Do you think the drafting-system is more fair in Magic than Hearthstone? If so, why?

Do you think the drafting-system is more fair in Magic than Hearthstone? If so, why?

Needs flying and to be black, but otherwise fair.

Yeah but that's not fucking hard.

Limited is still an utter mess and has been since they fucked with the rarities because fuck removal.

obviously, there's a magnitude of difference between drafting/building a deck from a collective set of cards versus every player drafting from a separate random pile. Being able to know what cards you are going to play against makes a huge difference, granted the small card pool for Hearthstone makes that almost true. But as the number of sets increases it will become even more random. MtG draft also allows you to choose from a larger subsection of cards at a time, allowing for more strategic decisions based on your known card pool.

and all this makes perfect sense considering it's free to draft in Hearthstone so they need to increase randomness in order to encourage you to spend money

In my mind, the differences are comprised in three major areas. But to preface this, in my opinion Hearthstone's drafting system is a joke, there's only a choice in about 10% of the picks, otherwise there's clearly a best pick. This leads to decks only have a variance in power level, basically all being homogeneous within the class, and you're never able to do cool things. Clearest example of this is the inability to draft a mill or jade deck for example.

The first is the set/block system of the games, Hearthstone throws all the cards in their drafting system into a big pile and says 'have fun'. In contrast Magic forces you to play with different sets, sometimes mixing them together. As an example KTK-KTK-KTK compared to KTK-KTK-FRF were quite different, a few of the archetypes were dead, or much worse, while more linear strategies and reliance on bombs became more prevalent. This is only within one block, an even better example is looking at 3x KTK, where you can reasonably play something like 5-colour control, midrange or some token decks, to something like 3x Zen. Aggro ruled and games were over by turn 4-5, hell, plays sometimes didn't even get made in 3x KTK by that point in the game outside of a single morph creature.

1/2

Secondly is the class system in Hearthstone, while Magic has access to cards of every colour at the same time. This means, there's no way to add powerful deck enabling cards that push certain draft archetypes without making them neutral, and even if you did there's too little card coverage in your three picks to be able to consistently pick up that enabler. Another issue with the class system is that it means that there's never really a critical mass of cards for an archetype, maybe you could play a real beast deck in arena if you had access to druid's and hunters beast cards, but having them segregated means there's really no chance of this.

Lastly, there's no other players interacting with the draft, so there's a layer of complexity removed, this isn't as big as the previous two, but it without a doubt makes it less challenging and interesting at higher level of play.

This whole post also ignores the different dynamics between the 15 card packs and picks between 3 cards, that's an important issue when looking at the ability to draft certain archetypes, but you get the idea anyway.

2/2

Alexstrasza would be Naya colors.

Good stuff. One thing that I would like to add to that is the act of repeatedly taking one card and passing the rest evens out the natural variance of pack strength. A Magic drafter who opens bomb rare, foil bomb rare only gets to take one of them and the guy who opens three packs of chaff will have weak first picks, but picks 2-14 will average out to where the whole table should have decks with pretty even raw power levels (assuming they're making good picks). In Magic you'll sometimes get a bomb rare but not play it because its color was being cut, which can't happen in Hearthstone.

That effect does not exist in Naya. There are already two cards that set a player's life total to 10 and they're both black.

>fair

dunno if it is more "fair" or not, but i think drafting in mtg is better overall. i'm not even sure arena should be compared to mtg drafting - it's closer to a shitty version of sealed deck.

as far as drafting goes, in mtg you draft 45 cards and construct a deck using ~23 playable cards and lands. since you don't have to use every single card you drafted, you can make risky picks on synergistic cards, or change your colors/strategy during a draft. however, in hearthstone you draft exactly 30 cards. every single card you pick goes into your deck, so there is no room to make risky choices. you have to stick with the strategy you start with, and all your choices are based solely on individual card strength alone (which is why everyone just uses an arena app to draft for them).

there are some things blizz could do to improve hearthstone drafting. if hearthstone had you draft ~35 cards and let you pick which 5 to not include, that would be a big help. people could take out their weakest card and take risks on picks that don't pan out later. they could also do a tetris-style preview of the next pack you are getting, which would give more context to each pick beyond "which of these 3 does the arena app rate higher".

No it doesn't.

It's either Dega or B/W only.

It's a really boring and shitty custom card though.

Why you people always insist on the most fucking cringeworthy flavour text, I'll never know.