Draft
So last night a coworker of my friend Brian had a draft over at his house. At this draft, apparently many of the better players in Houston show up, so Brian and I took this as an opportunity to learn and practice our drafting skills. Becky came as well as it would be a good opportunity for her to learn as well.
We actually ended up doing 2 drafts last night - an IPA (Invasion, Planeshift, Apocalpyse) draft and a XXX (3 10th Edition) draft. Also, the format they do for the drafts is interesting. Instead of doing single elimination, they do a team draft format where everyone in the draft is divided into two teams. Then, you play everyone on the other team and the team with the most wins ends up getting all the rares from all the packs and splitting them all amongst themselves. The common method of splitting the rares was called the Italian Game or something like that. Essentially, all the rares are tossed into a pile and shuffled up and kept face down. Then each player picks a card and the player with the highest converted mana cost rare gets the entire bunch of cards that were drawn. In the case of a tie, everyone draws again and the highest one gets all the ones that were turned face up (including the previous tie batch). Pretty neat way of randomizing things, although it did cause some bitching on the part of one guy.
In the IPA, Brian and I both did so so, which was ok since noone there was overly familiar with the cards except for like 2 people. IPA is pretty difficult to draft for since many of the cards in the set are multicolored (with IP going with allied colors while Apocalypse goes with opposing colors), making it necessary to draft a 3 color deck. I did a UWB controllish deck that did well in my first match, but got crushed in my second match, making me go 1-1 for the IPA draft. Brian's team ended up winning, but IPA doesn't have any real choice rares anyways.
In the XXX, Becky played in this one as well, but since we actually had 14 people who wanted to draft, we were broken up into two tables - an 8 player table and a 6 player table. Brian and Becky were both at the 8-man table, on opposite teams, while I was on the 6-man table. In my draft, I pretty much got all the choice white cards as everyone was scrambling around for green (buff creatures), blue (fliers), red and black (creature removal colors). That left white wide open for me, so I got to draft a pretty nice defensive deck that really punished my opponent for attacking me. I was paired up with this Asian guy named Haibing (or just Bing for short) and this guy I think his name was Andreas. Both were generally regarded as near the top players out of the people that showed up for the night, so I was pretty lucky to be on a team with them. Since I we were in a 6-man table, each of us played 3 games (against the other 3 players). I ended up going 2-0 (didn't have to play the third game since Bing and Andreas also had won so many matches that the other team couldn't beat us). I believe both Bing and Andreas went undefeated as well, so we pretty much put the beatdown on the other team. I got some pretty nice rares out of it and pretty much all the commons and most of the uncommons (most high level players don't care much about those).
In Becky and Brian's draft, Becky suffered since right now, she only is familiar with playing Black and White, so it really limited what cards she could play. As she gets more experienced and learns to play the other colors, she'll get better (being able to play and evaluate 100% of the cards as opposed to 40% will really help). Brian drafted a brutal red/green deck and went 4-0 for the night. His team won, but one of their teammates complained about the way rares were divvied up afterwards.
Overall a fun night and I look forward to playing again at the next one.
We actually ended up doing 2 drafts last night - an IPA (Invasion, Planeshift, Apocalpyse) draft and a XXX (3 10th Edition) draft. Also, the format they do for the drafts is interesting. Instead of doing single elimination, they do a team draft format where everyone in the draft is divided into two teams. Then, you play everyone on the other team and the team with the most wins ends up getting all the rares from all the packs and splitting them all amongst themselves. The common method of splitting the rares was called the Italian Game or something like that. Essentially, all the rares are tossed into a pile and shuffled up and kept face down. Then each player picks a card and the player with the highest converted mana cost rare gets the entire bunch of cards that were drawn. In the case of a tie, everyone draws again and the highest one gets all the ones that were turned face up (including the previous tie batch). Pretty neat way of randomizing things, although it did cause some bitching on the part of one guy.
In the IPA, Brian and I both did so so, which was ok since noone there was overly familiar with the cards except for like 2 people. IPA is pretty difficult to draft for since many of the cards in the set are multicolored (with IP going with allied colors while Apocalypse goes with opposing colors), making it necessary to draft a 3 color deck. I did a UWB controllish deck that did well in my first match, but got crushed in my second match, making me go 1-1 for the IPA draft. Brian's team ended up winning, but IPA doesn't have any real choice rares anyways.
In the XXX, Becky played in this one as well, but since we actually had 14 people who wanted to draft, we were broken up into two tables - an 8 player table and a 6 player table. Brian and Becky were both at the 8-man table, on opposite teams, while I was on the 6-man table. In my draft, I pretty much got all the choice white cards as everyone was scrambling around for green (buff creatures), blue (fliers), red and black (creature removal colors). That left white wide open for me, so I got to draft a pretty nice defensive deck that really punished my opponent for attacking me. I was paired up with this Asian guy named Haibing (or just Bing for short) and this guy I think his name was Andreas. Both were generally regarded as near the top players out of the people that showed up for the night, so I was pretty lucky to be on a team with them. Since I we were in a 6-man table, each of us played 3 games (against the other 3 players). I ended up going 2-0 (didn't have to play the third game since Bing and Andreas also had won so many matches that the other team couldn't beat us). I believe both Bing and Andreas went undefeated as well, so we pretty much put the beatdown on the other team. I got some pretty nice rares out of it and pretty much all the commons and most of the uncommons (most high level players don't care much about those).
In Becky and Brian's draft, Becky suffered since right now, she only is familiar with playing Black and White, so it really limited what cards she could play. As she gets more experienced and learns to play the other colors, she'll get better (being able to play and evaluate 100% of the cards as opposed to 40% will really help). Brian drafted a brutal red/green deck and went 4-0 for the night. His team won, but one of their teammates complained about the way rares were divvied up afterwards.
Overall a fun night and I look forward to playing again at the next one.