Welcome back, Dice Masters fans! Now that we're mid-OP season, I imagine many of us have been seeing the same characters coming up frequently. Maybe you're getting a little sick of seeing Mutate #666 in every single team. Maybe you wish Human Torch didn't seem like an eternal flame on the opposing lineup, or that Wind Rider would lose her grip on the reins. Maybe you feel guilty about using that stuff, and you wish you could branch out a little more, but in the interest of staying competitive, you have to use that streamlined, optimal team. What's a dieficianado to do?The answer - well, an answer, anyway - comes from Katie and I messing around to try and figure out a format that encourages use of more offbeat cards, without outright banning anything. We also wanted something that evokes something of the luck-of-the-draw, do-with-what-you-get element of sealed deck hybrid without actually making you buy boosters every time, to help you practice that aspect of the game. We settled on a draft-like format involving blind die pulls, with a few mulligan rules to keep things interesting.
We're calling it Daredevil Draft - DDD for short - for entirely un-PC reasons.
What You'll Need
Setup is very simple: you need a die bag and a full set of the Marvel Dice Masters character/non-basic action dice - just one of each should be fine. If you don't have any of a particular die, you can agree with your opponent on whether you just remove that character, or use substitute dice to represent them. Ideally each player should have their own bag and set of dice, but you can have players take turns drafting if you only have one.
Drafting Like Matt Murdoch, And We Don't Mean Legal Papers
The idea is pretty simple: you're going to draw eight dice from the bag, and make a team using your favorite card (or at least whichever you find most useful) for each those dice. Yes, this does mean you'll get some suboptimal stuff - War Machine without Iron Man, Phoenix when you have a lot of backline warmers, and so on. This is Daredevil Draft - deal with it! It's about getting out of your comfort zone and doing what you can with what you have. That said, it's not fun to be completely outmatched by the luck of the draw, so we've added in a few rules to compensate for this.
The first is that you can mulligan. After you draw eight dice, if you have drawn no characters who have a card with a purchase cost of less than three, or two or fewer characters who have a card with a purchase cost of four or less, you can call a mulligan; put all eight dice back into the bag and draw again. This is to prevent you from having a huge problem getting some bootstrapping characters to start the game with. Do note that this will include some characters you are more used to playing with more expensive versions of, like Human Torch and Storm! They have cheap versions, so they still count; it's up to you if you want to go with better abilities over easy-to-field characters.
The second rule is what we like to call the 'nope' mulligan. After you draw your first four dice, you have the opportunity to say 'nope' and discard them. If you do so, all four dice are discarded and not returned to the bag; you will not be able to draw them this game. You only get one 'nope' per game; if you use it, and your next first four are also terrible, them's the breaks - you're pretty likely to get some decent stuff for your back four, anyway, and you can use the normal mulligan rule if it applies. Note that if you mulligan after a nope, you don't put the four dice back - they're gone for good.
The idea behind the Nope is to protect you from a hand that you feel is very likely to be awful, that wouldn't otherwise be protected by the normal mulligan rule; say, Angel and three large, expensive characters you don't like. There's a cost involved, too - If you get <insert your favorite die here> and three stinkers? You've got a hard decision to make; you can drop the bads, but you will lose out on your prize.
The last rule is some thematic internal policing: the blind blunder. You're throwing these heroes together at a moment's notice; like with many sudden teamups, not everyone is bound to be ready to play, or interested in sticking to the plan. As such, once both you and your opponent have settled on their eight dice, you each get to choose one die from your opponent's eight, and pick the card for that die. I heartily recommend picking a less-used variant for a popular character, if that comes up; it'd be valid to choose an expensive version of the one card your opponent has with a low purchase cost, but that's kind of a jerky thing to do. Use it to flatten the power curve a little, or to dodge that one annoying card you hate, or just to shake things up with a card you haven't seen much, but keep in mind: your opponent will be doing the same to you.
After that, you and your opponent will each pick your seven cards and dice amounts; there's no need to take turns, go and figure that out for a few minutes and then reveal your choices simultaneously. After that, take turns picking action cards; technically you can have duplicates in normal play if both players choose the same cards, but I find that in DDD, actions can frequently play a bigger role, so it's nice to enforce a little variety. Play a normal 20-life game from there.
What We Tried, Or The Blind Leading The Blind
We've gone through a couple iterations of this play style; initially we had no mulligans at all, and we very quickly found how easy it was to get a team that was way too expensive to be practical. This was before I'd crunched the numbers on purchase costs; we now know how heavily upward-skewed the set is, and would probably have started with a mulligan rule if we knew then what we do now. The 'nope' evolved in the very next game, after both Katie and I pulled one reasonable die and three...not so reasonable dice for our first four, and wound up with teams that just barely failed to qualify for mulligans, resulting in a long, grindy game.
This helped, but we still found ourselves wanting a little more assurance of something that we liked. At first, we tried a fiat, where you could pick one card before drawing, and place that on your team, but we found that led to a lot of the Usual Suspects coming in. So we limited the pick to starter characters only...which turned that from 'Usual Suspects' to 'Mutate #666'. Looking to counteract that, we settled on the Blind Blunder rule as a penalty for using the fiat; we liked that, but didn't like that we still found ourselves taking Mutate #666. In the end, we realized the that Blind Blunder would help handle our issues with the Usual Suspects popping up, and create some (hopefully) fun interaction between the players, without explicitly banning any particular card (which we didn't want to do).
Our Blind Guess
We're fairly happy with the ruleset as it stands, but given that we here at The Reserve Pool represent just a few different lines of thought and opinion, we realize there could well be things done to make it even better. If you give it a try, and feel something doesn't work, or find a rule that you think helps it out, by all means, let us know! We're pretty excited to suggest something to kick the game up a little and get your tactical juices flowing, so if there's any way we can make it better, we're all ears.
Use the randomizing function in excel to select 16 distinct card numbers. If you get triples of anything, throw out the last one and use the 17th (18th, 19th...) selection instead. Then take your 16 random cards and shuffle them. Deal out in hands of 8 each. Draft one and hand 7 cards to your opponent. Continue until you have your team! Assemble your dice and go.
ReplyDeleteYeah, a card draft like this would also work to shake up rosters! I think I prefer 'here's a base team, work out the details' to the normal draft process, though - you wind up with some more moving parts to work with, so I feel like you get more of a chance to flex your strategic muscles. You also have a little easier time avoiding needing to mulligan (or play a really slow game) because you wound up drawing too many Things and Doc Ocks and other pricey characters.
DeleteMy favorite 2 person draft variant is a similar concept: Put 1 die from every hero in the bag, draw out 20. Each player removes 2 dice from consideration leaving 16 total, draft 1 2 2 1 then alternating until all the dice are gone, Pick cards for your 8 dice then fill the team per the normal rules. I originally ran this with just 16 dice from the bag, but like the pre-game bans to eliminate things like beast being the only churn character drawn or the like.
ReplyDeleteThis is cool although I like the card draft a bit better - since it almost always involves taking a look at alternate versions of characters that don't normally get played and then trying to draft the rest of your team around that. If you're just choosing dice I'm thinking the same versions of the characters will be played again and again.
DeleteI do agree that the card draft will force you to use more versions of a character, and I like that aspect of it...I just feel that there's enough cards with underwhelming abilities that doing so risks a game where one (or both) player has way too many 'trash' characters to make a coherent strategy, let alone a winning one. You could argue that's fair because both players can have that happen, but then you wind up with a really slow, grindy game, and that doesn't seem too much fun to me; if you like big slugfests between less useful characters like Thing and Doc Ock, more power to you.
DeleteJoe's dice system is Uncannily (sorry) similar to ours. We even draw 20 and select 1 each to return to the bag. We just draft 1 die alternately though. I let my daughter go first, it gives me an excuse when she beats me again. If we want to keep going after 2 to 3 plays we draft from the dice left in the bag. Most of our games however are not drafted, we draft whenever we want to shake things up.
DeleteI m attracted to the idea of a cradle draft, but we never use the same character on both teams.
Cheers - Chris
Another option is the MDM randomizer found here: http://opinionator.net/mdmR/
ReplyDeleteYou can choose to either draft from a pool, or directly set teams. There are optional settings to balance both cost and rarity.
I like the idea of the Blind Blunder rule....definitely going to try that!
Cradle = card, sorry
ReplyDelete