Making Draft Great Again

Hello friends!

The Draft Mode is entering its 7th year of existence soon and while it has provided joy in millions of matches since its inception, something is rotten in the state of Draft. Balance issues have plagued the game mode for years. In the past, the only tool at our disposal to battle the balance issues was to adjust the rate at which certain cards show up (making them more or less likely to show up). While this tool helps, it is fairly limited on how much it can accomplish. Looking at the data, two nations - USA and Finland are head and shoulders above the rest in terms of winrate and Japan and Britain are struggling hard. The rest is more or less ok, though a few tweaks can be made. So we are dealing with pretty severe balance issues that have made the draft mode very narrow in scope and a miserable experience for newer players to get into. Things are about to change.

In the upcoming fall update Air Supremacy, taking off on the 23rd of September, we will see two important changes to the draft mode.

First, we can now ban specific cards from showing up as draft picks and we can allow specially chosen cards in the Reserve Pool to be able to show up as a draft pick. This means we can prohibit cards that are so strong in draft that they can warp the whole thing from showing up and we can allow struggling draft nations to dip into their Reserve Pool to shore up their weaknesses. In other words, until now, the draft pool has been the same as the active pool for ranked battles, but balancing for draft is completely different from balancing for the active constructed meta. And as our focus has always been on the constructed side, the draft portion has suffered. Now that the two are separate we can finally control the balancing much better.

We will still try to maintain the active pool in the draft pool as much as possible, to not have it too jarring for newer players, but you will clearly notice the inclusion of reserved cards now when you draft, especially the nations seeing the most changes (Japan, Britain and the USA). Note that the draft deck list will show you which cards in the deck are reserved. This may feel a bit strange to some, but we deemed it better to show this to help players understand why they are seeing cards they may not otherwise be familiar with.

Moving forward, we will continue to update the draft pool lists, especially when new expansions drop and big rotation changes occur. The goal is for all the nations to have roughly the same winrate, so expect to see some tweaks as we adjust things to find the best balance. The full list of active cards banned from the draft pool and reserved cards allowed is public knowledge and will be provided for those interested.

The second change we are making is introducing a draft matchmaking system using a hidden MMR. Right now there are almost no matchmaking rules for draft, meaning anyone can pretty much be matched against anyone. The only meaningful matchmaking right now is that we try to match you against someone with the same score in your current draft run. This lack of rules is especially harsh for newer players to the draft format, creating a difficult stumbling block for them. Matching on the same score is still part of the matchmaking, but with a hidden MMR players will be matched against players of similar skill level much more often. This may be unfair to veteran draft players, but it makes the overall experience a lot more fair for the rest of the player base. 

It is important to note that this new hidden MMR (based on the Elo system) is separate from the one we use for constructed matches. So players will have two hidden ratings now, one to indicate their skill level for constructed battles and another to indicate their skill level for draft matches. There is no direct connection between the two, so it is entirely possible for a player to have a high rating in one and low in the other.

Note that it takes time for an Elo based system to fully kick in, as ratings are adjusted based on results to find the correct skill level a player has. So the matchmaking will be a bit chaotic for the next few weeks, but should stabilize soon.

Just like with the matchmaking formula for constructed matches, we will not provide exact details on the one for draft matchmaking. Suffice to say players should have a lot more even and balanced experience in draft post Air Supremacy. We hope you enjoy and let’s also hope we don’t have to wait 7 more years for the next update to the draft mode. See you on the draft battlefield, commander!

Here is the full list of cards removed and added to the draft pool: