I have quite a few responses to Ted’s complaint about the decklists not being posted for Rochester Drafts.
As many people know, I’m the decklist guy for most major events for Wizards at this point. That means that for most Pro Tours and US Grand Prixs, I’m the one who types up the decklists (in the past year I’ve done about half a dozen Pro Tours, US Nationals, US States, and US Regionals).
I type between 110-130 wpm, depending on how tired I am. I also have commissioned a special program to help me type in decklists – it counts how many cards are in each deck as they go along, plus they fill in the card name once I’ve reached a unique identifier (for example, PSY=Psychatog).
- My rate on Masters decklists this weekend: 30/hour.
- My rate on Rochester draft decklists this weekend: 15/hour.
Draft decklists inherently take longer than Constructed. With Constructed, the cards are listed one after another (instead of in checklist format where your eye must jump all over the page); there are usually twenty or thirty unique cards, listed neatly in rows of four-ofs, as opposed to the forty-five or so that you find in most Booster or Rochester decklists (not counting basic land).
Let me put this number in perspective: For a 345-person Rochester draft tournament, it would take a single person, using a shortcut program, twenty-three hours of continuous typing to finish the first draft pod alone. To finish every deck from the first day would take forty-six hours. Assuming one person could type decklists twelve hours straight before having their hands fall off and their eyes blur out permanently, one person would have to work four days straight (one day longer than the actual Pro Tour) to finish just the first day’s worth of decklists – and this isn’t counting that they wouldn’t be able to start until around noon, which is after the first draft has been concluded, the decklists have been turned in, and the judges have been given the chance to go over each decklist for errors (which they do an amazing job of – not many people realize this).
Obviously, this is impossible. Consider that there are about four to six Sideboard reporters at each event; Wizards would have to forsake all other tournament coverage just to get decklists done within a one-day period… For the first day of drafting.
As an experiment this weekend, Thomas Pannell (the head of the Sideboard Online, and the guy in charge of tournament coverage at Wizards) asked me to type up all the decklists for day two. It took me from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. to get those done, taking very short breaks every now and again. Included are all the decklists – and for those keeping track, you’ll notice that because of my new program, I can make sure I don’t leave out cards from decklists because now I can count as I go along.
(The program also auto-alphabetizes and auto-separates lands, creatures and spells. Wizards system requires that these cards be input into different categories, which causes the lists to take even longer without a special program).
As Ted proposed, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to get in every day two draft decklist. However, without writers out there to use these decklists to produce articles, there isn’t much point in posting them. Unlike Constructed, individual decklists for draft formats don’t give a ton of historical insight. So for those who have taken the time to read this article, go take a look at draft number three at The Sideboard, and see what you can hash out about the format. Write an article about how decks might have been built differently, the overall records of archetypes, what cards made one R/G deck go 4-0 while another went 0-4, what colors people drafted while sitting next to other people (since draft pods are listed, this can be reconstructed).
In short, the information is there. Let’s see you use it.
P.S.: For Worlds, I did all sorts of ridiculous number breakdowns for different deck types in draft – and as far as I know, nobody ever used this information.
P.P.S.: More importantly, I have an article being sent to Thomas Pannell for the Sideboard, which will probably go up at the end of this week. In this article – well, let’s just say that it will satisfy even the most hungry of stat-seeking Rochester drafters.
P.P.P.S.: 18,000 Words will resume in February, and will conclude by March, for those who have been looking for it. I’ve been busy between GP New Orleans, PT Chicago, and visiting my sick Grandma in Florida, so I haven’t had the time to work on it that I wanted to have.