Deck Generation

[Simown]

Hi Everyone,

I have some questions/comments on deck generation and how to proceed with this, which I'm planning on doing. Input or suggestions would be useful though.

Random deck generation seems flawed, the outcome of building a deck seems to generate >= 95% creatures out of the non-land cards. A bias on creature cards is probably good for randomly generated decks as in limited - but this seems excessive. I've generated several decks today that had no instant, sorceries or enchantments (not counting enchantment creatures). The ability to trigger "Heroic" or "Prowess" for example, is just not common enough - and devalues playing them sort of cards.

Some of the reasons I can see that may cause this outcome:

• Creature and non-creature cards are not retrieved independently from the database
• There are more creature spells in a block(?)
• The card pool selected to generate the deck might not contain non-creature spells
• Creatures are prioritized over non-creatures (see below)

As the DeckGenerator selects a card pool of 180-200 cards randomly out of the selected sets and then goes on to use DeckBuilder to prioritize and select the "best" cards in this randomly generated pool - the creatures will come out on top (since all spell cards have the same overrided RateCallback, and creatures have a higher priority generally). We are selecting random cards and then attempting to prioritize them? Looking at it, it seems like certain cards will always come out on top (which is ok for say - drafting), and others will have a very slim chance of showing in the generated deck.

Aside from the mechanics, the GUI for the dialog and the deck generation code live together in DeckGenerator it would be nice to separate them and keep the UI and logic distinct.

• Is anyone happy with the deck generation at the moment? I don't want to change any existing functionality if it's wanted.
• Do we want a random deck to be generated? Or what is the deck generator meant to achieve?

Following the changes to current deck generation it would be nice to add a bit of customisation to the deck generation: ratio of creatures/non-creatures, if non-basic lands are available etc. What options would be useful?

Any feedback/comments are appreciated.

Thanks.

[LevelX]

You're very welcome to improve deck generation. I'm aware of some flaws of the current solution.

Feel free to change in any way. There are no restrictions to take care of.
At least it should work after the improvement.

I can think of creating some profiles to select one before generating a new deck.
Like "Creature heavy" - "Non Creature heavy".
Or only some more adjust prameters for deck generating.

At least it can be a large task to do this nearly perfectly.

[Simown]

Thanks

I think profiles is a good suggestion to quickly customise the deck style, and maybe some more advanced options after that. I'll begin with small steps and see where we get to.

I agree it's going to be a large task - especially balancing the CMC cost of all cards that have been "randomly" selected. I can think of a few ideas though.