Isn’t that exactly what Phantom Draft prevents?
Casual phantom draft is pretty successful at being a casual-only mode! Most of that post was directed at constructed, though. There’s no good home for a casual constructed player who wants to sit down and play with what they have without the risk of getting blown out by a highly-tuned deck rolling over your tower with a snowballed Axe on Turn 3.
This is a pretty cool idea. How would it work when a certain card becomes popular in the format and the price spikes, in your mind? I figure they could do a rolling average or price ceiling/floor in the last X timeframe. Man, it’d be just as interesting of an economic study as a deckbuilding exercise tracking how prices rise and fall when cards get popular, and then fall out of favor when they get too expensive to include in a deck - and then the fallout for any complimentary cards that are no longer viable, and other cards filling in the meta void…
You could try to make it semi-stable, and just do snapshots, like “Your deck must cost less than five dollars, given the prices as they were at 11am PST on December 10.” Then do the same thing a month later.
You could do the same on a card-by-card basis, too. There’s a format called Penny Dreadful on MTGO that only allows cards that cost one cent, with new snapshots being taken every three months.
Or you could embrace the chaos and do either of the above but all in real-time, meaning your deck could just straight-up be illegal from one game to the next as the format bobs and weaves through pricing.
With all the concern online about the price of Artifact, it’d be a good move on Valve’s part to be as accommodating as possible of budget constructed play.
Yeah, I like the idea of a limited-constructed mode, if you will – one that forces people to play something other than the top three decks. I like your idea of a money-cap, sort of like a salary cap in sports. The only trouble is that prices fluctuate, so a deck might be viable today and not tomorrow, or vice-versa. I suppose another option might be to limit cards by winrate or even by some authority’s tier list or valuation list.
Constructed is problematic in all these CCGs, really. The internet quickly figures out the optimal decks, and then everyone strives to play one of them. Back in the day, I had no idea what an optimal Magic deck looked like. I just bought boosters and played the cards that looked fun. More information has not made us more free!
Fully agreed with all of this. In real life, it’s constrained by the fact that you’re playing with the same people over and over: if someone walks in with a meta deck that kills everyone once, sure, that’s actually fun to see too, but if they don’t have something that plays to the level of the room next time, everyone involved tends to let them know it’s a problem and work it out. Part of that, I’m sure, is that I am remembering from M:tG 20 years ago when it took a lot longer to get each card set fully tuned, and part of it is just inherent to digital.
Even limited-by-rarity filters (all commons, or no more than 3 rares, etc) would be a good start for where Artifact is right now, but I like the money caps too for how it changes the deckbuilding over time. Either way, get us something!
Do we have enough people interested in constructed to try a QT3 tournament or league? We could set our own constructed rules (I like the idea of Pauper, commons-only).
Pauper-type formats are cool, but without a card pool as massive as Magic’s (and hell, maybe even with one), I imagine it would still pretty quickly distill down to a handful of “optimal” decks, although I admit this is just a hunch and I haven’t done the legwork to find out.
That’s true – in Magic, even Pauper has a metagame. It’s not an entirely open field. And it looks like there are already some people playing around with it as a format in Artifact, so it’ll eventually have a metagame too.
But until we develop the technology to peer inside a player’s mind and figure out if their deck is truly 100% original, the best we can do is probably a format with a low barrier to entry and a relatively low power level.
I’m keen to join if we do that commons-only idea, as commons are the only cards I have!
I might be interested in a tournament, but I prefer Draft to Constructed, and tournaments do support a Draft mode.
I’m not sure how tournament drafting works, though; do we draft from the cloud, or among each other only? (In the casual phantom draft mode, I think we draft from the cloud, don’t we?)
I did not realize this. Draft would probably be more popular. I also didn’t realize that the in-game tournaments can be setup asynchronous league-style, too.
I assume all drafting (except the keeper draft) is done from the cloud.
The tournament feature set in this game really is excellent. I’m surprised it hasn’t been reported on more.
A Qt3 draft tournament would be enough for me to pick up the game if someone were to organize one.
Let me dig into it a little bit this evening. I’d like to set something up.
Thanks Brad for organizing it!
So there’s not a whole lot of documentation out there on how to set up a Swiss draft tournament. As far as I can tell, it goes like this:
- Tournament is created.
- Everyone drafts their deck.
- Once everyone has drafted and registered their deck, we can move to play games.
- Once everyone has played their games, it moves to the next round.
- Repeat until dead.
You only get the one draft, and after you register your deck, that’s it.
The only thing left to decide: for this first tournament, any preference between Best of One and Best of Three?
My vote is for best-of-one to help time-starved people. We can always go again when it’s over. I’m excited!
One seems fine, this is kind of a trial run anyway.
It’s live!