You have to give Wizards credit — they like to keep us on our toes. In case you haven’t seen Wizard’s latest announcement, Booster Drafts for all Scars and all future formats will involve opening sets in reverse order — the most recent first. A surprising change if only because of all of the criticisms I’ve heard about Limited formats in the past thirteen or so odd years I’ve been drafting, I haven’t heard one person ever bring up the order of packs as the problem.
While most people seem to be in favor of this, I’ve seen a few dissenters. Most of these people seem to be against change and convinced that tipping anything slightly out of balance with Magic is going to spell its doom.
Every time something changes in Magic, people act like the world is falling. This problem is exacerbated by Wizard’s seemingly odd habit of releasing big news, then not really explaining it very well. Or worse, adding a footnote in an article mentioning some giant change and a promise, “Look for the reasons why late next week!” and giving us players a week to stew about what is surely the end of the game without a single comment from Wizards. This time, at least, they seem to have thought this decision out well and announced it far enough ahead of the actual Mirrodin Besieged Prerelease that everyone will get the message before it starts, and not only that, they’ve given us their reasoning for it.
I only hope that this is indicative of what’s to come in the future. If only the WPN changes had been announced with as much explanation (or some might say, thought) by Wizards. But I’ll let people who were harmed by that decision speak on it. I don’t want to do their concerns a disservice by not explaining it well.
One of the things that has kept Magic interesting for the last sixteen years is that Wizards isn’t afraid to slaughter a few sacred cows on the Altar of Keeping Things Fresh and Exciting. I’ll admit that the Altar is starting to look like a scene from
Saw
at this point, but I think we can admit at this point that the vast majority of these changes have been for the best and have done a great job of improving the game we all love. We aren’t playing Yu-Gi-Oh! just yet, and we haven’t seen a rash of Pro Tours being won by terrible players fresh off the turnip truck.
Many people were quick to decry the removal of damage on the stack, but we’ve seen what the fruits of that change are, not just in games, but in the design of the cards. Could you imagine Ember Hauler being printed with damage on the stack still intact? How about Ardent Sphinx? Don’t games just go quicker with the mulligan rules? And how many people really miss mana burn? Wizards is at the very least not willing to sit on their laurels and pump out set after set of the same thing.
If you don’t think that this reverse in Draft order is going to affect much yet, then you’re going to be in for a surprise. The same way it was hard to evaluate the removal of damage on the stack after coming from sets that were designed with the rule still in effect, I believe we’ll see with Mirrodin Besieged a noticeable improvement in how the expansions interact with the base sets for Draft.
In most Limited environments, the cards in later sets tend to be just plain more powerful than the cards in the first set. There’s a good reason for this — they take the mechanics introduced in the first set and ratchet them up a few notches. That also means they tend to be more focused and harder to fit into just any random deck. This often creates a problem where you change your Draft strategy with the first pack, or first two packs, to leave yourself as open-ended as possible to fit in as many cards from your last pack as possible. In the full Shards block, for instance, you often spent most of your actual Shards of Alara pack focusing on setting up yourself to not have to take any fixing in Alara Reborn — that way you could maximize the number of powerful gold cards without worrying about how you were going to cast them. It really marginalized the first set and made a 3-0 draft deck all about your psychic powers of prediction for the contents of your third booster.
Lorwyn/Lorwyn/Morningtide had this problem in droves. A really good LLM deck included 12-15 Lorwyn cards and 10-13 Morningtide cards. The class tribal abilities were just much more powerful than the racial tribal abilities. And why not? You only had one pack to push it instead of three. This led to the unfortunate fact that mashing a class in packs 1 and 2, then hoping to open up well in pack 3 was not only a legitimate, but ideal strategy. If other people were focusing on Treefolk, Faeries, etc., the Wizard or Soldier spells or equipment just weren’t as useful to them, so you got them much later than their power level would suggest.
I refer to this as the third pack lotto. The best thing about base/base/base set drafts is that you have a lot of redundancy built in. The packs are of the same power level, so your picks are based on constantly improving your deck. When you have a third pack that’s much more powerful, your earlier packs are all working towards maximizing the importance of the third pack. If you open up well, then you will do well. If you open up poorly… well, my condolences.
If we’d drafted Morningtide/Lorwyn/Lorwyn, you would’ve started off with a class and then incorporated your racial abilities into it. You could try to get 10-13 cards for a single class, but since everyone is open for all of the classes, the likelihood of that happening was just much lower. At the same time, when you did take a powerful class-based card, it would feel more like a challenge to build around than a gift from the heavens. You would’ve seen a lot more integration between the class and racial synergies as opposed to the all-or-nothing configuration.
If we look at how this will play in Mirrodin for the future of Limited and set design, I think it will allow for the creation of more infect creatures outside of green and black. If we add white, red, and blue infectors in the next set, they’d be basically useless come pack 3 in SOM/SOM/MRB. If you happened to end up as mostly black infect and opened up a bomb infect creature in another color, you could take it, but that’s the only situation. In order for these other colors to even be playable until the third set comes out, you’d have to print:
Infectamaru
W
Infect
2/1
Anything much less powerful would relegate the other colors of infect to failed two-color strategies. Instead you’d just end up with third pack lotto shenanigans, which would make the colors totally imbalanced when the final set in Scars block came out.
We should also see the value of build-around cards in the second and third sets go up a lot. While cards like Lightning Rift and Furnace Celebrations have made for interesting builds in the first pack, other similar build-arounds like Ion Storm were relegated to bonuses in previous sets. No more. All of those gimmicky cards that were previously just mises for the right deck become legitimate options for high picks. It will create a wealth of new archetypes for drafting.
Now, not everything in this change is a sure-fire improvement of the current setup. There are some nuances to how we currently draft that are going to have to change dramatically. The set size differences between the large expansions and the small expansions are going to be highlighted even more when you’re opening the small sets first, and the choices you make for your first few picks are going to be considerably harder.
Your odds of opening up an Arrest, or any other individual common, in a pack of Scars of Mirrodin are about 1 in 9. Your odds of opening up a single common in Mirrodin Besieged are about 1 in 5.5. Uncommons go from 1 in 20 packs of Scars to 1 in 13 packs of Mirrodin Besieged. Rares 1 in 60 to 1 in 40 and mythics 1 in 121 to 1 in 80. This will lead to a lot less variety in the opens between everyone at the table, and probably a good deal more clashing between archetypes and colors if there’s a severe imbalance in the set. It also does mean that those build-around cards will be far more frequent.
As I said earlier, the nice thing about large sets was that they provided a certain amount of redundancy. There are a lot of “not that wrong” picks you can make. Most people like to make safe choices early on and see what’s open. Sylvok Lifestaff may not be as powerful as Chrome Steed in a metalcraft deck, but it will be much better if you end up in infect. You can only go so wrong with that pick. Because the cards in the small expansions tend to be more focused, safe picks will be harder to find — and detrimental to your deck if it ends up costing you a good deal of raw power in the end.
The pick orders for the first set will become far more dynamic, since you’ll probably need to work harder on pushing the specific strategies that go with your picks from the small expansion instead of the more generalized strategies within the large set. There’s a real risk that the strategy could become “Get greedy with pack 1, and try to smooth my deck out in packs 2 and 3,” which wouldn’t be much of an improvement over the old lotto strategies.
We won’t know exactly how all of this plays out until January when we actually sit down to open up these packs. Just like it was hard to evaluate how much damage on the stack changed what kind of sacrifice abilities you could put on a creature, this change may alter the way that R&D constructs sets. I think we can give Wizards the benefit of the doubt on this one considering their track record for game mechanics changes recently. One thing is for sure, though; this is going to change how much weight we put on the small expansions for Limited from now on.
SamStod on
Twitter