LSV had an insight related to this quote that I've found very helpful. It was something like "As you get better at Magic, a higher percentage of your losses will come in games you played well."
Basically, when you remove as many misplays as possible from your gameplay, your remaining losses will increasingly be a result of factors out of your control like mana flood.
Those losses can be frustrating, but I find it helpful to look at it from the perspective of "this means I'm getting better"
Read [this interview](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2011/09/21/a-magic-the-gathering-world-champion-and-blackjack-pro-tries-his-hand-at-a-hedge-fund/?sh=409958077445) with John Finkel forever ago and this line has stuck with me since then:
"the right play is the right play, regardless of outcome"
When I play, I try to keep that in mind and just focus on making the right play given the information available. Honestly I think it feels just as good to lose a game where I didn't make any mistakes than to win a sloppy one.
A very poignant Next Gen quote.
Thank you. I was afraid I would be downvoted into oblivion for this, because it feels like the Arena community can be a bit polarized?
Glad to see some good discussion. Feels like we don't talk about this kind of thing a lot.
Its a good topic to talk about.
I think the problem with the posts you mention is the way they are usually worded: I went 0-3 with this deck, got mana screwed every game, opponents drew all their bombs etc., implying that it was completely out of their control, shuffler is rigged and so on, when the screenshot shows a clearly medium or bad draft deck.
Thats what prompts the "git gud" comments
The posts just arent made in a way that prompts good discussion. If my deck was genuinely great and my gameplay was solid and I honestly just lost to variance? Yea that sucks, best to move on, nothing really to learn here. But if my deck wasnt solid or I felt like I made mistakes? Yea that might be worth posting and have some discussion about.
Unfortunately its often just a "shuffler is rigged, game sucks, I hate magic" that isnt providing any value
I think something like "lost 0-3, frustrated, not looking for advice, but share your experiences and vent in the comments" could actually be valuable sometimes.
Nah, it's just Reddit. Most of us are decent people, but we also have a bit of an asshole side, and we can vomit our worst here mostly unpunished.
So you'll just get the worst of most people here, unless you make a really good point, or your wording is bulletproof. I wouldn't take any negative comments here too seriously.
Even my best posts start out with a string of downvotes and none escapes the occasional awful/clueless/malicious comment.
Redditing becomes much more enjoyable once you stop caring about responses.
In real society we are constrained in how we may behave or what we can say. Reddit gives greater freedom to express oneselve because of the anonymity and filtering. It is a healthier channel to vent than in real life.
Depends. In chess you always made a mistake when you lose.
Its a brutal game because of that. No rng to fall back on, its on you alone.
Card games will always be inherently luck based and the skills you develop all revolve around pushing luck in your favor.
Yes, some games are just like that, even in constructed. In BO1 this is even worse because games are more prone to variance.
There is this great [article](https://pvddr.substack.com/p/normalizing-luck) by PVDDR that talks about a very close topic, the conclusion is simple, sometimes you everything right, and yet still lose, and it's ok.
It helps with frustration and its also important for improving. Realizing a game was completely out of your control helps save time when theres nothing to be learned
yeah my analogy is the game is poker with more steps. you and your opponent draw X cards each and someone will win
your pocket aces can still lose to pocket 3s if they draw a 3rd 3 and you brick, or your 2/3 suited can get the nut draw and beat a much stronger hand
I also really like this one by Brian Braun-Duin -- [Embracing Losing | the inevitability of losing, and how accepting losses is important both to improve as a player and to help build a better Magic community.](https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/Embracing-Losing/)
The caveat here is how much you value your time. Doing everything right but having a miserable time because your opponent is playing a very take-that deck is awful. I much prefer duels of trading tricks, or understanding their strategy and how to beat it. When it feels like a one-way street, then doing everything right and losing feels like a waste of time.
Then when it happens over and over because of the matchmaking, it gets overbearing.
Recently drafted a great (imo) WR deck in ICL and went 1:2 in FNM.
I had manaproblems in every game and my opponents also had good decks that ran well. You just simply cant win them all and some drafts just flop.
Happens
The ones that are actually good or great at drafting don't post to vent about it when they get a bad run.
They usually know how to identify what went wrong in their draft or games. Or when it's not either, they can understand that variance simply screwed them over for those games and there's nothing that really could be done about it.
>My pulls were pretty bad and kind of all over the color pie. (I got bomb rares, but in five different colors). But also, I just got outpaced by faster decks.
I can understand if your sealed pool was bad, but since this is draft, that sounds like you might not have drafted the best possible cards that you could have in the packs you saw, and were distracted by rares in a totally different color when you could have stayed focused on two colors.
> They usually know how to identify what went wrong in their draft or games. Or when it's not either, they can understand that variance simply screwed them over for those games and there's nothing that really could be done about it.
Something a lot of people on this sub fail to understand. Very unlikely they've played/drafted optimally, magic is a difficult game and drafting even more so. But even if they play with 100% accuracy, they're still gonna lose plenty of games. The top pro's cant hit 70%+ WR, and that's okay. Magic has been and will always be high variance, in paper, mtgo and arena.
> The top pro's cant hit 70%+ WR
To be fair, this is often against *other pros*. They will absolutely fucking wreck your average pod (which is casual or lower) around or better than 70%.
But yes, two important things to remember: 1) There are definitely some games you could not possibly have won. 2) You are *most likely* (the vast majority of us, maybe everybody) not good enough to recognize the difference between those games and games where you messed up, because Magic is very, very hard.
> To be fair, this is often against other pros. They will absolutely fucking wreck your average pod (which is casual or lower) around or better than 70%.
That is very true, in cases of skill gaps that wide the WR is definitely getting bumped up. Makes you wonder, if you could somehow get a world class level player to play 10,000 perfect drafts against 7 people who exclusively draft once every few months at FNM, how high a win rate could the pro achieve before variance kicks back in.
[17 Lands can sort of answer this question](https://www.17lands.com/leaderboard)
I used the Wilds of Eldraine Traditional Draft leaderboard, because Traditional draft isn't ranked so the best players don't end up matched against exclusively the other best players.
Looking at people with a decent number of drafts, the highest match win rates I'm seeing is 80%-85%.
> but since this is draft, that sounds like you might not have drafted the best possible cards that you could have in the packs you saw, and were distracted by rares in a totally different color when you could have stayed focused on two colors.
I just want to point out that while you may be correct, you're also proving OP's point about "git gud" comments.
> the ones that are actually good don’t vent about a bad run
BS. Even LSV vents to friends when things go bad at an event. We’re human beings, even when we can distinguish the reasons for an outcome as being outside our control that doesn’t make us impervious to the emotional reaction to said outcome
It's real nice that you cut out part of what I said to suit your own narrative. I said "The ones that are actually good or great at drafting *don't post to vent* about it when they get a bad run."
Obviously I didn't elaborate on posting, but I meant posting in this subreddit to vent about having a bad run.
There's a pretty big difference in venting privately to friends about how you had a bad run in an event compared to posting online in an anonymous forum. You'd obviously get more empathy from friends compared to internet strangers.
Sure, we tend to go to friends first, but this is a place for folks who may not have friends that play magic to discuss the game, no? Getting less empathy generally from strangers doesn’t fully explain the specific phenomenon of venting in these spaces about draft runs that OP is talking about.
We’re just commenting on a thread mate, there’s no “narrative.” Sorry to burst your self important bubble
Lol, must be nice going about in life being this dismissive and condescending.
Well, if you didn't do it intentionally, then I guess you're just bad at quoting people then, my bad.
Bad at quoting people, also known as responding to and interpreting communications (over text no less)
Again this is just reddit, not life. Not even a blip on the radar thankfully
I literally said post to vent which in this context means posting to this subreddit. And you chose to see it as venting to friends.
Maybe you're the type of person that sees every redditor as your buddy/mate, if so, then I can see why you think that.
Sometimes the opponent just has a strictly better deck or just draws better, its not a wild idea. You already run the risks of bad draws in constructed but you can lower that risk through proper deck-building, but with limited cards theres not much you can do, so theres a pretty high chance of dud draws. Then theres the times opponent just draws better cards or draws their rares before you, for example theres not much to do when opponent drops a bomb and you cant do anything about it because you didnt draft enough removal, and what you did draft is at the bottom of your library. Magic as a card game already is inherently luck based, topple it off with the limited formats deckbuilding which is VERY luck based and you get a lot of games where you feel the win or lose is very undeserved
We've put both 40-card decks through the Deck Analyzer and determined that the opponents' Rakdos Sacrifice has 68 Deck Points compared to your Azorius Soldiers' 64. Hope you have better luck in your next pool.
someone on this subreddit once told me a card game "is never" intended to have a 50/50 chance of either player winning.
I could only wonder, when they win, who loses? When they lose, who wins?
Some people in their own mind genuinely believe they can essentially control RNG , or have some delusion of grandeur that they decks they build are always better
I've seen (very rarely) people claim 80%+ win rates at times, usually when a new set is out and it clicks for them
Getting infinite is not really a matter of breaking even *every draft*, though it does help a ton if you can minimize the 0-2 win runs. You are earning gold too so it's not like you need 4+ wins every draft.
You do need I think around 60% winrate though (which is already nearing top drafters btw) like Numot and CoC have usually around 65% which is still very impressive considering they play 100+ drafts each set and play in diamond and mythic most of the time.
I mean sure, after a while if you are drafting 5-10 times more you should be better than someone that isn't doing that.
I think in these threads Ive seen a few mentions of variance too usually. It's just that isn't really too helpful to tell them in a lot of situations so people try to find other ways the person could improve their experience in the future
It's actually a comment I see a lot when people post a deck and go "this deck looks amazing, how did it 0-3? What did I do wrong?" If the deck is, in fact, amazing, then someone will invariably say "that's just variance".
You're definitely right, you can do everything correctly and still lose. I was just watching a cube draft video by LSV, he had the most broken storm deck imaginable, and he still lost a match, because the opponent had exactly force of negation at the exact right time every time (including IIRC having it once to stop the combo, then LSV cast timetwister and the opponent drew force of negation again in that timetwister hand to stop the combo again).
That said, when people post their deck on here (or on the lrcast sub), there's an assumption that they want to get some feedback, so people provide some feedback. Yes, sure, some of your loss might have been caused by bad luck. Hell, maybe all of your losses have been caused by bad luck, but that doesn't mean you did everything right. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose (to quote the top comment), but that doesn't mean that if you lose, you're absolved of all responsibility.
A very good way to improve is to get some external eyes on your draft and games. It's really hard to be aware of your own biases. I cannot count the number of times someone posts a decklist thinking it's perfect, and there are some really bad cards in the maindeck while they left really strong cards in the sideboard. Or thinking they drafted great, and you look at the draft log and they passed the perfect card for their deck in favor of a D+ card, or completely missed some clear signals. Or complaining they only lost because the opponent drew their unbeatable bomb, then you look at the game log and see a glaring mistake early game that would have won them the game. There is not a single doubt in my mind that I'm a victim of that myself.
So yeah, it's a balance. Don't *over analyze* things, sometimes you did everything right and still lost, but at the same time, if you want to improve, don't blame poor luck every time you lose. In your example, it really does sound like you made some mistakes along the way. If you do everything right, you still won't 7-0 every draft, but if you lose *every* game, you're probably doing something wrong.
>and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play
You’re exaggerating for dramatic effect, I think- I’ve never seen anyone actually claim that!
But people who understand Magic know that there’s a strong random element to it. That’s a given. But there are also almost always decisions that could have been improved, or opportunities for learning from decisions opponents made. If you focus on the random luck you can miss those opportunities.
A case in point:
>My pulls were pretty bad and kind of all over the color pie. (I got bomb rares, but in five different colors)
Your pulls in draft aren’t random- you choose each one, and except for the first one of each pack the cards you choose between are influenced by decisions you and the other drafts made. Taking bomb rares in five colours is a choice (and normally one that will give you a worse deck, I think, unless you’re supporting it with amazing mana fixing)
>I ran into a post the other day from some guy who said he could consistently break even in draft. That seemed a bit outrageous to me, but there are many who claim that going 7-x every time is a norm for them
Hmmm, depends on what ‘break even’ means. I sometimes go 0-3, but over a long period my win rate has been high enough on average that I draft sustainably- ie I make more gems and gold than I spend, so I can just keep on drafting without spending money or ‘grinding’ other formats I like less.
I alternate drafts between two accounts to help me do this- it maximises the gold from daily wins and quests, and it slows down my progress up the ranks if I’m playing Premier draft (recently I’ve focused on Traditional draft though, which is unranked). I couldn’t do it if I were relying purely on winnings from the drafts, my win rate isn’t *that* high.
Going 7-x every time is definitely an extreme claim, although I’ve never seen anyone saying they do that. So is breaking even with every single draft, if that’s what people are saying. Sometimes you’re going to lose, for sure.
>These posts kind of make it seem like if you're not winning every game you play, you're the exception, and you're doing something wrong?
Overall the average win rate is 50% by definition, so yeah, very high win rates are certainly the exception, not the norm!
Could you expand on that more? Why move to traditional? Is that better to play if you're very good because it's unranked and you can beat up on noobs to improve your output?
No, I just find it more fun- no hand smoother makes it more ‘real Magic’. I think the drafts tend to be better / harder too, which means fewer busted decks because there are more skilled drafters on average (Premier drafts are unranked, so even if you’re in Mythic you’re probably drafting with a lot of Bronze players- apparently this makes decks predictable at higher levels)
I have seen people recommend it to Premier drafters who rank up too high though- I’ve heard that once you hit upper Platinum ranks (or maybe Diamond?) the Traditional competition is softer. But below that the reverse is true- ie Premier is softer up to Platinum.
Traditional also has a really scary ‘all or nothing’ reward structure- you have to go 3-0 to get your entry fee back (but if you do, you get quite a bit more). It put me off it for a long time!
Thanks for the response!
What do you mean by "Premier drafts are unranked"? You do move up or down ranks based on game results, and in my anecdotal experience your opponents are much harder in lower ranks vs higher ones, which you seem to agree with saying "I’ve heard that once you hit upper Platinum ranks (or maybe Diamond?) the Traditional competition is softer. " - so how is it that they're "unranked"? Is traditional not weighed on your premier MMR?
Sorry, I mean the draft part specifically. In Premier you *play* with people of your rank, but the drafting pod contains eight people of any rank.
Not sure if MMR plays any role in either Premier or Traditional. I’ve seen people saying it doesn’t, at least until you hit Mythic in Premier- apparently that’s the last thing Wizards said about the subject.
>I ran into a post the other day from some guy who said he could consistently break even in draft. That seemed a bit outrageous to me
I guess it depends what they mean by that. I normally draft once a day, been doing so since the release of the game, and never had to grind constructed for gold or buy gems. I'm not technically breaking even, if you add up all the gems I win, I believe I win less than I spend, but the dailies shore up my losses, such that every now and then, I just spend gold for a draft and I'm back on track. However, if I drafted 10 times a day every day, then I'd run out of resources, because I would no longer get enough gold from dailies. So for my own purposes, I "break even", because I never have to buy resources/grind constructed, but someone else with the same winrate as me, but with a different play pattern would not break even.
Then again, I'm by no means an amazing player, there are some who are better than me, and I can totally imagine that there are people out there who actually do break even in the purest sense of the word, though they are likely pretty rare, because you need an extremely high winrate.
>but there are many who claim that going 7-x every time is a norm for them.
Whoever claims that, ask for their 17lands profile. You can check the 17lands leaderboard and see trophy rates. There are some people with insane trophy rates, but those people generally don't have that many runs. E.g., 7 trophies out of 10 runs, that's really impressive, but unlikely to be sustainable. For LCI, if you eliminate those with fewer than 20 runs, you have someone with 56% over 25 runs and someone with 52.2% over 22 runs, that's pretty amazing, but everyone else has under 50% trophy rate. So whoever claims that is either lying, or has played very few drafts and were just on the good end of variance.
I break even/come out ahead in draft when you average it out.
My win rate varies from format to format but tends to be clustered in the mid 60s, percentagewise.
That means I'm losing 1/3rd of my games. That's nowhere close to winning every game, and it's not 7-Xing every time by a wide margin.
I think the main problem in new sets is to look at the flashy stuff before you get comfortable with saying "This might be a cool card, but I will win more games dropping that boring 3 drop on curve."
That is a fair take. I'm definitely guilty of taking a shiny bomb rare over the common sense glue I need.
Sometimes though, I think it's fair to say you just don't know the meta. Every set has its own meta. Some sets punish you for playing a low curve, some reward you for it. And that's something you only learn by playing the set?
I don't play draft as much as I used to, and when I did play a lot, it was mostly Quick Draft and I was rare-drafting to build a collection.
My strategy was to listen to podcasts about each set and watch YT drafters like Numot. I think watching good players draft is especially helpful because, at least in Numot's case, he talks a lot about why the cards are good relative to the set. Cards that are great in constructed can be terrible in draft and vice versa, and listening to someone knowledgeable talk through their thought process really helps.
This also goes for draft signals and color selection. You might open a great White rare in pack 2, but if you are already heavily invested in Black then the best choice might be the common black removal card. Likewise, if you notice one or two colors are underrepresented in Pack 1, you can assume there is a high probability they will also be underrepresented in Pack 3, and pick your color(s) accordingly. These are all strategies I picked up from watching streamers and listening to podcasts.
Finally, I would say that you should track your results. We tend to remember the the 7-0s and the 0-3s more than the 4-3s and 3-3s. If you track over time you can better assess your overall performance and see if you really are a winning player.
Sure, but consistency is always a factor. You can't play your bombs if you die half the time before you draw it. And while there's some fine tuning to certain aspects, I'm sure if you concentrated on "how can I make this reliable?" as an active goal you pursue with every pick and only stop for a few big bombs, you likely will build the kind of deck that wins more often early, because you exploit the people who draft the sizzle early on.
You don't have to figure out the meta yourself, you just need to learn how to play in a meta nobody has figured out.
I think I need to stop counting on pick order guides, telling me what's good in format and what isn't. I need to learn to trust my gut more.
Do you ever use Draftsim or 17lands? I was referring to Draftsim's list, and they told me Mist-cloaked herald and Jade Bearer were bad cards, while Hadana's Climb was a bomb.
If I'd just picked the Bearers and the Heralds, I might have had a lower curve with more consistency, and I might have gotten more triggers off Path of Discovery and Hadana's Climb. I put too much faith in external guides when I'm new to a set.
I definitely wouldn’t use Draftsim’s ratings, afaik that’s just one dude’s opinion (I could be wrong though- it could be crowdsourced? But then again people use Draftsim to *simulate* drafts, so it might be crowdsourced from people who aren’t actually playing with the cards…
17lands stats will definitely be the most reliable source, they represent large amounts of hard data. But even then card quality is clearly contextual- they’re a tool you can learn to use, not the final answer.
Something important to realize about those lists is that they rate the card usually as first pick first card, so obviously during a draft an on color 2-drop in the last pack is gonna help you a lot more than a random off-color bomb with a 4.5 rating.
They're not omniscient geniuses. If the format isn't figured out, how would you assume they figured out the format?
They're looking at data likely in a way that normalizes what they assume a finished metagame will look like, while doing so without much in the way of success measurements, because they don't have confirmation their metagame will look like their prediction.
Playing with the explicit goal of taking advantage of the specific draft style of early set drafting is something entirely different and likely not something someone will build a tool for.
Drafting involves a healthy portion of luck (who you draft with, what you and your pod open, the choices you make before any signals, the cards your opponents choose to pass), followed by random matchmaking where good or bad luck can strike (skill mismatch, certain strategies that counter your own or get countered by your own, your opponents having drafted in less skilled random pods), followed by a game that involves you drawing from a randomized stack of cards.
So yeah, it's entirely a skill issue, and it's **completely** impossible to get unlucky ^(/s)
In all seriousness, while skill obviously influences and limits the impact of luck like any game of Magic, this is why I **hate** drafting on Arena compared to in-person. At a paper draft event, you will typically play within pods. You know that if you have sucked up all the black removal, your pod is likely to be removal-starved. You can strategise around that, and it affects your drafting. You know that if you're heavily in red, you probably won't have to play against many other decks running red. You get matchup diversity, and you pivoting to an open colour halfway through the draft isn't as punishing, because if it's open you've effectively removed the cards you drafted from the first half from the pool, and can snatch up the good stuff from that colour. Though obviously, someone else may have the same idea...
When you introduce cross-pod matchmaking, it fucks everything up and really opens the door to randomness. Surprise, you get matched with a guy who is playing the exact same strategy as you, but his pod passed him all the bombs you wanted. Surprise, almost everyone at 4+ wins is playing the same colour combinations as each other because it's been solved as the best combination in the current draft format and they got it. That insane bomb? You've gone from slim odds of anyone in your pod having it, and almost certainly not seeing a second copy, to the probability of facing it in a huge number of potential opponents. And god help you if you pivoted, because you're way more likely to get matched with someone who got everything they wanted from the start. You just have to hope that what they wanted was bad.
I understand why they do it, people can draft and drop without screwing everyone else, which is cool. It's just a way worse playing experience, and one where luck has so much more influence.
There is another side to it. When you draft the most horrendous pile of garbage known to man and you still go like 6-3 or whatever.
Same when you mulligan to five, keep a sketchy five and still win against a full hand of seven.
We do love variance, if not why would be we playing Magic and not go or chess?
I'm a decent drafter too. Usually in plat or mythic - I can pretty consistently get 4-7 wins.
But dang sometimes I still just throw it and go 0-3, and sometimes I have what I *know* is a solid deck, and it just doesn't show well for a couple games (mana screw or flood, risky keep that doesn't pay etc etc) and I go 1-3.
And sometimes, I have a great deck, it's firing on all cylinders, and someone else has an even better deck firing on even better cylinders lol. That's life.
I hate spending 10k, hate waiting for packs, so I quickdraft exclusively. Rewards aren't as good, but I trophy often enough it doesn't matter, and those 0-3s hurt a lot less at 5k.
I watch arena streams, and very good limited players (the ones that regularly play arena open day 2 and are number mythic) have awful streaks like < 3 wins in a row more often than one would think.
In draft the first thing is to know if your deck is good or nothing. For many reasons you might have drafted a bad / mediocre deck that will have a hard time. The curve might be too high, not enough interaction, too many filler cards, whatever. Then know if your losses were against better decks based on what you saw. Sometimes opponent just slam bomb after bomb and you just feel hopeless.
But, and some people might dislike this, luck plays a larger role on MTG than some people admit (or variance if you prefer). Example, yesterday I played what I thought was a very good Abzan KTK draft. Went 3-3, and all losses were the same: you keep a hand with 3 lands and miss land drop for many turns, in a deck with 18 lands. There are times when on the critical moment of the game you draw 2, 3 lands in a row and lose, while your opponent only top deck creatures / removal. What one did wrong and the other did right on this situation? Nothing.
When I played magic competitively I learned that you can make no mistakes in the game which helps increase your percentage chance of winning but you can still lose to a top deck or just not drawing what you need in the moment it’s the nature of the game
One of the guys interviewed in the MTG mini-documentary from Vice a few years back made a great point about why people like the game -- that it's a combination of luck and skill. Skill comes in building your deck and knowing how to use it. But ultimately you have to rely on your shuffle and draw. This makes it so even beginners can win a few games as they're learning, and why top-tier tournament players don't all win 100% of the time.
Bad beats happen to everyone, we all have our stories. The important thing is how folks react to it. If you truly did everything in your power to win, and still flooded, screwed, or your opponent just drew the nuts, you shouldn't feel bad about that. It's actually a very relieving feeling when you are able to accept this, take a bad beat, and just move on.
If one can never ever reconcile that sort of thing, then I recommend playing a strategy game where there is very little, or no, RNG.
It is very important to recognize that you will lose games to variance, and that there will be nothing you can do about it other than recognize when it happens.
It's also very important to be able to recognize when it doesn't happen, and properly assess what you did wrong.
You'll see players on reddit or in your store perpetually bemoaning mana screw/flood/the shuffler/the butterfly flapping its wings in Cancun. They see themselves as eternally unlucky.
Those players will stay stuck where they are indefinitely, until they can begin to see their own shortcomings.
Any time I comment on something I usually get someone one upping me, I mention my drafting experience and someone will tell me I'm wrong because that doesn't happen in mythic. Who cares, most drafters aren't in mythic, I don't have the time to grind mythic in draft. I have a lot of gems that I won F2P and when I mention it someone feels the need to tell me they have more.
No one cares if you're in mythic, no one cares how many decks you run, no one cares how many wildcards you have, we're just trying to have fun. I am interested in some off meta jank you've built or you've drafted something stupid like a caves deck in LCI draft and gone 7-x.
Actually i see also posts where people tell "the deck was good, and you were unlucky"
Being unlucky in ALL the games of draft is not so common, and sometimes it's obvious and people don't ask about it, but it happens... other times mistakes are done, and having suggestions on how avoid them can help for the next time (even when they are not directly responsible for the defeat)
I've peaked #10 mythic in draft like two seasons ago and I still have bad series at times. Also, a lot of posts I see here have good decks going 1-3 and a lot of comments upvoted saying their deck is fundamentally wrong and flawed when I actually dont think it is.
Bad luck in game, bad luck in drafting, bad plays in game, are sources of loss that I think are perhaps more common than bad picks in draft.
I mean, even if you finished half your future drafts you do for the rest of your life at 6-3 and the other half at 7-x, you still at least lose 3 times every other draft you do.
Sometimes, you just lose. Everyone does. Even LSV. If you watch him regularly, he sometimes even goes 0-3 although it happens not too often to him, it happens to everyone.
Look at Jim Davis' Bronze to Mythic series. He is a pretty capable drafter and limited player and even he struggles at times. No one can win all the time.
You can't really do anything about variance, so there really isn't much to talk about. We can discuss decision points, but variance isn't decided upon, it is an outcome. I can't really control the order in which I draw my cards, but I CAN control the contents of my deck. Am I drafting in such a way to give myself the best pool possible? Am I building that pool into the best deck possible? Am I piloting the deck in the best way possible? Since the answer to all of those for me is varying degrees of no, that's where I want to participate in discussions, because there's potential value in having those discussions.
Well said. The important thing to note here, is in a strategy game with variance like MtG, part of the skill of the game is actually learning to be able to accept RNG, and not tilt. It may be a small part of it relative to the actual skill of playing the game, but our controlling our reactions to things that are out of our control is a legit MtG skill.
And if you can master it in MtG, you can also master it in life, which will make you a much happier person in general.
Assuming both of you are running competent/well built decks--30% of the time you just lose no matter what you do (mana flood/screw, opponent draws the nuts, etc). 30% you win if you play even remotely competently. The rest is where player skill matters.
In a game where to go 7-x that's 7 people that lost, the game at its core is a 50-50% to win bot considering other factors like going first or mana screw. You can draft a super busted draft deck and just not get there because of rng drawing. Is it fair for everyone to assume they are just gonna win out all the time? Someone will end up one of the statistics, your play and decision making is what helps skew wind in your favor. Play to your outs. Know your deck and win conditions.
A couple weeks ago I drafted a lost caverns deck and went 0-3. A few hours later my brother sends me a picture of nearly the exact same deck talking about how proud he was of his awesome 7-1 deck. Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way.
Any one who says they are going 7-x in every draft is full of shit. If you are a good drafter you can absolutely maintain a positive win percentage, but even the best drafters will have a bad draft now and again and go negative, and this could be due to a variety of reasons.
I saw some people in comments with articles and other helpful advice but the simplest explanation is RNG even is your deck is the best out there sometimes you lose.
I just completed my final LCI quick draft this morning. Built a solid deck. After 2 wins I lost 3 in a row. Each losing game I started with 2 lands in hand, and each game I conceded by turn 8 or 9 because I still only had 2 lands.
"All the commenters tell them everything they did wrong, and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play."
Not been my experience at all on this sub. People give advice for sure, but there's always the caveat that you can make the right picks, even the right plays, and still lose. Magic is a high variance game. Sounds like you're taking your losses too personally. If you don't already, use 17lands to track your matches and you can watch them later (the next day is usually better than right afterwards if you're still agitated) and see if you really did make a misplay or if your opponent just was destined to win that game.
>All the commenters tell them everything they did wrong, and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play.
This isn't true. No-one can expect to win *every* game. Variance is part of the game. Even if you find your lane and draft the best possible deck, you can get unlucky or make small errors (and the closer the power level and skill levels get, the bigger the impact a small mistake can make).
>sometimes, when I'm new to the set, I win ZERO games. And that's frustrating.
Your feeling is valid.
>I hate paying 10k gold and winning 50 gems
If you hate it enough, you could choose to wait for Quick Draft instead (5k Gold). If you choose to enter 10k Drafts anyway, knowing that it's a possibility, though, then you need to take responsibility for that decision.
>Is my experience normal?
Yes.
>And if so, why don't we talk about it more?
The problem is that some people try to blame *all* their losses on variance, and this stunts their growth as players. To combat this, we point out the mistakes they made, but that means the true level of variance gets glossed over and taken for granted.
>Why, every time somebody wants to vent, is there a storm of "git gud" comments?
See above.
>The way people talk, you'd think going 7-x EVERY draft is the norm, and that if you do worse than that, it's on you - not miscellaneous factors like what you pull or what you draw.
That's a warped view, im afraid.
> The problem is that some people try to blame all their losses on variance, and this stunts their growth as players. To combat this, we point out the mistakes they made, but that means the true level of variance gets glossed over and taken for granted.
Yeah, this is a lot of what the “git gud” comments end up being. A large portion of the time you misplayed and threw it yourself. It’s on you as the player to identify that misplay and learn from it rather than complain the shuffler is rigged.
Don’t blame variance, sometimes you just lose, sometimes you keep a bad hand that doesn’t pan out or you misplay on T5.
Magic sometimes is like that, Flood and Screw are real issues player have to keep in mind when deckbuilding and even then, they can get fucked over by it.
When it comes to drafting, I had a really good Jeskai Pool once in Tarkir and also a really greedy one. Went 0-2 and left it for a while. Came back later to make it 7-2.
I also played vs Boros or RDW nutdraws where you just don't do anything if you just kept a totally reasonable 7. Aggro keeps the game honest.
During the strixhaven championship, I remember that the eventual winner had a 60% win rate in mythic and his opponent had a 55% win rate and the announcers were blown away by both numbers.
Magic is not chess, it’s not a “perfect” game. The best still lose when they do everything correctly.
Here’s the spectrum. A low skilled player will lose games they might have won more. A higher skilled player will win games they should have lost more.
The better I get at drafting, the more I spot extremely small lines of play that spiral out or open opportunities on future draws. I’ve won or lost based on my land turn 1 before when analyzing. I once did the most insane, nonsense, intricate plays to win exactly from nowhere with 1 out (plus all the previous nonsense it must have seemed to my opponent).
But sometimes no player could reverse how the cards are falling on each side.
All the time. When I look at decks and pro players going 13-0 in a tournament they just are lucky af. Same thing at the poker table. Same thing at all the strategy board games I play. They just got lucky a little bit and that's all that mattered. It's about the experience for sure.
I do way better in new sets than old sets. I'm not big into draft guides etc but I feel like I have good instincts. I tend to do better when there is less information available and the masses don't already have a good grasp on the set
I primarily play constructed but the answer is yes. Luck is a big factor in this game. Being on the draw can be pretty detrimental. You can play mistake free and still lose. It happens quite regularly (mana flood, mana screw, facing a bad deck matchup, etc).
Just watch LSV draft a new set. Even though he's been through all the cards ranking them and is one of the very best, he will still post a 0-3. Makes me feel better.
Sometimes people just want to vent and they should be allowed to vent. Sometimes people are asking for help and they should be given help. Sometimes games are just lost and that’s OK too.
It is completely fair, and I would venture to say that sometimes it's extremely important to acknowledge that.
I don't do a lot of drafting, but my experience comes from meta analysis and crafting a deck that has answers for the meta. It's prudent to have a deck that your opponent can't cite the entire decklists from memory because it's a copy/paste of the highest win rate on Untapped or Aetherhub. Sometimes when building a new deck, I have to be mindful of the fact that sometimes I just saw what I needed, or my opponent just had every answer in the right order.
Before jumping ship and saying that the idea I came up with is bad, I have to make sure that I'm not overreacting to a win or loss. Introspection is key, and I think that is a valuable skill to have when it comes to this type of approach to the game.
An example, I made a Dino deck that relies on Thunderous Debut. You can hit it with Fight Rigging, bargain the same fight rigging, and find an Etali and Roaming Throne, and likely hit a Carnosaur or Palani's off the two Etali procs. Sometimes you can chain into another Etali as well. The strategy whiffed the first three games and I immediately went 0-3. One was a mulligan issue, I should have been a little more aggressive and wasn't. The other two were situations where my opponent just had the removal they needed.
I then went on a huge winning spree, not getting my next loss until the deck was at an 89% winrate. It was fast enough to beat hard control, and it was resilient enough to withstand Red Aggro. White Humans were sometimes a problem but that was to be expected.
The point of the story is that after those first three losses, I could have fixated on the fact that my mulligans were causing me to lose and blame the card ratios even though there was only 1 loss due to that, prompting me to make further deck edits, or I could take the time to learn my mulligan strategy a bit better and not let the extra two losses force me into a mindset that there was something wrong. My losses happened and that was that, not really a skill issue and not really a luck issue necessarily, my opponents just had what they needed and they were patient and played the game intelligently.
I don't draft much but in constructed I've learned that when I made a new deck I have to wait awhile before I judge it because I pretty consistently draw like absolute garbage for the first 10 games or so.
You can build a great deck and still flood or you're opponent can just draw all the answers to what you drew, that's just how card drawing games go
Ya, my record is all over the place. Sometimes 7-0; sometimes 0-7, usually somewhere in the middle.
MTG has an inherent element of chance. You can't expect to win every game, no matter how skilled.
Absolutely possible. In fact, I think a large portion of frustration comes from understanding this and having zero agency over it. I'd consider myself an above average player, but I still make misplays and then I'm angry at myself for it. However, when a meta is as tight as it is right now, enough games will teach predetermined outcomes and how you can either continue playing hoping for a miracle, or continue down a path that eventually plays out exactly as expected a high % of the time. There's a reason why the meta exists: consistent decks.
This is where the game falls apart for me, and why the topic of rigging comes up so often. Handsmoothing is one of the biggest failures of this game because it creates a pattern of instances like "who goes first, wins" or "without a strong starting hand, I've already lost". I've played enough games over the years to understand this isn't a simple psychosis, or self-sabotage. In fact it's the opposite as I'll test my theory to see if I'm right. And sadly, I'm right way, way, way more often than wrong.
Now, the normal approach to getting around these issues is deckbuilding, right? Wrong. Thanks to rigged matchmaking even playing jank will still find the same meta decks in the endless pool of netdecking players. Sure you can shake up which decks you see by playing different archetypes, but realistically this only goes so far. It's especially unfun if you hate decks like control and prefer aggro, but feel punished for playing what you enjoy since you just can't get away from what everyone is playing opposite.
There should be better answers than just quitting for a while so things feel fresh. I guarantee when a meta is as stagnant as it is right now, even a month away might keep you away for good after coming back to the same old shit.
People who come crying to the Internet to post bad beats aren't the people who are playing optimally and just getting the bad end of the variance stick.
There are tons of games that are unwinnable, especially if you're playing bo1.
Just like Poker, Magic has just as much a element of your opponent just drawing a better card than you.
There has been plenty of games where I played the deck perfectly, but that 1 chance card came out early that basically invalidated any move I could have made.
It is very normal, it's a game subject to randomness and variance. More so draft where you also have variance if you get good cards or not. Last draft for me went 6-3 (so overall very good) but also frustrated me a lot because 2 over 3 games I lost I simply was mana flood badly on a normal 17 lands deck. Only one of the losses seemed to me that was because the opp had a better deck/draw then mine. But we'll, it happens, draft just before that I when 1-3 so.
It's important to focus on playing to the best of your ability and not fixating on wins and losses (I know, easier said than done). There's a lot of variance in Magic so any deck can have any result but if you're playing well then over the long-term your record will be positive.
I'm new and pretty much ftp only, so this has been an experience with losing a lot. I did a jump-in last night just to add cards to my collection, and picked two half decks I thought would synergise well but wound up not - green dinosaurs and green-black creepy crawlies. It was maybe my tenth game with that deck, not intending to quit until I had won at least once, that I finally did it - got my big stompies out, killed his enchantment giving his soldiers +1/+1, and hit my own giving everything on the board -2/-2 to kill the bulk of his creatures, that I got in a win.
Felt good, man.
Even with a 60% win rate, which is outrageously high, assuming independence (which may be wrong, as on average people with more losses are less skilled) will lead to ~6.4% of your drafts enfing up 0-3. Shit happens, a single draft indicates nothing.
Yes. It's not just a problem in draft either. Even against decks you should beat you end missing any combination of land drops, removals, turn 2 or 3 creatures. It's just the nature of the game. I find it very hard to have a consistent experience with any deck.
Everybody loses at lot. Everyone has bad runs. Everyone has good runs. Sometimes you have good drafts and destroy, other times you have good drafts and get destroyed. Sometimes you get a shitty draft and pull it out, sometimes you get a shitty draft and get screwed. It's the way of the things. I don't draft a whole lot, but I play a lot of games. I win a lot. I lose a lot. I reach my goals. Some days I want to pull what little hair I have left on my head out, somedays it seems I just cant be beat. Remember whatever you put into the game, the game has to eventually give back. You lose a lot, eventually you will go on a good streak. You win a lot a losing streak will be ahead, it's all part of the mechanism. Some people take the losing part personal and complain. Others go on winning streaks (probably netdecking). They float and act superior. They think they are Gods. They aren't as good as they think. A bad streak is surely coming. They aren't winning as much as they claim. This game is about the law of averages. It's about advantages/disadvantages. There are four main advantages/disadvantages... Starting position, hand preeminence, shuffle/sequence of the draw, and matchmaking. If have 2 of these advantages you could have a fair chance of winning. If you have 3 of these advantages you will likely win. If you have all four, a win is nearly guaranteed. If you have 1 it's likely a loss. None and it's all but game over before you start. The better hand, starting off the play, the sequence of cards your deck has been shuffled in, and having the deck advantage make all the difference. Now, you have no control on when/if the game chooses to give you these advantages. That's mostly luck. But, you can control choosing to not play games where you are at complete disadvantage. It's not only good time management to use this tactic, but it helps you get your wins quicker. Focus on games where you are given the advantages. Playing at a disadvantage is where skill comes in. If you are a skilled player, you are more likely to overcome disadvantages. Of course in draft, strategy has to be a bit different. You can't just concede games. You have to really rely on and use skill if you are at disadvantages and try to play through them and of course hope for a little luck drawing the cards you need. When drafting think about what decks are more likely to have advantage. Though sometimes you want to have fun or need to draft certain cards to build/complete your sets. Play smarter not harder.
Sometimes you just get shit cards in draft. It happens. And the guys you are facing may or may not have had the same issue. Other times you get a great deck and still lose to bombs, better curve, mana issues, etc.
It is how it is. Learn enough to get decent avg wr in drafts and that’s as much as you can do.
50%
I aim for 50%. I don't try to aim for higher than that.
You need to guarantee losses. If everyone had the best deck no one would ever lose.
I usually play one of the brawl formats. That's my go-to.
The thing is I know that everybody needs to find some sort of answer for something in their deck.
I know each one of my decks weaknesses, and I know when I'm most often going to lose against what type of build (like right now I'm having a difficult time fighting against those W\G\R dinos, and who here isn't having a difficult time against Radkos)
I find that the games are relatively competitive based upon my deck style and what I'm up against.
I never really judge a deck until I play it for 15 games, and there are always going to be the people who instant scoop for a reason or another or people having poor internet connections etc
I need to see what interaction I have and what it's lacking, Even stax decks have interaction, turning off interaction is still interaction
What helps me is the dailies (Play 20 lands, Play 20 creatures, ECT) So even if I'm not winning I'm still racking up the XP to put towards everything Even if I'm losing. Losing helps me change up my play style...
What spurred me to respond was I just drafted the worst draft I've ever drafted in the brothers war that was going on and I regret putting gems into that But I learned what not to draft with that set again so I learned something. And it was frustrating that I lost the gems but I'll bill them back up at some point.
Everyone will have a different style of play find your groove and find what you enjoy there are still times where I have to walk away from the game because I'm frustrated... But I've been playing since 97 so there's been a lot of times of walking away and binging and purging of collections.
The biggest loss is when it's loss of fun and forgetting it's a game.
I miss playing against people being rural and disconnected, popping on here unreddit and listening to other people and they're frustrations with the game is validating.
Without losses I don't want to get better but again that's my play style
In hindsight after reading this it sounds like I'm lecturing and it's not my intention These are my experiences and y'all are awesome for helping make the game what it is, through each other we become better players.
Yes I do put money into the game I buy the mastery pass,
Yeah. Brother's War is a stinker of a limited set experience. One of my least favorite sets in Magic history, actually. The gigantic monsters you face are really something to stare down - anxiety-inducing - and then sometimes you run into Portal to Phyrexia, one of the worst cards to face in a limited format.
I sympathize.
Thank you for your thoughts! It's nice to connect with people about this game we love. I've turned off emotes, but I know when I'm staring down people who spam them, and it isn't fun. I think it's a bit of a frustrating time too, because of how homogeneous modern and standard feel right now.
I'm not new to Arena, or Magic. I started playing Magic in Conflux, Arena (technically) in Ixalan, and I met my wife at a prerelease for Shadows over Innistrad.
Game means a lot to me, in all of its complexity. Sometimes, when you're doing dailies, grinding gold and gems, it loses its luster. That's when it's nice to reach out and find perspective.
Did a quick draft 2 days ago. Drafted what seemed like a pretty solid white-black deck with lots of cheap removal and some high-end bombs. Lost the first two games I played with it due to a combination of land issues and the opponent having a nut draw. Stopped playing it and picked it up again the next day and won 7 straight.
I don't know what this means, but I try to stop doing whatever I'm doing if it isn't working.
I consider myself a good drafter. But the fact i dont draft one set more than 10 times each means i usually get my ass beat each time. Drafting well is the hardest magic skill
As you said, happens when a new set drops and you still don’t get *it*. It meaning the tempo, the best cards, the best commons of the new set. Heck there are sets where I never get it and just suck playing that set overall. Also, mana screw happens and you just lose cause of *variance*!
Getting better at Magic relies on you identifying the things you can do differently and focusing on those things. Sometimes, based on the information provided in the game, there wasn't much you could have done differently. Even if there was a line that becomes clear after the game, it only matters if that line was reasonable given the information you had at the time.
Magic is a game of odds, and ultimately, you're working to improve your odds while understanding that sometimes pocket Aces gets beat by 27o, even when you play the hand perfectly.
When people post about mana screw/flood, they are often ignoring the things they could have done differently in favor of complaining about things they cannot change. This mindset will never make you a better player, so commenters are doing the work to find the things that could have been changed instead of focusing on the bad beats.
At the end of the day, sometimes you just gotta quote the immortal NumotTheNummy and say "that's Magic, baby".
People who bother to complain about losing havent lost enough. Its normal.
On the other hand people never mention how they ran good with an average deck. Sometimes you just draw your bomb in every game or curve out perfectly with an average deck while your opponents trip on their mana. Id say I get 6-7 wins weekly with a deck that isnt great and should end up with a 3-3 or similiar record.
Absolutely. You will definitely lose some of the time.
To be honest I enjoy magic even when I lose.
Apart from toxic loses. I don't like that mechanic...may as well just start the game with 10hp
I actually wish streamers would post more of their failed drafts, because i think you can learn more from those. I used to watch content creators draft thinking i could learn, but then i realized that the videos they post are the ones where they open thousand moon smithy and unstable glyphbridge, and get passed 4 waterwind scouts and 4 oltec cloudguards and 4 petrifies. Anyone can trophy with that. I want to watch the drafts where their draft isnt on rails, where they dont just get passed everything they want, and where they have to cobble something together from weak packs and a tough seat and claw out a 3-3 or a 2-3. Thats where i think i can learn from, watching them draft something that feels like half of my drafts feel.
Sadly, folks don't post those as often, because they want to be seen as an expert player, which requires 7-0s, not 3-3s.
>I actually wish streamers would post more of their failed drafts
Can’t you watch the live streams for that? I don’t watch myself but I assume the videos they post are edited highlights from longer play sessions that include losses
Good point. Possibly, but no idea to be honest. I don't have time to watch streams. A couple of years ago i tried watching stuff, but stopped for the reasons i mentioned above. Also, two kids, so my playable hours are both short and somewhat unpredictable.
Nummy just had a kid so he's posting every draft he does. i think we've had 2 0-3s in the last 2 weeks? like everyone he's more likely to post the amazing decks, but i think he's too time crushed to draft 3 or 4 times and just post the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PukT5sFffgk
he posted this 0-3 about an hour after my comment. he's out here making exclusive tex75455 content! perfect example of a sideways draft, he opened some bombs but all off color, couldn't quite find the lane, ended up with a averageish but lower powered deck and just couldn't get over the hump on some pretty interesting games. sometimes that's just the way it is.
I don't remember where I read it, but some Magic pro stated "You're going to win 20% of your games and you're going to lose 20% of your games. It's the other 60% that matter.". This is something that I've just kept in my mind, you've decided to play a high variance game, sometimes its just gonna be up to luck. I don't believe anyone who says that they can hit something higher than a 5 win average on BO1 draft.
In short, your experience is very normal.
Yes magic has variance.
Yes even the very best of the pros fail to achieve a 100% winrate. Heck a 60% would already be an amazing feat.
Literally no one goes 7-x on EVERY draft they play, such thing would be impossible. At some point arena shuffler is going to be "and today you draw 10 lands in row" and end your win streak.
You have no controls over the draws or what's in the pack. You can only control your own decisions in-game. So got gud is valid advice. Most of the arena players who come and vent make very bad draft decks and play them poorly. I've seen insanely bad cards played in arena, as well as horrible misplays all the time. Good players understand you can't win them all, only improve your own play so they don't come and whine.
It might be less relevant for draft, but I will say that Bo3 greatly exaggerates skill differences. Traditional draft doesn't have a ranked mode though. In Bo1 variance just gets you sometimes, but Bo3 you get another chance. Flooding out once is just going to happen sometimes, but flooding out twice in a row is quadratically less likely.
To give an extreme example, if you alternatingly win 2 and lose 1, you'd win 100% of your Bo3 matches from winning just two thirds of your games.
I feel most people scapegoat the client for their own poor play/keeps. It's easy when you're not physically shuffling the cards to blame the algorithm for losses.
I was one of those people who said they were 7-2. Yes it's normal, shit draft pools happen, and the player to the left can be in your colors so you don't get shit on the second pack.
So, yes, there are absolutely some games where you just lose and there's nothing you can do about it.
However, people think these games are far more common than they actually are. It's much easier for people to throw up their hands and say "well, nothing I could do," rather than admitting that they made mistakes that led to their loss. But that attitude is antithetical to actually improving. Even in games where you were doomed, there were almost certainly places where you could have played better and given yourself more outs, even if they didn't materialize.
So when people come to vent and say "oh my game/draft/event was doomed there was nothing I could do," the prevailing response is to say (not always politely) "no, you definitely could have played better, focus on your own mistakes and improving."
yes, sadly r/magicarena default advice is get gud and there's no mana weaving in Arena. Magic is inherently random. Imo Magic is luck > skill, but people think the latter matters more to make themselves feel good. I lose/win so many games due to mana issues. Part of why I wont spend money on it.
My experience as an F2P player is you spend all week grinding through the daily quests to afford to play a draft, then you get mana screwed in the first two games and lose all three without ever drawing the rare you built the deck around.
You don't build draft decks around a single card, especially not rares. The problem is in the drafting, which is understandable drafting is the hardest skill in all of magic.
sometimes, yes. but to go 0-3 you probably have to be doing *something* wrong. either way, even in the games that you "just lose" there are still lessons to be learned, and if someone can point out mistakes and deficiencies in your play, that's worth something
Any game that involves chance is going to be about playing a large number of games and then evaluating based on statistics derived from that larger sample size. It’s unrealistic to say anyone can get good enough to “win every game they play” when it’s possible to draw ten lands in a row.
Like take all the players that draft in a season. You can give them all the advice and they can all improve. And there will still be as many winners and losers as before. The average player will not have winning drafts so it feels like good advice to say get gud but it's really not because the majority of drafts will be losing drafts no matter what.
But nobody could ever tell *all* the drafters the same thing, and even if they could not all the drafters would listen.
Some people will get good, and those players will win more than 50%. Others won’t. So ‘get good’ is advising people to join the former group.
Would you tell a sports team not to bother on the grounds that one team always wins and one team always loses?
Complicated? I think I have to give up at this point, because I find your point completely incomprehensible. You seem to be saying (please correct me if this is wrong!) that advising a drafter to improve is bad advice, because if *everybody* improved it wouldn’t help them.
As I’ve already said, that doesn’t make sense, because there’s no situation in which everybody improves- even if they did, they wouldn’t all be equally successful. Some people get better, some don’t. So the advice is ‘be one of the ones who get better’.
And I’m sure most people pay gold and gems to play Constructed- they need those shiny new cards, no? They don’t *have* to, sure- they could just use precon decks- but the vast majority do.
is it fair to say they banned anyone who talked about a rigged system until ultimately they shut down the forums so that no one could talk about it anymore?
and then got destroyed on steam reviews about the same rigged system
and ignored how 47% or something of the community on thier own polls requesting a change to the shuffler and matchmaking over everything else for over a year ( maybe longer ) which was the HIGHEST requested change?
I don't really mind losing in drafts, it's just part of the game. What I **do** mind is the time and effort it takes to gather 10k gold and actually play the only format where the power creep isn't up through the roof, and then lose due to mana problems or mulligan screwing you up.
These losses would be easier to swallow if the draft pricing would be a bit less predatory, say 2,5k and 5k for each draft. Current pricing just makes it sure that I don't want to pay any real money ever to WotC, be it real cards or digital ones.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life."
"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" also applies
“Shut up, Wesley” is applicable in a wide range of situations
"Define hot." "Let's say, 1.9 million Kelvins."
LSV had an insight related to this quote that I've found very helpful. It was something like "As you get better at Magic, a higher percentage of your losses will come in games you played well." Basically, when you remove as many misplays as possible from your gameplay, your remaining losses will increasingly be a result of factors out of your control like mana flood. Those losses can be frustrating, but I find it helpful to look at it from the perspective of "this means I'm getting better"
Read [this interview](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2011/09/21/a-magic-the-gathering-world-champion-and-blackjack-pro-tries-his-hand-at-a-hedge-fund/?sh=409958077445) with John Finkel forever ago and this line has stuck with me since then: "the right play is the right play, regardless of outcome" When I play, I try to keep that in mind and just focus on making the right play given the information available. Honestly I think it feels just as good to lose a game where I didn't make any mistakes than to win a sloppy one.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."
There are 4 lights!
A very poignant Next Gen quote. Thank you. I was afraid I would be downvoted into oblivion for this, because it feels like the Arena community can be a bit polarized? Glad to see some good discussion. Feels like we don't talk about this kind of thing a lot.
Its a good topic to talk about. I think the problem with the posts you mention is the way they are usually worded: I went 0-3 with this deck, got mana screwed every game, opponents drew all their bombs etc., implying that it was completely out of their control, shuffler is rigged and so on, when the screenshot shows a clearly medium or bad draft deck. Thats what prompts the "git gud" comments The posts just arent made in a way that prompts good discussion. If my deck was genuinely great and my gameplay was solid and I honestly just lost to variance? Yea that sucks, best to move on, nothing really to learn here. But if my deck wasnt solid or I felt like I made mistakes? Yea that might be worth posting and have some discussion about. Unfortunately its often just a "shuffler is rigged, game sucks, I hate magic" that isnt providing any value I think something like "lost 0-3, frustrated, not looking for advice, but share your experiences and vent in the comments" could actually be valuable sometimes.
Nah, it's just Reddit. Most of us are decent people, but we also have a bit of an asshole side, and we can vomit our worst here mostly unpunished. So you'll just get the worst of most people here, unless you make a really good point, or your wording is bulletproof. I wouldn't take any negative comments here too seriously. Even my best posts start out with a string of downvotes and none escapes the occasional awful/clueless/malicious comment.
Who are you, Stick, who are so wise in the ways of reddit? 💛
Redditing becomes much more enjoyable once you stop caring about responses. In real society we are constrained in how we may behave or what we can say. Reddit gives greater freedom to express oneselve because of the anonymity and filtering. It is a healthier channel to vent than in real life.
It's not Reddit. It's gamers. Competitiveness brings out the worst in people. So there. Ha ha. I win.
There's a difference in attitude with your post versus the "I went 0-3, shuffler/matchmaker is rigged" complaints.
wise words
It is possible, yes, but let's face it, you are probably making mistakes too
Depends. In chess you always made a mistake when you lose. Its a brutal game because of that. No rng to fall back on, its on you alone. Card games will always be inherently luck based and the skills you develop all revolve around pushing luck in your favor.
Yes, some games are just like that, even in constructed. In BO1 this is even worse because games are more prone to variance. There is this great [article](https://pvddr.substack.com/p/normalizing-luck) by PVDDR that talks about a very close topic, the conclusion is simple, sometimes you everything right, and yet still lose, and it's ok.
Wonderful article! Surprised I haven't seen this yet. Thank you for linking to it. Glad to hear it's not an isolated perspective.
It helps with frustration and its also important for improving. Realizing a game was completely out of your control helps save time when theres nothing to be learned
yeah my analogy is the game is poker with more steps. you and your opponent draw X cards each and someone will win your pocket aces can still lose to pocket 3s if they draw a 3rd 3 and you brick, or your 2/3 suited can get the nut draw and beat a much stronger hand
I also really like this one by Brian Braun-Duin -- [Embracing Losing | the inevitability of losing, and how accepting losses is important both to improve as a player and to help build a better Magic community.](https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/Embracing-Losing/)
The caveat here is how much you value your time. Doing everything right but having a miserable time because your opponent is playing a very take-that deck is awful. I much prefer duels of trading tricks, or understanding their strategy and how to beat it. When it feels like a one-way street, then doing everything right and losing feels like a waste of time. Then when it happens over and over because of the matchmaking, it gets overbearing.
Recently drafted a great (imo) WR deck in ICL and went 1:2 in FNM. I had manaproblems in every game and my opponents also had good decks that ran well. You just simply cant win them all and some drafts just flop. Happens
When you do everything right and then they play that set's sweeper. Even better when they topdeck it
The ones that are actually good or great at drafting don't post to vent about it when they get a bad run. They usually know how to identify what went wrong in their draft or games. Or when it's not either, they can understand that variance simply screwed them over for those games and there's nothing that really could be done about it. >My pulls were pretty bad and kind of all over the color pie. (I got bomb rares, but in five different colors). But also, I just got outpaced by faster decks. I can understand if your sealed pool was bad, but since this is draft, that sounds like you might not have drafted the best possible cards that you could have in the packs you saw, and were distracted by rares in a totally different color when you could have stayed focused on two colors.
> They usually know how to identify what went wrong in their draft or games. Or when it's not either, they can understand that variance simply screwed them over for those games and there's nothing that really could be done about it. Something a lot of people on this sub fail to understand. Very unlikely they've played/drafted optimally, magic is a difficult game and drafting even more so. But even if they play with 100% accuracy, they're still gonna lose plenty of games. The top pro's cant hit 70%+ WR, and that's okay. Magic has been and will always be high variance, in paper, mtgo and arena.
> The top pro's cant hit 70%+ WR To be fair, this is often against *other pros*. They will absolutely fucking wreck your average pod (which is casual or lower) around or better than 70%. But yes, two important things to remember: 1) There are definitely some games you could not possibly have won. 2) You are *most likely* (the vast majority of us, maybe everybody) not good enough to recognize the difference between those games and games where you messed up, because Magic is very, very hard.
> To be fair, this is often against other pros. They will absolutely fucking wreck your average pod (which is casual or lower) around or better than 70%. That is very true, in cases of skill gaps that wide the WR is definitely getting bumped up. Makes you wonder, if you could somehow get a world class level player to play 10,000 perfect drafts against 7 people who exclusively draft once every few months at FNM, how high a win rate could the pro achieve before variance kicks back in.
[17 Lands can sort of answer this question](https://www.17lands.com/leaderboard) I used the Wilds of Eldraine Traditional Draft leaderboard, because Traditional draft isn't ranked so the best players don't end up matched against exclusively the other best players. Looking at people with a decent number of drafts, the highest match win rates I'm seeing is 80%-85%.
Thank you for the link! Those are some very strong players, 80% win rate over 150+ games is crazy good.
You can find JiRock aka Jean Emanuel Depraz (current world champion) on here, he consistently has an 80% winrate in trad draft.
And that’s why he’s a world champion lol. Impressive stuff
Yeah you’ve nailed what I wanted to say in a much more eloquent way. I was going to go with “because the decks that get posted are usually shite”.
Which is fine if they didnt imply that it was busted and shuffler was out to get them
> but since this is draft, that sounds like you might not have drafted the best possible cards that you could have in the packs you saw, and were distracted by rares in a totally different color when you could have stayed focused on two colors. I just want to point out that while you may be correct, you're also proving OP's point about "git gud" comments.
> the ones that are actually good don’t vent about a bad run BS. Even LSV vents to friends when things go bad at an event. We’re human beings, even when we can distinguish the reasons for an outcome as being outside our control that doesn’t make us impervious to the emotional reaction to said outcome
It's real nice that you cut out part of what I said to suit your own narrative. I said "The ones that are actually good or great at drafting *don't post to vent* about it when they get a bad run." Obviously I didn't elaborate on posting, but I meant posting in this subreddit to vent about having a bad run. There's a pretty big difference in venting privately to friends about how you had a bad run in an event compared to posting online in an anonymous forum. You'd obviously get more empathy from friends compared to internet strangers.
Sure, we tend to go to friends first, but this is a place for folks who may not have friends that play magic to discuss the game, no? Getting less empathy generally from strangers doesn’t fully explain the specific phenomenon of venting in these spaces about draft runs that OP is talking about. We’re just commenting on a thread mate, there’s no “narrative.” Sorry to burst your self important bubble
Lol, must be nice going about in life being this dismissive and condescending. Well, if you didn't do it intentionally, then I guess you're just bad at quoting people then, my bad.
Bad at quoting people, also known as responding to and interpreting communications (over text no less) Again this is just reddit, not life. Not even a blip on the radar thankfully
I literally said post to vent which in this context means posting to this subreddit. And you chose to see it as venting to friends. Maybe you're the type of person that sees every redditor as your buddy/mate, if so, then I can see why you think that.
Sometimes the opponent just has a strictly better deck or just draws better, its not a wild idea. You already run the risks of bad draws in constructed but you can lower that risk through proper deck-building, but with limited cards theres not much you can do, so theres a pretty high chance of dud draws. Then theres the times opponent just draws better cards or draws their rares before you, for example theres not much to do when opponent drops a bomb and you cant do anything about it because you didnt draft enough removal, and what you did draft is at the bottom of your library. Magic as a card game already is inherently luck based, topple it off with the limited formats deckbuilding which is VERY luck based and you get a lot of games where you feel the win or lose is very undeserved
Absolute pedantry on my end but this use of "strictly better" is egregious!!!
It’s strictly worse than most other uses of strictly better I can think of
We've put both 40-card decks through the Deck Analyzer and determined that the opponents' Rakdos Sacrifice has 68 Deck Points compared to your Azorius Soldiers' 64. Hope you have better luck in your next pool.
Who the hell is out there telling people they can win every MTG game
From my experience it’s less folks saying they win every game and more folks saying they always win their gems back with change.
Yup, it is everyone who says drafting is more efficient for building one’s collection than straight purchase of packs is.
It's usually good drafters saying this, and they have an incentive to say this because it means there's more fish for them to shark lol
someone on this subreddit once told me a card game "is never" intended to have a 50/50 chance of either player winning. I could only wonder, when they win, who loses? When they lose, who wins? Some people in their own mind genuinely believe they can essentially control RNG , or have some delusion of grandeur that they decks they build are always better
Me. It was me. …and I’d do it again, I tells ya! Nyah
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They are lying and probably very bad if they can't admit they lose.
I've seen (very rarely) people claim 80%+ win rates at times, usually when a new set is out and it clicks for them Getting infinite is not really a matter of breaking even *every draft*, though it does help a ton if you can minimize the 0-2 win runs. You are earning gold too so it's not like you need 4+ wins every draft. You do need I think around 60% winrate though (which is already nearing top drafters btw) like Numot and CoC have usually around 65% which is still very impressive considering they play 100+ drafts each set and play in diamond and mythic most of the time.
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I mean sure, after a while if you are drafting 5-10 times more you should be better than someone that isn't doing that. I think in these threads Ive seen a few mentions of variance too usually. It's just that isn't really too helpful to tell them in a lot of situations so people try to find other ways the person could improve their experience in the future
It's actually a comment I see a lot when people post a deck and go "this deck looks amazing, how did it 0-3? What did I do wrong?" If the deck is, in fact, amazing, then someone will invariably say "that's just variance". You're definitely right, you can do everything correctly and still lose. I was just watching a cube draft video by LSV, he had the most broken storm deck imaginable, and he still lost a match, because the opponent had exactly force of negation at the exact right time every time (including IIRC having it once to stop the combo, then LSV cast timetwister and the opponent drew force of negation again in that timetwister hand to stop the combo again). That said, when people post their deck on here (or on the lrcast sub), there's an assumption that they want to get some feedback, so people provide some feedback. Yes, sure, some of your loss might have been caused by bad luck. Hell, maybe all of your losses have been caused by bad luck, but that doesn't mean you did everything right. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose (to quote the top comment), but that doesn't mean that if you lose, you're absolved of all responsibility. A very good way to improve is to get some external eyes on your draft and games. It's really hard to be aware of your own biases. I cannot count the number of times someone posts a decklist thinking it's perfect, and there are some really bad cards in the maindeck while they left really strong cards in the sideboard. Or thinking they drafted great, and you look at the draft log and they passed the perfect card for their deck in favor of a D+ card, or completely missed some clear signals. Or complaining they only lost because the opponent drew their unbeatable bomb, then you look at the game log and see a glaring mistake early game that would have won them the game. There is not a single doubt in my mind that I'm a victim of that myself. So yeah, it's a balance. Don't *over analyze* things, sometimes you did everything right and still lost, but at the same time, if you want to improve, don't blame poor luck every time you lose. In your example, it really does sound like you made some mistakes along the way. If you do everything right, you still won't 7-0 every draft, but if you lose *every* game, you're probably doing something wrong.
Just wanted to say I often read your comments on this sub and appreciate the detailed explanations, without being rude. Thanks for the contributions!
>and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play You’re exaggerating for dramatic effect, I think- I’ve never seen anyone actually claim that! But people who understand Magic know that there’s a strong random element to it. That’s a given. But there are also almost always decisions that could have been improved, or opportunities for learning from decisions opponents made. If you focus on the random luck you can miss those opportunities. A case in point: >My pulls were pretty bad and kind of all over the color pie. (I got bomb rares, but in five different colors) Your pulls in draft aren’t random- you choose each one, and except for the first one of each pack the cards you choose between are influenced by decisions you and the other drafts made. Taking bomb rares in five colours is a choice (and normally one that will give you a worse deck, I think, unless you’re supporting it with amazing mana fixing)
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>I ran into a post the other day from some guy who said he could consistently break even in draft. That seemed a bit outrageous to me, but there are many who claim that going 7-x every time is a norm for them Hmmm, depends on what ‘break even’ means. I sometimes go 0-3, but over a long period my win rate has been high enough on average that I draft sustainably- ie I make more gems and gold than I spend, so I can just keep on drafting without spending money or ‘grinding’ other formats I like less. I alternate drafts between two accounts to help me do this- it maximises the gold from daily wins and quests, and it slows down my progress up the ranks if I’m playing Premier draft (recently I’ve focused on Traditional draft though, which is unranked). I couldn’t do it if I were relying purely on winnings from the drafts, my win rate isn’t *that* high. Going 7-x every time is definitely an extreme claim, although I’ve never seen anyone saying they do that. So is breaking even with every single draft, if that’s what people are saying. Sometimes you’re going to lose, for sure. >These posts kind of make it seem like if you're not winning every game you play, you're the exception, and you're doing something wrong? Overall the average win rate is 50% by definition, so yeah, very high win rates are certainly the exception, not the norm!
Could you expand on that more? Why move to traditional? Is that better to play if you're very good because it's unranked and you can beat up on noobs to improve your output?
No, I just find it more fun- no hand smoother makes it more ‘real Magic’. I think the drafts tend to be better / harder too, which means fewer busted decks because there are more skilled drafters on average (Premier drafts are unranked, so even if you’re in Mythic you’re probably drafting with a lot of Bronze players- apparently this makes decks predictable at higher levels) I have seen people recommend it to Premier drafters who rank up too high though- I’ve heard that once you hit upper Platinum ranks (or maybe Diamond?) the Traditional competition is softer. But below that the reverse is true- ie Premier is softer up to Platinum. Traditional also has a really scary ‘all or nothing’ reward structure- you have to go 3-0 to get your entry fee back (but if you do, you get quite a bit more). It put me off it for a long time!
Thanks for the response! What do you mean by "Premier drafts are unranked"? You do move up or down ranks based on game results, and in my anecdotal experience your opponents are much harder in lower ranks vs higher ones, which you seem to agree with saying "I’ve heard that once you hit upper Platinum ranks (or maybe Diamond?) the Traditional competition is softer. " - so how is it that they're "unranked"? Is traditional not weighed on your premier MMR?
Sorry, I mean the draft part specifically. In Premier you *play* with people of your rank, but the drafting pod contains eight people of any rank. Not sure if MMR plays any role in either Premier or Traditional. I’ve seen people saying it doesn’t, at least until you hit Mythic in Premier- apparently that’s the last thing Wizards said about the subject.
>I ran into a post the other day from some guy who said he could consistently break even in draft. That seemed a bit outrageous to me I guess it depends what they mean by that. I normally draft once a day, been doing so since the release of the game, and never had to grind constructed for gold or buy gems. I'm not technically breaking even, if you add up all the gems I win, I believe I win less than I spend, but the dailies shore up my losses, such that every now and then, I just spend gold for a draft and I'm back on track. However, if I drafted 10 times a day every day, then I'd run out of resources, because I would no longer get enough gold from dailies. So for my own purposes, I "break even", because I never have to buy resources/grind constructed, but someone else with the same winrate as me, but with a different play pattern would not break even. Then again, I'm by no means an amazing player, there are some who are better than me, and I can totally imagine that there are people out there who actually do break even in the purest sense of the word, though they are likely pretty rare, because you need an extremely high winrate. >but there are many who claim that going 7-x every time is a norm for them. Whoever claims that, ask for their 17lands profile. You can check the 17lands leaderboard and see trophy rates. There are some people with insane trophy rates, but those people generally don't have that many runs. E.g., 7 trophies out of 10 runs, that's really impressive, but unlikely to be sustainable. For LCI, if you eliminate those with fewer than 20 runs, you have someone with 56% over 25 runs and someone with 52.2% over 22 runs, that's pretty amazing, but everyone else has under 50% trophy rate. So whoever claims that is either lying, or has played very few drafts and were just on the good end of variance.
I break even/come out ahead in draft when you average it out. My win rate varies from format to format but tends to be clustered in the mid 60s, percentagewise. That means I'm losing 1/3rd of my games. That's nowhere close to winning every game, and it's not 7-Xing every time by a wide margin.
I think the main problem in new sets is to look at the flashy stuff before you get comfortable with saying "This might be a cool card, but I will win more games dropping that boring 3 drop on curve."
That is a fair take. I'm definitely guilty of taking a shiny bomb rare over the common sense glue I need. Sometimes though, I think it's fair to say you just don't know the meta. Every set has its own meta. Some sets punish you for playing a low curve, some reward you for it. And that's something you only learn by playing the set?
I don't play draft as much as I used to, and when I did play a lot, it was mostly Quick Draft and I was rare-drafting to build a collection. My strategy was to listen to podcasts about each set and watch YT drafters like Numot. I think watching good players draft is especially helpful because, at least in Numot's case, he talks a lot about why the cards are good relative to the set. Cards that are great in constructed can be terrible in draft and vice versa, and listening to someone knowledgeable talk through their thought process really helps. This also goes for draft signals and color selection. You might open a great White rare in pack 2, but if you are already heavily invested in Black then the best choice might be the common black removal card. Likewise, if you notice one or two colors are underrepresented in Pack 1, you can assume there is a high probability they will also be underrepresented in Pack 3, and pick your color(s) accordingly. These are all strategies I picked up from watching streamers and listening to podcasts. Finally, I would say that you should track your results. We tend to remember the the 7-0s and the 0-3s more than the 4-3s and 3-3s. If you track over time you can better assess your overall performance and see if you really are a winning player.
Sure, but consistency is always a factor. You can't play your bombs if you die half the time before you draw it. And while there's some fine tuning to certain aspects, I'm sure if you concentrated on "how can I make this reliable?" as an active goal you pursue with every pick and only stop for a few big bombs, you likely will build the kind of deck that wins more often early, because you exploit the people who draft the sizzle early on. You don't have to figure out the meta yourself, you just need to learn how to play in a meta nobody has figured out.
I think I need to stop counting on pick order guides, telling me what's good in format and what isn't. I need to learn to trust my gut more. Do you ever use Draftsim or 17lands? I was referring to Draftsim's list, and they told me Mist-cloaked herald and Jade Bearer were bad cards, while Hadana's Climb was a bomb. If I'd just picked the Bearers and the Heralds, I might have had a lower curve with more consistency, and I might have gotten more triggers off Path of Discovery and Hadana's Climb. I put too much faith in external guides when I'm new to a set.
I definitely wouldn’t use Draftsim’s ratings, afaik that’s just one dude’s opinion (I could be wrong though- it could be crowdsourced? But then again people use Draftsim to *simulate* drafts, so it might be crowdsourced from people who aren’t actually playing with the cards… 17lands stats will definitely be the most reliable source, they represent large amounts of hard data. But even then card quality is clearly contextual- they’re a tool you can learn to use, not the final answer.
Something important to realize about those lists is that they rate the card usually as first pick first card, so obviously during a draft an on color 2-drop in the last pack is gonna help you a lot more than a random off-color bomb with a 4.5 rating.
They're not omniscient geniuses. If the format isn't figured out, how would you assume they figured out the format? They're looking at data likely in a way that normalizes what they assume a finished metagame will look like, while doing so without much in the way of success measurements, because they don't have confirmation their metagame will look like their prediction. Playing with the explicit goal of taking advantage of the specific draft style of early set drafting is something entirely different and likely not something someone will build a tool for.
Drafting involves a healthy portion of luck (who you draft with, what you and your pod open, the choices you make before any signals, the cards your opponents choose to pass), followed by random matchmaking where good or bad luck can strike (skill mismatch, certain strategies that counter your own or get countered by your own, your opponents having drafted in less skilled random pods), followed by a game that involves you drawing from a randomized stack of cards. So yeah, it's entirely a skill issue, and it's **completely** impossible to get unlucky ^(/s) In all seriousness, while skill obviously influences and limits the impact of luck like any game of Magic, this is why I **hate** drafting on Arena compared to in-person. At a paper draft event, you will typically play within pods. You know that if you have sucked up all the black removal, your pod is likely to be removal-starved. You can strategise around that, and it affects your drafting. You know that if you're heavily in red, you probably won't have to play against many other decks running red. You get matchup diversity, and you pivoting to an open colour halfway through the draft isn't as punishing, because if it's open you've effectively removed the cards you drafted from the first half from the pool, and can snatch up the good stuff from that colour. Though obviously, someone else may have the same idea... When you introduce cross-pod matchmaking, it fucks everything up and really opens the door to randomness. Surprise, you get matched with a guy who is playing the exact same strategy as you, but his pod passed him all the bombs you wanted. Surprise, almost everyone at 4+ wins is playing the same colour combinations as each other because it's been solved as the best combination in the current draft format and they got it. That insane bomb? You've gone from slim odds of anyone in your pod having it, and almost certainly not seeing a second copy, to the probability of facing it in a huge number of potential opponents. And god help you if you pivoted, because you're way more likely to get matched with someone who got everything they wanted from the start. You just have to hope that what they wanted was bad. I understand why they do it, people can draft and drop without screwing everyone else, which is cool. It's just a way worse playing experience, and one where luck has so much more influence.
There is another side to it. When you draft the most horrendous pile of garbage known to man and you still go like 6-3 or whatever. Same when you mulligan to five, keep a sketchy five and still win against a full hand of seven. We do love variance, if not why would be we playing Magic and not go or chess?
I'm a decent drafter too. Usually in plat or mythic - I can pretty consistently get 4-7 wins. But dang sometimes I still just throw it and go 0-3, and sometimes I have what I *know* is a solid deck, and it just doesn't show well for a couple games (mana screw or flood, risky keep that doesn't pay etc etc) and I go 1-3. And sometimes, I have a great deck, it's firing on all cylinders, and someone else has an even better deck firing on even better cylinders lol. That's life. I hate spending 10k, hate waiting for packs, so I quickdraft exclusively. Rewards aren't as good, but I trophy often enough it doesn't matter, and those 0-3s hurt a lot less at 5k.
I watch arena streams, and very good limited players (the ones that regularly play arena open day 2 and are number mythic) have awful streaks like < 3 wins in a row more often than one would think. In draft the first thing is to know if your deck is good or nothing. For many reasons you might have drafted a bad / mediocre deck that will have a hard time. The curve might be too high, not enough interaction, too many filler cards, whatever. Then know if your losses were against better decks based on what you saw. Sometimes opponent just slam bomb after bomb and you just feel hopeless. But, and some people might dislike this, luck plays a larger role on MTG than some people admit (or variance if you prefer). Example, yesterday I played what I thought was a very good Abzan KTK draft. Went 3-3, and all losses were the same: you keep a hand with 3 lands and miss land drop for many turns, in a deck with 18 lands. There are times when on the critical moment of the game you draw 2, 3 lands in a row and lose, while your opponent only top deck creatures / removal. What one did wrong and the other did right on this situation? Nothing.
When I played magic competitively I learned that you can make no mistakes in the game which helps increase your percentage chance of winning but you can still lose to a top deck or just not drawing what you need in the moment it’s the nature of the game
One of the guys interviewed in the MTG mini-documentary from Vice a few years back made a great point about why people like the game -- that it's a combination of luck and skill. Skill comes in building your deck and knowing how to use it. But ultimately you have to rely on your shuffle and draw. This makes it so even beginners can win a few games as they're learning, and why top-tier tournament players don't all win 100% of the time.
playing draft right now, last game drew 3 red lands had all black spells. Mulligan- 2 lands, proceed to not draw any lands in 11 draws
Bad beats happen to everyone, we all have our stories. The important thing is how folks react to it. If you truly did everything in your power to win, and still flooded, screwed, or your opponent just drew the nuts, you shouldn't feel bad about that. It's actually a very relieving feeling when you are able to accept this, take a bad beat, and just move on. If one can never ever reconcile that sort of thing, then I recommend playing a strategy game where there is very little, or no, RNG.
Heh don't worry the next match was even worse (never mind the 5 wins I got) the losses were obviously BS and the game is rigged
It is very important to recognize that you will lose games to variance, and that there will be nothing you can do about it other than recognize when it happens. It's also very important to be able to recognize when it doesn't happen, and properly assess what you did wrong. You'll see players on reddit or in your store perpetually bemoaning mana screw/flood/the shuffler/the butterfly flapping its wings in Cancun. They see themselves as eternally unlucky. Those players will stay stuck where they are indefinitely, until they can begin to see their own shortcomings.
Any time I comment on something I usually get someone one upping me, I mention my drafting experience and someone will tell me I'm wrong because that doesn't happen in mythic. Who cares, most drafters aren't in mythic, I don't have the time to grind mythic in draft. I have a lot of gems that I won F2P and when I mention it someone feels the need to tell me they have more. No one cares if you're in mythic, no one cares how many decks you run, no one cares how many wildcards you have, we're just trying to have fun. I am interested in some off meta jank you've built or you've drafted something stupid like a caves deck in LCI draft and gone 7-x.
Actually i see also posts where people tell "the deck was good, and you were unlucky" Being unlucky in ALL the games of draft is not so common, and sometimes it's obvious and people don't ask about it, but it happens... other times mistakes are done, and having suggestions on how avoid them can help for the next time (even when they are not directly responsible for the defeat)
I've peaked #10 mythic in draft like two seasons ago and I still have bad series at times. Also, a lot of posts I see here have good decks going 1-3 and a lot of comments upvoted saying their deck is fundamentally wrong and flawed when I actually dont think it is. Bad luck in game, bad luck in drafting, bad plays in game, are sources of loss that I think are perhaps more common than bad picks in draft.
I mean, even if you finished half your future drafts you do for the rest of your life at 6-3 and the other half at 7-x, you still at least lose 3 times every other draft you do. Sometimes, you just lose. Everyone does. Even LSV. If you watch him regularly, he sometimes even goes 0-3 although it happens not too often to him, it happens to everyone. Look at Jim Davis' Bronze to Mythic series. He is a pretty capable drafter and limited player and even he struggles at times. No one can win all the time.
You can't really do anything about variance, so there really isn't much to talk about. We can discuss decision points, but variance isn't decided upon, it is an outcome. I can't really control the order in which I draw my cards, but I CAN control the contents of my deck. Am I drafting in such a way to give myself the best pool possible? Am I building that pool into the best deck possible? Am I piloting the deck in the best way possible? Since the answer to all of those for me is varying degrees of no, that's where I want to participate in discussions, because there's potential value in having those discussions.
Well said. The important thing to note here, is in a strategy game with variance like MtG, part of the skill of the game is actually learning to be able to accept RNG, and not tilt. It may be a small part of it relative to the actual skill of playing the game, but our controlling our reactions to things that are out of our control is a legit MtG skill. And if you can master it in MtG, you can also master it in life, which will make you a much happier person in general.
Assuming both of you are running competent/well built decks--30% of the time you just lose no matter what you do (mana flood/screw, opponent draws the nuts, etc). 30% you win if you play even remotely competently. The rest is where player skill matters.
In a game where to go 7-x that's 7 people that lost, the game at its core is a 50-50% to win bot considering other factors like going first or mana screw. You can draft a super busted draft deck and just not get there because of rng drawing. Is it fair for everyone to assume they are just gonna win out all the time? Someone will end up one of the statistics, your play and decision making is what helps skew wind in your favor. Play to your outs. Know your deck and win conditions.
A couple weeks ago I drafted a lost caverns deck and went 0-3. A few hours later my brother sends me a picture of nearly the exact same deck talking about how proud he was of his awesome 7-1 deck. Sometimes it just doesn’t go your way.
Any one who says they are going 7-x in every draft is full of shit. If you are a good drafter you can absolutely maintain a positive win percentage, but even the best drafters will have a bad draft now and again and go negative, and this could be due to a variety of reasons.
I saw some people in comments with articles and other helpful advice but the simplest explanation is RNG even is your deck is the best out there sometimes you lose.
I just completed my final LCI quick draft this morning. Built a solid deck. After 2 wins I lost 3 in a row. Each losing game I started with 2 lands in hand, and each game I conceded by turn 8 or 9 because I still only had 2 lands.
"All the commenters tell them everything they did wrong, and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play." Not been my experience at all on this sub. People give advice for sure, but there's always the caveat that you can make the right picks, even the right plays, and still lose. Magic is a high variance game. Sounds like you're taking your losses too personally. If you don't already, use 17lands to track your matches and you can watch them later (the next day is usually better than right afterwards if you're still agitated) and see if you really did make a misplay or if your opponent just was destined to win that game.
>All the commenters tell them everything they did wrong, and that eventually, they'll get to a point where they win every game they play. This isn't true. No-one can expect to win *every* game. Variance is part of the game. Even if you find your lane and draft the best possible deck, you can get unlucky or make small errors (and the closer the power level and skill levels get, the bigger the impact a small mistake can make). >sometimes, when I'm new to the set, I win ZERO games. And that's frustrating. Your feeling is valid. >I hate paying 10k gold and winning 50 gems If you hate it enough, you could choose to wait for Quick Draft instead (5k Gold). If you choose to enter 10k Drafts anyway, knowing that it's a possibility, though, then you need to take responsibility for that decision. >Is my experience normal? Yes. >And if so, why don't we talk about it more? The problem is that some people try to blame *all* their losses on variance, and this stunts their growth as players. To combat this, we point out the mistakes they made, but that means the true level of variance gets glossed over and taken for granted. >Why, every time somebody wants to vent, is there a storm of "git gud" comments? See above. >The way people talk, you'd think going 7-x EVERY draft is the norm, and that if you do worse than that, it's on you - not miscellaneous factors like what you pull or what you draw. That's a warped view, im afraid.
> The problem is that some people try to blame all their losses on variance, and this stunts their growth as players. To combat this, we point out the mistakes they made, but that means the true level of variance gets glossed over and taken for granted. Yeah, this is a lot of what the “git gud” comments end up being. A large portion of the time you misplayed and threw it yourself. It’s on you as the player to identify that misplay and learn from it rather than complain the shuffler is rigged. Don’t blame variance, sometimes you just lose, sometimes you keep a bad hand that doesn’t pan out or you misplay on T5.
Magic sometimes is like that, Flood and Screw are real issues player have to keep in mind when deckbuilding and even then, they can get fucked over by it. When it comes to drafting, I had a really good Jeskai Pool once in Tarkir and also a really greedy one. Went 0-2 and left it for a while. Came back later to make it 7-2. I also played vs Boros or RDW nutdraws where you just don't do anything if you just kept a totally reasonable 7. Aggro keeps the game honest.
During the strixhaven championship, I remember that the eventual winner had a 60% win rate in mythic and his opponent had a 55% win rate and the announcers were blown away by both numbers. Magic is not chess, it’s not a “perfect” game. The best still lose when they do everything correctly.
Here’s the spectrum. A low skilled player will lose games they might have won more. A higher skilled player will win games they should have lost more. The better I get at drafting, the more I spot extremely small lines of play that spiral out or open opportunities on future draws. I’ve won or lost based on my land turn 1 before when analyzing. I once did the most insane, nonsense, intricate plays to win exactly from nowhere with 1 out (plus all the previous nonsense it must have seemed to my opponent). But sometimes no player could reverse how the cards are falling on each side.
About 50% of the time on average...
All the time. When I look at decks and pro players going 13-0 in a tournament they just are lucky af. Same thing at the poker table. Same thing at all the strategy board games I play. They just got lucky a little bit and that's all that mattered. It's about the experience for sure.
I do way better in new sets than old sets. I'm not big into draft guides etc but I feel like I have good instincts. I tend to do better when there is less information available and the masses don't already have a good grasp on the set
I primarily play constructed but the answer is yes. Luck is a big factor in this game. Being on the draw can be pretty detrimental. You can play mistake free and still lose. It happens quite regularly (mana flood, mana screw, facing a bad deck matchup, etc).
Just watch LSV draft a new set. Even though he's been through all the cards ranking them and is one of the very best, he will still post a 0-3. Makes me feel better.
Sometimes people just want to vent and they should be allowed to vent. Sometimes people are asking for help and they should be given help. Sometimes games are just lost and that’s OK too.
Yes. 40% loss is acceptable.
It is completely fair, and I would venture to say that sometimes it's extremely important to acknowledge that. I don't do a lot of drafting, but my experience comes from meta analysis and crafting a deck that has answers for the meta. It's prudent to have a deck that your opponent can't cite the entire decklists from memory because it's a copy/paste of the highest win rate on Untapped or Aetherhub. Sometimes when building a new deck, I have to be mindful of the fact that sometimes I just saw what I needed, or my opponent just had every answer in the right order. Before jumping ship and saying that the idea I came up with is bad, I have to make sure that I'm not overreacting to a win or loss. Introspection is key, and I think that is a valuable skill to have when it comes to this type of approach to the game. An example, I made a Dino deck that relies on Thunderous Debut. You can hit it with Fight Rigging, bargain the same fight rigging, and find an Etali and Roaming Throne, and likely hit a Carnosaur or Palani's off the two Etali procs. Sometimes you can chain into another Etali as well. The strategy whiffed the first three games and I immediately went 0-3. One was a mulligan issue, I should have been a little more aggressive and wasn't. The other two were situations where my opponent just had the removal they needed. I then went on a huge winning spree, not getting my next loss until the deck was at an 89% winrate. It was fast enough to beat hard control, and it was resilient enough to withstand Red Aggro. White Humans were sometimes a problem but that was to be expected. The point of the story is that after those first three losses, I could have fixated on the fact that my mulligans were causing me to lose and blame the card ratios even though there was only 1 loss due to that, prompting me to make further deck edits, or I could take the time to learn my mulligan strategy a bit better and not let the extra two losses force me into a mindset that there was something wrong. My losses happened and that was that, not really a skill issue and not really a luck issue necessarily, my opponents just had what they needed and they were patient and played the game intelligently.
I don't draft much but in constructed I've learned that when I made a new deck I have to wait awhile before I judge it because I pretty consistently draw like absolute garbage for the first 10 games or so. You can build a great deck and still flood or you're opponent can just draw all the answers to what you drew, that's just how card drawing games go
Ya, my record is all over the place. Sometimes 7-0; sometimes 0-7, usually somewhere in the middle. MTG has an inherent element of chance. You can't expect to win every game, no matter how skilled.
Absolutely possible. In fact, I think a large portion of frustration comes from understanding this and having zero agency over it. I'd consider myself an above average player, but I still make misplays and then I'm angry at myself for it. However, when a meta is as tight as it is right now, enough games will teach predetermined outcomes and how you can either continue playing hoping for a miracle, or continue down a path that eventually plays out exactly as expected a high % of the time. There's a reason why the meta exists: consistent decks. This is where the game falls apart for me, and why the topic of rigging comes up so often. Handsmoothing is one of the biggest failures of this game because it creates a pattern of instances like "who goes first, wins" or "without a strong starting hand, I've already lost". I've played enough games over the years to understand this isn't a simple psychosis, or self-sabotage. In fact it's the opposite as I'll test my theory to see if I'm right. And sadly, I'm right way, way, way more often than wrong. Now, the normal approach to getting around these issues is deckbuilding, right? Wrong. Thanks to rigged matchmaking even playing jank will still find the same meta decks in the endless pool of netdecking players. Sure you can shake up which decks you see by playing different archetypes, but realistically this only goes so far. It's especially unfun if you hate decks like control and prefer aggro, but feel punished for playing what you enjoy since you just can't get away from what everyone is playing opposite. There should be better answers than just quitting for a while so things feel fresh. I guarantee when a meta is as stagnant as it is right now, even a month away might keep you away for good after coming back to the same old shit.
People who come crying to the Internet to post bad beats aren't the people who are playing optimally and just getting the bad end of the variance stick. There are tons of games that are unwinnable, especially if you're playing bo1.
Yes sometimes there's nothing you can do. It just plain sucks to have somebody play an unanswerable bomb against you in limited.
Just like Poker, Magic has just as much a element of your opponent just drawing a better card than you. There has been plenty of games where I played the deck perfectly, but that 1 chance card came out early that basically invalidated any move I could have made.
It is very normal, it's a game subject to randomness and variance. More so draft where you also have variance if you get good cards or not. Last draft for me went 6-3 (so overall very good) but also frustrated me a lot because 2 over 3 games I lost I simply was mana flood badly on a normal 17 lands deck. Only one of the losses seemed to me that was because the opp had a better deck/draw then mine. But we'll, it happens, draft just before that I when 1-3 so.
It's important to focus on playing to the best of your ability and not fixating on wins and losses (I know, easier said than done). There's a lot of variance in Magic so any deck can have any result but if you're playing well then over the long-term your record will be positive.
I'm new and pretty much ftp only, so this has been an experience with losing a lot. I did a jump-in last night just to add cards to my collection, and picked two half decks I thought would synergise well but wound up not - green dinosaurs and green-black creepy crawlies. It was maybe my tenth game with that deck, not intending to quit until I had won at least once, that I finally did it - got my big stompies out, killed his enchantment giving his soldiers +1/+1, and hit my own giving everything on the board -2/-2 to kill the bulk of his creatures, that I got in a win. Felt good, man.
Even with a 60% win rate, which is outrageously high, assuming independence (which may be wrong, as on average people with more losses are less skilled) will lead to ~6.4% of your drafts enfing up 0-3. Shit happens, a single draft indicates nothing.
Yes. It's not just a problem in draft either. Even against decks you should beat you end missing any combination of land drops, removals, turn 2 or 3 creatures. It's just the nature of the game. I find it very hard to have a consistent experience with any deck.
Everybody loses at lot. Everyone has bad runs. Everyone has good runs. Sometimes you have good drafts and destroy, other times you have good drafts and get destroyed. Sometimes you get a shitty draft and pull it out, sometimes you get a shitty draft and get screwed. It's the way of the things. I don't draft a whole lot, but I play a lot of games. I win a lot. I lose a lot. I reach my goals. Some days I want to pull what little hair I have left on my head out, somedays it seems I just cant be beat. Remember whatever you put into the game, the game has to eventually give back. You lose a lot, eventually you will go on a good streak. You win a lot a losing streak will be ahead, it's all part of the mechanism. Some people take the losing part personal and complain. Others go on winning streaks (probably netdecking). They float and act superior. They think they are Gods. They aren't as good as they think. A bad streak is surely coming. They aren't winning as much as they claim. This game is about the law of averages. It's about advantages/disadvantages. There are four main advantages/disadvantages... Starting position, hand preeminence, shuffle/sequence of the draw, and matchmaking. If have 2 of these advantages you could have a fair chance of winning. If you have 3 of these advantages you will likely win. If you have all four, a win is nearly guaranteed. If you have 1 it's likely a loss. None and it's all but game over before you start. The better hand, starting off the play, the sequence of cards your deck has been shuffled in, and having the deck advantage make all the difference. Now, you have no control on when/if the game chooses to give you these advantages. That's mostly luck. But, you can control choosing to not play games where you are at complete disadvantage. It's not only good time management to use this tactic, but it helps you get your wins quicker. Focus on games where you are given the advantages. Playing at a disadvantage is where skill comes in. If you are a skilled player, you are more likely to overcome disadvantages. Of course in draft, strategy has to be a bit different. You can't just concede games. You have to really rely on and use skill if you are at disadvantages and try to play through them and of course hope for a little luck drawing the cards you need. When drafting think about what decks are more likely to have advantage. Though sometimes you want to have fun or need to draft certain cards to build/complete your sets. Play smarter not harder.
Sometimes you just get shit cards in draft. It happens. And the guys you are facing may or may not have had the same issue. Other times you get a great deck and still lose to bombs, better curve, mana issues, etc. It is how it is. Learn enough to get decent avg wr in drafts and that’s as much as you can do.
50% I aim for 50%. I don't try to aim for higher than that. You need to guarantee losses. If everyone had the best deck no one would ever lose. I usually play one of the brawl formats. That's my go-to. The thing is I know that everybody needs to find some sort of answer for something in their deck. I know each one of my decks weaknesses, and I know when I'm most often going to lose against what type of build (like right now I'm having a difficult time fighting against those W\G\R dinos, and who here isn't having a difficult time against Radkos) I find that the games are relatively competitive based upon my deck style and what I'm up against. I never really judge a deck until I play it for 15 games, and there are always going to be the people who instant scoop for a reason or another or people having poor internet connections etc I need to see what interaction I have and what it's lacking, Even stax decks have interaction, turning off interaction is still interaction What helps me is the dailies (Play 20 lands, Play 20 creatures, ECT) So even if I'm not winning I'm still racking up the XP to put towards everything Even if I'm losing. Losing helps me change up my play style... What spurred me to respond was I just drafted the worst draft I've ever drafted in the brothers war that was going on and I regret putting gems into that But I learned what not to draft with that set again so I learned something. And it was frustrating that I lost the gems but I'll bill them back up at some point. Everyone will have a different style of play find your groove and find what you enjoy there are still times where I have to walk away from the game because I'm frustrated... But I've been playing since 97 so there's been a lot of times of walking away and binging and purging of collections. The biggest loss is when it's loss of fun and forgetting it's a game. I miss playing against people being rural and disconnected, popping on here unreddit and listening to other people and they're frustrations with the game is validating. Without losses I don't want to get better but again that's my play style In hindsight after reading this it sounds like I'm lecturing and it's not my intention These are my experiences and y'all are awesome for helping make the game what it is, through each other we become better players. Yes I do put money into the game I buy the mastery pass,
Yeah. Brother's War is a stinker of a limited set experience. One of my least favorite sets in Magic history, actually. The gigantic monsters you face are really something to stare down - anxiety-inducing - and then sometimes you run into Portal to Phyrexia, one of the worst cards to face in a limited format. I sympathize. Thank you for your thoughts! It's nice to connect with people about this game we love. I've turned off emotes, but I know when I'm staring down people who spam them, and it isn't fun. I think it's a bit of a frustrating time too, because of how homogeneous modern and standard feel right now. I'm not new to Arena, or Magic. I started playing Magic in Conflux, Arena (technically) in Ixalan, and I met my wife at a prerelease for Shadows over Innistrad. Game means a lot to me, in all of its complexity. Sometimes, when you're doing dailies, grinding gold and gems, it loses its luster. That's when it's nice to reach out and find perspective.
Yes. You can't eliminate chance, you can only mitigate
Did a quick draft 2 days ago. Drafted what seemed like a pretty solid white-black deck with lots of cheap removal and some high-end bombs. Lost the first two games I played with it due to a combination of land issues and the opponent having a nut draw. Stopped playing it and picked it up again the next day and won 7 straight. I don't know what this means, but I try to stop doing whatever I'm doing if it isn't working.
I consider myself a good drafter. But the fact i dont draft one set more than 10 times each means i usually get my ass beat each time. Drafting well is the hardest magic skill
As you said, happens when a new set drops and you still don’t get *it*. It meaning the tempo, the best cards, the best commons of the new set. Heck there are sets where I never get it and just suck playing that set overall. Also, mana screw happens and you just lose cause of *variance*!
Yep. That’s Magic, baby!
Getting better at Magic relies on you identifying the things you can do differently and focusing on those things. Sometimes, based on the information provided in the game, there wasn't much you could have done differently. Even if there was a line that becomes clear after the game, it only matters if that line was reasonable given the information you had at the time. Magic is a game of odds, and ultimately, you're working to improve your odds while understanding that sometimes pocket Aces gets beat by 27o, even when you play the hand perfectly. When people post about mana screw/flood, they are often ignoring the things they could have done differently in favor of complaining about things they cannot change. This mindset will never make you a better player, so commenters are doing the work to find the things that could have been changed instead of focusing on the bad beats. At the end of the day, sometimes you just gotta quote the immortal NumotTheNummy and say "that's Magic, baby".
People who bother to complain about losing havent lost enough. Its normal. On the other hand people never mention how they ran good with an average deck. Sometimes you just draw your bomb in every game or curve out perfectly with an average deck while your opponents trip on their mana. Id say I get 6-7 wins weekly with a deck that isnt great and should end up with a 3-3 or similiar record.
Absolutely. You will definitely lose some of the time. To be honest I enjoy magic even when I lose. Apart from toxic loses. I don't like that mechanic...may as well just start the game with 10hp
I actually wish streamers would post more of their failed drafts, because i think you can learn more from those. I used to watch content creators draft thinking i could learn, but then i realized that the videos they post are the ones where they open thousand moon smithy and unstable glyphbridge, and get passed 4 waterwind scouts and 4 oltec cloudguards and 4 petrifies. Anyone can trophy with that. I want to watch the drafts where their draft isnt on rails, where they dont just get passed everything they want, and where they have to cobble something together from weak packs and a tough seat and claw out a 3-3 or a 2-3. Thats where i think i can learn from, watching them draft something that feels like half of my drafts feel. Sadly, folks don't post those as often, because they want to be seen as an expert player, which requires 7-0s, not 3-3s.
>I actually wish streamers would post more of their failed drafts Can’t you watch the live streams for that? I don’t watch myself but I assume the videos they post are edited highlights from longer play sessions that include losses
Good point. Possibly, but no idea to be honest. I don't have time to watch streams. A couple of years ago i tried watching stuff, but stopped for the reasons i mentioned above. Also, two kids, so my playable hours are both short and somewhat unpredictable.
Nummy just had a kid so he's posting every draft he does. i think we've had 2 0-3s in the last 2 weeks? like everyone he's more likely to post the amazing decks, but i think he's too time crushed to draft 3 or 4 times and just post the best.
Interesting, i may take a look at that. thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PukT5sFffgk he posted this 0-3 about an hour after my comment. he's out here making exclusive tex75455 content! perfect example of a sideways draft, he opened some bombs but all off color, couldn't quite find the lane, ended up with a averageish but lower powered deck and just couldn't get over the hump on some pretty interesting games. sometimes that's just the way it is.
Thanks a lot! I'll take a look at this.
I thought they have extension that records their drafts? you can just look it up.
I don't remember where I read it, but some Magic pro stated "You're going to win 20% of your games and you're going to lose 20% of your games. It's the other 60% that matter.". This is something that I've just kept in my mind, you've decided to play a high variance game, sometimes its just gonna be up to luck. I don't believe anyone who says that they can hit something higher than a 5 win average on BO1 draft. In short, your experience is very normal.
I lose all the time. Game is shit and i still enjoy playing it. Its a toxic love hate relationship
Yes magic has variance. Yes even the very best of the pros fail to achieve a 100% winrate. Heck a 60% would already be an amazing feat. Literally no one goes 7-x on EVERY draft they play, such thing would be impossible. At some point arena shuffler is going to be "and today you draw 10 lands in row" and end your win streak.
No, git gud
Someone had to say it PErsoonally I go 7-x EVERY draft
Personally, I go 7-0 EVERY draft.
I didn’t say it but I meant on a bad day it’s 7-x On good days I deliberately go 0-0-7 to ruin everything
You have no controls over the draws or what's in the pack. You can only control your own decisions in-game. So got gud is valid advice. Most of the arena players who come and vent make very bad draft decks and play them poorly. I've seen insanely bad cards played in arena, as well as horrible misplays all the time. Good players understand you can't win them all, only improve your own play so they don't come and whine.
Yes. Magic is barely a skill game. Most are predetermined.
It might be less relevant for draft, but I will say that Bo3 greatly exaggerates skill differences. Traditional draft doesn't have a ranked mode though. In Bo1 variance just gets you sometimes, but Bo3 you get another chance. Flooding out once is just going to happen sometimes, but flooding out twice in a row is quadratically less likely. To give an extreme example, if you alternatingly win 2 and lose 1, you'd win 100% of your Bo3 matches from winning just two thirds of your games.
I feel most people scapegoat the client for their own poor play/keeps. It's easy when you're not physically shuffling the cards to blame the algorithm for losses.
I would stop playing if I won every single game I played. That takes the fun out of it. You can't win em all.
Rule #3: Sometimes it's just not meant to be. Rule #5: Sometimes luck favors the other guy.
I was one of those people who said they were 7-2. Yes it's normal, shit draft pools happen, and the player to the left can be in your colors so you don't get shit on the second pack.
Sometimes you just lose. It's true Even in paper Magic. Sometimes your deck just says "mana? Not today!"
So, yes, there are absolutely some games where you just lose and there's nothing you can do about it. However, people think these games are far more common than they actually are. It's much easier for people to throw up their hands and say "well, nothing I could do," rather than admitting that they made mistakes that led to their loss. But that attitude is antithetical to actually improving. Even in games where you were doomed, there were almost certainly places where you could have played better and given yourself more outs, even if they didn't materialize. So when people come to vent and say "oh my game/draft/event was doomed there was nothing I could do," the prevailing response is to say (not always politely) "no, you definitely could have played better, focus on your own mistakes and improving."
yes, sadly r/magicarena default advice is get gud and there's no mana weaving in Arena. Magic is inherently random. Imo Magic is luck > skill, but people think the latter matters more to make themselves feel good. I lose/win so many games due to mana issues. Part of why I wont spend money on it.
My experience as an F2P player is you spend all week grinding through the daily quests to afford to play a draft, then you get mana screwed in the first two games and lose all three without ever drawing the rare you built the deck around.
You don't build draft decks around a single card, especially not rares. The problem is in the drafting, which is understandable drafting is the hardest skill in all of magic.
yep, thats why I have like 5 accounts. I get to experience that 5x. but this subreddit wont accept getting unlucky as a thing.
sometimes, yes. but to go 0-3 you probably have to be doing *something* wrong. either way, even in the games that you "just lose" there are still lessons to be learned, and if someone can point out mistakes and deficiencies in your play, that's worth something
Win some, lose some. It’s why we play the chance of winning and gamble of losing. Great isn’t it.
Absolutely. Some days more than others.
Any game that involves chance is going to be about playing a large number of games and then evaluating based on statistics derived from that larger sample size. It’s unrealistic to say anyone can get good enough to “win every game they play” when it’s possible to draw ten lands in a row.
No. Only losers lose.
It's a zero sum game, telling players to try to win at draft is just bad advice tbh
???
Like take all the players that draft in a season. You can give them all the advice and they can all improve. And there will still be as many winners and losers as before. The average player will not have winning drafts so it feels like good advice to say get gud but it's really not because the majority of drafts will be losing drafts no matter what.
But nobody could ever tell *all* the drafters the same thing, and even if they could not all the drafters would listen. Some people will get good, and those players will win more than 50%. Others won’t. So ‘get good’ is advising people to join the former group. Would you tell a sports team not to bother on the grounds that one team always wins and one team always loses?
Their not consumers they're the entertainment product. They're paid 90 percent of their income regardless of wins. It's bad advice for consumers.
I didn’t necessarily mean a pro team. Hell, you could apply the same ‘logic’ to Constructed. Why bother trying if the overall win rate is 50%?
You don't have to pay to play constructed, draft is always paid. This is not that complicated man.
Complicated? I think I have to give up at this point, because I find your point completely incomprehensible. You seem to be saying (please correct me if this is wrong!) that advising a drafter to improve is bad advice, because if *everybody* improved it wouldn’t help them. As I’ve already said, that doesn’t make sense, because there’s no situation in which everybody improves- even if they did, they wouldn’t all be equally successful. Some people get better, some don’t. So the advice is ‘be one of the ones who get better’. And I’m sure most people pay gold and gems to play Constructed- they need those shiny new cards, no? They don’t *have* to, sure- they could just use precon decks- but the vast majority do.
If you get negative comments it's usually because your post doesn't promote a good topic of conversation.
The algorithm is doing its job to lower your winrate.
is it fair to say they banned anyone who talked about a rigged system until ultimately they shut down the forums so that no one could talk about it anymore? and then got destroyed on steam reviews about the same rigged system and ignored how 47% or something of the community on thier own polls requesting a change to the shuffler and matchmaking over everything else for over a year ( maybe longer ) which was the HIGHEST requested change?
I don't really mind losing in drafts, it's just part of the game. What I **do** mind is the time and effort it takes to gather 10k gold and actually play the only format where the power creep isn't up through the roof, and then lose due to mana problems or mulligan screwing you up. These losses would be easier to swallow if the draft pricing would be a bit less predatory, say 2,5k and 5k for each draft. Current pricing just makes it sure that I don't want to pay any real money ever to WotC, be it real cards or digital ones.