Okay, leagues need some major work done.

After paying 25g to sign up for the silver league, the cards I recieved are next to unworkable in any combination. I've got dozens of buildings, spells and enchantments, but incredibly few creatures.

Now, I like the basic premise of leagues....everyone gets a random set of cards, some good, some bad, and has to make do. On paper, it sounds great, but in practice, it's flawed. When you completely randomize the cards you're being given, there's nothing to say that you won't get nothing but incredibly awesome cards, or incredibly crappy ones. I think a better system would be to give the players something along the lines of 18 cards per faction, and 4 cross faction. Of those 18, you would get 3 of the starter building (grove, magma chamber, etc), 3 random buildings (such as bone fortress or ivory spire), 3 random spells, 3 random enchantments, and six creatures of varying strength/rarity. This would be a big step towards fixing the current imbalance of certain players being unable to compete simply because of the hand they were dealt.

And speaking of being unable to compete, another problem has arisen in the fact that the leagues are essentially being dominated by a few really good players. It might be a good idea to add different levels of leagues, such as Beginner, Intermediate and Experienced. Your eligibilty to join any of these leagues would be determined by your overall ranking.

I agree that the disparity in awesomeness of a deck needs a check. But I really don't want to see that done with X amount of buildings, X amount of spells, X amount of creatures, etc. So much of the fun of league is this "make it work" mentality. It's about tailoring your strategy to your deck. So if your deck is building heavy, or spell heavy, or creature heavy, you're going to be going a different route.

It forces you outside your comfort zone, both in terms of strategy and domain. So I don't think it should be constrained by domain either. I haven't played with anything except dark legion. But in silver league right now, that is not an option for me based on what I got.

Part of the good-player-domination concern is mitigated by the fact you can only play someone 3 times. But maybe some kind of battlenet-type rank matching in league? I don't know. I'm just talking now.

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-Minds

Also: if you're in two different leagues (say, purely hypothetically, Release and Silver), it'd be fab if the tabs up top had two different labels. Rather than tournament and tournament.

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-Minds

I'd like to see you be able to pick up to two domains to receive cards from, or barring that, a selection of cards from the basic starter decks that give you a basic platform to start a deck from to help ease problems involving inadequate buildings/weak creatures.

In Silver there's no way I can create a deck for two of the domains because the basics simply aren't available.

I think that's the point. It forces you to play the other two domains.

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-Minds

this is draft play, and draft play you must learn to make due with what you have to work with not what you want to play neccissarily, as far as decks someone will get lucky some will get bad luck its the nature, but in play ive seen more games lost due to bad plays then bad cards. I have never felt that draft play is a beginners format, you have to have a quick grasp on the game itself and the deckbuilding, and deckbuilding is the hardest part of most tcgs. In this everyone is a newcomer those with a basis in tactics and tcgs have an extream advantage of experience though. Drafts flat out are not a format for everyone.

I'd like propose an alternate scoring system.
Simply base rankings on win percentage multiplied by percentage of the allotted games completed. If you want a tiebreaker stat you can use most games played. Though it wwould be less likely to be needed since continued play would keep changing one's win percentage anyway.

Here's my reasoning for prefering this system.

For one it makes it far far simplier to assess your current ranking in the league. All you need to know is where your current win percentage stands verses the other players' win percentages. You automatically know that everyone still has the potential to go up and down between 0 and 100 so you dont have to go check how many games they have left to play or calculate their potential score or anything else.

Another reason is that is makes the order in which you play people irrelevant; unlike the current system in which the order that you play people can end up affecting your score. Here's an example. Let's says that it's week 1 of league, I've played 20 games, and I've won 15 of them. Under my proposed system that would rank you at (15/20)*(15/15)=75%. Under the current system you have to know wether I won the games during the first 15 or during the the last 5 which would go to tie breakers. So of the possible 45 points for the week I could have scored anywhere from 45(100%) to 35(77.77%). This
possible score variation in the current system encourages you to play weaker opponents during your allotted games to lock in a good score and then to go after stronger opponents who have not yet locked in so that you can have a shot at causing them to have a lower score while only risking tiebreaker points. Then after everyone does get locked into a score, for those who are tied the game degenerates into who can spend the most time playing since you only need to be a better than 50% player in order to start generating tie breaker points and you're likely to be gaining them at a similar rate to those you are tied with by vittue of that fact that you were tied. By instead letting players' games continue to contribute to their win percentages, their scores will start to diversify as they continue to head towards the win percentages that most accurately represents each player.

Wait, if I'm understanding you correctly, what's to stop me from playing one game, winning it, and staying at 100% win ratio?

I actually think the 15 games/tie breaker point system works phenomenally well, because frankly I don't have as much time to play this game as Baumgardner =P Under a percentage system, a mediocre player such as myself can make up for that fact simply (but only) by playing lots and lots of games and crossing their fingers they win more than lose. The benefit goes to those who can grind at their score, which certainly sucks the joy out of it for me.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic, and I'm actually really glad you brought this system up. It's important to put every idea to the test just to see.

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-Minds

Xibvert, Ya, I'm not liking it all to much based on what minds said. Its just a grind fest. Plus what's to keep you from playing a bunch of weak players and score 100% and suppressing all the weaker players scores.

I wouldn't mind seeing an elimination based League. Where losses are recorded until you're eliminated and perhaps kills are recorded too.

In response to mindtheatre:

What stops you from winning one game and staying 100% win ratio is nothing. but the system I proposed was your win percentage times your percentage of allotted games completed. So if you're being given 15 games a week for say 4 weeks. you would end up with (1/1)*(1/60)=0.0167=1.67%. Simply not completing your games to keep a higher win ratio it not going to score well after you multiply by percentage of allotted games completed.

A far the concern that a mediocre player might play lots of games and up with a higher score, it's more likely that mediocre player will score better with less games played than with more. Say your example of winning 1 game and having 100%. That is easier for a mediocre player to achieve than going 2 for 2 or 10 for 10. So if you're concerned that a weak player might score well in a system where more games are factored into their score than you should be more concerned that a weak player might score well in a system that factors less games into their score.

You can't just indefinitely play to increase your score unless you can indefinitely win without losing. And if you can indefinitely win without losing, then why is that not deserving of a high score?

If you're an 80% player than playing an extra ten games doesn't get you anything if you only win 8 of them. And the same goes if you play an extra 100 games and only win 80. The higher you get your percentage the harder it becomes to raise it. You have to actually be consistently winning at a better ratio to increase your score. And the higher you score the harder it becomes.

So you really only want to play more games if you feel your currently being underrated otherwise you're not going to gain anything.

And in reponse to Vaylen:

If it's so easy to just play all weak player and get 100% wins why didn't everyone just do that in the current system? That would be a good plan in almost any scoring system. The unfortunate fact is that unless you are to actually some degree good or part of an elaborate conspiracy it's unlikely you'll be able to pull off this I'll just beat everyone strategy. And both my proposed system and the current system would treat this the same way. Winning all your games ranks you number 1 and defer to a tiebreaker stat incase of multiple such players. Also how are you going to suppressing other players score other than by directly defeating them? I'm not sure what you meant by that last comment.