The Rule: Torment
Over a year ago, I wrote an article about The Rule, which can be found here. The Rule is based on the principle that it is a great advantage to be playing the colors that are currently underdrafted by the average player. If the format is sufficiently unbalanced or misunderstood, drafting the right color or color combination becomes more valuable than any one card. If it's worth more to be (for example) a solid black-blue mage than it is to have a broken card like Overrun or Shower of Coals. It's bad for a player to take a blue or black card out of the first pack he opened and find no more playable cards in those colors. In Odyssey that happens much more often than in the past, but The Rule can still normally be followed if a drafter decides that it is appropriate.
What causes a draft format to become unbalanced?
What causes a draft format to become unbalanced? Draft is naturally self-balancing, because players will be more likely to draft the better colors, and by drafting them more often they bring the colors back into balance. However, this can break down for one of several reasons. The easiest reason is just that the players do not correctly value the deck archetypes or the individual cards. Early on, all the Pros loved black-blue in Odyssey draft but very few even respected red-green. As a result, I forced it at the New Orleans Masters and got an amazing deck. By San Diego, I felt that white-blue was being neglected to such an extent that if we had been Booster Drafting instead of Rochester then I likely would have forced white-blue. As formats are played more, the players gain a better understanding of what's involved. In this case, the difference was marked the most by a simple change in how players rated the archetypes. In a related case, Jeff Cunningham picked up on the fact that black-blue was unusually strong due to the tendency of drafters to give away valuable midlevel cards such as Last Rites.
The third and I think most interesting case where The Rule can become important is when the color balance shifts over the course of the draft due to different booster packs. As I noted last year, The Rule was first introduced to Mirage Block, and that was the textbook case of a shift in color strength. White was amazing in the third set and blue was strongest in the second, so those who fought for white-blue early on were rewarded. Since not all the players took future prospects fully into account, this effect did not balance itself out and the strategy continues to be valid to this day if a quirky tournament involves old packs.
One of the primary reasons Weatherlight was 'the white set'.
This brings us to the problem of Odyssey/Odyssey/ Torment drafts. As everyone knows,* Torment* is "the black set". While Weatherlight may have drafted like it was "the white set" this is definitely taking things to the next level. The black cards are better, they're meaner, they're more mana intensive, they encourage people to have swamps in play and there's a lot more of them than any other color. There's more than twice as many black commons as there are white commons in* Torment . Of course, in this case, it's obvious even to people who've never drafted before that a Torment* pack is a very large incentive to draft black cards. The question is how many black players the format justifies. When there were triple-* Torment* drafts at the Prerelease, I declined to play because "I didn't feel like drafting against seven black mages." I don't think that was unrealistic.
The best way to approximate how strong a color is is to look at its commons. There are thirteen black commons in* Torment* I would consider playable, and several of those are very good. Being as generous as possible, white might have five. Blue has eight. Red has at most seven, but two of those only do anything in black-red. Green would be lucky to have six. In short, about a third of the playable cards drafted in* Torment* will be black, but it's more serious than that. None of the white commons are exciting at all, and neither are any green ones except Basking Rootwalla. All red has without black is Fiery Temper. Blue does a little better with Skywing Aven and a few friends, but in terms of cards that are good - instead of just playable - black commons are close to a majority. That would indeed translate into six or seven black drafters at a table with three* Torment* packs.
Before combining the results from Odyssey with those of* Torment *, it should be pointed out that black having this many commons in the same pack is damaging. Often, a player drafting two other colors will have no choice but to take away a black card. If a red-green player doesn't open Fiery Temper or Basking Rootwalla, there will often not be much else worth taking. This effect will cause a number of black cards to be counterdrafted. Of course, it can also cause players to decide to splash black as a third color.
In Odyssey, I found that a Rochester table would divide nicely if the colors could be split up as four green mages, four blue mages, and three each of red, white and black. However, the fact that this added up to seventeen meant that one color would have to come up short, and that fact became very important. Instead, since there are more three color decks now, I will use the extra deck as part of the baseline. When I did a numerical analysis of pure card quality early on, I found that green was even stronger than this but could still in practice only support four players. When I privately pointed Odyssey right after I saw the spoiler list (see Randy Buehler's column for the way WotC does it) I found that green's total was the same as red and black combined! I no longer think that, but things were definitely seriously out of balance.
A short version of the calculation of what a modern draft table should look like would go something like this. Black is a little below average in Odyssey, but actually close to half of* Torment *. Adding up the numbers to find an average, black looks to be about a quarter of all the cards worth playing. That means that it should be a quarter of all colors played, half of all players should play black, and the average table therefore supports four black mages. Magic isn't that easy, but that's a good place to start. How it ends up working depends on the exact details of the situation, which color combinations are viewed as viable and how well they use the specific cards and a number of other factors. However, the early math is useful for helping you form intuition. It is very likely that there will be four or five black mages at a balanced table.
Historically, it's very hard to push the number of players above four. The reason is simple: If there are five people drafting the same color, there are two sets of players drafting it next to each other. It is commonly assumed that it's horrible to draft the same color that the person on your right is drafting. It's not as bad as people think it is, but it's definitely a very bad thing. In particular, drafting black means counting on pack three to make your deck. If black is then cut off, that's a disaster. In a draft with five black mages, at least two of them would consider themselves to be in a 'bad position'. While it may be that such a position is survivable, it's highly unlikely to yield the best deck at the table.
A lot of players will attempt to force black even though that doesn't really accomplish all that much.
What this suggests is that a 'normal' table will have four black drafters, but that the pressure will normally be in the upward direction. Early on, there will likely be only two or three black drafters, but there will often be four and there will often be others who consider themselves black players in waiting. When* Torment* rolls around, everyone then has to reevaluate their situation in light of the new packs. If any player is short on cards, he will virtually have to switch into black to get a deck, since* Torment* will otherwise likely offer him little. In time, there will be more black being drafted than the format can support.
I suspect that will be the equilibrium. A lot of players will attempt to force black even though that doesn't really accomplish all that much. Remember, the person on your right is the one who decides if you get black in* Torment , and he's not under your control. In fact, it would even be worth thinking about intentionally NOT drafting black in pack one to get the person on your left into black, then use his cooperation to try and strangle the person on your right in pack two with the intention of mopping everything up in Torment . The problem is that black is so strong in Torment* that no one is going to abandon it once they enter, ever. Whoever first picks that Ghastly Demise and then gets another black card isn't going to get out. They might minimize their black, but they're probably going to stay in.
On the flip side, consider the situation of a player who isn't drafting black, especially one also not drafting blue. To be confident that their deck will contain all playable cards, they must have most of them in hand at the end of Odyssey. I wouldn't count on* Torment* for more than four or five cards at most in a non-black deck even in a good position. That means that if a player doesn't intend to draft black, he has VERY little time to mess around. Of the first thirty cards, about nineteen need to be worth playing, which means getting ten picks per pack. If that player's initial guess doesn't hold up, he's probably stuck with three colors.
Where does that leave The Rule? It's possible that there will be so much black drafted in pack three that The Rule should be that a player should never start out drafting black. If you start out black, then you're expecting to start weak and finish strong, which means that there's no turning back if things go badly. On the other hand, starting with any other color means being able to go into black later. It might even be true that it's best not to draft black as a main color at all, except when your initial color combination proves undraftable. For example, a drafter might start by taking Mystic Zealot, then Treetop Sentinel, then Syncopate, then Hallowed Healer. If his draft then refused to provide blue-white cards, he would go into black. Unless he was given the strongest signals ever, it would be too late to switch into anything else, because all his signals tell him is what is in* Torment *. That information isn't worth much to a potential red drafter.
As time goes on, players will undoubtedly find out more about how to properly draft with* Torment *. It's a unique experiment, and hopefully it will result in a very interesting puzzle for them to solve.
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