Now Foundations has left #Mtgarena I'm ruminating on it, and 2024 in general as an effort to draft more and get better at it.
I know I did shift from being intimidated by the button to being excited to get to press it. I -like- drafting when it's out ahead of me and I like the draft games I watch and the complexities and interesting game interactions they present.
I installed untapped dot gee gee before I started on Foundations so I'd have some statistics and examples I could consider.
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my ranked constructed performance is pretty consistent; I get bumped to gold at the start of the season, I get to platinum, I stop.
Now, part of this is playskill but part of it is investiture. I am usually playing budget/cheap decks and cards that can be reused across decks a lot, rather than burning wildcards to try and chase a metagame. I'm almost always playing 'mono-red-with-the-cards-I-got' run-over-you strategies in constructed standard.
As my collection grows, this'll prolly change.
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My winrate in ranked is 54%. Better than average but not by much. Part of this is that the deck hasn't been meaningfully adjusted for a long time: I basically sat the Leyeline Of Resonance period out entirely, because people were gunning for a better version of what I was playing, and I couldn't beat it either.
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I have tried to play other decks in standard, but my mono-red aggro deck, aka Beep Beep Threep (because it's the third Beep Beep deck) is at 68%, which suggests that I have 'the deck I can afford, which is pretty okay.'
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My winrate in unranked is like 49%, and that includes 'times trying to make a deck concept work' like this:
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this is fine, in my opinion, there are things I enjoy doing more than I expect to win with them. I want to have a Gro deck like back in the day where you could play out a Quirion Dryad and defend it with white and red spells, and win the game, and it turns out that's not a thing we have any more.
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this is however tearing off a bandaid because the thing I got untapped dot gg for is to collect data on how I play in limited and if I'm getting better. Back in OTJ, in one season I successfully climbed to Gold, which struck me as at the time, an impossible ask, and I was so happy about it.
Here's how foundations looks:
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During FDN draft I did go 7-1 at one point, something I genuinely thought of as impossible. It honestly scared me because I couldn't tell what I'd done to get it to happen. I didn't feel like I'd played really well or made great decisions.
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now, some things I think about FDN in hindsight, just going off memory:
-ANYTHING expensive feels like a trap. I've had the Sire of Seven Deaths, the Platinum Angel, the Runescarred Demon and I've either been able to cast them on the turn I died or they rotted in my hand
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In play, I just think I need to take things slower and think a lot more about what I'm doing because my opponent doesn't know how hopeless it feels to look at my hand and pray they don't have removal for the tenuous skein of threats I have
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Am I better at drafting? I dunno. I think drafting is a lot easier than it was when I learned to but I also think it's more punishing of mistakes. I won't draft a deck with 7 creatures ever again, but the 16 creatures I get will probably not be able to close a game or have synergy.
But I do like that it's a place for some very sweet cards that don't have a home in constructed, like Mild Mannered Librarian and Vampire Gourmand
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But I also think that drafting, badly, going 0-3, multiple times in a season just feels fucking dreadful and I hate that the game can give me that experience in exchange for my gold coins.
Note: I haven't spent ANY money on arena after an intro 'welcome to the game' purchase a year ago.
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.. tell you what this IS making me feel like I wish I could draft at the moment
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OH ANOTHER THING: twice now, the 'newest' draft format has updated on me with a non-standard draft set (MH3 and Pioneer Masters). Since I'm trying to build my standard cardpool, I don't draft those.
Those 'off-season' times are FUCKING HARD. That's when the drafts are slower to fire and the players in them just seem better and I get paired up to like PLATINUMS as a bronze
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@Talen_Lee It does suck sometimes, and Arena's BO1 hand smoothing tends to muck up opening hands, but drafting and building limited decks really is a different skillet than constructed deckbuilding. The more you do it, the better you'll get, I promise. I'm proud of you for sticking with it!
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@WoF It feels fundamentally true that I'm surely a better drafter now than I was this time last year, at least
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text/gemini
