With the release of Guildpact on Magic Online, there will now be more drafting than ever before, all available with just a click of the mouse any hour of the day (or night). So check your catheters and secure your IV drip, and put a fresh pot of coffee in the drip bag… because it’s time to lose ourselves in Ravnica, the City of Drafting.
As new as it may be on Magic Online, the paper world has been drafting with Guildpact for over a month now, and so instead of a card-by-card analysis – or even something like an overview of the changing archetypes – I’m going to peek at something that comes up on MTGO a fair amount of the time: different perspectives on how to draft Rav-Rav-Guildpact, and how these different methods of going about drafting can lead to a final deck.
I – Superbia
“Pride goeth before the fall,” it’s said, and drafting with Guildpact can teach you a few things about that. In addition to being the first of seven deadly sins, Pride is often the first mistake made when drafting with Guildpact, for those who have not yet come to realize that everything which they had learned in countless hours in the triple-Ravnica 4-3-2-2 queues now must be unlearned and then learned anew in the new context. Guildpact changes everything, after all, and those who chug blindly along trying to do the same thing that has always brought them success will find two key changes. The first is the obvious; that with one less pack of Ravnica, you get two-thirds as many Ravnica cards to build your final deck… and while sometimes you’ll get to twenty-three in two packs – or at least eighteen and you’ll compromise on five cards from the third pack – that’s something that happens accidentally rather than by design.
The second is implied by the first, which is that the signaling system going on during Ravnica packs just isn’t the same as it used to be. Everyone is taking more guilds than before, so the color signal isn’t going to be anywhere near as easy, and the values everyone puts on the different colors, guilds and cards are very different… and often vary wildly. Blindly chugging forward as if nothing has changed is a sure way to wind up at the Wizards store, pushing the limits on your credit card or PayPal account to get the next Draft set.
“Just” trying to Draft a Ravnica guild is as unfashionable as bell-bottoms and poodle skirts, so the intoxicating game of choosing colors and reading signals just got that much more complicated. Thinking you know what you’re doing without trying to figure out what’s going on is a great way to run out of packs with nothing to show for it, because that one pack changes the world.
II – Invidia
“Green with envy” has nothing to do with whether you have Forests in your deck, and everything to do with trying to do something regardless of whether it is the right thing to do. In the case of drafting with Guildpact, Envy is the indecisive player… you all know him, and hell, one time or another you’ve all been him. You know who I’m talking about: the guy (or girl!) whose first four picks span five different colors and who just can’t seem to come up with a final decision until it’s almost too later… or perhaps after it’s already too late.
With seven guilds available and a lot of cross-guild action going on, people mostly try to stick to just two colors and one minor splash at the most. Whether you like it or not, there will be times when you first-pick yourself a bomb Selesnya Guildmage, but don’t see any Green or White cards in the second pack, so figuring you’ll go Dimir you scoop up that Last Gasp for pick two. Conspicuously, there is just nothing interesting to you for the third pick, with Benevolent Ancestor, Ivy Dancer or Golgari Thug as your “in-color” options, but that third-pick Galvanic Arc could probably go nicely in whatever deck you end up.
Drafts can start like this a lot, because the signaling just doesn’t work as well as we’re used to, partly because people can now start a Draft looking to go “off-signal” and draft Orzhov, Izzet, or Gruul when these signals can’t be easily read out of the “noise” that is Boros, Dimir, Golgari, and Selesnya. Another part of the problem is that everyone’s card valuations have changed along with the change in color valuations, with Red cards being more loved than ever before. There’s an even greater potential for the Boros cards to just lap the table again and again, because the Izzet and Gruul mages value different cards and don’t particularly want your Boros Fury-Shields or Ordruun Commandos. Yet another aspect of the problem is that a lot of people float their first few picks, trying to listen for that signal from upstream telling them what they will get rewarded later for drafting now. This compounds problem (I), because a pack-three reward requires a pack-three guild as your color choice, and making your life difficult because you can’t read a signal until they themselves start sending one.
Of course, if you choose to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, you can always be the guy who benefits from the changing upstream signals first, and throw some elbows downstream as people scurry to get out of your way. Of course, they could get stuck in substandard colors by eating your exhaust, if they happen to be in the same colors you settle for. If you can probably make a decision that allows you to play any of your early picks pretty much regardless of their color, why wouldn’t you just take the most powerful card and bide your time until you know exactly how you’re going to make it work?
III – Ira (Wrath)
“Don’t drive angry,” weatherman Phil Connors told the groundhog on his lap driving the car one endlessly dreary February day. Everyone’s had days when they are on tilt, and those bad times can last for weeks if you have a bad patch of drafting in real life, a Draft or two each night for two or three nights as you hang out at the card shop with your buddies on your regularly scheduled weekly hang-out nights. Imagine how much worse this problem can be if you don’t need the company of friends, or to bow to the inconvenience of a bunch of other peoples’ schedules and real-life commitments (What wife?) to get your next Draft on. Then square the problem by the fact that once you lose on a MTGO Draft, you’re done playing, and don’t get another two matches like in a three-on-three to let your deck redeem itself and your temper recede.
Drafting on tilt is very, very easy. I haven’t drafted on MTGO nearly as much as others I know – I’ve only had the program for three months, and if I get to it once a week for a Draft or two I’m pretty much above the curve. Part of my use for it was as a testing tool to get familiar with all of the combinations you can work with just before the Sealed Deck Pro Tour Qualifier season started, so there were entire weeks when I did nothing but draft Dimir over and over again, or Selesnya a half a dozen times, or march onward with an endless stream of Boros decks. And when you lose, as I did once with a deck that saw Agrus Kos, Brightflame, and Flame Fusillade as my top “bomb” Rares in a Boros deck packed just right with all the nuttiest cards, the format of done-and-you’re-out can leave you wondering what you did wrong, just mystified when things didn’t go quite as you had expected. Nothing to do for it but log into another Draft queue, and force the same combination again, to learn what you did wrong or vindicate your prior match loss by winning the queue with an identical deck!
There’s a simple premise at the heart of the modern psychological science of neuro-linguistic programming that says ‘If you always do as you’ve always done, you’ll always get as you’ve always got’. Repeating an event to satisfy your urge to prove you were right, beating down with your not-yet-printed Simbic Combine U/G Draft deck, means you are flying blind when it comes to a key portion of drafting: looking at the pack and taking the best card. Yes, you may really want to take that Galvanic Arc, because you are bent out of shape trying to get the Drake Draft to work for once, but if you’ve opened Keening Banshee and Selesnya Guildmage and Faith’s Fetters you should probably turn your brain on and think instead of charging blindly into the fray.
After all, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a sure sign of insanity.
Drafting angry is the easiest way to make this mistake, because when your blood is up and you’re on full-blown tilt you won’t make the best decisions… and thus not the correct decisions. This may be part of the reason bad beats can continue for weeks sometimes, because the person perpetuates the bad luck at least as much as the vagaries of fate do. And if the person ahead of you is drafting angry, you benefit… especially if you can recognize that and read the strong signal they sent you, instead of wondering what it is they took over Selesnya Guildmage out of a pack that looks like garbage, or better yet when you find a nice eight-ticket dual land accidentally shipped into your pile because they pressed Viashino Fangtail before they looked at the rare.
IV – Avaritia (Greed)
Let’s face it, some people are at the tables for different reasons. Greed has some people sitting at the table, and it’s their desire to crack three rares and take them, take any others that get passed to them, and somehow win a match in the 4-3-2-2 queues and get two packs back. It’s a good way to pile on the commons and uncommons for a set, to play Standard or whatever format floats your boat, but some people aren’t trying to build the objectively best deck, they’re trying to make objectively the best investment.
This is one huge place where MTGO economics takes drafting away from real-world economics, as in an “IRL” Draft people don’t rare draft very much (probably less than they should) and in Team Draft people don’t rare draft at all. MTGO economics tells you to take money cards, because there will always be another draft one click away, so taking Lodoxon Hierarch for your Black-Red-Blue deck pack two is 100% reasonable… and 100% right, to the point where the argument is indefensible.
Fortunately, this means if the rare is missing you can ignore it as a signal, because most of the time it won’t be. Some power rares, like the Hierarch or Flame Fusillade, are so high above the power curve that they demand to be taken first… but more of the cards that will disappear that quickly do not, like Dark Confidant (he’s, um, great in Draft, right?), Life from the Loam, Dimir Cutpurse, and any dual land. When looking to get a signal from your daddy, look for the gold, and if it’s not there treat it like a non-signal for the purposes of figuring out what the hell he must have taken over Lightning Helix, Moldervine Cloak and Keening Banshee. The signaling is already convoluted enough without going out of your way to make it worse by reading invisible signals.
And hey, if you are that guy, I can’t really give you advice because you already know you have to crack good packs and don’t take awful rares over playable cards. The expected value of a dual land is about the same as the expected value of the draft, but the expected value of a Hunted Troll you can pick up is probably less than the expected value of drafting something like Peel from Reality.
V – Tristitia
Ravnica is a world of exploration, and those who are willing to be creative and push the boundaries discover good decks, while those who don’t get stuck in the same old patterns. Sloth is an interesting bug… Unlike Wrath, which sees an angry mistake repeated over and over, or Pride, which sees the lessons of Ravnica applied to a format that does not necessarily hold up to the previous assumptions, Sloth is settling for the good enough. It can be as simple as just liking one color combination, or thinking you always do better with it, or even just thinking that Golgari Rotwurm is big and common and thus you should always draft Black/Green.
Laziness is not a motivating factor, pretty much by definition. It’s a lack-of-motivating factor, and those who do not do the work do not reap the rewards when it comes to getting a good draft deck. Maybe, in a perfect world, your Golgari habit can be turbocharged by keeping an article with pick orders by Nick Eisel open in case you run into a tough call you don’t know well enough to judge by yourself. Maybe you just did good enough with Golgari decks and decided to keep drafting them, because you’re having fun and you like Shambling Shell lots and nobody else seems to take your cards. Sloth can be a well-reasoned and very conscious decision, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right one.
Ravnica-Guildpact Draft challenges your creativity and your imagination, as well as your ability to make a plan and see it through (that’s what Brian Boitano’d do!) to a finished product. Those who do not use their creativity, who cannot be bothered to use their imagination, will get stuck in a rut. It may be a comfortable rut and not even necessarily a bad one, because winning six matches out of ten can be pretty profitable if you do something simple like always take any Rare worth two tickets or more if ever given the opportunity.
But who ever said “good enough” should be good enough for you? Isn’t the point to be the best, not “top thousand on MTGO”…? Isn’t the extra match won out of every ten matches worth the extra thought and willingness to experiment that comes with opening packs randomly and trying to apply your predictive talents and discriminatory skills to pick the wheat from the chaff?
Why settle for hundredth best?
If you notice you are in a rut, an excellent way to get out of it is to challenge the precepts that have put you there. If you think you do well with Black/Green, it’s possible that you’re frequently drafting Black/Green and are doing well because you are a good player. If you think you do well by not looking at what you open as carefully as you possibly should and follow a preordained script to see you through a complex web of choices and gambles and decisions… well, why should you be rewarded?
Challenging yourself is the ultimate rule for succeeding in Magic, and it is one that is very easy to neglect when there’s always another Draft around the corner, and nobody watching to see if you made the right play, nor anyone to advise you how you could have done something better. The anonymity of the Internet means nobody’s going to point and laugh… but if they did, wouldn’t you have learned something, and wanted to try and avoid repeating the mistake that brought down this ridicule? Nobody is going to challenge your ability to grow as a player except for you.
VI – Gula
Gluttony is the habit of trying to take too much, too soon. With the sea change in Ravnica drafting taking the four-guild system and flushing it down the toilet, it’s easy to do as we do in Sealed Deck and play as many colors as you can get your grubby hands on, drafting whatever you want and trusting in the end somehow to make the mana all work out later. Gluttony is an easy trap to fall into, when it seems so easy to splash just one more card or just one more color, and it’s not just a trap anymore: it’s an active Draft strategy to some people, and when done right it works. (It’s often called “Drake Draft!”)
Sometimes this works out, and everything is amazing. The synergy you can get out of some cards once you ignore the colored mana in their casting cost is impressive, but you’re really not expected to be able to cast all five colors of spells in your deck. Taking the most powerful thing you can get your hands on and not worrying about the little things (like “color consistency” or “mana curve”) can be surprisingly powerful… but somewhere in there you have to make a decision… either choosing a set of colors like a normal human being; or deciding that no matter what else is in the pack, any Civic Wayfinders that go by are going in your deck. Double-lands and Signets also pick up an abnormally high value if you’re going to insist on drafting in this fashion, and even if you “only” cut it down to three colors your deck will thank you. (If you don’t, it’s going to scream bloody murder as it begs for mercy, but with the right tools it can be made to work despite its protests.)
Personally, I tend to like plans. My first three or four cards suggest a plan, and incoming signals alter the plan. Taking the best the world has to offer no matter what is not a plan; instead, it’s practically the absence of a plan. Hey, maybe it’ll work out, right? Keep eating the good cards, pal.
VII – Luxuria
I’m going to remember right off the bat that this is a friendly fun website, and not mention that somewhere out there are people drafting and "multi-tasking" to fulfill certain desires that the act of drafting just cannot sate.
That naughty bit gotten out of the way, for the most part the common usage of Lust really doesn’t apply to Magic. But as the dictionary says, lust is “intense eagerness or enthusiasm,” and it is very easy to imagine not having to do anything for days on a time except to sit on the computer and Draft. Certain Invitationalists have also been known to be playing MTGO on the side… in the middle of an Invitational match! If there is nothing to say that you can’t do something to such a great excess, why should you show restraint and not do it?
Rather than remind you that there is a whole wide world out there in the crazy nation of "IRL" (and no, I don’t mean Ireland) and that sunlight replenishes the body’s natural resources of Vitamin K. The more obsessively you game, the more likely you are to accrue poor decisions caused by fatigue, emotional responses, and an inflated sense of accomplishment. Just because you have won one time does not fully vindicate that your deck is the r0x0rz and you should always be forcing Dimir Infiltrator/Necromantic Thirst/Infiltrator’s Magemark.dec. Even a Draft won is just three matches, and while that is a good reason to start giving an idea credence, it is not insurmountable proof that your crazy idea will work in your average Draft. Drafting on MTGO for hours and hours can very easily build a sense of accomplishment, because whatever is going on you can always feel like you have accomplished something. Much like playing in a tournament and doing well, hours of successful interaction at Magic can make you feel like you are on fire, and this too helps to present the opportunity to fail: overconfidence has slain many a giant in its time.
I won’t tell you how to live your life, but after the first twelve hours on MTGO you should probably log off and do something. Anything. Maybe outside, even.
Other than that, feel free to enjoy to excess… and watch for the symptoms of poor decision-making and how they can spring up when you are least looking for them, because each decision should be different than the last. Removing the conscious aspect of the decision-making process will not go well in your favor in a game as complicated as Magic, especially in one of the formats that requires the most involved decision-making process of all.