I played in my first Overdrive draft here in Portland the other day. Ignore balance for the rest of my post, since I’ve only played 1 draft, i can’t speak much too balance.
Not to much to say on strategy other than that I really messed up some picks in my first go around. For instance pretty sure I passed on Tri Maf Contact two separate times, as well as a security testing pick or two, and in retrospect those cards seem very good at sustained economy even with their drawbacks.
I ended up with 2 elizas toybox and drafted around that, in the games where I didn’t lose in the first few turns I won with my 2 archers + tollbooths + curtain wall. It was pretty sweet, toybox is really powerful, and doing powerful stuff is fun. It’s much more exciting then the previous format where I tried to bait people into servers and hope they used all of their crypsis stuff. I also had half of a “Grail” strategy. I found that I didn’t take enough early game ice since I was too excited about all of my toybox plan lol, In the last draft you could get cheaper ice like wall of static and such as late as 5-7th pick, but most of the stuff I saw at that range were much more expensive ice picks.
The format was fun, and might I mention, fun. I really think that this draft format stands out as a format I would love to repeat play, and not just because its draft. I liked the previous draft format, it was okay. One of my most memorable games was against Sneaky Sly in the format. But it still lacked something, mostly because Magnum Opus + Crypsis was boring, and some of the other cards were dry, and just seemed vanilla. Wall of static, Ice Wall, Enigma etc are all solid cards, but they are fairly boring. Crypsis? Okay you can break everything. New format has all sorts of stuff going on. The runner side could use a little more improvement maybe. Since decks are so small(30 cards) and we need breakers and $, I still don’t see enough draftable runner archetypes.
I could just be crazy though, maybe after all the new cards lose their “Newness” factor the format won’t be exciting anymore, but hey! Maybe there will be some new draft format out for next cycle. As of right now, I am ready to draft again already, and I just did it on Saturday. Really excited to draft some more Upstalk in the future.
I am hoping we can run some tournament sometime with 3 rounds of overdrive draft, 3 rounds of constructed, and then just see where the swiss results land, would be pretty great.