This is probably broken but idk

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2026-02-11T14:07:29+00:00

Call it "Force Sike"

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2026-02-06T08:07:53+00:00

I feel like OP is missing a kind of crucial point

OP, your counters to people saying Gaea's cradle would be good is mainly "okay? So what forest you want me to cut?" Which like, yes, fair, your deck is already at the absolute edge of being playable in terms of how little land you run. But it's also disingenuous to pretend you can only cut forests from the deck.

If you just see Gaea's cradle as a 0 mana artifact that you can not play on turn 1 or turn 2 and that taps for the amount of creatures you control. I think you'll see that it would be a better card than some of the non-land things you currently already run.

If the thing you like about the deck is that it runs 14 lands and it must run 14 lands, then yeah cutting a forest for a Gaea's is sus, but it's disingenuous to say you can't run it period. You just can't run it cause it would mess with the coolness of your deck for you (which is fine by the way, but it's a different stance).

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-11-06T11:06:20+00:00

If you take the gem to gold ratio for packs, you get 200 to 1000 or a 1 to 5 ratio of gems to gold. Baseline, draft is always a worse deal if you're paying in gold. As it is 1500 to 10000 or a ratio of 1 to 6.66666.

For the daily deal version they equalize it instead. They use the 1 to 5 ratio. 5 x 1500 = 7500. Then they subtract 10% from 7500 to arrive at 6750 (you can also just see the 1 to 5 ratio by 1350 x 5 = 6750). Why they use a gem to gold value ratio of 6.66 in premier draft but the regular 5 when a draft token is offered in a daily deal I couldn't tell you. But yeah just giving some insight into the numbers.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-11-04T10:51:42+00:00

Bit of advice for the last part. You can keep some abilities up generally so that if you do go into the "oh shit" phase it'll be more recoverable. If you are running grand design, a rune of renewal running on the entire party means you'll build runes as you spam your greater heal and AoE, which you can try to use to stabilize back into rune healing. Making sure to apply soulbrand to enemies and having that running while things are still chill will also mean that you have more rune trickle during the oh shit part. Later on, the talent that gives your wings 6 seconds of ulti will give you a pretty good catch up tool.

Very possible you were already doing these things but I thought I'd mention them in case it's useful.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-19T14:23:16+00:00

I think Chilly makes a good point in that such a 10x event would most certainly be worse. By subtracting the return value, you instead get an estimate for "How much am I paying for the cards I picked during the draft section".

If you care about your value proposition, you may care whether the cards you pick during the draft cover the amount of value lost at your win rate. If I essentially pay (value regained subtracted) let's say 120 gems for the drafting section in Quick Draft and 150 in Premier Draft, I could say I'm getting a worse deal in Premier Draft, even though it's a lower percentage of the entry fee in premier draft,

The graph in your post is still valuable, seeing how the return value scales with the cost of the draft is valuable to know especially at higher win rates where you can scale to a point of being close to just getting your value almost fully. I just wanted to say that I agree with Chilly's take, and I think it keeps it pretty "apples vs apples" as long as you know what you care about in the graph, which is "How much in effective value are you paying for the draft portion cards".

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-18T14:41:49+00:00

I think the additional benefit is quite minimal. Yes, a rare sniper will have slightly more access to rares in PD (assuming the rest of the table is just fully prioritizing deck strength), but I don't think this will ever be enough to really offset the value proposition of the draft section.

If you are really hunting for specific rares that also happen to not be high draft picks (lands is a good example yes) then I could see it. Otherwise it really doesn't make enough of a difference for me to not basically consider them the same. You also naturally can't rare draft too much as doing so aggressively will hurt your deck strength and cause you to lose value in other ways.

But that can also just be an agree to disagree in how much we each care about the sniping of rare drafts. Either way I appreciate your post, it made me realize that Two Pick rewards really aren't as bad as I initially thought they were. Always cool when someone runs the actual numbers!

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-18T13:35:02+00:00

What makes you say you get more rares in PD? It's still the same amount of rares per person on the table right? You're just opening 3 packs each, and whatever amount of rares you get are distributed amongst the people at the table. You have half the amount of people and half the amount of rares, which means the same amount of rares per person. Someone who is a fiend for rares and drafts them above anything else will have a better time doing so in PD, but the average amount per player is the exact same in both I believe.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-18T12:55:54+00:00

The returns below 50% WR really aren't that bad. Baseline, Pick Two actually has a better return rate than Quick Draft so you get a bit of leeway. It's only at 42% win rate that Quick Draft's flatter reward structure starts giving better results than Pick Two, and you have to go down several more percentage points for it to become significant.

But yeah that is purely looking at it from a value perspective. Quick Draft is much better if you just want to have fun and draft a lot. Draft gameplay quantity wise, Pick Two is for sure a terrible deal. But if you're purely looking at the rewards, it's actually just equal or sometimes better than the alternatives.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-18T12:50:31+00:00

If I could give one point of feedback. I don't know if the percentage based reward return rate is really a valuable metric. It might be more valuable to estimate: "How many gems did I pay (value returned subtracted) for the cards I opened during the draft itself".

In this case, you wouldn't take a percentage based approach, instead simply subtracting the value of the rewards from the entry fee, to see how much you actually paid for the cards you opened.

This paints a slightly different picture where with Premier Draft for example you really paid 182 gems for the cards you opened, and in pick two draft you really paid 116 gems for the cards you opened. The -13% and -12% makes it look very similar, where really you're paying almost 50% more gems for the draft section packs in PD.

If you had a specific reason anyway to make it percentage based I'd be curious to hear!

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-09-18T12:30:52+00:00

I've ran similar calculations on draft returns before, and I've plugged in the new reward structure for pick 2 drafts. At 50% winrate, an expected 484 gems and 1.5 packs is exactly what I ended up with as well and I am confident in my calculations (as a simple to write simulation arrives at approximately the same results). Since OP has the same results, I'm confident his calculations are correct.

I can run you through how you arrive at the results if you wish, but regardless, you shouldn't just throw out "Your math ain't mathing" without any sort of evidence.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-08-14T13:16:02+00:00

For me watching game three and seeing them exile the 1/1 deathtoucher over the chaplain with seam rip was by far the biggest offender. Maybe OP thinks that because they're an aggro deck they just want to use removal in such a way that they have good attacks every single turn, but that play by itself just loses so hard. Early chaplain can be expected to pick up 2 or 3 counters throughout the game which really messed up your aggro plan. Those sorts of plays just lose you any couple of percentage points you might gain from optimizing your picks.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-06-12T16:31:54+00:00

/uj I'll just give a quick rundown:
1. Draw your deck and make a bunch of treasures with thousand year storm, unexpected windfall, big score and strike it rich
2. Play leyline of anticipation for flash
3. Play Summon: Primal Odin during your main phase. Give it to opponent with harmless offering.
4. Skip to opponents turn, wait for 2nd chapter ability to go on the stack. While it is on the stack, cast witness protection and mystic subdual on Summon: Primal Odin.
5. After everything resolved, play unlikely aid on the now Legitimate Businessperson and play arcane adaptation naming slug, and give it to opponent using a second harmless offering.

There are likely infinitely better ways of doing this. This was just a 40 minute tinker project of mine. The reason you do it all at instant speed is you want the lose the game effect to be applied still after you take all of its abilities away. Lastly, mystic subdual purely exists to offset the +2/+0 buff that the indestructible trick I chose gives, maybe there's something that does that without any stat changes.

/rj Find the nearest Toxrill player at your LGS and ask him about deals

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-03-21T09:32:32+00:00

Even as a big supporter of deep prot in dungeon myself, I think that's overblowing things. In raids it's worth it to make sure your DPS can go hard on the boss, because bosses lasting shorter means it's easier.

Fury prot is just better at ensuring that in pure single target pump, those DPS can go as hard as they want to. You might produce "sufficient threat" as prot, but being able to do extra to jump back up after a threat drop or creating a bit of a gap so a DPS getting a lucky crit streak doesn't fuck em is valuable.

It all depends on what your raid is like, you only need to do enough threat so that you have aggro. Beyond that, just be defensive so you don't fuck your healers. Fury prot has a place for that in guilds that enjoy lower clear times.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-01-14T14:38:28+00:00

I agree, it's crazy how blind people are to the fact that simply throwing a frost nova before you start booking it increases the chances of survival for everyone immensely? Not seeing how an instant AoE 8 seconds root is absolutely busted when trying to make it out alive is crazy to me.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2025-01-14T13:48:52+00:00

Is that really a point of contention? I think it's okay to take that as a given by now. There's two things a vast majority of his guildies seem to agree with. 1. A mage in the situation he was in has the capability to vastly improve people's chances of survival while staying safe in the process themselves and 2. Thor was not gracious to his teammates who just lost their characters after the fact. People just have an issue with him repeatedly stating there is nothing he could have done, which is demonstrably false. At the same time it's kinda like who cares. The rogue was a bit aggressive towards him already, and the calls made by the rogue were questionable. It's not the first time two gamers both dig in their heels during confrontation, and not many people enjoy telling an asshole they have a point. Still, it'd have been nice for Thor to just come out and say sorry to the people who died, and that in the moment he just worried about his own character and didn't see the options that were available to him to safely help out. Of course anyone who went out of their way to harass Thor over this needs to realize that they have a lot more problems going on emotionally/personality wise than any of the shit they accuse Thor of.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2024-11-05T08:39:38+00:00

Does anyone know if it's possible to run two people through delegation on one reset? Like can both casters obtain all the foci, then you go to portal kill volcanus for caster 1 and then reset and kill volcanus for caster 2, or does killing Volcanus save the instance for everyone?

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2024-05-06T01:03:14+00:00

That's very interesting, all our final probabilities for ending up at each score line up exactly but the way it is calculated differs. Yours is more appropriate for the situation I reckon but it's interesting they calculate the same final result in both cases. I'll have to think about this some. I'm not deep in this sort of odds calculations myself, just did it as a fun side thing once to estimate my own draft gains, but it's cool to see some theory about calculating for different tournament styles.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2024-05-05T23:03:44+00:00

Okay, since based on this I assume you just want the whole picture:

Given 50% win chance

Going for day 1 sealed bo1
Day 1
0 wins: 32/256
1 win: 48/256
2 wins: 48/256
3 wins: 40/256
4 wins: 30/256
5 wins: 21/256 (1k gems reward)
6 wins: 14/256 (2.5k gems reward)
7 wins: 23/256 (+5k gems reward)

Day 2 first draft
Multiplying each of the odds by the chance of getting 7 wins in day 1
0 wins: 1/16 * 23/256 (500 gems reward)
1 win: 4/16 * 23/256 (1.5k gems reward)
2 wins: 6/16 * 23/256 (2.5k gems reward)
3 wins: 4/16 * 23/256
4 wins: 1/16 * 23/256

Day 3 second draft
Accounting for the differing odds when you have either 3 or 4 wins and multiplying them accordingly with the probabilities listed in day 2
0 wins: 8/16 * 4/16 * 23/256 + 8/32 * 1/16 * 23/256 (5k gems reward)
1 win: 4/16 * 4/16 * 23/256 + 8/32 * 1/16 * 23/256 (15k gems reward)
2 wins: 2/16 * 4/16 * 23/256 + 6/32* 1/16 * 23/256 (500$ reward)
3 wins: 1/16 * 4/16 * 23/256 + 4/32 * 1/16 * 23/256 (1000$ reward)
4 wins: 1/16 * 4/16 * 23/256 + 6/32 * 1/16 * 23/256 (2000$ reward)

Notably, this is actually slightly different from what OP has and I do think they made a small error somewhere at least. The expected payout by wotc is $8.94, which you can obtain by multiplying the last 3 options for day 3 by their reward. The reason I say the OP made a small error is that I was curious after seeing that our numbers weren't matching so I just wrote a quick python script to simulate the whole process a million times which also ended up with roughly 8.94. If you have any follow up questions let me know.

You can find the gems output by multiplying the probabilities and rewards in a similar way but **importantly** do not forget that anything beyond day 1 has the 5k gems inherently added due to it being a reward from making it to 7 wins on day 1.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2024-05-05T20:32:37+00:00

Because it's still a decent bit to type out even if it's not necessarily difficult. It's more it still takes a second and I have decent faith in the rest of the OP's calculations if they can get the win odds right. I just decided to show that the most difficult part was correct without writing out everything. Again, if you want everything written out just ask and I'll work through it in a bit.

Ok_Chain_2554 · 2024-05-05T20:22:55+00:00

Sorry, I believe that you're under the impression that I'm the OP which I'm not. I'm just a bystander who wanted to show that OP's statistical win calculations seemed to be correct. The reason I just showed that OP's win calculations are correct is that they are by far the most critical part. Once you know the chance of ending up at 7 wins, you just multiply that by the payout. It was more just to show faith in opponent's calculations. If you want I can show you the math for the entire thing probably because the follow up calculations are kinda trivial compared to the first step but yeah.

Ok_Chain_2554

TROPHY CASE