Great content and analysis as always. I am forever interested in the dilemma of “when do you take a very powerful gold card over a powerful one color card early on” You sort of touched on it, but it really is incredible how players like Ben and LSV can really narrow in on speculative picks that pay off and i always seem to just waste that pick in most attempts to do that. Keep up the good work
Thank you. I think it is often just a hard decision to make and part of the challenge of MTG. If the gold card and single-color card overlap in a color the gold card really has to be significantly better in that deck for me to want to take it. For example I might take Broodspinner over a Patchwork Beastie but probably not take a Drag to the Roots over it. It feels like sometimes we overvalue gold cards in the decks they fit in. Optimistic Scavenger appears to perform better than Gremlin Tamer in UW so that should actually be a fairly easy pick most of the time even if the Tamer feels like it should be the payoff for going UW.
I think the deeper you are in tft, the less hard some pivots seem. With the recent sets, augments and items pivots got rarer and its usually the pivot from the early game board to the end game board. There is still room for some pivots around 4 costs, but it's very limited
Leaving a question here - I realized in a paper draft recently that blue was very open - like pick 10 Unnerving Grasp open. But, I didn’t have a single blue card at that point (I was mostly evenly split between Jund colors). At what point is it too late to pivot and abandon basically all of pack 1?
To answer the question directly I am basically never fully committed before I at least see what I open pack 2. The latest I will pivot depends on if I am dropping all of my early picks or maybe just 1 color but usually I want to commit by mid pack 2. If I open a huge bomb p2p1 I am almost always going to consider picking it and ditching part of all of my pack 1. Obviously there are a bunch of factors involved in that. We want to get to 23 playables in most decks. That means you need to get about 8 per pack or 12 if you drop all your first pack. 12 is pretty hard to hit but not impossible. I sometimes find that I have a decent deck after only 2 packs. Most packs are so playable rich that if you were to AFK for the entire pack 1 you could still have a playable deck some of the time. Realistically if you were to pivot into Blue to get the p1p10 Unnerving Grasp you have 1 blue playable and you could play some number of your Jund cards in a Blue/x deck. If you went into pack 2 with the Grasp plus 3 Green cards and went into U/G you would be starting with 4 playables which is less than ideal but still not a disaster scenario. How much a single card going late means a color is "open" is hard to tell. You could find a sequence of packs that lead to some really strange things coming around late.
Great video. One problem. I am begging you to level your audio. Put it up 6db at LEAST in your editing software. That probably isn't enough. It's so low, man. I have to change my audio settings just to hear you.
How do these drafting methods compare in the Quick Draft format? Obviously signals aren't really a thing and I'm not sure if bots are designed to always pick the highest power card?
To be honest, I don't play much Quick Draft. In the past there were some issues of the bots undervaluing certain cards which meant you could force certain decks.(the Mill Merfolk Secretkeeper in Eldraine and I think Mono-Red in a different format.) I don't know for sure how the bots have been adjusted. I have played around in Quick Draft trying to force certain build arounds. Sometimes human drafters will spec on or just hate draft certain build arounds and it felt like the bots didn't do that as much but my sample size is too small to read much into.
TLDR: quick draft is often much more predictable, forceable, and "easy" than premier, that's why they punish you in the reward structure. You need 5+ wins to roughly break even vs 3+ because they know it's very gameable. 17lands is really powerful in quick draft in particular imo, you can take the data really seriously as the successful archetypes and color pairs are going to be really consistently successful: the bots are more predictable en masse than people are in my experience. Just make sure to use the quick draft data as opposed to the premier. Forcing archetypes works better as the bots tend to undervalue certain cards and archetypes and will do so every time, they struggle with synergy and combos and look for raw power. You can often pick powerful cards early and expect the synergistic but slightly weaker cards to table almost every time. If a lane is open in quick draft it almost always stays open, the bots almost never pivot. In shadows over innistrad for example the UB zombies deck was almost always open as the bots didn't care for the 1 and 2 cost creatures and spells that the deck ran on, and didn't correctly value the defiled zombies as a mechanic. It was certainly the best or second best color pair in the format (competing with UW) so you could literally always heavily value the most powerful and generic blue uncommons and commons knowing that the bots will almost always let you play UB or if the cards dry up UW
@@MagicByTheNumbers absolutely. Reddit/spikes will sometimes have good breakdowns a couple weeks into a format from experienced players, but the data will often speak for itself. Win rates in quick draft are often much higher and much more skewed: the best color pairs will be 5-10% over the middling to bad ones
Great content and analysis as always.
I am forever interested in the dilemma of “when do you take a very powerful gold card over a powerful one color card early on”
You sort of touched on it, but it really is incredible how players like Ben and LSV can really narrow in on speculative picks that pay off and i always seem to just waste that pick in most attempts to do that.
Keep up the good work
Thank you.
I think it is often just a hard decision to make and part of the challenge of MTG.
If the gold card and single-color card overlap in a color the gold card really has to be significantly better in that deck for me to want to take it. For example I might take Broodspinner over a Patchwork Beastie but probably not take a Drag to the Roots over it.
It feels like sometimes we overvalue gold cards in the decks they fit in. Optimistic Scavenger appears to perform better than Gremlin Tamer in UW so that should actually be a fairly easy pick most of the time even if the Tamer feels like it should be the payoff for going UW.
I think the deeper you are in tft, the less hard some pivots seem. With the recent sets, augments and items pivots got rarer and its usually the pivot from the early game board to the end game board. There is still room for some pivots around 4 costs, but it's very limited
Great video! Thanks for sharing your knowlegde with us !
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you the video, would you mind d sharing some of the sites you use to look at data?
I just use 17lands. I don't have any of the apps installed so I just use the public data they have.
It looks like he is using 17lands for a majority of his data, like the winrates for each deck archetype
Leaving a question here - I realized in a paper draft recently that blue was very open - like pick 10 Unnerving Grasp open. But, I didn’t have a single blue card at that point (I was mostly evenly split between Jund colors). At what point is it too late to pivot and abandon basically all of pack 1?
To answer the question directly I am basically never fully committed before I at least see what I open pack 2.
The latest I will pivot depends on if I am dropping all of my early picks or maybe just 1 color but usually I want to commit by mid pack 2.
If I open a huge bomb p2p1 I am almost always going to consider picking it and ditching part of all of my pack 1. Obviously there are a bunch of factors involved in that.
We want to get to 23 playables in most decks. That means you need to get about 8 per pack or 12 if you drop all your first pack. 12 is pretty hard to hit but not impossible. I sometimes find that I have a decent deck after only 2 packs.
Most packs are so playable rich that if you were to AFK for the entire pack 1 you could still have a playable deck some of the time.
Realistically if you were to pivot into Blue to get the p1p10 Unnerving Grasp you have 1 blue playable and you could play some number of your Jund cards in a Blue/x deck. If you went into pack 2 with the Grasp plus 3 Green cards and went into U/G you would be starting with 4 playables which is less than ideal but still not a disaster scenario.
How much a single card going late means a color is "open" is hard to tell. You could find a sequence of packs that lead to some really strange things coming around late.
@@MagicByTheNumbers This is awesome advice!
Great video. One problem. I am begging you to level your audio. Put it up 6db at LEAST in your editing software. That probably isn't enough. It's so low, man. I have to change my audio settings just to hear you.
Sorry about that, I'll adjust the OBS settings a bit to see if that helps.
How do these drafting methods compare in the Quick Draft format? Obviously signals aren't really a thing and I'm not sure if bots are designed to always pick the highest power card?
To be honest, I don't play much Quick Draft.
In the past there were some issues of the bots undervaluing certain cards which meant you could force certain decks.(the Mill Merfolk Secretkeeper in Eldraine and I think Mono-Red in a different format.) I don't know for sure how the bots have been adjusted.
I have played around in Quick Draft trying to force certain build arounds. Sometimes human drafters will spec on or just hate draft certain build arounds and it felt like the bots didn't do that as much but my sample size is too small to read much into.
TLDR: quick draft is often much more predictable, forceable, and "easy" than premier, that's why they punish you in the reward structure. You need 5+ wins to roughly break even vs 3+ because they know it's very gameable.
17lands is really powerful in quick draft in particular imo, you can take the data really seriously as the successful archetypes and color pairs are going to be really consistently successful: the bots are more predictable en masse than people are in my experience. Just make sure to use the quick draft data as opposed to the premier.
Forcing archetypes works better as the bots tend to undervalue certain cards and archetypes and will do so every time, they struggle with synergy and combos and look for raw power. You can often pick powerful cards early and expect the synergistic but slightly weaker cards to table almost every time. If a lane is open in quick draft it almost always stays open, the bots almost never pivot.
In shadows over innistrad for example the UB zombies deck was almost always open as the bots didn't care for the 1 and 2 cost creatures and spells that the deck ran on, and didn't correctly value the defiled zombies as a mechanic. It was certainly the best or second best color pair in the format (competing with UW) so you could literally always heavily value the most powerful and generic blue uncommons and commons knowing that the bots will almost always let you play UB or if the cards dry up UW
Thanks for this info.
It seems worthwhile for people interested in quick draft to try to check what the bots are valuing on a given patch.
@@MagicByTheNumbers absolutely. Reddit/spikes will sometimes have good breakdowns a couple weeks into a format from experienced players, but the data will often speak for itself. Win rates in quick draft are often much higher and much more skewed: the best color pairs will be 5-10% over the middling to bad ones
@@crooker23 I use draftsmith for data about top picks, would that generally tell me what is good to pick up in quick draft or not really?
Your voice lowkey similar to LSV lmao
what/???