How long does it take to get to a point where you're not -100% roi on drafts?

Any good sites/guides/training sites?

Depends how long and much you have played Magic. Being seasoned player will help a lot in limited to quickly evaluate cards and see in-play Like I was 0% ROI or maybe even marginally +EV during the Ravnica/Time Spiral era, but I drafted a ton, having my mtgo limited rating over 1900. Drafting really isn't that hard to get to at least ok in it, a lot of people advocate BREAK to new drafters (Bombs>Removal>Evasion>Average>Krap). I believe new players should just try force some archtypes in beginning instead of going with the flow, like it's really hard to get totally screwed if you draft aggressive UW or GW from p1p1.

A lot of info here

www.starcitygames.com
www.channelfireball.com
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/forumdisplay.php?f=23

I've installed cockatrice, if anyone wants to play. Maybe we can get drafts going now.

Thanks Anssi checking out the links. I haven't played much except a brief stint w/ standard running Jund last summer.

Yeah, Fox is a fine card. He's not that good in GW (Captain, Shepherd, Wolf, Viper, and Youth are all significantly better) and bears aren't exactly the type of card I'm looking for in UW, but he's not bad either. In my experience though, the decks where I wind up mainboarding Silverchase Fox aren't the great ones. They're often decent, just not the 'man this is a great deck' decks. Maybe that's simply a testament as to how important 2 drops can be in this format. I'm not sure.

In addition to reading up about draft archetypes and watching videos, the best advice I can give you is to play swiss drafts. There are a few reasons for this:

1) You will be up against easier competition in swiss. They will pass you better cards, build inferior decks and make mistakes in the games.

2) Once you get a little experienced, it is not that hard to go 2-1 in a swiss. If you can average a 2-1 finish, that will cut down on your costs quite a bit. Furthermore, it is very hard to go 0-3 in a swiss (although it has happened to me a couple of times).

3) You get to play all 3 rounds regardless of how you do. So, that gives you more experience in the format and it also takes up more of your time so you have less time to fire up another draft and spend more money!

thoughts on bertoncini scandal?

It's clear he cheated, and it reflects almost as badly on SCG as it does on him.

Yeah, he ran some pretty diabolical cheats, not just opportune mistakes. Ed Flores is scum too, but none of this is new. That's why online is the place to play, because you have to play lots of games in paper.

It was amazing how someone dares to cheat on recorded games/feature matches. I hope He'll get lifetime ban, but I feel DCI is always too lenient when it comes to bannings based on cheating. Cheating often only brings a suspencion of 1 year.

The "two explores" cheat shows clear intent to me. He dodges the "what turn is it" question and tries to get the guy to drop it. After the guy says "turn 3 + 2 explores is 5" Alex then lies to his face and tells him its actually turn 4. This one has clear intent to cheat and to cover it up after the fact.

The Kira cheat COULD be an honest mistake, but it should definitely been a warning, which would make all the other questionable mistakes carry a tougher penalty.

The Sower of Temptation cheat should also show intent. Not calling a judge on yourself when you find a sideboard card gets a game loss penalty upgraded because of the cover up. Any excuse about him not being sure what his maindeck and sideboard were are just stupid. He's not that random of a scrub to forget that he had Sowers sideboard for the entire tournament up until the game against reanimiator when he had no outs to Plat Angel.

The brainstorm cheat is not clear. SCG says it's not 4 cards and just a shadow on the 3rd card. He did get caught not putting back 2 cards with the Brainstorm right before that though and I'm not sure if that got him a warning or what.

At this point, I am fairly convinced he is cheating and not just making a ton of sloppy plays. I also believe StarCityGames is not being vigilant enough if this situation. If anything, I believe they are trying to cover up as much as possible for Alex. They have deleted multiple comments about him and I went to view some of the video evidence and it was removed at the time but someone had already uploaded it to YouTube. (this may of been temporary, I don't know if they are actively deleting all the video evidence).

what all is he accused of, I know he has a feature match where he cast sower game 1 in a bad matchup to win the game, from the scg announcement post it sounds like he brainstormed for 4, or played an extra land off explore

- He was playing against Reanimator and knew this from scouting beforehand. In game 1 he conveniently draws a MD Sower of Temptation that wins him the game, and doesn't say anything despite knowing that he only runs Sower in his SB.

- Similar to the above: he knew he was playing against RDW and he preboarded an extra Timely Reinforcements. He gets deckchecked and puts the MD and SB in the deckbox facing the same way, and when the discrepancy is pointed out he accuses the judge of making an error. He then goes round telling people he got a game loss for presenting a 75 card deck.

- Playing against an opponent with Jace TMS and Cursed Scroll in play, he casts Kira. His opponent uses Jace -1 to remove Kira's shield and uses Scroll to kill it. Next turn Alex casts his other MD Kira and his opponent does the same thing. Alex puts the Kira back in his hand as if Jace's ability was the final thing that happened. This could be a mistake, but it's suspicious given that he performed the correct action in that exact situation the previous turn.

- He plays T2 Explore, so on T3 he untaps with 3 lands. He plays a land, casts Explore, plays his extra land, casts Preordain, then - with very bad acting - asks if he's played two lands this turn. His opponent says no, so Alex plays a third land.

- He's messed up multiple Brainstorms: on one he drew 3, cast FoW removing a blue card, and then failed to put two back; on another, he drew what looks like 4 cards.

http://mixedknuts.wordpress.com/2011...ex-bertoncini/

This was the recent article that brought a lot of the evidence together after his SCG Invi win last weekend. This video with the 2 explores is so damning. Watch his timings on the turn 3 when he cheats. Then his non-answer cover up mode when the cameraman asks.

In that video, after preordain he peeks at the bottom card (He plays Preordain at 1:01, and at 1:06 he performs the peek.) That is already an offence

18 months. I'm fine with that.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x...d&tablesort=7b

Starcity is letting him keep the 10K + full set of power 9 still. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. It sucks to see a cheater take that much money out of the MTG community and I'm fairly certain they could win against him in a lawsuit for breaking their Terms and Conditions.

I'm not so sure they are "letting" him so much as don't have any other option for a reasonable price tag. This isn't the olympics where you can just strip a medal, the logistics of taking him to court and the associated costs cannot be worth it. Not to mention I am sure StarCity just want this story out of people's minds and have very little to gain by even winning the case.

He wasn't DQ'ed without prize from the event so not much they can do. I'm also sure that it said that the Play of the Year must be in good standing when receiving the prize. Unfortunately, he was in good standing until today.

Im going to be cashing out my stuff in th enext few days if anyone wants to buy it. Would rather sell to one of you guys. Have like 6 masque packs like 10 tixs and some cards

http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/s...ertoncini.html

Gets to keep his P9, his 10k is instead donated to charity. More in article.

So they create a new policy and enforce it retroactively?

I hate cheating/dishonesty with a passion, but I don't really like SCG's move here.

I like it even less that they are effectively DQing him, but instead of moving everyone up on the pay scale they give the money to charity.

Yeah all of this. I haven't followed the thread much because I haven't been playing much, but this double blunder by SCG is such nonsense. I understood why they were at first going to let him keep his prize, even if I feel that cheaters should not get prizes. The reaction of taking it back after public backlash and then giving it to charity strikes me as an attempt to buy public goodwill because they know the whole thing reflects poorly on them. I think robbing every player that earned a prize is worse than the first plan of action, but they hope it will be immune to criticism because it's charity.

Obv prizes should be distributed amongst players instead of charity.

No, they should have paid that man his money.

I don't like it, but I like companies who retroactively change policy even less.

They let him play and didn't catch him cheating in the tournament.

Who's to say if you win they won't decide to stiff you because you aren't a very nice guy or any number of reasons?