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Cubers Anonymous – Talented Mr. Roto (Part 1)

Justin Parnell talks about a way to cube that he considers the most skill-intensive way to play Magic: Rotisserie Draft. For a fun look into the format, read this article.

Welcome back, current and soon-to-be cube degenerates, to Cubers Anonymous. Today is going to be the first part of a two-part series about my favorite cube format, the majestic Rotisserie draft. I will warn some of you, my lead-in today is going to be about fantasy sports. If you have no interest in hearing about anything other than Magic, skip down to the heading titled The Connection. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy.

A Brief History of Fantasy Sports

As some of you already know, I am not the Talented Mr. Roto. That nickname would be referring to Matthew Berry, ESPN Senior Fantasy analyst. At the conclusion of this short series, I might be the Talented Mr. Cube Roto, but we’ll get into that later. Roto is of course shorthand for Rotisserie. According to Wikipedia (aka the best thing to ever happen to the internet), the origin of the term “rotisserie” as it referred to fantasy sports was coined when a New York City restaurant named La Rotisserie Francaise became the meet up place for Daniel Okrent and some friends to play what we would now refer to as fantasy baseball in 1980.

“Rotisserie” stuck as a way to describe any game where players were drafted from a sports league, MLB in this case. Every player from every roster could be “drafted” (selected) to an “owner” (someone participating in the drafting) following a randomly predetermined drafting order. The first owner drafts, followed by the second owner, then third, until reaching the last owner. Then the draft moves in reverse order (known as a snake draft, as the draft picks move in a fashion that would resemble a snake, albeit a snake you’d find on a 1999 Nokia phone rather than in the wild). When the second round completes, the draft continues with the first owner drafting, then the second and so on following this order until the predetermined number of rounds is done, and everyone has their “team.” The owners would track their player’s performances in the season and would score points for each stat they would accrue.

I’m sure that last paragraph was news to approximately 1% of you, but in 1980, this type of thinking was revolutionary. Even for the portion of you who haven’t ever played any type of fantasy sport, the term “fantasy football” isn’t new to you. For those of us who do play fantasy sports, try and remember the first time you heard about it. It’s probably tricky since you most likely heard of it before you learned fully about it.

Imagine that any conception of fantasy sports had never crossed your ears. Someone sits you down and explains to you every inch, nook, and cranny of fantasy football. You draft your own team. Trade players with other teams. Decide who to start and who to sit. To me, this conversation would be mind blowing. Complete control over every decision for a season, and sometimes longer if you decide that with the other owners. Oh yeah, the other owners. The people standing in your way of championship glory and everything that comes with it (potentially some kind of jellybeans, but most certainly bragging rights). If you want to win, you have to outwit, out-maneuver, and, let’s be honest, out-luck your fellow owners.

People play fantasy sports for a number of reasons. Maybe it’s the love of statistics. Maybe you’re a degenerate gambler. Maybe you just want to crush your friends and say I told you so. Maybe you love the game so intensely that you have to be around it in any way possible. For me, I love fantasy football for all of these reasons.

There are two groups of people who play fantasy sports and only two groups. The people who play just for fun or maybe to do something with their friends who also like whichever sport it is. They won’t draft people from teams they hate, maybe forget to change their lineup a few times. No big deal, they just play to play. Let’s call this group of owners the William Ford group.

Then there is the other group of owners. These owners show up first to the draft with six outlines of potential draft plans. They lose hours and hours of sleep deciding whether Malcom Floyd or Robert Meachem should fill their flex spot. They almost wet themselves when Tom Brady is still around at the end of the second round, all while wearing their Darrelle Revis Jets jersey. These owners live by one motto when it comes to fantasy sports: just win, baby. As such, these owners we’ll call the Al Davis group. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t in this group.

The AD group wants to say just one line at the end of the season, when they’re holding their gold cup/wad of cash/Shiva Bowl trophy, pointing at each of their league-mates:

I outdrafted you. I outplayed you. I outsmarted you. I just know more than you do.

Hmmm… do we know any other group of people like that?

The Connection

In general, I think there are two groups of Magic players. The first are the Gamers, the ones who are immersed in video games, other card games, and the like. The second are the Sports Fans, and that definition should be fairly obvious. There are certainly people who are equal amounts of both, but I think the majority fit mostly into one of the two categories. It’s probably obvious at this point which group I reside in.

I believe there are more Magic players in the Gamers category, so some of you may not know a couple of things that sports in general have contributed to Magic. The biggest is the competitive and professional structure, which borrows very, very heavily from professional golf and tennis, even more so with the recent changes to Planeswalker Points and the Magic Team World Cup. I won’t get deeper into these comparisons here, as you’re probably ready for me to get on with the cube stuff. (Let me know in the forums if anyone would like me to elaborate.) The other is, of course, drafting. Mainly the rotisserie style draft that has fallen out of favor with most Magic players.

Rotisserie drafting in the Magical sense happened long before a traditional cube even existed. You would take the entire contents of one Magic expansion or block, and just like a fantasy sports snake draft, take turns drafting cards until there were no more or reached the agreed upon limit per person. Upon completion of the draft, it played out exactly like every other Limited format. Of course, in the nineties, we didn’t have fancy google.docs to hold our hand for easy drafting. You’d lay every single card that you were drafting on a table and commence. Something like that would be overwhelming for even the most veteran of Magicians. What about the best cards in Magic, or better yet, every card in Magic?

The first people (as far as I know) to host a rotisserie draft of every Vintage-legal Magic card on google.docs were a group of folks at WotC midway through 2010. A crew of Channel Fireballers followed quickly hosting one, and shortly after that another WotC one popped up. Then several more started popping up. I couldn’t help but think about how awesome doing one of those would be. An article at the Mothership appeared at the end of October that year, giving a nice analysis of what exactly went into a live draft and about half of the drafter’s strategies. I kept looking for opportunities to play in one myself, but none presented themselves.

I moved to Wilmington, NC about a year ago and started going to the local shop named Cape Fear Games to try and stir up some cube goodness. During one particular cube draft, I was trying to goad a group into doing a rotisserie draft of the entire cube. For some strange reason, not everyone is as addicted to cube drafting as I am, and the idea was met with lukewarm response. As I looked at everyone’s faces, it became clear that they really didn’t want to take the time or effort to be a part of it—my fire was getting prematurely extinguished. Until my friend Greg Respet (who is bar-none the most respectful and nice person to ever trade with, and trust me, he has what you’re looking for) said, “Why don’t you just do it online?”

Obv.

Why Rotisserie?

Now having three full cube rotisserie drafts under my belt, I can say without remorse that it is my absolute favorite way to play Magic. The only bad thing about a rotisserie draft is that you need seven other people (at least) to feel the same about it as you do. So why would you want to rotisserie your cube?

It is my humble (depending who you ask) opinion that Limited Magic is the most skill intensive way to play. I also think that rotisserie drafting is the most skill intensive of all Limited Magic formats. Add those together, and you have the most skill intensive Magic format. Period. You have to have an initial plan, but your plan changes after every single pick. You have to be able to read the flow of the draft as well as your fellow drafters. Every bit of information is out in the open, and the person who uses it to their advantage the best will end up in the best position at the end of the draft.

Rotisserie drafting a cube is certainly different than rotisserie drafting every Vintage-legal card. You have a much more manageable number of cards to digest, and there won’t be a card like Chill or Boil waiting in the wings to blindside you when you think you have every angle worked out. Cards that sometime go late in a normal cube draft due to being opened in pack three become superstars and cornerstones of decks, like Fastbond, Tezerret, Agent of Bolas, or Entomb. You have every tool you need to build any deck you want, assuming you can pick them before anyone else does. Even if you think you’re cut, there is always a chance to move into a different direction entirely based on what you think you know about your opponent’s drafting habits. Each draft morphs into a specific metagame, and the quicker you figure out how to defend against it, the easier task you’ll have when it’s time to play the matches.

Of course, rotisserie drafting isn’t for the faint of heart or ones who become bored easily. The draft will take a while, even if you manage to get all the drafters together to knock a large part of the draft out. And there will be delays in between picks, when picks are snatched away at the last minute or plans get radically changed. Despite these “flaws,” if you love to analyze, read people, or sculpt beautiful decks while your opponents have no idea what you’re doing, then you’ll love rotisserie too. If you play any type of fantasy sport, why haven’t you done a cube rotisserie yet?

The Start of Something Beautiful

Using the already-formatted Vintage Rotisserie drafts as a guide, I set up my first rotisserie draft in March and planned to have it played out at SCG Open: Baltimore in May of 2011. You can find the entire draft here. I wanted people to have access to a maximum amount of cards for their maindeck and their sideboards, so I initially set it up to allow for a mammoth 60 picks per drafter. That was way too many, and I even had to cut it down to 55 towards the end of the draft. I did at least use all of the cards to my advantage, siding in every single card I drafted at least once, to finish with a draft-best record of 6-1. Even still, I learned so much about what I did wrong from that first draft. The biggest issue in Baltimore was playing out every match. The idea is that every drafter plays a best 2-out-of-3 match with every other drafter, meaning that the event would be 28 full matches when it was all said and done.

Let me tell you, attempting to organize 28 matches is a logistical nightmare. It wouldn’t be so difficult if every participant in was there just to play out the roto, but the fact is that everyone is also playing in another Magic tournament (which they usually feel is more important) or worse yet, working the event. Everyone has time restrictions, as far as when they arrive to the event site, if they can only play before or after a certain time, or if they won’t have any time between rounds of the main event since they decided to bring their Turbo-Fog deck. I have hosted three different drafts, and not a single one has been able to play every match. Almost all of them end up mattering for tiebreaking purposes, so you really have to rule with an iron fist over the drafters.

The system that was implemented after the conclusion of this first draft was that if you don’t play someone, you can’t get points for a win. Points are awarded just like a regular tournament, with three for a win and zero for a loss or a DNP (Did Not Play). This usually helps push people to try and get all of their matches done before it gets to crunch time. Of course, with only eight players, ties to determine the final standings will be sure to happen. The tiebreaking system I came up with is in order of best to worst breakers as follows:

Best record
Head to head record
Opponents you defeated total match win

Anything beyond those tiebreakers remain a tie, as they are probably far enough down in the standing that it doesn’t matter for whatever prize (I suggest jellybeans) you have on the line. If two people really want to know who finished seventh and who finished eighth, tell them they both finished last.

Another bump in the road occurred at the end of the draft, when one of my friends had the deck he had drafted swiped from his possession. This is always a possibility when drafting or playing Magic in general, but it’s especially important to have everyone keep their closest eye on their deck, especially when you have eight floating around for days at a time. Hopefully anyone that had cards they didn’t own stolen from them would automatically offer to replace them, but I always make it clear before handing over the deck.

The last thing I came away with from the first draft was how much effin’ work it is. Start to end, the host should be ready to put some work in. From moving the draft along at a reasonable pace, to building the decks once the draft is over, to encouraging everyone to finish up their matches, and of course organizing and distributing the all-jellybean prize, if it’s your cube and your draft, then it’s your job to make sure everything happens as it should. Since you likely own a cube or wouldn’t be hosting one of these, this really comes with the territory anyway.

Work in Progress

The second draft went much smoother, especially after I moved the number of picks per person down from 60 to 55 to finally 45 (note: this is still too many and has been addressed as such with our current 40-pick draft). No decks stolen, and every match that mattered was played out in what seemed to be a timely fashion.

After the conclusion of the second draft, I had a bunch of people ask me to be in the next one, enough people that I couldn’t include them all. So I came up with the rule that if you had played in two consecutively, you had to sit out once before throwing your name into the hat. This excluded the winner from the previous draft, as that person had an auto-seat if they so chose. I announced the random drawing on Facebook and chose seven random people from the 13 who had entered to fill the draft, after I had to sit three people who wanted to participate but had played in the past two, including myself. The third draft went over well, and as you could probably figure out, I had even more people ask me to be in the next one. (If you’re friends with me on Facebook and have met me in person, I’d be more than happy to let you enter the random drawing for the next in the series!)

I hope this has enlightened you on the history and the maddening fun of rotisserie drafting. This is just the first part of the series, and next time I’ll jump in to the meat and potatoes, my favorite part, roto strategy. Don’t miss it as I’m unveiling every bit of strategy I know that will undoubtedly be used against me shortly after the article goes live. In the meantime, go out of your way to try a rotisserie draft!

As always, thanks for reading and please hit the forums to let me know what you think and if you have any questions for the next article!

Recent Winchester draft deck. Five-color aggro!

 

Justin Parnell

@JParnell1 on Twitter

Official Facebook Cube Drafting Page: http://www.facebook.com/MTGCubeDrafting

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