Ravnica Repack Draft

[Ephraim]

Disclaimer:  This post is an introduction to an idea on which I am working.  This draft format is not yet complete.  I am posting in part to garner feedback from the community.  Particularly, if my intuitive approach to probability is wrong, please point it out to me!

Background:  I have enjoyed drafting out of Ravnica block since it came out.  Early on, however, I recognized a subtle weakness in guild system for drafting.  If you want to draft by guilds, you're stuck with the combinations set up by the three sets.  You can draft (Boros, Dimir, Golgari, Selesnya), (Gruul, Izzet, Orzhov), or (Azorius, Rakdos, Simic).  It occursed to me that it might be fun, however, to draft (Azorius, Golgari, Izzet) or (Golgari, Gruul, Selesnya, Simic) (all four green guilds).  My goal was to develop a method of generating repacks to allow for this.

Facts:

In an 8-person draft, 360 cards will be used.
24 rares
72 uncommons
264 commons

In Ravnica, the rarities were broken down as follows:
88 rares (84, without dual lands)
89 uncommons
114 commons (109, without basic lands)

In Guildpact, the rarities were broken down as follows:
55 rares (52, without dual lands)
56 uncommons
54 commons

In Dissension, the rarities were broken down as follows:
60 rares (57, without dual lands)
60 uncommons
60 commons

Setup:

Intuitively, given the distribution in a pack, I think I am going to need one of each rare card, three of each uncommon card, and eleven of each common card in order to achieve the correct distribution.  I may be willing to sacrifice distribution accuracy in order to make the number of cards more managable.  I don't really want to be dealing with a stack of 1200 commons.  If I cut back to six of each common, I'd still have plenty of cards.

To generate the repacks, I would separate out every card that could belong to one of the selected guilds.  For simplicity's sake, this may include all mono-colour cards in the block (assuming that all five colours are represented.)  This is where things begin to get hairy.  At this point, I must figure out the proportion of each colour that is represented in the "set" that is being drafted.

Using the (Azorius, Golgari, Izzet) example from above, blue is 2/6 and each of the other colours is 1/6.  I would shuffle together all of the green, black, and Golgari rares into one pile, all of the red and Izzet rares into a second pile, and all of the white and Azorius rares into a third pile.  I would then separately shuffle all of the blue rares, split them in half and then shuffle the halves into the Izzet and Azorius piles.  Non-guilded artifacts would also be distributed evenly among the three piles.  I would then select approximately eight cards from each of the three rare piles (eight is "ideal" but I could also introduce some random variance to let one pile "steal" one or two cards from the other piles.)  I would shuffle together the 24 selected cards and then set them out as the rare for each of my repacks.

I would repeat this process for uncommons and commons, except that I would pick 24 cards from each of the uncommon piles and 88 cards from each of the common piles.  This leaves me with eight repacks ready to be drafted.

[Nefarias]

That seems like a whole lot of work, but if you're willing to do it, I'm sure it'll be a blast. I too have often thought about how different it would be if the guilds were distributed differently. Personally, I have a highlander "draft cube" that includes a lot of Ravnica stuff, which is not as cool as what you're doing, but also a lot less work.

Your pack creation logic seems mostly sound, except possibly for one thing. I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but I believe that for the colors that aren't heavily represented by guilds in a certain set (for example, red, blue and black in Rav), they actually have more mono-colored cards because they have less multi-colored ones. Your packing method, if I understand it correctly, gives more cards to the heavier guilds (in the example, blue). I think that this makes sense, as those colors will be more heavily drafted, but it doesn't accurately represent actual Wizards packing procedures. I don't feel that's particularly a problem, unless you're really going for that, though.

Of course, I could be mistaken too. I'm pretty tired right now and am not wrapping my head around this fully, but I think that's right.

[Matt]

This seems like way too much work for the return you get. Why not just buy draft sets, but say "Okay this time we're drafting Dissension first, then Ravnica, then Guildpact". That's like 90% of what you're going for at like 2% of the work & time invested.

[Harlequin]

This seems like way too much work for the return you get. Why not just buy draft sets, but say "Okay this time we're drafting Dissension first, then Ravnica, then Guildpact". That's like 90% of what you're going for at like 2% of the work & time invested.

I think the point was to have the rares from the other 7 guilds NOT in your draft.  So the rares would only be from 3 guilds, but the commons and uncommons whould be from any and all?  I'm not really sure.  I started getting confused as i was reading down.  But in the example above, If you decide to draft "Azorius, Golgari, Izzet."  Then it would be impossible to draft up Firemane or Sky Swollower... for example.   if you just do a seal pack from each, It'll just be really hodge-podge mess of cards.

Its probably easier to separate each card (on an individual basis) into a Guild card or non-guild card.  then after each draft session, have the players separate the entire stack in to 11 piles.  1 pile for each guild, and one Guildless Pile.  Then when you want to play, you shuffle together each Guild's stack that you would like to participate, along with the Guildless pile.  So in our example you would take the Azorius, Golgari, Izzet piles, and shuffle them in with the guildless cards... and set aside the other 7 piles.

Now you have your sub-set of the entire block built.  At this point you could just deal out the draft sets as is.  And through perfect rareity distribution to the wind.  OR you could then have all the player sort the new pile into Commons, Uncommons, Rares and then reshuffle each sub-pile and deal out the draft sets.

The thing that I like about these methods, is that you can have everyone help set up.  So its not too much of a burden on one person to get the draft packs built.

[Ephraim]

This seems like way too much work for the return you get. Why not just buy draft sets, but say "Okay this time we're drafting Dissension first, then Ravnica, then Guildpact". That's like 90% of what you're going for at like 2% of the work & time invested.

I think the point was to have the rares from the other 7 guilds NOT in your draft.  So the rares would only be from 3 guilds, but the commons and uncommons whould be from any and all?  I'm not really sure.  I started getting confused as i was reading down.  But in the example above, If you decide to draft "Azorius, Golgari, Izzet."  Then it would be impossible to draft up Firemane or Sky Swollower... for example.   if you just do a seal pack from each, It'll just be really hodge-podge mess of cards.

Essentially correct, but I'm not just talking about the rares.  I also mean the commons and uncommons.  An Azorius, Golgari, Izzet draft wouldn't contain any of the other seven guildmages, signets, or karoos.  It wouldn't contain Sunhome Enforcer, Wild Cantor, or Wrecking Ball.  As far as guilded cards are concerned, it would contain only cards from the selected guilds.

Nefarias raised the interesting point that the colours that are less heavily represented by guilds may be more heavily represented in a set than the colours that have a heavier guild presence.  I think I'd rather have the monochrome cards be distributed evenly with the guild colours, if only for my sanity's sake.

I did also think of another problem with the distribution model I'm using that may require me to rethink how I add monochrome cards.  As it is, I'm using guilded cards from the selected guilds only, but monochrome cards from throughout the block.  I think this means that the proportion of monochrome cards to guilded cards in my pre-deal stacks is going to be abnormally high.  It may be necessary for me to shuffle the monochrome cards separately and then only use 1/nth of the resulting stack of monochrome cards to maintain a proper ratio of guilded to monochrome cards.

Matt, I agree that this is going to be a lot of work, but I think once I get the technique down, it will go reasonably quickly.  Also, considering how hard it is to get people to buy into a draft at the store I frequent, "giving" away a draft (even if I'm reclaiming the cards afterward) would be a cool way of drumming up some activity up there.  They could just toss in $3 for the prize pool (store credit) and then we draft with my repacks. Also, if I go ahead with this, I plan on getting an automatic shuffler for the commons and uncommons, which should help mitigate some of the tedium.