Yeah, I thought about Booster. I play MtG pretty frequently, and drafting is always one of the best parts of it.
However, as you mentioned, cheating is the biggest issue with this type of draft. Who is to say that someone couldn't simply pick any random Pokemon they wanted, put it on their team, and then delete the best Pokemon in the pack so another player couldn't take it?
IRL this would be a lot easier to manage, but it's very difficult over the internet unless a drafting simulator were created. That's why I'd prefer the Rochester version.
That being said, I think it's still worth a shot. I just get the feeling that it might be more prone to cheaters/lengthy.
I'm tempted to get a tournament of some sort together, but these rules would need to be solidified. I'd open an IRC network, but a) I'm not too familiar with it, b) as a corollary to the first, I'm not sure if IRC stores backlogs, I will probably be need, and c) my computer lags itself shitless whenever I do go on IRC. A Skype chatroom would work best imo because it records history and such, but would anyone have a better idea for a means of communication?
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This would also need to all be mostly in one tier, because when you introduce the lower ranked UU poke's to any OU poke's it's not too much of a fight. Select the ones that are used most in OU (like uxie) and add them in the last slot of the pack, but they shouldn't be too present.
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Not necessarily. Plenty of OU teams use UU Pokemon successfully. Additionally, when you limit it to only one tier, you have far less variety. What if you're doing a four-person draft with 36 Pokemon in the pool? If you do multiple, you'll be getting the same Pokemon over and over again. I suppose we could start off that way, however.
Additionally, I also really, really like the idea of basing "rarity" of a Pokemon in a draft by its usage. The top of OU, to use an analogy with Magic, would be the "Mythic Rares," while the mid OU would be "rares." Low OU, BL, and high UU could be "uncommons," leaving the low UU to be "commons." Unfortunately, I realize that this would make a lot of the more viable Pokemon a lot harder to come by. Suggestions are completely welcome.
For future reference: here are the chances of coming by a card of a specific rarity in Magic.
Mythic Rare: 1/8 from 15 =
1:120
Rare: 7/8 from 53 =
1:60
Uncommon: 3 from 60 =
1:20
Common: 10 from 101 =
1:10
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However, the problem about completely randomizing the pool is that, unlike Magic, it can be much more difficult to pick a theme and then be able to carry it out. In Magic, you can (Zendikar block time) decide to pick an Allies theme to carry out, and there will almost certainly be enough Allies in the pool to get a full team. However, in Pokemon to carry out a theme such as Sandstorm you need to have a lot of lucky picks, including a Sand Streamer and a lot of Ground/Steel/Rock types. That's not all that likely to be found.
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That may be true, but you have to realize that there aren't as many "themes" in Pokemon as there are in Magic in the first place. Basically, the only themes are No Weather, Sun, Rain, Sand, Hail, Trick Room, Gravity, and Tailwind (lol), and within each of these themes, you can go offense, balanced, or stall for your playstyle. That leaves 3 * 8 = 24 team types, 21 when you eliminate Tailwind. Additionally, some of these themes don't work very well with a playstyle. Rain, Sun, and Trick Room aren't really made for stall, for example. If you keep making generalizations like this, you will begin to realize that the number of "themes" that you can use is very small.
The purpose of drafting isn't to build a team with a particular theme, but to build a team with synergy, which is entirely possible with a pool of 18 Pokemon if you build the right movesets.