Wordle, but M:TG Drafting

What would happen if you tried to make a Magic: The Gathering draft experience that was kindof like Wordle, in the sense that you could play it in 5 minutes and then get a score that ranks you against other players? Would that be fun?

I built it!

Introducing Mtgbattles.com, the site for free five minute M:TG drafts. The basic play loop is this:

• Each day there are 5 daily drafts (Current, Classic, Cube, Crazy and Chaos), each featuring a different format.
• You enter a draft (even without an account), pick your cards, build your deck
• Forge, the open source M:TG AI plays 100+ games with your deck against the rest of your pod
• Your deck gets a Battle Ranking (basically an ELO score)
• You can compare how you did vs. other human drafters who saw the same draft (with an account) Collect gem

Every human drafter sees the same cards in the same order. Will you have the same Pack 1 Pick 1 as the majority? Will you find more draft synergy than your opponents? What cards did you take that no one else did? How did that work out for you? Is hate-drafting against bots ever worth it?

After the draft is completed, you can build a deck with the cards you drafted. Then you get three results: 1) how well did you do against the decks produced by the rest of your drafting pod? 2) how well did you do against the "mirror drafter" - a bot that sat in your seat and made its own choices? and 3) how much better (or worse) is your deck than the decks constructed by every other human player to finish that Daily Draft?

To figure out the answer to the last question, we run an all-bot instance of each daily draft. The AI in the player's seat is the "mirror drafter" - your silicon nemesis. It sees all the choices you did. Then that pod builds decks and those decks are ranked. They become the "standard candle" decks that all other human-submitted draft decks will be paired against to determine which human-submitted decks are strongest. This is way better than pitting all of the human decks against each other directly, since often those decks will look similar/be the same colors/archetype. It also encourages well-rounded deck construction more typical of a real draft.

Mtgbattles.com offers 5 distinct drafts every day, one from each of 5 broad categories: Current, Classic, Cube, Crazy, and Chaos.

Current - A standard draft from recent sets that are still tournament legal
Classic - A standard draft from a not-recent set(s) that at one point were tournament legal (but maybe from 20 years ago)
Cube - A cube draft from a random cube that we support
Crazy - Crazy formats mostly invented by myself. Read on.
Chaos - This is basically Chaos draft, but with a twist. Read on.

Wow! Five C's! Collect gem Collect gem Collect gem Collect gem Collect gem I got this idea from the hucksters who sell diamonds.

What are the CraZy formats? This list is sure to expand. At the moment we have:

• The Three-Body Problem — Three players draft three Edge of Eternities Play Boosters each. Packs come back after just two other picks, so cards wheel fast.

• Ravnica Rumble — Ten players each open one pack from five different Ravnica sets. The order varies by seat, so the pack passed to you might be from a different set than the one you opened that round.

• Innistrad Moon Cycle — One pack each of Innistrad, Shadows over Innistrad, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, and Innistrad Remastered. Hooooowllll!

• Zendikar Expedition — One pack each of Zendikar, Battle for Zendikar, and Zendikar Rising. Build a landfall deck across three generations of the plane.

• Kamigawa Neon Upgrade — Draft Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, and Saviors of Kamigawa, then jump to the cyberpunk future for a Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Collector Booster. Have fun when your one good rare is off-color.

• Collector’s X — Four players each draft three Collector Boosters from the same set, chosen for the challenge. Expect packs loaded with rares and alternate art.

• Double Double Masters — Four players draft four packs alternating between Double Masters and Double Masters 2022. Each pack has two rare or mythic slots, and you take two cards every pick.

• IP Slop Draft — Eight players each get three 15-card boosters from one big pool of licensed crossover cards, including Secret Lair drops. Every eligible card has equal odds of showing up, with no rarity slots. Enjoy playing your favorite card game but with Spiderman, for some reason.

If you have ideas for additional CraZy draft formats, please send them in using the feedback buttons that are everywhere.

But Wait! There is More...

I built a "Pack It Up Simulator" which allows you to play the Chaos draft format popularized by Ben Bateman and his YouTube show. Chaos draft is basically drafting from all of the packs of M:TG ever made. Ben's main twist on it is that it is a pick 2 format, which really helps decks to become more cohesive.

Spin the Wall of Chaos for your three mystery boosters , choose the order to open them, and pick two cards at a time against three bots. Build your forty, then let Forge play the games. A draft can put packs from very different eras together, which seems like a good way to find out whether cards printed twenty years apart can agree on a game plan (they can't typically; this is the central challenge).

Cravat Emperor

It's not perfect. The obvious problem is that MtgForge is currently much worse than humans at playing Magic. If you draft a clever control deck or something full of non-obvious combos, you won't score as high as you might. It is fairly good at playing ramp strategies. Open source M:TG engines are getting better though, so maybe in the future this can be addressed. There's a Monte Carlo Tree Search option in Forge that I haven't experimented with yet and there are several other projects also trying to carry the AI performance flag. Integrating one or both might be possible later. (It's a world that I'm resisting getting sucked into, but already I've been making modifications to my local version of MtgForge to improve performance.) It's still fun, I think.

Explore this completed daily draft →

There's also a bunch of bonus features. I've actually been working on this project for several years (so it's very exciting to finally kick it out the door). In addition to drafting, mtgbattles.com supports some constructed play. There's a deck builder that allows you to build any sort of deck you want using all of the cards. Then you can submit that deck to one of two (currently) leagues running on the site - the Anything Goes League and Eternal 93/94 League (see the ruleset). Decks submitted to these leagues are constantly playing games against each other. They get assigned ratings. You can iterate and create different versions of the same deck and see if they get stronger or weaker.

So if you want to make a deck with 40 Lightning Bolts and 20 Mox Rubies , that would be a valid deck in the "anything goes" format.

That's Mostly It

Go try it!

Send bugs and feedback!

Addenda

Mtgbattles.com is mostly about the daily drafts and that is the part of the product that is the most polished. However, I have also been messing around with two other things: constructed deck battles and genetically optimizing decks. These things are not quite ready for prime time and have been unceremoniously stuffed into the deep submenus of the top nav bar of the site.

I will write a longer blog post about my experiments with trying to genetically optimize Magic: The Gathering decks over the course of millions of AI vs. AI games. It's very slow but it does actually work. I built some simple harness software that allows me to turn every computer in my house into a MTG botnet that just plays matches forever as fast as possible, in parallel. It tops out at about 1000 games/minute. Collect gem I am thinking about ways to turn this into a sort of super nerdy and weird async multiplayer game about directed evolution and intelligent design, possibly with gambling. It hasn't come together for me yet.

There Can Be Only One (shedletsky.com account)

I'm doing an experiment where I've created a single account system for all of my hosted web projects, so if you already have an account on shedletsky.com, then you already have a mtgbattles.com account. All my future projects will also use shedletsky.com accounts. There are only shedletsky.com accounts. I'm hoping that this makes things less complicated operationally instead of more complicated. We'll see. I've never seen anyone else do this, so its probably a subtle footgun. Collect gem

Wrap Up

I've been a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering ever since I started playing it in middle school. Unfortunately I started playing right before Fallen Empires came out, so as a kid I didn't get a chance to open any really cool vintage cards. Only Icatians and Saprolings. The Sarpadian Empires fell for a reason, people (I actually don't know the lore around this). Collect gem

I'll be continuing to work on mtgbattles.com, so if you would like to get an email about it three months from now when you've totally forgotten that it existed, subscribe to email updates .