You are: Home -> Articles -> Feature Article |
Editor: Professor X. Tuesday 06th July 2004.
|
 How I got the Draft!!! or My First Marvel Draft Opening trading card game boosters can be a real rollercoaster ride. We've all heard Magic - The Gathering referred to as cardboard crack and I don't think I can conjure a more apt description. You get a real buzz off opening a chase rare or a card you particularly like or want for a deck. But the other side of the coin is that you get bummed when you find a junk rare or a card that you already have more copies of than you want. For me, a recent example of this has been my ability to open Nim Devourer whenever I crack a Mirrodin booster or Wand of the Elements whenever I buy a Darksteel pack. It's just plain frustrating. A wise friend of mine named Jens has introduced me to the idea of only ever opening packs when drafting. Not only does this put a competitive and social spin on the whole process of the cracking ritual, but it also works to remove, or at least reduce, the addictive element of our hobby. I can't recommend this policy enough. We draft all of the rares and foils at the end of play as a way to compensate good play (boosting the competitive element) and to avoid "rare drafting" from the outset. I hope there aren't too many people reading this who don't understand the concept of drafting, but in case there is, I'll run through the basic processes (particularly as it pertains to Marvel Origins) in the next par. Feel free to skip it if you like and move straight into the tale of my first Marvel draft. Draft is a format of Marvel Origins where players build decks from a limited card pool. It usually works best with an even number of players (to avoid boring byes). Each brings three boosters and sits around a table in a circle. All players simultaneously open one of their packs and look at the contents. Each player chooses one card from the pack and puts it face down in front of them and then passes the remainder of the pack to the player on their left. Each player selects a new card from the second pack, then passes the remainder of that pack to the left. Players continue selecting (drafting) the cards and passing the packs to the left. When the first pack is finished, players open their second boosters and repeat the process, this time passing to the right. Then for the third pack, they do it again, passing to the left once again. When the draft is finished, each player will have selected 42 cards in total. Then they'll build 30-card decks with which to play. Pairings can be determined randomly, either out of a hat or using a die, or by any other means your group agrees on. On to my not-so-torrid tale ... I had bought the X-Men vs. Brotherhood starter pack and learned the very basics of the Vs System, and I wanted more. What about my policy of only opening boosters in a draft? I didn't know anyone else who played Marvel Origins in Canberra or anyone who was looking to buy into the game. This led me to "cheating" myself a bit. I bought three boosters and opened them. I was interested in the possibility of drafting Marvel Origins from the very first time I heard about the game and found out that limited formats were possible, so I looked through each pack as though I was opening it for a draft. One pack featured a Magneto, Lord Magnus and two Dr Doom, Victor Von Doom (yes two of the same common in one pack caused me some concern, but at least it was a big character). Another pack had Thing, Heavy Hitter. If Magic was cardboard crack, then Marvel Origins proved to be cardboard smack for me. I got the same dizzying high from busting open those three packs that I once experienced with Magic boosters. I immediately knew I wanted more. With that in mind, I decided to invite a couple of Magic playing friends to learn how to play the game and then draft some packs that I would buy and keep. After the usual hassles of finding people who were interested and able to attend, I hosted a four person draft, with Jens, Mark and Mace making the trek interstate (from Canberra in the ACT to Queanbeyan in NSW - where I live - is about a 15 minute drive). Luckily for me, Mark had read up a bit about Marvel Origins and went through the online demonstration. This made it a lot easier to try and teach the guys how to play, as Mark and I played a bit of a demo game after going through the different card types and the basic rules. I had also written a "cheat sheet" for the guys to use during the draft, which outlined the importance of taking six, seven and eight costed characters early, which teams were the easier to draft, a suggested breakdown of the curve and how many non-character cards to include in their decks. I had kept the three initial boosters I bought intact. Even though they had been opened, the guys were happy to draft them (one of these packs was randomly included in the three packs each of my guests received, so my prior knowledge was of limited value to me). So with that, we started drafting. My first pack was devoid of big characters, with the biggest being the five-drop Robot Destroyer, and little else in terms of exciting non-character cards. Straight away, I was going against my own advice to be wary of the Doom team, because so many of the cards required Dr Doom to be used or to be effective. I hoped (as it turned out, in vain) that the boys heeded my advice about Doom and dived right in. It turned out that Mace (who was sitting to my left and was being fed by me), had the pack containing Magneto, Lord Magnus and the two copies of the common Dr Doom. Taking Magneto - who turned out to be the only eight-drop and only bigger than six-costed character in the whole card pool - Mace passed Mark the two Dr Dooms, who nabbed one and then seemingly thought, "Michael said we should be careful about drafting Doom, so I can force the team and maybe get run of the table". Luckily for me, the second Dr Doom went through Jens, but beside a couple of commons, such as the location Doomstadt, which luckily "gives" you Dr Doom for the purposes of card requirements, and the character Titania, I didn't see that many of the decent cards for this team. As it turned out, Jens moved into Doom later in the draft to make it extra hard for me to get the goods. Meanwhile, I picked up a couple of good, smaller X-Men, such as Archangel and Banshee, and a lot of decent plot twists. Before the second pack was finished, I had picked up She-Hulk, Green Jeans and a couple of other Fantastic Four characters, including Wolverine, New Fantastic Four. I also picked up a very valuable non-aligned Puppet Master. I felt like things were not going that well for me at the end of the second pack, as I had about 15 non-character cards by this stage. I was mindful of the fact that I'd only be able to cut a total of 12 cards from my pile when I made my deck. I found out later that Jens was picking up very few non-character cards, which was contributing to the lack of quality characters, regardless of team, that I was seeing in the first and third packs. In the third pack, I opened the common six-drop Mystique, Shape-Changing Assassin and Savage Beating. I knew from my reading of internet articles that the plot twist was in fact a beating, but at this stage the only six-drop or bigger that I had was one Dr Doom. My characters were generally more minnows than titans, and I figured titans were what Marvel Origins was all about. So I shipped the Savage Beating ... lucky Mace. Also early in the third pack, I picked up Mojo, who pumped up according to the number of non-aligned characters you had in play. He looked every bit as good as a Sabertooth, Feral Rage in a deck that had plenty of non-aligned characters, so I began to keep an eye out for those Random Punks. Adding a six-drop Colossus, another Mystique and a couple of four and five drops to round out my curve as best I could, meant that, while I would be playing a four team deck (with X-Men and Doom the primary teams) that also featured Mojo and a number of unaffiliated guys, I had a decent curve of recruitment costs. Among the 12 cards that I cut in making my deck there were only three characters - two one-drops and a solitary Sentinel - with the rest mainly being plot twists. Mace finished up with what looked to me to be a decent aggressive Brotherhood/Fantastic Four hybrid that featured the eight-drop Magneto, as well as a very nice Human Torch, Super Nova. Being a Magic player who, I think, likes to go in for the aggressive tendencies of Red and especially direct damage, Mace particularly liked Pyro. Mark is a very good Magic drafter and is particularly skilled at card evaluations. It was no surprise then that he saw the value of the locations, Negative Zone and Avalon Space Station, when combined together. Mark was packing Doom, X-Men and Brotherhood. Jens finished with mainly Fantastic Four, along with X-Men and Doom, but had almost no non-character cards and very little fat. I think he only had one six-drop at the top of his curve. I played Jens first and won the die roll to take the initiative for the first and subsequent odd turns. His lack of combat tricks seemed to really hurt him during the course of the game and he got to find out that the key to Vs combat is in good formations and consistent drops. An early for me Puppet Master made it hard for him at the start, while Banshee, Archangel and She-Hulk, Green Jeans made forming up a nightmare for him in the mid-game. I had no idea of the semi-combo that these smaller X-Men characters had with the uncommon She-Hulk, but I was glad for it when it materialised during the game. The X-Men made it unattractive for Jens to put characters in his support row, but the number of characters he had in his front row boosted She-Hulk. In the end, a six-drop Dr Doom sealed the game on turn seven, with me on about 16 endurance. The game went so long that we decided not to play best of three (as it was we finished after midnight and I had an early start the next morning). Mark beat Mace in the other game. We swapped opponents with me facing off against Mark. He won the roll and gave me the first initiative. Mark showed his excellent general drafting and playing skills in forming what I thought was a very good deck. I got a very good draw that gave me a Random Punks equipped with Dual Sidearms on turn one (Mark played nothing) and Puppet Master on turn two, which negated his two-drop. He got a decent drop on turn three, but I laid a very big Mojo on turn four to keep up the pressure. Mark played a lot of good tricks and used Negative Zone and Avalon Space Station to very good effect. What he really wanted to do, though, was KO my Puppet Master. He clawed back into the game and on turn six dropped his Dr Doom, Victor Von Doom, which denied me access to the face-down plot twists in my resource row and was strictly better than my Mystique, especially when you considered the +3 DEF boost it got from his Doomstadt. I can't remember the specifics, but I scraped through on turn seven, with both of us on negative life at the start of the recovery phase. Mark also made it interesting by asking lots of timing questions, which I couldn't properly answer because I hadn't yet downloaded a copy of the comprehensive rule (not for want of trying, I had a lot of problems with the PDF and only scored when I found it in Word format). Mace and Jens started playing a second game after Mace won the first (I think), but they more or less gave that game away when Mark and I took our eyes off the game and then looked back to find them ignoring the unique character rule, with multiple Pyros and Things in play. I blamed myself, because their understanding of the game was still very limited at that stage and they probably needed more instruction in the beginning and better guidance later on. We then called it a night. The next day, however, I took the time to analyse the card pool a bit and draw some conclusions. Rarity
The card pool comprised 168 cards (12 packs):
Card Types
- Characters - 103 (8 Rare, 12 Uncommon, 83 Common), which is about 61%.
Teams - Characters
- Brotherhood - 23 (1/1/21), 22% of Characters.
Fatties
- 8-Drops - Total 1 - 1 Brotherhood (1/0/0)
Based on that, I'd say just about letting any six-drop or bigger go past you would have been a mistake, since there were only 2.5 of those per player in the card pool. Also, I think it shows that taking plot twists higher than some characters, particularly smaller ones, would have been a good drafting strategy. My experience was that teams, while important, were not super-critical (I played with four teams and three non-aligned characters, but the Doom/X-Men team up plot twist did smooth things out a little). Also, fighting over the 19 per cent of Doom characters probably didn't work out that well for any of Mark, Jens or I. Hopefully my next draft/sealed will go even better than the one recounted here, but all in all I'm glad I hosted and played in this event. I had a great time with good friends, playing a great game ... what more could I ask for?
Michel Pittman
|
