Magic the Gathering: Goldfish Draft

Back in the day I used to be a pretty obsessive Magic: The Gathering player.  I first heard about it through baffling snippets posted on rec.games.board (for those of you who still remember Usenet; ah, memories...) that were tantalising in how they hinted at a rich set of unfamiliar concepts and gameplay waiting to be explored.  I was fortunate to wander into a local games shop on what they said was the first day of sale for Unlimited Edition packs in Sydney and soon roped a friend into playing some games with me.  I was, inevitably, hooked (as was he) and much damage was done to my bank account thereby.

Looking back at the release dates I can only have been playing for a couple of years; Fallen Empires was the last expansion I acquired and I never even really looked at it much; I'm not sure I even got around to separating out the play cards from the unneeded extras.  The next expansion after that was Homelands (released October 1995; Unlimited Edition was released in December 1993) but I had mostly stopped playing by then.  That coincides well enough with my starting full time work and so having much less time, but I think I'd already started to drift away from it -- the friends at university that I used to play with had mostly either left or were leaving that year, and the ongoing cost for each new expansion was troublesome.

Another likely contributing factor is that the previous two expansions at the time (The Dark and Fallen Empires) were both rather boring in their way; I see that Wikipedia's entries on them suggests that they are both regarded as rather weak expansions.  Certainly the earlier Legends expansion was much better on all fronts than both, except for the then-infamous A/B box issue.  (Due to poor collation at the factory, the uncommon cards were implicitly split into two groups in such a way that boosters would only ever have uncommons from the same group.  Worse, all boosters in a box were of the same type, and it seems that all boxes in the same... crate?  I don't know what the next step up was... were also of the same type.  So a store that ordered ten boxes (say) would very likely get all boosters of the same type.)  I think trying to overcome this distribution issue may have been my first foray into online purchasing items from overseas.

Aaaaaanyway, I have friends who play the game still (or rather, picked up the game well after I left, but do play now), and I do hear occasional snippets about it from various sources.  (Like doing away with mana burn; I swear, kids these days...)  One of those friends is David Morgan-Mar, who does a great many things (including many great things).  David recently posted about a "Goldfish Draft" that his circle of friends had engaged in, and it piqued my interest.

In particular, David linked to Andrew Shellshear's series of posts about the draft, where Andrew was kind enough to go through the draft choices he was confronted with turn-by-turn.  It was interesting to "play along" and see what choices I would have made instead; they mostly turned out pretty well, perhaps undeservedly so.  I commented on the various articles there, but the comment field format was getting a bit constricting towards the end.  Hence this blog, so that I can more easily address a couple of points in upcoming posts.  In particular:

• How my final draft choices worked out; addressed in this post.
• How a very small adjustment could have made a very large difference to my result; addressed in this post.
• With the benefit of hindsight, what is the best we can do?  I don't have a certain answer for that, but I like to think I'm doing pretty well.

In the unlikely event that someone ends up reading this then I encourage you to read through Andrew's posts and play along with us.  There's some hard decisions to be made, but it's also quite enjoyable when things start to come together and a decent line of play can be developed.