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Scott Hunstad
Good Intentions…
Scott Hunstad
November 4, 2005
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Obviously I hadn't thought things through, starting an anticipated series of articles on Avengers draft 3 weeks prior to JLA and 5 days before I was to go Overseas for two weeks. So it goes. This of course leaves us with a slight conundrum – to finish what was started or to go onto something new? Given that for the majority of VS drafters, the Avengers season has finished or will in a week, and also given that Alex Brown has recently done a great series of articles on Avengers drafting for StarcityVS (check them out!), I'll elect to go with the ‘something new' option.

But first I'd be remiss if I didn't at least answer the question I posed at the end of the first article – namely, “How to Beat FoE?” The truth is, there are many answers to that question, as on an experienced draft table, FoE is really no longer the most viable strategy.

At the beginning of Avengers draft, people had some initial delving into such strategies as the no-hand SS deck and mono-Kang. What they found is that they had one game out of four that went spectacularly, and two or three that were average at best. What you'll find is that for the average VS player who drafts maybe every other week (say six times over the course of a three month set), they may then dismiss these ‘kooky' attempts at trying something else and NEVER give them another chance. They'll revert back to the more ‘stable' options and leave it at that, not really understanding how the guy with the Supreme Sanction deck, midway through the season, managed to 4-0 the draft. It means they may never have the chance to draft something like MoE/SS (which is actually quite a good archetype in itself – undercurve/reservist with MoE to empty your hand early in order to get the SS engine going), as certain things just get avoided altogether.

The simple rule here is that practice makes perfect. As mentioned we've done dozens of Avengers drafts here in Sydney and that really gives a person more of a chance to truly flesh out the format, and see what it takes to make the Kang or the SS no-hand deck actually work – to tune decks so that the previous one spectacular game turns into 3. And to even take that previous Avengers deck and draft in such a way as to beat the FoE player at his own game.

Consider:

Avengers player kicks things off on Turn 1 with a Hank Pym. FoE plays out his Radioactive Man again. Turn 2 and FoE guy plays Beetle and discards to get a Yellow Jacket. Avengers guy plays Wasp. Trades leave the insects on the table at the end of Turn 2. Turn 3 and Avengers hits Quicksilver, while FoE plays out Yellowjacket with a search for Melissa Gold and then plays Blizzard and flips two FoE. Wasp and Quicksilver take out Blizzard and Yellowjacket, and FoE passes on the return. Turn 4 and Heinrich comes down for FoE, but this time Avengers plays a Natasha and a Dane. Blizzard takes out Wasp, Heinrich takes down Quicksilver and Beetle takes out Dane, leaving Avengers guy with Natasha and Quicksilver at the end of the turn. Turn 5 and Avengers guy recruits another Hank Pym and a Hawkeye. FoE guy lays out the Melissa Gold (MoE) and Marcus Daniels. Avengers teams Quicksilver and Natasha into Heinrich with a Legendary Battles and from there the FoE guy loses his whole team. This is in light of a pretty damn good draw for FoE and a reasonable one for Avengers.

The reason this sort of game started to happen is that the Metagame shifted again – we had previously seen your standard Avengers/Tbolts curve deck get massacred by the FoE deck, where now we see an Avengers off-curve deck beat FoE at it's own game. What this really goes to show again is that FoE isn't necessarily the best DECK, it just employed the best strategy for the time. When other teams adopt this strategy, we see that they are able to fight back. When Avengers off-curve decks start picking up the Heinrichs as well, then we see the FoE players struggle to get their requisite cards to enable the archetype. And when 2 or 3 players at a table each start forcing FoE because they've been told it's the best thing to draft, we see some pretty mediocre decks indeed.

And with that I'll get on to what I wanted to talk about in this article. There has been a wealth of discussion on card valuations for MtG. In fact, it's one of the most popular types of articles for limited aficionados. “1 st pick, 1 st pack – X,Y,Z, what do you choose” – that sort of thing. Card valuation is an equally massive topic for VS, and determining why a particular card is better than another, given your current situation, is a tough, and more specifically for VS, a varied call.

If you have previously been an MtG drafter, you know, for example, that generally speaking, removal is preferable to creatures. This maxim is as true for the first pack as it is for the third. The reason this is maintained is because in MtG you can play a draft deck with 22 creatures, and you can play one with 12 – and either one could be the better deck. So, unless you are disastrously low on creature count, you are going to pick that removal spell every time. What this means is that in MtG you can have a preset card valuation going into a draft and this will generally hold true throughout the course of the draft. This is great for those of us who have very good memories and can read articles on card valuations and actually remember the information as we're drafting (I'm not in that category!) – It essentially takes a bit of the intuition out of the draft.

With VS, however, we don't have this luxury. In VS you NEED to have a certain number of characters to make a deck function, and even more, they need to be at various points on the curve. If your aim is 18-19 characters and 11-12 others, then you will have to make some new card valuations on the fly during a VS draft in order to meet your card requirements when all is said and done.

This sets us up with some very interesting situations. For example, when first drafting Green Lantern, a set which was riddled with solid generic pumps, we often had situations where at the end of pack 2, your pile had 12 great blue cards and only 7 or 8 characters that you actually wanted to play. If 2 or 3 guys at your table were in the same situation, you had a very strange character-grab in pack 3 that would set all presupposed card valuations on their ear. When you're the guy who makes his curve early and gets the 8 th pick Locked in Combat, you can't help but smile.

To excel at VS drafting, one has to have the ability to modify their card valuations on the fly in order to meet the needs of their current deck, and to adapt to the vagaries of the particular table and set of packs. This could very well mean first or second picking a 3-drop in pack 3 over a very solid blue card – something you would perhaps NEVER do in pack 1. This is the more obvious of situations. Certainly it's something we've all been in, and we have all probably learned the hard way that sometimes even Sharon Ginsberg *shudder* has to be picked over something ‘good'

What is perhaps a bit less obvious though, are the picks leading up to that point. Too often we ‘expect' that the cards will come. We'll still adamantly follow our preconceived card valuations even though at the back of our minds we know we're getting trapped in a hole such that we'll need to take some seriously suboptimal picks in the last pack to compensate.

It's extremely important, then, to keep track of what you're drafting while you're drafting it. One needs to start making the hard calls earlier. For example, picking your 2 nd 3 drop (say some off-affiliation guy) midway through the second pack over some reasonably good blue may be essential in that it may allow you to make better use of your first few picks in the last pack. Keep in mind that when you are passing good cards in order to fill your curve in the last pack, someone else is getting and playing them!

A short lesson perhaps, but this is definitely one of the greatest downfalls of the newer or less-experienced drafter – don't just pick and affiliation and run with it, make sure you are keeping a mental picture of what you've been drafting along the way.

 

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