Starting Hand Drafting

[JessyIsCute]

I would love to see 2 new game option for this game:

Starting hand Project Drafting:
2 sets of 5 cards for each players in a Draft.

Starting hand Prelude Drafting
4 preludes but in a draft.

These both make the game more competetive (by adding more strategy and descision making and removing the high roll options where an opponent could have the two strongest cards of the game etc) and many people already play with these rules.

[Qarqar]

Neither of the two make the game more competitive. Fryx was most right not to put this in the game and consistently oppose these ideas throughout the years.

[Yahyra]

Thanks for sharing opinions all.

As discussed in another thread; any changes that anyone wants implemented on BGA need to be approved by the designer (Fryx) and there also apparently needs to be some funding or compensation.

Hope this helps!

[moods-]

Neither of the two make the game more competitive. Fryx was most right not to put this in the game and consistently oppose these ideas throughout the years.

Can you elaborate?

[MattiaDixon]

Yup, I also agree drafting the starting hand would help but it's not in the rules.

At least in every live tournament I've played that is mandatory, as otherwise luck would play an even more major role

[FrankJones]

Neither of the two make the game more competitive. Fryx was most right not to put this in the game and consistently oppose these ideas throughout the years.

Can you elaborate?

I'll try, even though it wasn't comment

Keep 5 pass 5 doesn't change the fact that one person might get 5 high tier cards and another player might get none.

And how many high tier cards can aa player with a bad starting 10 reasonably be expected to have passed to him or her during the drafting? Someone's 6th - 10th best cards aren't likely to help all that much.

so, I keep Earth office, Earth catapult, Olympus, Mars, AI central. something like that. I pass the rest. How good are those other 5 cards goi to be? And if someone had a terrible hand, now he keeps 5 bad cards and receives my trash?

Same with preludes. Someone gets only bad ones. Keeps a bad one, passes others, and now receives someone else's junk preludes.

[FrankJones]

Wait, I misread, my apologies.

So, the idea would be, give each player 5 project cards. Keep 1, pass 4, then repeat until everyone has 5 cards.

Then repeat that until everyone has 10?

That could help, but everyone would know so many of the cards in play. The game already has that mechanic by way of the generations 2-end drafts, where each player only has one secret card from the research phase each generation.

That's not necessarily a problem - some games have that as a standard mechanic: 7 Wonders and blood rage.

Regardless, as has been pointed out, the Fryx family isn't interested, so it's a non-discussion other than for intellectual curiosity.

[marathus]

Neither of the two make the game more competitive. Fryx was most right not to put this in the game and consistently oppose these ideas throughout the years.

Can you elaborate?

Sure (it was me). There are so many reasons… I’ll try to make a coherent list.
1. Starting hands become predictable. Supposing 2x5 draft there are only two unknown cards per player... and they aren’t that „unknown” either if you’re facing (and you yourself are) a competent player. Any deviation from what you would expect during the draft hints at a card your opponent initially kept. Very often the unknown card is played early anyway. There are more subtle ways to guess the card too.
2. Card draw becomes much stronger than it already is because it breaks away from the pattern.
3. Keeping speculative/synergistic cards is much worse against a competent player because they might be able to deny your plans or at the very least know what you’re up to. And it’s visible whether you kept some or not.
4. Initial hand clarity messes with award funding mechanic.
5. Most hands you consider bad aren’t even bad and don’t need initial draft to make them playable.
6. Luck evens out in a vacuum across all stages of the game.
7. Every card’s value is relative. Imagine having to cut a bad prelude like MoholeExcavation because your opponent has RoboticWorkforce… not to mention EE targets. I can see Kelp+EE being a common scenario. Passing it to your opponent doesn’t seem that scary. You know where it is. You can counter it. But what if you get EcologyExperts in your pack of 4 preludes? The whole concept of drafting both makes absolutely no sense. And you have to. Drafting one of the two is even worse.
8. Initial draft is prone to psychology at a high level and unreadable otherwise.
9+. I didn’t even mention how corps affect the whole thing.

There’s more. What drafting the initial hand actually fixes is it reduces the number of EC+AI opening hands. But the strength of these hands is dependent on preludes/corp and most of the time you have the means to at least battle that setup without the initial draft. And why not mention games where initial hand drafting actually makes such situations worse by allowing your opponent to scoop up more science/earth/plant(NRA) tags?

If anyone actually wants more competitive rules for tournaments they should instead ban a corp or two depending on the format. E.g. 2p — ban PointLuna. 4p — ban TharsisRepublic. Banning Vitor/SaturnSystems for 2p/4p respectively goes a long way if you have players of varying strength at a tourney too.

That's not necessarily a problem - some games have that as a standard mechanic: 7 Wonders and blood rage.

That’s one of the reasons why there are more 700+elo TFM players than 500+elo 7 Wonders players. Same goes for Blood Rage.

Most people advocating for initial draft rules have not once reached 700elo rank let alone a higher one. I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just that a lot of players overfocus on patterns (specific cards/combos) that tend to show in their games. Saying initial draft adds balance is a shallow perspective. Corp/prelude mulligan has some merit if it comes at a cost but it’s just unnecessary. It’s a card game. It won’t always be balanced.

[FrankJones]

Well said, no disagreement from me.