Hey all!
Went to my second draft ever last night (first was 12 or 13 years ago) and had studied up on Aetherdrift since I’d asked about the event and was told it’s pretty much always just drafting whatever the latest set was.
When I got there, though, it turned out the regulars wanted to do a chaos draft, so I ended up trying to make a deck out of everything currently standard legal. Needless to say, this went incredibly poorly for a relative newcomer like me and I ended up going 0-3 (as expected, I assumed I’d lose since drafting is hard, even for experienced players).
After the first match, though, it was pretty clear that this was going nowhere, and the space was a bit louder than anticipated and I could feel myself getting exhausted pretty early. While I finished out the evening playing all 3 matches to completion, I was wondering what the ettiquite around dropping early actually is. Is it OK to bow out if it’s clear that my picks were trash and there’s no chance? Or if not, can I just let my opponents for matches 2 and 3 know that it’ll be pretty one sided and preemptively concede so they don’t have to waste any time on rolling me? Or is it expected to just take the lumps and play through the whole thing?
It would be different if I thought I could put up a fight even if I lost every game, but I was having trouble getting any amount of damage through, or impacting board state at all. So the whole thing just felt like I was wasting my opponent’s time.
So yeah, just hoping for an ettiquite lesson. Not rules (I know I can technically drop any time for any reason if I let the TO know), but the social angle.
This was great, very comprehensive. Thank you!
Yeah nobody said or did anything egregious. I could just see my second opponent getting bored and kind of annoyed even of she kept it to herself. At least I think she was, I’m admittedly not great at reading faces. I think most people had friends there, so I felt like every moment they were spending on our games was going to be time they couldn’t be getting in a real game between rounds. Lots of friendly side games seemed to be happening between rounds. If that’s not actually an issue, then I won’t worry about it if I go again.
And yeah, the format change didn’t really change my odds of winning, but it threw me off and since I don’t really have fundamentals yet, it kind of felt like the floor falling out under me. Not a big deal though, just harder to learn from.
I can only speculate about what your opponent might have been thinking, but if she really wanted to play with her friends then she is also free to concede at any time. Since she didn’t, she must have seen some value in staying in the match. To be fair, some people are not suited for the “patient teacher” role and maybe that was the case for her. But there’s only so much management of other people’s feelings you can do. Also… she has basically unlimited time to play casual side games with her friends whenever she isn’t in the middle of a tournament.
One thing that I, as an introvert, like about sanctioned tournaments is that nobody has to explain or justify why they are there. You are there to play a pre-determined amount of Magic, against algorithmically selected opponents, you will play exactly that much Magic and will stop playing afterwards, and you are entitled to play because you paid your entry fee.