to win, but you then have to play at the disadvantage you’ve accepted in order to hurt that deck. In short, if you have the same chance you had before to win round one, you then get to face on average a worse matchup in rounds two and three.

The exceptions to this arise when you know who you’re going after. If you know you can attack the stronger decks, that becomes more attractive. If you know you can attack your bad matchups that too becomes attractive, and that is a much more realistic situation. Suppose you’re playing Red/Black, which has a traditionally hard time with White/Blue. Taking time out to counterdraft cards that are strongest in White/Blue makes a lot of sense. In fact, there’s an additional benefit to that: By making the White/Blue deck weaker against everyone, you make it less likely you will ever even have to play against it on your way to the top. There can be a big difference between how strong a deck is overall and how good it is against a specific opponent. If you can take advantage of that, it’s worth paying a higher price than you would usually be willing to pay. Note however that it actually is less important than usual to take away a card that will specifically destroy you, even though that must seem odd. Then again, if your deck is so strong that you feel there’s little else to fear, counterdrafting such cards can be strong – but that’s even more true when you’re just looking for a solid record.

If you play against the deck you’ve hurt, you’re more likely to win, but you then have to play at the disadvantage you’ve accepted in order to hurt that deck...

All of this must be adjusted to account for the relative limited skills of the players at the table. As usual, being at a large advantage or disadvantage requires an adjustment in strategy. For those at a disadvantage, you need to do everything you would otherwise do, only more so. Also note that by gambling and guessing aggressively, you’re reducing the need to rely on your more complex drafting skills. For someone at a disadvantage, this is a nice plus. If you sit down at the top eight of a Qualifier and feel you have no right to be there, it makes a lot of sense to start taking green and red cards and never look back. Shift the focus away from areas where you are weak and toward areas where there is a level playing field. This works the same way as my advice to play more aggressive mana bases when you get in over your head.

On the other end of the spectrum are those who think they have a good chance to win the table, or even those who expect to. The more confident you are, the less you should let these strategies warp your drafting. You don’t need as much of an advantage from the draft, because you can rely on your drafting, deck building and playing skills to give you the edge. At the extreme, a player who actually expects to win the draft outright the majority of the time should barely adjust his drafting at all. He’s no longer looking for big rewards, just a solid deck he can work with. There’s no reason to start gambling in that situation. In fact, given enough of a gap (we’re talking hundreds of rating points) this effect can even overwhelm the need to win the table. If I were to look to win a table full of random players on Magic Online and none of them had a rating significantly above 1600, I would actually draft more conservatively than I would at a table with eight Pros where I needed to go 2-1.

What’s the bottom line? Unlike the relatively simple issues that arise in constructed, the questions raised in limited are much harder to give definitive answers to. Figuring out how to do nothing is a lot easier than figuring how to do something, especially something complex. It comes down to taking risks, and putting aside worries that your deck might turn out completely horrible. In practice, that means going more often for the decks that might not come together. It means taking good cards and covering your holes later. It means reading signals that are only half there. Most importantly, it means remembering to adjust your drafting to your goals. Like most other aspects of Magic, most players fail to properly consider the risks and rewards offered by the tournament structure before deciding what to do. This is your chance to change that.


- Zvi Mowshowitz