The former can pick off a small creature, make one of ours big, or gain a little life if we’re in a race. The latter slows down our opponent’s creatures and then draws us between two and four cards. On top of all of that, they both become creatures, like some kind of charitable vending machine Transformer named Ultra Snackus.Īccording to 17Lands, the two Sagas have Average Taken At (ATA) numbers of pick 5.03 and 4.91, respectively, meaning they’re available roughly two entire picks (3.11, 2.76) after humans would take them in a Premier Draft. Seeing a Life of Toshiro Umezawa available Pack 1, Pick 8 feels like stealing candy from a robot baby. Now, let’s be clear: these are two exceptional cards in most decks in the format. The real kicker is that in Dimir, we’re able to use ninjutsu to return them to our hand, if we deem necessary, and repeat the whole Saga over again. Blue also contains bounce and blink effects, but we’re going to call upon our Ninjas to do the heavy lifting for us most of the time. Perusing trophies, I quickly noticed that most had at least a single copy of High-Speed Hoverbike, which bots draft 1.67 picks later than humans. Our Kirkland brand Light Cycles do fantastic work in this deck, tapping down an opposing blocker to set up ninjutsu and giving us an evasive threat to bounce with an “enters the battlefield” effect when we have a ninjutsu card in hand. It's worth it to bite the bullet and practice in actual human drafts, where you can work on skills like finding the open lane and reading signals.When it comes to bikes in NEO, I’m a regular Lance Armstrong. It's much more like bad Constructed than Limited, imo, as you have the same issue of constantly playing the same decks/cards, but now your cards aren't even good. My 2 cents, quick draft may be cheaper, but if you actually get into draft, it's not worth it. Then, either just draft that deck or, knowing that the majority of your opponents will be on a narrow range of decks, see if there's a different archetype that exploits it. What does that mean for you? It means you should figure out whatever the current meta is (usually someone will have posted a bots breakdown here or r/MagicArena, and if not you can look at the data on 17lands yourself). This means there are two-ish viable decks and if you draft anything else you'll lost to those two decks that can wheel key commons (early Eldraine was a great example of this, either you took all the Revenge of Ravens and beat every creature deck or you took all the Merfolk Secretkeepers and milled out all the Revenge of Ravens decks). Because of how they value cards, you will never see a rare (even if you're in the "open colors") and they will always draft the same commons and uncommons. My experience from doing a ton of quick drafts from before there were human drafts: You should also prepare for opponents that do the same. Since the bots are much more consistent than humans you can often find a deck the bots undervalue and more-or-less force it a huge portion of the time. This makes Quick Draft much more about knowing the meta than Premier. Since Quick Draft is the best choice for lower win rate drafters there are often strong cards that are criminally undervalued. Notably, the pick order is based on how Quick Draft players are choosing cards, not what is winning. The pick order is usually updated after every two-week run of a Quick Draft, so changes stick out on 17lands Card Evaluation Metagame. People say the each bot has a random color preference, but I haven't found anything to back that up.
They'll happily take payoffs without enablers, or make a deck of nothing but 4-drops. The bots do not understand archetype or deck composition. Once a bot has collected enough cards in two colors, it "locks in." At that point it will choose those colors much more highly, though it will still "splash" a card if it is much higher rated. This uses a "lean" like hand smoothing, so they don't always pick in precisely the same order. As far as we know (mostly from Ryan Spain/GoingOptimal), the bots are pretty simple.Ĭhoose the highest rated card in each pack.