Thursday, July 23, 2009

Rewards, Riches, Doubloons

So the question of how to motivate tournament success — and how to equally demotivate drafting for the sake of enhancing one's previous decks — still hangs. It would probably be wise to resolve this before the night of, when we will all be drooling impatiently at things shrink- and foil-wrapped, so let's sort this out. The options on the table right now are, as far as I know:
  1. The winner may bring in outside card/s of his choice. This is a very tactically interesting reward and it attracts me because of all of the cards, even from our two recent tournaments, that I'd really like to get to use in the Tournaverse. However, despite the fun of it, getting to bring in even one or two cards of your choice, especially early on, will probably be immensely powerful — probably over-powerful. One way to balance this would perhaps be to allow everyone to bring in some limited number of cards, and maybe to limit by rarity. e.g., the winner can bring in one rare or two uncommons or four commons, second place can bring in two U or three C, everyone else gets one U or two C, or something like that. That way the power creep would be spread out a bit.
  2. Extra boosters go to the winner. This dilutes the advantage the winner gets from the previous one, as only a portion of the cards will be applicable to your deck and you're not guaranteed to get any game-winners in the pack. A mild disadvantage is that this increases the cost a bit, and, more acutely, tomorrow night we won't have any extras anyway unless someone goes and gets some. A bigger disadvantage to both this and the previous one is that we don't generally want to make repeat tournament winners all that much more powerful than everyone else in the first place.
  3. Honour. The winner's only reward is to be celebrated in the tournament rankings on here. We are all fairly mature game players who can comply with an honour system pretty well, as far as I know, and I suspect we'd mostly just be smart and draft for the situation instead of for our pool's pre-existing cards. Drafting to your on-going constructed deck isn't even that advantageous, because we can always trade afterward anyway. What's more, we also enjoy having bragging rights, so posted rankings aren't without their own incentive. But still, some of us may be more closely wedded to single colours than others regardless of how hard we try to draft fairly, which makes it still seem like a bit of a problem. I'm not such a fan of this because of that, and also because trading isn't quite that free and easy (are you really going to not take that huge mythic you want and just hope whoever takes it will be happy to part with it?).
  4. Raredraft. This usually makes me kind of sad, as I get attached to the cards I draft, but it solves the drafting-best-cards problem and rewards the winner withou providing him with a vastly superior pool of cards. My favourite option so far.
  5. Shamus' Magical Map. I will leave this to someone else to explain. It looks like...a lot of work. And fun?
That's all I've got for now. Votes? Suggestions? Refinements?

11 comments:

  1. I say we combine numbers 1 and 4. Players may bring cards to each event that they'd like added to the pool, then a 'rare draft' is done with all the cards that were brought in for this purpose. In a sense, each player is betting what they bring. If you bring something shitty, you could probably lose terribly and still get it (I know you were wondering, Christos). But bring in something really good, and the winner might steal it, laugh at you, then demand something outrageous in trade.

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  2. Intriguing!
    I'd feel a little worried to bring in cards from my collection that I deliberately intend for my deck, though, only to have them sort of randomly thrown into the merry-go-round of the raredraft. It seems as though your chances of getting that one card are pretty low, especially if you want anything from the draft itself. I suppose if everyone puts one in then everyone will want to grab their card back, but it would be dumb if this resulted in everyone just taking back out what they put in, and then raredrafting as usual.

    The standard raredraft still feels most straightforwardly balanced to me. But the bring-in-a-card remains the most fun, interesting and tactical. I dunno!

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  4. Also, if we're bringing in outside cards, a sensible limitation would probably be to stipulate that they should be Type 2 legal as of the birth of the Tournaverse, which would be Lorwyn and onwards. Unless some of us don't have any such cards -- but there's at least the last two tournaments we did.

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  5. Chris told me about his idea before and while I think it is an interesting mechanic I really don't like it. I don't mind not being able to bring the cards in because I didn't place well, but also losing those cards... that seems like quite the punishment.

    The typical rare drafting format is generally used in a normal draft to discourage rare drafting within the first draft. In a sealed deck game, do we think we need to rare draft or will the trading of cards be okay?

    I think when we draft a rare draft is a good prize, when we play sealed deck some approach like option 1 would be best. But instead of the winner getting to get the most rares, uncommons and commons I think they should get some allotment of card "points". For the sake of argument the winner of a tournament with 6 players get 6 points. Rares equal 4, UC = 2 C = 1 and Mythics = 8.

    This way the last place person still gets to bring a card in or they can save up points to bring in a better card the next time they play. It creates incentive to do well while not making it be too out of control.

    It doesn't have to be linear and it doesn't have to be this rewarding or this limiting. It could be that we get 14 points for the win or 3 or that these cost something very different.

    Anyway, I really like the idea of being able to bring something in, and we will be trading anyway so if someone doesn't have something outside the pool of any value but they have something great inside they could set up a trade for points even (that may be too crazy... but you never know... hell let's just call them dubloons!)

    Okay well it is 2am, and while I don't have to go to work tomorrow, I am driving Kel to her work. I will be picking up Christos's packs from Strange Adventures tomorrow. If we decide on the prize being more packs, let me know early in the day.

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  6. I think that a standard rare-draft at the end of a draft is a must – otherwise, it's definitely the case that people will draft the colour of their constructed deck.

    For sealed, I don't really care, but I think that it would be quaint to have the prize of a draft be a rare-draft, and the prize of a sealed be more sealed packs. For constructed, we could bet cards, if we wanted, or do the more-packs thing.

    I don't really like the idea of brining cards in, now that I think about it, because it's potentially dramatically unbalancing, and also violates the spirit of the Tournaverse.

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  7. Draft with Draft (makes sense and good)

    Sealed with Sealed (makes sense, so I can go get them, how many? does 2nd get anything? etc.)

    Betting on constructed... I don't get it. Are you thinking of something like the "ante" they used to want you to use?

    I think you are probably right about it unbalancing the Tournaverse... especially in the first few sessions. So while I like the idea I will forget about it.

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  8. My inclination would be something rather sedate: 2 for first place, 1 for second? Could also do 3/2 or 3/2/1.

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  9. I am happy with either 2/1 or 3/2/1

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  10. Well, why don't you get 6 and we can do 3/2/1?

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  11. Yeah, sounds good to me. I still like the idea of getting to be all tactical on the insertion of outside cards, but maybe we should introduce that later on when it's at least going to be less unbalancing.

    Also, I'm totally up for calling card points doubloons, but it turns out it's spelt 'doubloons', so, let's all take note.

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