I really enjoy Pandora and I think it does a good job of serving a lot of purposes well, helping new players experience cards they can’t afford yet in a level field and acting as a rewarding way to grind and improve your play. That said, I am sometimes very frustrated by bad or unlucky drafts that completely destroy my ability to compete. Of course, the nature of drafting is that sometimes it goes better than others, but I think these two suggestions might decrease feel-bad pools/match-ups without decreasing variety or the amount of skill involved in play:
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Consistent rarities in draft. EDIT: mostly I think Legendary distribution needs to be more regular
Either in the form of a set number of each rarity appearing or in a set ‘rarity value’ over the whole draft (assigning a value to each rarity and ensuring everyone gets the same total). I think the biggest ‘rarity problem’ is legendaries. I have had and have faced drafts from 0-3 legends and it can feel pretty daunting and unfair. Even something like, everyone gets one legendary pick and everything else is as it is now, would probably feel better. I DON’T think, though, that the order or rarities should be standardized as it becomes to predictable.
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Drafting over 30 cards and deselecting some (a sideboard)
This is more of a personal preference than a perceived problem but I would really like a system where you drafted 35 or so cards and made a 30 card deck from those. This would allow for some more dynamic drafting, as you don’t get as locked into a color or strategy as early and could allow for editing and correction between games if you found that some cards weren’t working as well as you had hoped. It also eliminates the problem of being 29 cards into a mono-red deck and having 5 blue cards for your last pick. This could help new players get used to building a deck (including harvesters, finishers, removal etc) and as far as UI, the deck creation part could appear after the draft was done so as to not crowd the screen.
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I like it how it is now. It gives bad players a chance when they get a good selection, and vice-versa. Over time everything should even out.
[quote=“Boss_Smiley, post:1, topic:6260”]
Drafting over 30 cards and deselecting some (a sideboard)
[/quote]I like how it is now. Of course, it’s the same for everyone, but it means you have to choose whether it’s worth risking going down a path (eg: getting forest-makers in the hope of getting oaks, or getting events for Aurora’s disciple). Making it safe would IMHO also make it more boring.
I really agree with both these issues, I think a 5 card sideboard would be perfect, gives you a little less variance which always encourages skill and Pandora is the least skillful part of Faeria IMO, this would go a long way to help I think.
I like the sideboard idea. The case you’ve used to illustrate it (“being 29 cards into a mono-red deck and having 5 blue cards for your last pick”) seems to be unlikely, though. I’ve heard (and it matches my own humble experience well) that pandora draft adapts to your choices and shows you cards that are more likely to fit your deck in terms of color. On the other hand, this create situatons when can pick one or two blue cards, then - select a bunch of decent red ones, and then - you’re stuck in positive feedback lopp that makes you get more red cards in selections, pick more red cards, which increases chances of them appearing in selections even further… The result looks like this:
As for the more consistent rarity… As you could notice in the bottom left corner of the image I’ve posted above - I’m currently conducting a small rarity research. Would be cool if more people would join us in xploring’s thread. Because before discussing how consistent the rarity of the card should be, it would be nice to estimate how consistent it is at the given state of the game.
P.S. An alternative way to increase consistency of pandora experience is to allow people select solo or multiplayer mode after the draft.
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Wow, I’d be super interested in the results of your survey as they come together.
I agree with you that I may have been jumping the gun a bit on whether or not the distribution is relatively fair. My main bone to pick was in regards to the noticeable absence or presence of legendary cards and I think I reached a little far in trying to generalize.
As far as the color-screw thing, it is rare but does happen. 29 cards in was a bit of hyperbole but I have been late into a draft with no on-color options and someone recently posted this on reddit (http://imgur.com/a/aM3SQ). I definitely do feel like it is correcting for me sometimes though, and would be super interested to know if it does actually adapt.
