My MTG:A Draft Experiment

It’s been quite a long time since my last entry. However, with the semester having just concluded this week, I think I will be able to write on this blog with greater regularity. I do have considerable material to share in posts for the succeeding weeks. Since the end of January, I’ve made the top 1000 mythic ladder in constructed twice (qualifying for the MQW next week), am currently at 69^th place this season, dabbled a bit in streaming, and conducted an experiment to collect a full set of WAR cards. It is this last activity that I will detail in this post.

Objective

While not strictly a FTP player (I bought the welcome bundle and a 20k gem cache), I am very interested in minimizing the cost associated with playing MTG:A. At the moment, my only complete tier 1 decks are Mono Red and Mono Blue, and I think this will be the case for me until rotation. However, I would like to make sure that post rotation, I will have access to all of the cards needed to build tier 1 decks. This means having access to as many constructed playable cards as possible after rotation (GRN set onwards). There are two ways to do this on MTG:A; these are either buy packs or play limited. Previously, I went with the first of these strategies, using all of the gold I generated to buy RNA and GRN packs. Using this strategy, I’m currently missing 94 rare/mythic cards from GRN and 55 from RNA (I am lumping rare and mythic cards together) from a full set of 4 copies per card. This month, I considered trying Ranked Draft as a means of building my collection. My objective was to compare the efficiency between using Ranked Draft and just buying packs.

How many drafts?

Assuming that one picks 3 rares/mythics on average when doing a draft, one would get 4 rares on average per draft (including the one from the pack that you win regardless of record). There are 68 rares and mythics in WAR which means I need to collect 68x4=272 cards; equivalent to 68 drafts. However, we get 3 free WAR packs at the start of the season and 3 packs of WAR every week during the two WAR seasons (8 weeks). There are also the rewards from one’s ranks in limited and constructed (which I am pegging at 7 per season for me). This adds up to 41 packs which means I only need about 58 drafts.

Strategy and Starting Resources
My strategy is to first use gems to pay for drafts and then when my gems cache got low, to use gold and recoup the gems. Ideally, using gems is much more efficient than gold, since the 5000 gold cost of ranked draft translates to 1000 gems whereas entering drafts using gems only costs 750 gems, and so one pays a premium of 250 gems per draft using gold. However, this means that if I make more than 250 gems on average from winnings using gold then using gold this way would still be more efficient. At the start of the experiment, I had 90,000 gold and 17020 gems stored up. 

Results

I did 38 drafts in total. I decided to stop after my 38^th because I was already running into the 5^th copy too often (had to pick Ugin twice more despite already having 4). I used gems until my cache got to 9k, and then I started using gold. My final resources after the entire experiment were 15000 gold and 16650 gems.

Overall, I was able to gather 121 cards from the drafts and 55 prizes packs. This is a total of 176 WAR rare/mythic cards. The cost of this endeavor was 75000 gold and 370 gems, which converts to roughly 77 packs if used to buy packs. This means that using drafts, I got 99 more WAR cards than I would have just buying packs with the same resources. Additional things that need to be accounted for are the wildcards that I would have gotten opening packs outside of drafts. These are (77-55)/6=3.67 wildcards which we can round up to 4 wildcards accounting for those that one can randomly get in place of the pack rare/mythic. Thus, the trade of was 176 cards versus 77 cards and 4 wildcards. This comparison seems to favor drafting by a wide margin.

Draft Performance
Obviously, one needs to maintain some level competence in playing draft to come out ahead using this strategy for building a collection. However, draft is not my strong suit. In 38 drafts, I managed to get to platinum on the 37^th draft. Counting the times when I got an extra pack without making 7 wins, my average wins per draft was 438 gems, which means I won about 3.07 games per draft on average. Per draft performance is detailed in the following table.

Wins	Frequency
0	6
1	5
2	7
3	7
4	1
5	4
6	3
7	5

As shown from the table, my performance is nothing stellar. There’s definitely room for improvement in my draft play. I won 117 out of 226 matches which given the setup of ranked draft translates to a match win probability of 50.58%. Still, this was enough to realize the gains detailed in the previous section. In terms of the time it took to finish 38 drafts, it took 4 days total, with a draft pod taking anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours to finish (not including time for drafting).

Overall Output

Including the free WAR packs that I will accumulate for the rest of time before the next set, I estimate accumulating 222 WAR rares/mythics by the next set without spending anymore gold. This means I can accumulate gold to use for drafting the new core set.

Overall, I think it is safe to say that even a mediocre drafter can find drafting more profitable in building a collection than buying packs. It is important to remember that if you engage in this endeavor, you should not open any packs until after you have finished all of your drafts in order to maximize duplicate protection.  Also, given the time it took to complete the 38 drafts, it is very feasible to do this for the new set on rotation in order to get most of the playables and minimize the number of wildcards that one needs to use.

May the shuffler be with you!