Hour of Devastation draft is live!
Never done a draft game before. DOTP 2014 was my first foray into Sealed and I did pretty well there.
I know draft is a different animal entirely but I've done my research and am going to give it a shot sometime this weekend.
Still have yet to play against anyone here or on Discord and I hope that changes soon.

I did one, its not against bots... I played againt one freaking baby that chew the clock until all his timers consumed... what a wimp.

So I had a glimpe of a ramunap desert but... I thought it will come back -against bot it should but it didn’t, I did get my last Scarab God and a Gid of the trials + 3 packs including a Mithyc WC.
I thought it was going to be Amonkhet but it was 2/3 of HOU and I had no real clue of whats that set like overall, so I think with a little research I could do better I ended up 4-3.

it was fun to play a different format.

Lot's of A holes out there roping. It sucks but I never concede. I'll sit as long as it takes to get the win.
Jerkoffs

Roping is guys that burn the clock?

The draft is against the bots but the playing is indeed against players just as advertised.

Drafting is you drafting against bots that are "drafting in order to try to win". So they are going to try to build the best deck they can. You should only expect to see more rare/mythic cards from packs from the "person" right next to you, because by the time a pack goes around the table odds are at least SOMEONE will be playing that color.

Playing is against real people.

It's $5 or 5000 gold per entry. If you are F2P you basically only get to do one of these, since they don't reward gold for prizes.

Naturally the amount of salt you will experience is going to exponentially increase with how expensive it is to play this mode at all. Thus the roping is to be expected? I would expect people to be jerks when losing with that steep of an entry cost.

People are people. People no like losing. People no like paying tons of money to lose more than losing for free.

I haven't spent a dime yet, since I just got in a few days ago and still finding my footing. But when I go to draft, I can pay 5000g or 750gems to enter. If I go above 5 wins, I get more gems back than it costs me to enter. So even though *most* will not be able to draft free, for some people it should happen. 6 wins means you net 100gems more than you paid and you still get 40odd cards + 1-3 boosters. I haven't tried yet, because I dont have 5000g, or any gems at all. I'm just curious.

5 wins in Draft is significantly harder than you think. Or at least it will be eventually. Going infinite itself is going to be even harder than that.

The problem is that it's Best of One. This means mana flood/screw, going first vs going second, and other random factors have a significantly greater effect on your chances to do well. There's a reason that REAL drafting and sealed is Best of Three. And it's a very good reason. Best of Three lets good player's skill have enough of an effect on the game that they can somewhat mitigate all the draw RNG. Best of One is a cluster**** by comparison.

In addition, after the initial wave, I expect most of the people still drafting to be the best drafters on the platform. Just because those will be the people who can afford to keep going instead of playing once every 5 days, either due to actually going infinite (true drafting gods) or through a combination of going near-infinite with some money thrown in. When playing against the best opponents available, in a best of one format, it's going to be extremely hard to get 5 wins consistently over a long period of time. Draw RNG and just general hard opponents is going to make you lose enough that you won't go truly infinite. And THAT, THAT RIGHT THERE, is the problem.

This system is fine with something like Hearthstone where draw RNG is less important AND the mode rewards you the primary F2P currency AND the mode is possibly 2 days worth of grinding for a F2P entry after a 0-3 run.

In MTG: Arena, "near-infinite" isn't good enough. The mode rewards gems, and you don't have any other way to earn gems for free. So as soon as your total rewards dip below the 750 gems mark, you're done as a F2P player until you gather up 5000 more G to put into the system. This is going to utterly destroy a lot of F2P player's ability to fully enjoy the mode casually, because the only F2P players who will get to play lots of drafts will be those people with 10+ accounts where they do all the dailies every day and don't even touch the 4 wins bonus. Every couple of weeks they'll get to do like 10 drafts in a row and that's good enough. If you don't want to do something like that, this system just sucks and feels designed to either make you spend money or piss you off so much that you just quit the game because 1 Draft 5 days from now REALLY REALLY SUCKS, especially if you feel like RNG mattered more than anything you did.

Drafts should reward gold or drafts should cost a reasonable amount of f2p currency to enter. Otherwise it's not even pay to win. It's pay to play. The mode is fundamentally broken when it's designed to only let F2P players enter 6-8 times per entire month, instead of once every other day AT WORST. Most primary Arena players in HS manage to be that kind of player b/c their daily quest is usually enough, combined with their prize from the last run, to play something like 25 days out of 30. Those same people aren't going to play a draft mode where it's 6 days out of 30.

TLDR: Drafts reward gems. Should reward gold or have some form of it designed so it doesn't take 5 days to earn enough gold to enter one time (i.e. there's no reason they couldn't do phantom drafting where you get to keep the reward gems and the reward packs but not the drafted cards).

The keeper draft is too expensive for f2p players anyway. 5000 gold is 5 days of grinding. They need a non-keeper draft with entry fee 500 to 1000 and rewards in gold.

The gold/gem system is starting to feel evil. If gems were purely a representation of money, it would be understandable. But with some events paying off in gold and other in gems, one starts to wonder what Wizards’ game really is here.

To make people pay real money for playing their game?

I wonder which type of draft makes more sense

MTGO has Drafting in the same style of Arena. It also has cheaper "Phantom" drafting where you don't get to keep your drafted deck. There are very good reasons that game has both, and I would certainly hope that MTG: Arena will eventually have both.



They are trying to frustrate you so you buy more gems.

The cheapest and most expensive gem bundles can't be completely spent on packs. You will always have some gems leftover. They have deliberately designed the system so that you have leftover gems whenever you buy packs with real money, so that you are tempted to buy even more gems so that those leftover gems are not "wasted". It's all a psychological game to get you to spend more money. This is the same reason that Quick Constructed costs 95 gems to enter instead of 100. Having those 5 gems "wasted" feels really really bad for some unknown (at least to the consumer) reason, incentivizing you to pay gems to play the mode at least 9 more times so none of your gems end up "wasted". Even if that isn't necessarily the smart thing to do.

Drafting exclusively rewards gems instead of gold because if it rewarded gold there wouldn't be as much of an incentive to pay real money to play it. F2P you only get to play draft 1-3 times a week (more if you are really good). Spending money you get to play draft as much as you want without having to wait for 5 days. It's meant to be intentionally frustrating to get F2P players to cough up money to play their favorite mode.

Drafting also exclusively rewards Dominaria packs instead of packs of whatever you are drafting in order to encourage you to go buy some of those older packs with real money. You'll get some good cards from drafting, but it's not quite the same and the vault progress will be much worse.

The entire gem thing is a very well thought out thing freemium mobile games have been doing forever (in internet years). The entire point of a secondary currency is to prey on people's psychological tendencies while partially obscuring how much money you are really spending. There is absolutely no reason that you shouldn't be able to straight out buy gold in the shop, other than the fact that WOTC wouldn't be able to play these psychological games as much if they did that. There's essentially no difference between buying 20,000 gems and 100,000 Gold, except you tend to get stuck with 200 gems left over doing nothing. Sitting there. Waiting to be used. Someday...

I got three packs from HOU...

I spend those spare gems on draft....

Instead of phantom draft can we start by getting rid of the the 1-3 pack reward that is not based on record? In order to draft with 3 packs you need to buy 4-6 and crack some for no value.

Except there is. Events are cheaper in gems than in gold, if you convert the cost to packs, where 1 pack = 1000 gold = 200 gems. Draft entry is 3.75 packs in gems and 5 packs in gold. So if the idea behind gems was to incentivize moneybags to pay for events rather than simply buy packs, I can understand it and it's OK with me. In other terms, it makes drafts more available to paying customers than f2p customers. They may have a reason to want that, maybe they feel rare-drafting is a danger to their planned f2p progression rates. So, I wouldn't mind the currency separation as long as it was only about paying for stuff and the only way to get gems was to pay money.

But with the draft rewards in gems, I'm confused about what they want to achieve. Maybe it is actually to reward players for playing a lot of draft with easier subsequent draft entry (because the gem entry fee is lower than the gold entry fee). Maybe it's something worse. We'll see.

And I don't buy the OCD argument. Like people with 5 gems remaining in their account would want to get 100 more in order to spend the 5 gems. Lol, whut?

Same with the "you don't know how much you are spending" argument. You always know the amount you pay, because it's right there on the pay form, isn't it? Now, if they hide the pay form and make gem purchase automatic, that will be a reason to worry.

Events reward gems to make F2P players feel bad and want to buy gems. That's all it is. If you don't buy gems, you have to start all over once you don't have enough gems to keep going. And 5000 gold is a lot of days worth of grinding for only one starter run in a best of one format.

It feels very bad to save up for 5 days to play one draft where you go 3-3 and then it's over. If you do okay you will get to play roughly 3 drafts every 10 days. If you do way above average that number will increase to 5-8 drafts per 10 days, but it's still a very small amount of drafting (the real reward here) for the time spent grinding. Five days grinding every time you don't have enough gems is a very steep hill meant to feel bad on purpose. The rest of the time spent grinding and waiting will feel like **** because you only get to play your favorite mode one to three sets per week.

Unless of course you buy gems. That lets you play the mode way more often.

I agree here, Gems makes drafting a real thing. I went 4-3, 5-3 and 6-3, and the rewards went like this:

1srt draft 4-3
650 Gems entry ticket
3 Boosters + Gid of the trials and some other cards + 450 Gems. = -150 Gems balance

2nd draft 5-3
650 gems entry ticket
1 lousy booster + one Lyly and a couple of decent cards + 650 Gems = -150 Gems balance

3rd draft 6-3
650 gems entry ticket
another lousy booster + one hour of revelation and one God Pharaoh gift + 850 Gems = 0 Gems balance

This results are not of the charts at all, and in the end I spend 0 gems, opened 4 boosters and a couple of good cards.

Coins are not the currency for drafts for sure.

Anyone interested in draft this weekend, I found this on the internet, its a very good guide for improving your chances.


DOMINARIA

That was fun Cucho, thanks!