It’s finally happened…

As some of you may know, I haven’t had the best of luck playing Magic: the Gathering lately. And by “lately” I mean for the last 9 months or so. I’ve been on a losing streak. A bad luck streak that’s turned into a belligerent sort of “giving up before I even start” type of thing. Everything has been going wrong, most of which is out of my control (yes, I’m not so ignorant that I’ll say none of it is my fault. I make mistakes).

Week after week, I open bad packs, while I sit across the table from people who start going crazy at what’s still in the pack after the sixth pick, I’m stuck taking some horrible card second because the person next to me also opened something horrible. Every week, I get rolled over by decks containing good card after good card that I never saw in the draft. Every week, I get put on a team with people who have okay decks, and get pitted against a team which has decks which are insane. (We have a program that uses our rankings to come up with “fair” teams.) On the off chance that I’ve actually gotten a deck which isn’t horrible, I’ll get mana screwed at least 2 of the games every match. On the off chance that I actually open a bomb rare, I’ll never cast it, or if I do, I never get to use it.

Week after week I’ve been losing. I haven’t had a winning record more than once in the last half of a year, and most times I’m not on the winning team anyway. More than half of the times in the last two months, I’ve been on the team that loses by some horrible landslide… even though the system says we should be statistically even. If we ever do win, it’s by a hair. So why do I keep going back? I keep thinking, “this is my week. This is the week that the Law of Averages will kick in.” But it never does. It always seems like I’m fighting an uphill battle. It seems like in order to win, I have to open good packs and choose the right colors (because my neighbors never send good signals) and make the right choices in the packs and make my deck right and choose when to mulligan and never make a single play mistake. Just to have a winning record. If any one of those goes wrong, it all goes to hell. This is what I feel like after 9 months of losing.

Last week was almost a stereotypical week. Open up a pack that’s pretty bad. I take a Kabuto Moth as the first pick, and the rest of the pack is very unexciting. Second pick, I take a Strength of Cedars from a pack that is very strong, but has a missing rare. Third pack, I just sit and stare at, because all of a sudden, there’s nothing. Seeing nothing in the colors of either of my previous picks, I take a Floating Dream Zubera. The next two picks are two other mediocre white and green cards, then sixth I’m sitting staring at a pack that still has a Nezumi Cutthroat and a Scuttling Death in it.

(Now here’s where I probably made a mistake. At this point, not only had I not passed any good black cards to my left, I hadn’t seen any good black cards at all. If I took one of these black cards, the person to my left surely would have taken the other and we would have been fighting all through the next pack. As it turns out, I saw all sorts of good black cards later — I should have taken the Cutthroat, but I didn’t. I took another sub-par blue card and passed the problem on. The two consecutive players to my left both took them, and ended up hurting each other.)

The draft continued horribly. Everyone on the other side of the table was saying how amazing things were going, but everyone to my immediate left was complaining about how horribly it was. (At least it wasn’t just me, for some reason the good cards just stopped immediately to my left.) The rest of the draft was unexciting. I ended up first picking a green Genju over the Glassspinner rare because blue was probably going to be a splash. (It ended up being two 2/3 Glasskites, a Counsel and some other card I can’t remember.) And this is when it really started showing. As a W/G/u deck, every single pack of Betrayers had the same common run, and every good card left in it was red or black. I ended up getting one of the Glasskites second, and the other sixth or seventh, but everything inbetween was junk that ended up not getting played.

My deck was awful. I had no removal, subpar creatures except for the Genju and the glasskites (and a white genju passed to me by my team). What had happened was this:

Immediately to my right, the guy had opened Yosei, which put him strongly in white. He then took a green card, ignoring the fact that he had passed me a Strength of Cedars, chalking this up to “the pack was bad for sending signals.” More on this later. He ended up with a deck full of very strong White and Green cards, all very good and with Yosei as a finisher. To his right, the guy had a red/black deck full of creature removal: Two Befouls, two Torrents of Stone (which plenty of arcane to splice it on to), two Rend Spirits and some other seventh piece I can’t remember, plus solid creatures… not that it mattered. To his right was the blue/white drafter who ended up with more than half of his creature flying, including two Mindsweepers, plus a Dampen Thought and a bunch of arcane, plus two Innocence Kamis and other ground stall and tapping, and to finish it all off, the White Myojin. All three of them cooperated wonderfully, which means that no good cards made it through to the rest of us.

I’ll give you one guess as to which three people were all on the same team. I got what could probably be the best possible draws from my deck. I played both Genjus on numerous occasions. I rarely got mana screwed. I had Blessed Breath or Mending Hands when I needed it.

I went 0-3 before the draft was over in an overwhelming loss for our team. There were situations where my opponent would play one card and there was no conceivable way for me to win.

Lastly, on the subject of “sending bad signals” I call bullshit. If you pass a good green card, you should seriously consider not switching into green, as you’ve already sent a signal. “Sending bad signals” is if you’d taken Yosei and there was a Nagao in the pack as well. This may be my greatest flaw as a drafter. I tend to be too “friendly”, especially since this is a team format, where there’s a good chance the person next to you may be on your team. The problem is that it boils down to a classic game theory problem: The Prisoner’s Dilemma. If two adjacent people in a draft cooperate (i.e. deny) then they both end up with good decks, because neither one is competing with the other. However, if one person decides to stop cooperating (i.e. confessing) and start taking cards of a color they’ve previously been passing and likely sent their partner in to, they get a better deck, and their neighbors will get a lot worse. The problem is that I always choose to “deny”, and it seems like the winning move is always to “confess.”

It’s too late to test this theory, though. Because it’s finally happened. Why do I keep going back week after week? Because by the time Wednesday rolls around, the anger and frustration from the week before have faded away, replaced by optimism and hope. But not this week. This week, it’s built up so much that I’m still angry and frustrated. I likely will be for a long time.

I’m taking my Wednesday evenings back, and I will be less frustrated to show for it.

3 Replies to “It’s finally happened…”

  1. It sounds like the drafting game isn’t the one for you, especially if it relies so heavily on the luck of the draw for yourself and two other people. If you like the rest of the game, maybe you should throw away the bits that don’t suit you and keep the bits that do.

    I hadn’t played since 1995, and now that there’s no money involved, I’m more interested in learning the ins and outs of it.

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