Predicting Human Card Selection in Magic: The Gathering with Contextual Preference Ranking
This addresses drafting challenges in games like Magic: The Gathering, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of drafting in Magic: The Gathering by proposing a contextual preference network to compare card deck extensions, resulting in improved evaluation over previous methods.
Drafting, i.e., the selection of a subset of items from a larger candidate set, is a key element of many games and related problems. It encompasses team formation in sports or e-sports, as well as deck selection in many modern card games. The key difficulty of drafting is that it is typically not sufficient to simply evaluate each item in a vacuum and to select the best items. The evaluation of an item depends on the context of the set of items that were already selected earlier, as the value of a set is not just the sum of the values of its members - it must include a notion of how well items go together. In this paper, we study drafting in the context of the card game Magic: The Gathering. We propose the use of a contextual preference network, which learns to compare two possible extensions of a given deck of cards. We demonstrate that the resulting network is better able to evaluate card decks in this game than previous attempts.