I don't know, what do you consider good? My limited rating was at about 1750 when I last looked, mostly from drafting. It was higher before I started jumping in to draft formats I missed and know little about every week with the flashback series this year.
I'm quite well aware of what the differences are, and how infrequently they come up in a game. By comparison, I can easily play 5-10 drafts a week, so that's at least an hour or two of wasted time I can avoid per week.
On your note about hate drafting though, any of the best limited players would already tell you that it's almost never correct to hate draft even in a regular pod, and most have.
First off, the reduction in card quality is not that high, if you are early enough in the pack to be hate drafting anything, odds are there are still reasonable cards left.
Second, once you realize that you are hurting your deck to make a marginal negative impact on one opposing deck, you have to remember that the odds are against you even having to play against that deck.
If you do play against that deck, the odds are against them ever drawing and casting the card that you could have hate drafted in any given game.
At the end of the day, you have hurt your own deck for a marginal benefit against someone you probably won't play if and only if they actually would have drawn that card and been able to cast it.
You are just far better off taking something that might go in your own deck, or even a solid sideboard card.
Oh. But I agree with you :) I was asking Longtimegone if he is a good drafter? He said that League drafts was a good thing. I am not convinced at the moment.
hah, none taken, I mean why would someone get offended by the truth? Limited play has always been my weakest part of the game, because I just don't enjoy it. :/
Of course this still goes away from matching the paper experience of drafting.
No offense. But maybe you are not a very good drafter? The drafting strategy will be different when you dont meet the players from the same draft pool. Hate-picking a card so that the opponents will not benefit from it does not make sense anymore. Drafting and sealed play will be a lot closer to each other now that there is no connection between the draft pool and your opponents.
The more I think about it, the less it bothers me.
The way I'm looking at it, the things that are being lost by moving to cross pod pairing happen vastly less frequently than the annoyances that are being eliminated.
Yes, it's cool that you can remember that you passed some key card and occasionally notice that the person you are playing is in those colors and successfully play around it.
On the other hand, every single draft you end up stuck sitting around waiting with nothing to do for easily 20-40 minutes per event in Swiss queues. That doesn't even touch on the cases where you don't have time to play a full draft so you can't start one, or something more important comes up and you have to drop.
The thing we are losing happens occasionally, while the annoyance that we are losing was a part of every single draft.
To give a comparison, I'd happily take a deal that said I'd never again find money on the street if it meant that I'd never have to sit at a red light.
We are giving up an occasional upside to get rid of a constant hassle, I think it's just harder to see right now since we are used to the hassle so we only feel the loss.
Hi Kuma, may I ask: Do you expect that Moat will receive the ban hammer any time soon? Interested to know your thoughts, and of course I realise that you can't give a firm confirmation either way.
I think that if Moat is here to stay, then it will only be a matter of time before I will be too tempted to use this card and stop all the creatures on the ground. I like defending myself against ground creatures. With 4 copies of Moat main deck, and with no sideboard hate possible from your opponent, this card is very devastating.
But you weren't doing Rick's Picks at the time. It would be interesting (to me, at least) to see a video of you playing ZEN-WWK, or possibly even more triple ROE, that I remember as a very strange draft environment.
Thanks for the comment Rick. Yeah that is a big upside for me as well - I will probably still do a draft all in one shot, but getting to shave potentially 1 hour or more off the time is a great benefit of the leagues.
Thanks for the comment pcjr. As far as the wait between rounds, it can certainly be put to good use. The upside for leagues though is you get to choose if you need a break and for how much time, rather than having to watch the clock. Of course, that is not a priority for everyone.
I agree it is possible to develop bad habits that could hurt in the transition to 8-4. Folks would have to learn those in the high risk/high reward environment rather than the safer swiss queues. Ideally MTGO would have enough players to support both a swiss queue and a league. I do hope they bring one swiss queue back in the future once they've looked at the data so that they can support the preferences of more players.
Seems to me when I look at all the games being offered many of the commander games that come up are for 1v1. It should not take long at all. Be wary it is not the same format at all, more resembling 100cs than multiplayer edh.
I don't have any problem waiting for rounds to start. My life is busy, there are lots of things I get done during the downtime. Just the other day I nearly finished making dinner between rounds before my wife arrived home to finish the work.
Moving from swiss drafts to draft leagues will make it more difficult for you to transition to the only remaining "real" draft format left (8-4 single elim.). You will start ignoring important things like the cards/bombs you've passed. Picking that card that you've never played with in your life just in case a one-in-a-zillion situation came up that you'd like to sideboard it in, instead of that card you know someone's going to main deck and wreck you with...This is a skill lost in swiss leagues.
I used to mostly 4-3-2-2 draft, I could fairly consistently make it past the first round, so I got to draft a lot with little investment. I didn't mind switching to 6-2-2-2 swiss that much, because it could give me more time to discover what was right and wrong with the deck I drafted.
Now, I've gone ahead and switched to 8-4. I figure its the only format for me after next week so I might as well start getting used to it. I might draft league for a bit when a new set comes out, instead of sealed leagues, in order to discover the format. But, that's the only use I have for them.
Thanks for reading. To find any EDH game go to -> Play Lobby -> Constructed Open Play -> Just for Fun. Under the format filter you can check Commander to show all the EDH games. You can also check if you want to play multiplayer or 1-on-1.
I dislike the idea of a timeout under favourable conditions being thought of as a good thing or positive indicator. Clock management is vital in the online game.
I tried Punishing Fire once, and, even besides my natural slowness, the card has inherent time issues if used as a dedicated win con.
By the way, the Angels deck has a bug that very likely cost me a game. Angel of Jubilation prevented Wasteland from destroying his lands (he was stuck on four mana and stayed stuck on 4 mana for several turns), but kept pumping out 4cc angels, and eventually won when he should have been Wasteland-locked earlier. And if anyone wants the extra data point for future worthiness determination, I also timed out g.2 in a favorable board state.
I remember the times you speak of. I didn't know you all that well back then but I knew there was something amiss. And then later I found out why. Sad times are not great for reflecting upon (unless you have masochistic tendencies) but they do give your reads some very good insight into who you are and what makes you tick. Real is better than not real imho.
In RE: The bugs that keep breaking the game. It is a tough line to toe to keep everyone happy and interested. I suspect the PTB have stopped thinking about that aspect all together when making the tough decisions. Not without reason. Hard to please everyone and have everything work all the time. Not apologizing for WOTC. In an ideal world they WOULD be held accountable in a satisfactory way. But unideally there is no one to take that function up because the players won't. And WOTC won't self-police unless it is impacting profits. No company at their stage of the "game".
I love the idea that they could put themselves in the penalty box for failing to fix something that inconveniences players (again and again) but that would require a certain kind of person at the helm that I don't think is currently there. Only a very great leader would even begin to consider such an idea. And then that person would probably quickly either forget it (self-preservation) or lose their job.
"Give away money??? Are you nuts?? We only do that when we get a substantial benefit for doing so!" my idea of that conversation's end.
I don't know, what do you consider good? My limited rating was at about 1750 when I last looked, mostly from drafting. It was higher before I started jumping in to draft formats I missed and know little about every week with the flashback series this year.
I'm quite well aware of what the differences are, and how infrequently they come up in a game. By comparison, I can easily play 5-10 drafts a week, so that's at least an hour or two of wasted time I can avoid per week.
On your note about hate drafting though, any of the best limited players would already tell you that it's almost never correct to hate draft even in a regular pod, and most have.
First off, the reduction in card quality is not that high, if you are early enough in the pack to be hate drafting anything, odds are there are still reasonable cards left.
Second, once you realize that you are hurting your deck to make a marginal negative impact on one opposing deck, you have to remember that the odds are against you even having to play against that deck.
If you do play against that deck, the odds are against them ever drawing and casting the card that you could have hate drafted in any given game.
At the end of the day, you have hurt your own deck for a marginal benefit against someone you probably won't play if and only if they actually would have drawn that card and been able to cast it.
You are just far better off taking something that might go in your own deck, or even a solid sideboard card.
Oh. But I agree with you :) I was asking Longtimegone if he is a good drafter? He said that League drafts was a good thing. I am not convinced at the moment.
hah, none taken, I mean why would someone get offended by the truth? Limited play has always been my weakest part of the game, because I just don't enjoy it. :/
Of course this still goes away from matching the paper experience of drafting.
No offense. But maybe you are not a very good drafter? The drafting strategy will be different when you dont meet the players from the same draft pool. Hate-picking a card so that the opponents will not benefit from it does not make sense anymore. Drafting and sealed play will be a lot closer to each other now that there is no connection between the draft pool and your opponents.
Fair point! ROE is a format I actually enjoyed a lot, so I'll see if it works for me.
I have decided to delete a lot of comments here.
I'll say it again, we do not condone the actions and speech of those that wish to speak with hate in their hearts.
If you want to continue your conversation, there are places for that, this is no longer the place.
The more I think about it, the less it bothers me.
The way I'm looking at it, the things that are being lost by moving to cross pod pairing happen vastly less frequently than the annoyances that are being eliminated.
Yes, it's cool that you can remember that you passed some key card and occasionally notice that the person you are playing is in those colors and successfully play around it.
On the other hand, every single draft you end up stuck sitting around waiting with nothing to do for easily 20-40 minutes per event in Swiss queues. That doesn't even touch on the cases where you don't have time to play a full draft so you can't start one, or something more important comes up and you have to drop.
The thing we are losing happens occasionally, while the annoyance that we are losing was a part of every single draft.
To give a comparison, I'd happily take a deal that said I'd never again find money on the street if it meant that I'd never have to sit at a red light.
We are giving up an occasional upside to get rid of a constant hassle, I think it's just harder to see right now since we are used to the hassle so we only feel the loss.
Thankfully we are going to rotate writers until Pete is ready to come back. I do not have the personality to do this weekly.
Moat has just come back, it will stay at least all season, then we'll see if it's been overpowered or not.
Nice to see you take the mantle while Pete's away! And game of the week is a super neat idea.
Hi Kuma, may I ask: Do you expect that Moat will receive the ban hammer any time soon? Interested to know your thoughts, and of course I realise that you can't give a firm confirmation either way.
I think that if Moat is here to stay, then it will only be a matter of time before I will be too tempted to use this card and stop all the creatures on the ground. I like defending myself against ground creatures. With 4 copies of Moat main deck, and with no sideboard hate possible from your opponent, this card is very devastating.
I wish there were a like button.
For years people complained about the lack of leagues. Now we get to complain about leagues eliminating the formats we like to play.
Leagues: The devourer of online formats.
Yeah, going back to Innistrad and Ravnica and Zendikar felt weird to me too :D
But you weren't doing Rick's Picks at the time. It would be interesting (to me, at least) to see a video of you playing ZEN-WWK, or possibly even more triple ROE, that I remember as a very strange draft environment.
Thanks for the comment Rick. Yeah that is a big upside for me as well - I will probably still do a draft all in one shot, but getting to shave potentially 1 hour or more off the time is a great benefit of the leagues.
Thanks for the comment pcjr. As far as the wait between rounds, it can certainly be put to good use. The upside for leagues though is you get to choose if you need a break and for how much time, rather than having to watch the clock. Of course, that is not a priority for everyone.
I agree it is possible to develop bad habits that could hurt in the transition to 8-4. Folks would have to learn those in the high risk/high reward environment rather than the safer swiss queues. Ideally MTGO would have enough players to support both a swiss queue and a league. I do hope they bring one swiss queue back in the future once they've looked at the data so that they can support the preferences of more players.
I was initially bummed out by the change to draft leagues. However...
"This flexibility also solves one of the big annoyances for me with the queues - waiting for other matches in your pod to finish."
That does it for me, so far. I think I'm a (cautious) believer.
(5-3-2-2 single elimination is still my drafting dream for MTGO, though.)
Seems to me when I look at all the games being offered many of the commander games that come up are for 1v1. It should not take long at all. Be wary it is not the same format at all, more resembling 100cs than multiplayer edh.
I don't have any problem waiting for rounds to start. My life is busy, there are lots of things I get done during the downtime. Just the other day I nearly finished making dinner between rounds before my wife arrived home to finish the work.
Moving from swiss drafts to draft leagues will make it more difficult for you to transition to the only remaining "real" draft format left (8-4 single elim.). You will start ignoring important things like the cards/bombs you've passed. Picking that card that you've never played with in your life just in case a one-in-a-zillion situation came up that you'd like to sideboard it in, instead of that card you know someone's going to main deck and wreck you with...This is a skill lost in swiss leagues.
I used to mostly 4-3-2-2 draft, I could fairly consistently make it past the first round, so I got to draft a lot with little investment. I didn't mind switching to 6-2-2-2 swiss that much, because it could give me more time to discover what was right and wrong with the deck I drafted.
Now, I've gone ahead and switched to 8-4. I figure its the only format for me after next week so I might as well start getting used to it. I might draft league for a bit when a new set comes out, instead of sealed leagues, in order to discover the format. But, that's the only use I have for them.
Thanks for reading. To find any EDH game go to -> Play Lobby -> Constructed Open Play -> Just for Fun. Under the format filter you can check Commander to show all the EDH games. You can also check if you want to play multiplayer or 1-on-1.
Great article, but where do you even play 1v1 edh on modo?
I dislike the idea of a timeout under favourable conditions being thought of as a good thing or positive indicator. Clock management is vital in the online game.
I tried Punishing Fire once, and, even besides my natural slowness, the card has inherent time issues if used as a dedicated win con.
By the way, the Angels deck has a bug that very likely cost me a game. Angel of Jubilation prevented Wasteland from destroying his lands (he was stuck on four mana and stayed stuck on 4 mana for several turns), but kept pumping out 4cc angels, and eventually won when he should have been Wasteland-locked earlier. And if anyone wants the extra data point for future worthiness determination, I also timed out g.2 in a favorable board state.
I remember the times you speak of. I didn't know you all that well back then but I knew there was something amiss. And then later I found out why. Sad times are not great for reflecting upon (unless you have masochistic tendencies) but they do give your reads some very good insight into who you are and what makes you tick. Real is better than not real imho.
In RE: The bugs that keep breaking the game. It is a tough line to toe to keep everyone happy and interested. I suspect the PTB have stopped thinking about that aspect all together when making the tough decisions. Not without reason. Hard to please everyone and have everything work all the time. Not apologizing for WOTC. In an ideal world they WOULD be held accountable in a satisfactory way. But unideally there is no one to take that function up because the players won't. And WOTC won't self-police unless it is impacting profits. No company at their stage of the "game".
I love the idea that they could put themselves in the penalty box for failing to fix something that inconveniences players (again and again) but that would require a certain kind of person at the helm that I don't think is currently there. Only a very great leader would even begin to consider such an idea. And then that person would probably quickly either forget it (self-preservation) or lose their job.
"Give away money??? Are you nuts?? We only do that when we get a substantial benefit for doing so!" my idea of that conversation's end.