Introduction

This is part 6 of the transcription of the limited level-ups episode 37. This one is about less obvious observations about effective drafers and team draft. Here you have a list of all parts of the transcription: part1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Transcription

I think one other thing that’s interesting to me is to also look at a few of the things that there wasn’t a huge difference between these two groups and curious to hear your thoughts on these. So the first one that we have here, is that the effective drafters don’t have much difference in their bias in early color preference from the comparison group. So the way that I think about this is, the higher level drafters are not any more likely to be drafting with preferences versus drafting the hard way then the comparison group.

Yeah, that’s interesting to me. I definitely would have thought that, you know, that the better drafters would have a higher bias. And I wonder, maybe that is, based on the fact, that in the past few years also that there hasn’t been, you know there’s been a pretty good balance as far as colors go in formats, right? Like in this format, of course blue is great, but the worst color which is either white or green I would say. Like, it’s not that much worse than you know, the next worst color, for example. There is notable exceptions of course, you know, there is black in M21 which even then it wasn’t that bad. So, I wonder if just like the power level of the cards and the delta between the worst cards and the best cards and the worst colors and the best colors is just not big enough that we should, you know, really be taking that into account in the big picture, like, when there’s a tie breaker, I think that’s important. But I wonder if that has mattered less as they’ve gotten better at balancing sets.

Yeah, and just to be clear. We’re not saying here that you shouldn’t be drafting with preferences, but just that we don’t see hugely different rates here. So I think that probably speaks to Ryan Saxe and everyone else who sort of advocated for drafting the preferences that they’ve gotten the message out there, that drafting the hard way isn’t only way to go about things. So yeah, we’re wishing people to do a good job at that. And then the other group of things that we didn’t see much difference in, that I’m curious to get your thoughts on, are also related to the deck that you build. So, we didn’t see much difference in the converted mana cost of the decks, we didn’t see a big difference in the rate that people are splashing and then a couple other ones, were that, people usually have about the same rate of how often they are like skewing their deck colors if you think back to Throne of Eldraine, where you were highly incentivized to build a mono color or as close to mono colored deck as possible and the lessons that people learned from that, that people are doing that about the same rate across the two groups. And the last one was, that the rate that you’re playing lands compared to the number of cards of that color that you have, is about the same. So, like a concrete example of this might be, if you are splashing a single card in your deck, you see in both groups about three sources of that per deck. So yeah all these sort of deck building things, people are generally pretty consistent in across different groups. So might be a suggesting that you don’t need to focus on these things as much.

Yeah. And I almost wonder kind of like you what you’re saying about the message has gotten out there. I wonder if it’s less like these things aren’t important and more that both groups of players are doing them at an equal pace, right like, maybe, the lesser drafters are just you know, still building their decks correctly in these aspects.

Yeah, totally makes sense. And yeah, I know you do a lot of coaching sessions. I’m curious if these sort of habits are tthings that you see that people need to improve on or what do you think of these are the most important people should be focusing on?

Yeah. So I mean, I think, just going through the list here: filling holes. I think this is probably the biggest one for me if I’m looking at all these. I think, filling holes, for sure because I do think it’s very easy to get locked into: “This is just the best card in the pack. I should take it!”, right? And I think that filling holes comes in time because it’s not one of those things where I can just be like, “Oh fill your holes better”, right? Like it’s not something that it’s apparent what you should do, just by telling that this is a habit you should get into. You need the context. You need to know, you know, you need to have those reps in to know how to fill those draft holes better, right? So, I think, I would suggest to anybody out there who is looking to improve in this area, just, like, in your Pack 3 really critically look, “What do I already have in my deck?”, “What doesn’t my deck have?” And then, you know, maybe you’re not going to get it hundred percent correct on that first try, but I always say, getting that conversation with yourself started is huge. Just so you can really… You know, half the battle is noticing that something needs to be changed. And if you do start noticing, “Oh, I’m just taking this removal spell when I already have six removal spells and I don’t have any 2-drops”, like, noticing that in the first place, that is the first step and honestly the most important step. Because once it is at the forefront of your thoughts, you’re going to start noticing it and you’re going to start naturally doing it better. Robert let’s wrap it up from there. Thank you again for putting this together. This was fantastic. I really enjoyed this and thank you for coming on, I think, like, I really appreciate your insights and I enjoyed this conversation overall. Where can people find you?

Yeah, this was a great conversation. I was happy to sit here and learn from you while we’re talking through these. Yeah, so if you want to find me on Twitter, I’m at 17lands, number 17, not right now. You can find all of our data on 17lands.com and in various Discord channels, including the one that we have for our 17lands, you’ll find me as Viralmisnomer in there.

Awesome, if you’d like to contact the show with any feedback, you can do so by e-mailing us at limitedlevelups@gmail.com, or of course, as I mentioned before, if you’d like to send your question of the week, you can send it there. If you’d like to follow me, you can do so by following me on Twitch or Twitter. I am Chord_O_Calls on both those platforms. Robert, thank you again so much for coming on. It was a delight!

Yeah, thanks Alex, this was a pleasure.

Alright, and we will see you next time on the next episode of Limited Level-Ups.

Alright, so I couldn’t finish the show without at least mentioning, touching on the Lords versus Resources team draft showdown that happened this weekend. Well, you know to get a little bit of a debrief, touch on it, a little bit of a small recap, and just give kind of my thoughts on it. So, I mean, first of all it was an absolute blast! I hope everybody out there had at least half as much fun watching it, as we did playing in it. And from what I heard, you people did. People had a really really good time watching it. From my perspective, it was an absolute treat. I mean aside from being able to play against LSV and Marshall and BK, you know, you don’t get to do that every day, right? That part was awesome. Being able to team with Ben and Ethan, you know, two people I consider friends and just great magic players, right? Just being able to be in a team with them, you know, we actually were planning to go to a team sealed event, it was may, but of course that got canceled, you know, GPs got cancelled because of covid. So, being able to actually do a team event with them in the end, that was really awesome. Just preparing for it. And you know, just the primal aspect of like team versus team going at it, that was great! But team draft itself, I think, I hope and I think I’ve seen a little bit of this already, I hope this ignites some excitement over team draft because I think team draft is such a deep and interesting format. Really, really great! And, I think, you know, if you have a chance to team up with two people, your friends or just 2 people online with you against three other people and you know, I’ve already seen people organize this on Twitter and Discord, I would highly recommend it. It’s a ton of fun, really great. You know, just cannot recommend it enough, team draft is awesome! That’s my first take away. My second takeaway is, man, I hope there’s more competitive limited events sometimes soon, like, you know, there’s obviously been a lack of competitive limited for multiple reasons, right? Because of covid, because for whatever reason WOTC has kind of dialed back on Limited in high-level events at the Mythic invitationals and stuff and you know, if anything, I think this event has really shown that people want to see competitive high level limited events, right? There was huge viewership on wednesday night. LSV’s VOD had like 50,000 views, right? And like I had double the amount of viewers on my stream that I usually have. People want to see this stuff and obviously the hyped-up team aspect of it definitely contributed to that. But I think people are jonesing for it and I really hope in the future that, you know, WOTC sees this, and that, you know, we’ll get more competitive limited events in the future. Number three is about of team draft advice. Unfortunately, I only learned after. So, Ryan came on my stream after the team draft and we went over my draft log basically and, Ryan’s a team draft expert, and he kind of dissected the draft, and, you know, I was explaining my thought process, and a really important tidbit about team drafting, and if you’re not familiar with this, when you’re team drafting, hate drafting is a real thing. You’ve got to hate draft, because, you know, in normal draft the cards that you pass, you know, they usually won’t matter because, you’re not going to face the person that you’re passing to most of the time. But in team draft, you know, if you pass a bomb rare that you open in pack 3 and you can’t usually play it like a, you know, you’re red-blue and you open a Felidar Retreat? You still want to take that card because you can’t pass that to the person beside you because, you know, somebody on your team is going to play against that and you will at some point as well, right? So, hate drafting is huge. And when I was drafting, you know, I had pegged Marshall, who was on my right, as being in Black. I was pretty sure, and multiple picks during the draft, what I did was, you know, say there was a good removal spell, like a Deadly Alliance, right, but there might have also been a Feed the Swarm, like, you know a comparable card and I was in red white. I ended up red white in the draft, you know, big surprise, but say there was that Deadly Alliance, a good white card for me, let’s say, I don’t know, Shepherd of Heroes and the Feed the Swarm, well, I said to myself: “Okay, well, I’ll take the Deadly Alliance, I can afford to give up this white card”. And you know, again, I’m going to take one for the team basically. That logic is faulty though, because what ends up happening is, you don’t get a good card for your deck, you take, you know, A card from Marshall, let’s say, but Marshall just gets the Feed the Swarm, right? So you’re down so much EV on that exchange because you don’t get that card and Marshall still gets a fine card, right? So you can’t really reliably hate draft if the person you’re passing to was just going to get a good card anyway. So right, that’s just a little tidbit for anybody out there who is going to team draft. Just, I learned it the hard way. My final takeaway here, is, it felt pretty good to beat Luis and BK, I will say. You know, just humble breaks here, I’m pretty proud of how I played all my matches, honestly. There was a few small mistakes in there that, you know, just, I think over the course of three really intense matches you’re bound to make one or two small things, but overall, I’m super pleased with myself that I got to steal the win from both, you know, both pro-players. Couldn’t get it from Marshall, but you know, I feel pretty good about 2-1. Anyhow, for the team, by the way, I feel pretty good that we did end up 4-5, we got four wins, the other team got five. But, I think, you know, that’s a pretty respectable record. And I’m happy with that overall. You know, I was joking that beforehand, that I can’t wait to write the article, you know, how I beat LSV and you know, it turns out that I’m still going to be able to write that one, luckily. Anyways, those are some of my thoughts on team draft and yeah, it was, already said it a bunch, but it was an absolute blast and I can’t wait for the Lords versus Resources grudge match that is bound to happen at some point in the future.

The end

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