Why (and How) You Should Draft Fire Emblem Games

when I was a kid and Fire Emblem was a lot less popular than it is now it was often hard to find people that played the series in real life so instead I turned to game FAQs which was filled with advice of wildly varying quality hot takes and most importantly people to draft Fire Emblem games with drafting is when you have a group of three or four people and take turns picking units until there are no units left to pick then you play the game using the units you selected all other units can't be used and need to be benched or killed super simple and it will be a familiar concept if you're into sports or trading card games drafting is one of my favorite ways to play fire emblem for a few reasons first when you draft a fire emblem game you end up using units that you wouldn't normally use in a shadow dragon draft I'm playing right now for example I drafted Tiki Aaron and RIS that's three units I almost never use long term in Shadow Dragon so just picking them is going to freshen up a game I've played multiple times additionally I'll also have to go without some units that I usually do use I almost always use barstand augma but this time I didn't get them so I'm gonna have to do without in Shadow Dragon this completely changes the early game because the first few Maps can be pretty tricky but even more so when you only have two or three units available instead of an entire Army another reason I enjoy drafts is that they force you to evaluate units a little bit differently than you would in a typical run of a fire emblem game instead of just looking at who the best combat unit is or who the best staffer is how replaceable they are is heavily emphasized so let's look at engage Hortensia is a unit that frequently sits towards the top of engaged tier lists because she's the best staffer in the game but in our drafts of engage Hortensia usually didn't get picked up until after the first round of the draft at the earliest sometimes after the second this was because most of the players felt the gap between Hortensia and the next best staffer wasn't as big as the gap between the best combat units and their Replacements so people wanted to pick their combat units for first since they felt using a different staffer to replace Hortensia would be easier than using a different combat unit to replace units like kigetsu panette and Marin basically in a draft format good units with difficult to replace utility really shoot up in value another example is in a Fire Emblem 7 draft if the rules don't allow undrafted units to steal items then Matthew's value as an early game Thief really goes up because picking him gets you some useful stealable items that you won't have access to without him it's special utility that can't be replaced with another unit I really enjoy thinking about which units are most valuable in a draft context I think it provides a new way to think about games that you may have played multiple times and it's a lot of fun to do evaluation in that context another fun part about drafting is the draft itself Fire Emblem is usually a totally single player experience so it's interesting to gather together with other Fire Emblem enjoyers to do the draft together you get to see whether your evaluations match up with other players or not and you'll have to adjust your plans on the fly as units get picked so there's some Dynamic thinking and Team Planning you need to do during a draft in our shadow dragon drafts my plan was to pick a warper in the first round but I was assigned last pick in the draft craft and the first three players all picked the premier warpers of the game since everybody already had their warpers and the remaining ones weren't nearly as good I felt like the remaining warpers would stay on the board for a few rounds so I decided to pick combat carries instead and just risked the warpers potentially coming off the board this let me get multiple of the competitive combat units that I wanted and I was still able to pick up riffs with my fourth pick of the draft Fire Emblem drafts are full of these little decisions and all of them are tiny risks because if I was wrong about the staffers staying on the board I might have ended up without a good one beyond the planning and the moment-to-moment decisions in draft it's also fun to react to what your friends do it's exciting when someone unexpectedly drafts Navarre and announces their plan to use him as a magical carry and you get to feel kinda big brain when a unit you think is good sticks around for a while and you get to grab them with a later pick than you expected or on the other hand really small brain when a unit you thought would stick around gets snatched up early and you have to adjust your plans once the draft is over and it's time to actually play The Run it's also fun to share updates with the people you drafted with which units got blessed or screwed how you managed chapter one with no one but Martha jagan and what random early game unit you turned into a curate so that you have staff access it just makes for a little bit more of a social experience than Fire Emblem usually is another fun thing about drafts is that you can make your own rules or make them competitive if you want for example two common types of competitive formats for drafts are draft races or ltcs in draft races everyone does their draft and then starts playing at the same time and the winner is whoever finishes first kind of like a speed run alternatively in LTC drafts the winner of the draft is whoever finishes the game in the least amount of turns so if you're more competitively inclined a draft can be a good way to add that to Fire Emblem or if you just want to have a fun casual draft you can do that too that's what most of my drafts are but whatever rules you do will add some wrinkles to how you evaluate units and plan out your team compositions even in casual drafts you can add some interesting restrictions like drafting class in games with reclassing last time I did an Engaged draft we used a point system so each unit caused a certain amount of points to draft and you couldn't go over a certain amount of points in total and that was a pretty fun format that changed where certain units got drafted so those are all the major reasons why I think drafting is really fun but let me talk about how to go about actually doing a draft the first thing you need to do is find a group of people and pick a game you all want to play most drafting used to happen on forums and based on a little Googling it seems like you can still find drafts on forums or Reddit but most of the drafting I've seen seems to happen on Discord these days there are all sorts of Fire Emblem discords including this Channel's Community Discord that do drafts or if you have a few friends that are into Fire Emblem you can just draft with them but once you've got a group you should pick a game some games are better suited to drafts than others ideally you want to pick a game with a big enough cast to support the amount of people you have to draft with for example if you have three drafters Sacred Stones is a good game to choose because that means each player will have about 10 units if you play with more than three drafters people can end up with some pretty small teams on the other hand shadow dragon is great for four drafters as the large cast ensures everyone gets a healthy team of about 13 units you'll also want to pick a difficulty that everyone is comfortable with for our shadow dragon draft we went with Hard 2 as the higher hard difficulties seemed a little too restrictive in a draft context some games are also not great for draft because of the way recruitment Works in them radiant Dawn for example is tricky to draft for because of how unit availability Works units come and go pretty frequently in radiant Dawn and there are a lot of chapters like the one where you only have nephinny and Braum where you have to make units free for the draft to even work you can still draft games like radiant on you just have to think about how you're going to manage its unusual structure depending on which game you pick you'll also want to set up some rules what can undeployed units do for example a common limitation is that undrafted units can meet Shield without weapons and maybe even move around and Shop but they aren't usually allowed to deal damage to enemies and can only be deployed if you need them to recruit another character you'll also have to decide if you want any banned or free units in your draft in our shadow dragon draft for example we made jagen free for the first four chapters because early game shadow dragon isn't very fun without him whoever drafted jagen would be allowed to use him for the entire game we also made Mark III for the entire game since he's the main lord of the game in other games it's really common to make the dancer free as well since there's only one per game and they provide extremely valuable unique utility in a game with really powerful over centralizing units it's also somewhat common to ban a unit a lot of Sacred Stones draft span Seth for example and you can even get more specific with your bands in our shadow dragon draft we thought about banning Sita But ultimately settled on allowing her but Banning using the wing spear which reduces her power a lot you'll have to decide what set of rules is right for your gaming group if you're stumped on what the rules should be though it can help to Google other people's drafts usually drafts on forums start with a description of the rules that you can use for inspiration for your own draft once you have all that set up it's time to actually do the draft you should randomize what order you're gonna pick in and then just jump into it usually drafts operate in a snake order meaning you pick an order and then reverse it so you'll have player one pick then player 2 then 3 and then four and then four will pick again and you'll work your way back up to one this makes it so that the last pick isn't getting the short end of the stick by having to pick last every single round I like to use tear maker to keep track of everyone's picks but you can just type out the draft too that's how it's usually done on forums depending on how many players you have and what game you chose you may find players don't end up with exactly the same amount of units one or two players may have one more unit than the rest you can just live with this if you want usually it's not a big deal for a couple people to have an extra pick at the end of draft since only the weakest units will be left anyway however a common workaround for this is to just let the people with fewer units pick an extra unit from the bottom or low tier of materialist you agree upon to fill out their roster once you have all your teams set up you can go ahead and play the draft if it's a draft race you need to start at the same time but otherwise you can play at your own pace it can be a good idea to set a date when you want the draft to be over by if it's a competitive draft like if you're doing an LTC draft that way there's a clear end date where you can see who had the best run so that's pretty much it drafting is super simple but it's a great way to put your unit evaluation and Team Planning skills to the test in that you need to decide which units are the most valuable to pick then when you're playing it tests your ability to do more with less especially in the early game where you often have to figure out how to beat maps with less resources than usual it's a fun Challenge and it can make a playthrough of a game fresh even if you've already beaten it dozens of times so if that sounds interesting to you then find a group to draft with there's tons of discords doing drafts including our community Discord in the video description and they're a great way to replay your favorite games it's also a good way to meet some other Fire Emblem players the social aspect of Fire Emblem drafts is something that really appeals to me and a lot of the people I met in the Fire Emblem Community I met through doing drafts with them thanks for sticking around to the end of the video besides these weekly videos I also stream regularly so you'll see a schedule for this week's streams on the screen now and if you liked the video and want to see more stuff like it consider hitting the like or subscribe button or stopping by a stream to chat either way have an awesome week foreign [Music]

Channel: ActualLizard

Views: 5,027

Keywords: Actuallizard, fire emblem, drafting, shadow dragon, engage, radiant dawn

Id: XnZDpNF8xKQ

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023