Trading Picks in Snake

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Hello friends!

Today, I come to you with an idea myself and many others have discussed this on Smogtours each of the past 2 years. It's no secret that the Snake draft format innately makes it harder to reward good managers than it's auction-based counterpart, SPL. So, how about a way to make the draft a bit more rewarding and theoretically help stronger managers stand out in the tournament?

What I am referring to, as alluded to by the title of this thread, is the act of trading draft picks. The concept that I am proposing would be simple. If a manager had the 2nd overall pick and the corresponding 19th pick, they could conduct a trade with someone else and acquire their picks. They could get the 3rd and 18th overall picks for example, or perhaps swap third- or fifth- round picks even. We could also do trades that don't involve pick swaps, but these would be a bit more complicated, and I believe the TDs wish to maintain the '14 player requirement' for every team, so that idea might be a bit of a tougher pill to swallow.

This idea brings forth some of the strategy involved in past SPLs with the concept of trading retains, only in this setting, a manager can't be held hostage by their star players. The rewards for this system are obvious. Teams could make pretty mutually beneficial trades depending on their evaluation of certain players. The managers who ultimately better understand the playerbase could gain an advantage by trading up or down. This Snake is a good example. There's a pretty steep drop-off after ABR based on the current player pool, so the manager picking 2nd might find it in his best interest to trade down if he knows the player he wants will be available later. Or the individual with the first pick might not want ABR, so he could proceed to trade the first pick for a king's ransom of pick swaps.

The only downside to this idea is that it would make the draft slightly more convoluted, but the idea that I am proposing is pretty simple. You could even lock trades so that they could only occur before the draft, if you don't want to deal with the hassle of live trades. Personally, I think it would work either way.

I think this idea will bring a bit more hype and fun to a tournament almost everyone sees as an inferior SPL. The concept of trading picks is obviously the foundation of American sports leagues, and with a few modifications, I don't see any reason why they couldn't work in this tour. This idea is simple and helps reward more intelligent managers.
 
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I think this is a good idea on its own but it could be expanded upon if we really want Snake to stand out from SPL. A couple ideas:

- Adding player trades to pick trades mid-draft could shape some far more interesting scenarios than just pick for pick, especially if pick trades are confined to pre-draft.

- Adding 1-2 rounds at the end of the draft but keeping the player minimum at 14. Being able to move up in the auction at the cost of a 15th or 16th round pick adds an additional layer that I think would be far more interesting. It can create interesting team dynamics around hoarding picks or trying to move up and create a star-centric super team. This is the change I would push for the most, but if ading extra team slots is a concern I'd want to lower the minimum player count to accomodate having "extra" picks.

- This one's a bit more ambitious but if you add these changes you could add a unique retain factor to this tournament to preserve team identities by removing a team's x round pick by allowing them to retain a player. How this would work best functionaly would probably be that a retain requires a team to give up a high value pick (Round 3 or higher depending on the player's win count the previous season).

I think these changes, the second one in particular, would help alleviate some of Snake's identity issues and create something unique but only slightly lesser instead of "SPL 2".
 
Managers can trade their pick order before the draft; not 1 or 2 specific picks, it has to be the entire thing. They can also trade players after the draft as long as the teams trading end up with 14 players each. Mid-draft trades of any sort are not allowed.

What I am referring to, as alluded to by the title of this thread, is the act of trading draft picks. The concept that I am proposing would be simple. If a manager had the 2nd overall pick and the corresponding 19th pick, they could conduct a trade with someone else and acquire their picks. They could get the 3rd and 18th overall picks for example, or perhaps swap third- or fifth- round picks even. We could also do trades that don't involve pick swaps, but these would be a bit more complicated, and I believe the TDs wish to maintain the '14 player requirement' for every team, so that idea might be a bit of a tougher pill to swallow.

This isn't going to be officially implemented because it's simply meddling with the bot unnecessarily and increases the risk of shit going wrong mid-draft. If managers wish to do this kind of "trades" all they need to do is talk with each other and agree to the terms. eg: "I'll pick x for you and you pick y for me. We trade them after the draft".
 
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