We just finished a snake draft, organized (and won) by @kevintame . The players were the current crew of regulars at Cardboard Gaming in Odenton, MD. The actual competition was held at Canton Games in Baltimore, MD-- Dan was generous enough to offer up some deluxe prizes from days gone by (playmats and older alt arts).
The only issue that I had was that it made my unhealthy obsession with this game even harder to keep under wraps when I neurotically checked my phone as my picks were coming up to see if they were going to get snatched out from under me
One thing to note-- we played without MWL. I didn’t really hate-draft against decks that were looking totally nuts-- In my head, I rationalized it as “oh, well I’ll only face that deck once at most, more important to get my own house in order and put some tech in if I feel the need.”
I think I would have been much better off had I fought those battles during the draft rather than trying to fight them during the tournament. You end up facing such a variety of decks that tech slots feel bad, and even if you only face the toughest decks once on the day, if those players are cleaning house with them, that doesn’t help you win the tournament
Would you recommend playing without MWL if you could do it again?
Did you find any good written guides to snake drafting that you could share with people to get them interested? I really like the Beyoken videos, but I was struggling to find anything written.
Also, congrats, Kevin, on both the victory and also your absolutely disgusting CtM list!
I think it depends on the group. On the whole we were inclined to be some combination of polite/conservative in terms of hate-drafting, so enforcing MWL would probably have led to a more balanced set of decks across the board (capping the upper limit on power). On the other hand, if we were more cutthroat, that would have probably limited power levels as well. Incidentally, I don’t mean for this to take away from Kevin’s victory-- it was well-deserved and I probably could have done better with more brutal MWL-free selections (my corp deck ended up actually legal, which is probably a red flag).
The first page of the spreadsheet had some general tips and links to other snake drafts. I looked at some of the old forum posts from the “elite draft of the whole cardpool” but nothing formal. Some of the decklists linked from the Always be Running event page have relatively detailed writeups, which might be helpful.
