It's a good time not to have any time. The server's going down for about a week as they transition to the new version starting tommorow. Looks like the current server wanted to get a head start and already crashed out tonight though.

Yeah dreamspoilers are way ahead of glen elendra, they are only choice if you took faerie harbringer in #1.

Good to know that I'm apparantly terrible at judging value right now. I thought witches were only ok, and definitely not better than sentinels.

Also good to know that I'm apparantly really screwing this draft up so far.

There is a stupid amount of luck, but it's also a tournament format in which top8 gets paid and the tournaments usually have exactly 24 people, most of which have ratings in the 1500s. Being better at combat than these people actually gives a decent skill edge (I 3-for-1'ed someone with Bosh the other day because he didn't understand that I could stack damage and then kill his Silver Seraph, and banding cards are completely nuts because no one understands them), even if that does often get negated by blowout games where someone just gets better drops and then wins.

So I played the 3rd Edition some 13 years ago. Am I going to be lost trying to play this online against other people? I have noticed a couple of things I've never seen on cards like Flash and Clash...has it become a lot more complicated?

If you start with core set cards there won't be much of a learning curve wrt mechanics...you'll even recognize a few of the cards. With expansions on the other hand, they introduce new mechanics basically every set (though they don't continue them into future sets), so once you start playing with constructed formats or the hot new sets there'll be more to learn.

Overall the game has actually become less complicated on the whole; there are more mechanics but generally if they can't be described in like 2 or 3 sentences they just aren't done (like banding and phasing). There was a large rules overhaul around 6th ed that you should probably know about; the best summary I've ever seen is here

Thanir, I also used to play a longgggg time ago. It was even easier to pick up again after a long break. They seem to have just gotten rid of everything that was annoying about the old version (interrupt and spell batch resolution/timing in particular) and replaced it with a more simple and powerful system. It's really a whole lot more intuitive now and you'll have it down in like 2 minutes. Something the article doesn't mention is that 'mulligans' (redraw your entire starting hand with one less total drawn) are now an official and big part of the game.

As far as new keywords, I just use the wikipedia page here. The important ones I was not familiar with were: defender, vigilance, double strike, flash, shroud, clash, and indestructable (which I still don't really understand - how does this work?). The most important being vigilance and double strike since they're fairly common and the ability is not described on the cards.

imsa, you're really undervaluing meadowgrain...I'm used to LLM now.

Maybe its a lot better w/ reinforce, in LLL it was always kinda meh, obv its a good card but kithkin are just like "whee swarm smash win etc" which meadowgrain is a great add to, but not really defining or anything.

Looking back I think I like faerie harbringer a lot more pick 1 over aquitects.

Pack 3:





Wispmare, Stonybrook Angler, Thieving Sprite, Gilt-Leaf Ambush, Hillcomber Giant, Streambed Aquitects, Stinkdrinker Daredevil, Hunt Down, Giant's Ire, Dawnfluke, Spellstutter Sprite, Glarewielder, Eyes of the Wisent

Looking back at this pack and reading what you guys have wrote, I realize how differently my draft could have gone. I bet you can guess what I picked here.

I played the 3.0 beta some before they shut down the servers. I didn't look around much, because it seemed mostly dead outside of the drafts (who's going to trade when purchases are free?). But did anyone else who played 3.0 perceive any benefit to it over the old version? I saw none. At a minimum, I was expecting some facility to play multiple games at once, but with all the dockable/floating window functionality they added, the actual game play window was not one of them. In some ways the software seemed worse. Like, if a card was RFGed, it popped up a dialog that I could not figure out how to get rid of. Also, I could not figure out how to open and expand the graveyard window to see its contents more closely. Did they add any features to facilitate trading? What did they add?

Actually I probably agree with taking Dreamspoiler over Sentienels in pick 2.

Pick 3, you have to chose between Aquatect, Spellstutter Sprite, Thieving sprite, Stonybrook. Here I would take the Stonybrook Angler. Even though it doesn't fit the faerie's tribe, it's a very good card and can tap down blockers to get in more damage or attackers to prevent damage.

Just double-click the windows and they minimize. I did about 10 drafts and the only benefit I saw was zero lag and the server didn't crash on me once. Looks cleaner also.

I hadn't played Magic since Ice Age and I never took it very seriously "back in the day" but when I read here about the v3 Beta, I signed up and played a bunch of drafts. Had some fun, even though I got my ass handed to me a lot. Now that the beta is done though, I'm not sure if I'll be back. I don't really want to get involved in an MMORPG type time and money sink. However, if I could play casually, be competitive and (more or less) have it pay for itself I might stay with it.

So, just how good do you need to be to "go infinite"? There's very little chance I'd ever put the time in to be anything resembling "world class". I'd presumably be playing drafts, sealed and/or leagues.

I don't really understand how the economy works. Boosters are $3.99 from the store. 8 player booster drafts cost 2 tickets each player and prizes are 4-3-2-2. So 11 packs as prizes for $16 in entry fees. So effectively, MTGO is selling those packs for $1.46 each. That seems really exploitable. Couldn't you get 8 of your friends together to play a draft against each other and split the prizes? Or is the secondary market for individual cards so soft that there's no way you make your money back on the opened packs?

Speaking of which, since I was never on the v2 server I never got a real look at the secondary market for singles. I've pulled up price lists for online cards like this one:

http://www.magictraders.com/pricelis...t-magic-online

But I have no idea how reasonable it is for quick sale or selling to bots and there are a lot of cards missing, including rares. However, could you enter a draft and each round only select the most sellable/tradeable card available. Then at the end of the draft try to cobble together the best deck possible and maybe fluke out a win as a bonus, but really the goal being to get the most value from cards and resell/trade them? Since you pay $13.97 to enter (a little less if you get your tickets on the secondary market) and you get 45 cards you'd need an average card value of $.31 to break-even. You're guaranteed three rares from the packs you open, are there enough good uncommons or rares other players might pass over to make up the rest? Or is this a losing game even if you're able to cherry-pick? Surely this is not a new idea...

About the exploitability of the pack payout, you have to account for the 3 boosters you are using in addition to the 2 tickets for each entry fee. In any currently-drafted set, the most valuable rare usually tops out at 6-8 tix, with the large majority of them (90 percent or so) ending up at half a ticket or less, so the whole "getting a bunch of friends to join the same draft" idea doesn't quite work out financially.

As for "how good do you need to be to go infinite", if you are looking to go infinte through booster drafting, then you need to be extremely good. I personally have been able to stay infinite since MTGO went live, but I played on the Magic Pro Tour for several years, and had several solid money finishes in limited formats. Several of my friends, who had attended a few Pro Tours but had no success there, have tried to go infinite and they either end up quitting or realizing they need to put money on every so often in order to keep playing. So, if you can win a limited Pro Tour qualifier, you still might not be good enough to go infinite on Magic Online via just drafting.

That said, if you enjoy playing constructed, for some reason the average constructed player is significantly worse than the average limited player, from a technical and strategic standpoint. Also, entry fees for constructed tourneys are much fairer considering the prize payout relative to that of drafting. This makes constructed a lot more beatable financially.

Yeah, opened packs are way way way -----EV.

You can definitely raredraft a few cards, but the average value of cards in a pack is maybe 1.5 tix.

Just to get the obvious out there, I picked the Glarewielder and made a commitment to go red at this point (unless something crazy got passed to me 4th). Glarewielder is a good card, right? I forget what card it reminded me of a few sets back when I was drafting, but it seemed pretty awesome when I read it, so I figured it's a definite go, given the cards I had already picked.

Yeah, Glarewielder is really good...whenever I draft red/blue, I always like to have him. Tarfire and Lash Out are both better, and you should always be taking those over it, but Glarewielder is very solid.

Cry Me A River,

Are drafts the only form that interest you? I'm in a similar situation to you in that I want to play without a huge time or money investment, and leagues work out really well for that. You get all the games you want in a week for about $20, and the high end prizes are pretty good (27 packs for first). Works out to be pretty damn cheap in $/time.

Macdaddy,

FWIW, three cards wide fits the fixed width styles perfectly. 4 starts getting cut off.

No, it's just that drafts were really all they had running and scooping up the better cards, regardless of whether they really fit together as a deck, seemed like a possibility as far as maximizing ROI/minimizing cost. However, I expect it's like with paper cards where commons may be priced at a quarter each in a store's singles binder but in reality they're basically worthless. So you're left hoping to get value from your rares and good uncommons.

But, if, as choo-choo says, open packs are worth about 1.5 tickets then let's say you could draft well and bump that to 2 tickets per pack by cherry-picking. To enter a three booster draft, you're paying 14 tickets (4 tickets per pack, 2 tickets to enter you can do a little better on the secondary market but I'm hedging towards worst case scenarios). When you loose in the first round your net is -8 tickets. If you go out third or fourth, you win 2 packs (equal to 8 tickets) so your net is +0. Second is net +4 tickets and first is net +8 tickets.

So break even in three booster drafts is to make it to the second round. That answers my question as to how good you need to be to break-even... Good enough to exploit the draft a little and average an ITM finish. I would expect other formats to be similar. I guess if you're a sharp trader, you could improve that a little....

It sounds like they're not going to have leagues for a while though once the servers go back up. So leagues might not be an option for some time. Meh, I dunno. I might try a draft or two when the server's back up now that I know the Lorwyn set a bit since that's all the drafts that were running. Shrug.

If you were really interested in "pack EV", figure out how much the most expensive rares are going for (total) then divide by the number of rares.

So if there were 10 rares in a set:
1x goes for 10 tix
2x go for 5 tix
7x go for 1 (or .5) tix.

So the total for the 3 best rares would be 20 tix, divided by 10 total rares = 2 tix.

You shouldnt include the crap rares because first picking them over a mulldrifter or something is -EV.

I'm so glad they're leaving the trial server up during the transition period. I can at least get a bit of a magic fix. But it's starting to get kind of annoying. There are a ton of guys who would rather time out than concede on the trial server with anonymous temporary accounts, and most of the people playing are really really bad (coming from me!) especially with blue which makes the games not as much fun.

Pack 1, Pick 4





Fertile Ground, Moonglove Winnower, Whirlpool Whelm, Leaf Gilder, Adder-Staff Boggart, Triclopean Sight, Nath's Buffoon, Caterwauling Boggart, Tideshaper Mystic, Elvish Handservant, Kithkin Harbinger, Eyes of the Wisent

Actually had some trouble with this pick, as pretty much everything seemed super mediocre again.

That's very very very easy pick of Kithkin Harbinger, especially with the new white being good, and you can search for so many good cards with it.