The Ultimate Magic Draft

turgy22

Nothing Special
I just had a great (or maybe really bad) idea for a new Magic draft format. Imagine that you and your friends owned one copy of every single Magic card ever printed and you basically decided to draft them all. So in the end, everyone ends up with a singleton deck and no two people have any of the same cards.

I've been trying to think about how a draft like this might go, but it's hard to imagine how people value cards when they can choose any of them. Is Black Lotus automatically the first pick if you know you can only have one in the deck? How about the moxes? Will there still be a premium on creatures, like in other drafts or are there enough control cards in Magic that one or two people can create decent decks using them? And how much disparity will be between the first pick and the last pick? Assuming 8 people draft, the last pick of a 45 round draft will be approximately the 360th best card in Magic.

So anyway, seeing how my friends and I don't own one of every Magic card, nor do we have the hours on end to attempt this using proxies, I thought these forums would be a great place to try this out. If anyone's interested, let me know and we can hammer out the details and give it a whirl.
 
D

DarthFerret

Guest
Wow, That would be really tough.

Some friends and I almost did a draft back when Unlimited was the only set out, and a guy had 3 sets. He wanted to do 1 more set, have 5 people get 4 full copys of a color, and one full copy of Artifacts (Except Mox's, you would get 4 of your color) and see who built a better deck. This sounds kinda similar...(assuming most decks would be Mono Colored....)
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Drat. I forgot to put a "TM" after "Ultimate" in my drafting challenge so that Turgy couldn't steal it... :p

I'm still not sure exactly how this is supposed to work, but I'll give it a shot. Is the idea to basically just make a draft pool out of one each of every card and make piles from that? Only instead of just three piles, you keep going until there aren't enough cards left to go around?

If I'm not mistaken, MS Excel has some feature where you can shuffle the items in a column (I haven't used such a feature personally, but I think it exists). If so, it would be easy to put the card list onto Excel and use it to shuffle...
 
L

Lythand

Guest
Question. When you say one card only. Do you mean one card with the same name or do you mean if the card was reprinted in another set, then that card could essentialy be chosen more then once.

Count me in by the way. I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish, but I will help.
 
L

Lythand

Guest
Are we going to play this in the forums?

What would be cool is once we go througha nd draft all the cards, make a master list of each persons cards, post them in this forum, Load up apprentice or magic workstation, and duel it out. Maybe a little tournament or something.
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Oversoul: Sorry about the Ultimate. I forgot that you had taken that. I'll try to come up with a better name.

To clarify how it works: I actually thought of this after the NFL draft, which took place last weekend, so it works more like a sports draft (or fantasy sports draft) than a typical Magic draft. Basically, all the "players" are out there for everyone to see and you just pick the best ones. If you're familiar with how Rochester drafting works, it's sort of like that, except instead of opening one pack at a time and picking around, you have one "pack" that contains one copy of every card, so there's something like 8000 cards to choose from. (Keeping it Vintage legal, too.)

Lythand: When I say one copy of each card, I mean one and only one copy. So there's one copy of Stone Rain, not 30 or however many times it's been reprinted. And once Stone Rain is off the board, no one else can take it. Also, I'm not sure what I'm trying to accomplish either. It just seemed fun and interesting.
As far as playing goes, I was thinking we could just do it in the forums (the drafting and the mini-tournament), but if everyone would rather use Apprentice or MWS, that's fine with me.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
turgy22 said:
Oversoul: Sorry about the Ultimate. I forgot that you had taken that. I'll try to come up with a better name.
It's cool. I just couldn't resist making a reference(TM) to it.

To clarify how it works: I actually thought of this after the NFL draft, which took place last weekend, so it works more like a sports draft (or fantasy sports draft) than a typical Magic draft. Basically, all the "players" are out there for everyone to see and you just pick the best ones. If you're familiar with how Rochester drafting works, it's sort of like that, except instead of opening one pack at a time and picking around, you have one "pack" that contains one copy of every card, so there's something like 8000 cards to choose from. (Keeping it Vintage legal, too.)
Ah, now that is different. It should result in more powerful decks...
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Ransac said:
When are we going to start this?
I was hoping for at least 8 people. I count seven so far:
turgy22
Oversoul
DarthFerret
Ransac
Homestar
Lythand
Spiderman

I'll wait until Monday to see if anyone else wants to join. If not, I don't think seven will be too bad. Then I'll determine the draft order randomly and we can get started.
 
L

Lythand

Guest
I would rather use a program. I don't see how you can achieve random card drawing. And to comment. I can see if this were and actual Cardboard versionof the game, we would pick the "best" cards, but if its essentially going to be a "highlander" deck when completed, I would think to choose cards that work well with each other. I have this very interesting red/blue highlander deck myself. Works really good and fun to play.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Lythand said:
I can see if this were and actual Cardboard versionof the game, we would pick the "best" cards, but if its essentially going to be a "highlander" deck when completed, I would think to choose cards that work well with each other.
In drafts I've seen, the value of the prize you'd get from winning is greater than the value of the cards you'd get by rare-drafting.

I do think this will provide a rough trend of which cards are better than others and I'll be interested to see the decks, but there are two factors to keep in mind about how this gauges card quality...

1. Cards like Fluctuator (very good but crappy in highlander) rank lower than they would by most estimations of card power.
2. Cards like Dwarven Pony (bad) rank higher than they should because Ransac picks them early on. :p
 

Ransac

CPA Trash Man
HEY! Dwarven Pony should be drafted before it travels around the table, once. I don't care what you guys, think!!!!



DWARVEN PONY ROCKS MY SOCKS OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!



Note: 2500 Posts, baby!!!!


Ransac, cpa trash man
 

turgy22

Nothing Special
Melkor said:
I'll make it 8. Question, does the one of limit apply to basic lands?
Fantastic. No, everyone has an unlimited supply of basic lands to choose from, just like any other limited format. I think putting only one of each basic would really throw off the fun of this, as people would be struggling late to fill their land quota for the deck.

So, if there are no other questions, we can begin. I was thinking 45 rounds, since that's the typical limited draft pool. It may very well take the next 3 years to finish, but what the hell? Does that seem like a good number or should we tighten it up?

Anyway, I'll roll to determine the draft order and here it is:
1) Spiderman
2) Oversoul
3) Ransac
4) Melkor
5) Homestar
6) DarthFerret
7) Lythand
8) turgy22

For anyone who's ever participated in a fantasy draft before, the order is going to be reversed for all the even numbered rounds. I'm not sure if that has a name, but I call it a snake draft since it goes back and forth. So basically, over two rounds the order would look like this:

1. Spiderman
2. Oversoul
3. Ransac
4. Melkor
5. Homestar
6. DarthFerret
7. Lythand
8. turgy22
9. turgy22
10. Lythand
11. DarthFerret
12. Homestar
13. Melkor
14. Ransac
15. Oversoul
16. Spiderman

Rinse and repeat for rounds 3 and up.

If there are any other questions, let me know. Otherwise, Spiderman, you're on the clock. Pick a card, any card.
 
D

DarthFerret

Guest
I assume we get to see what card everyone else picked before we pick correct?
 
Top