Drafting “magic: The Gathering” With High-Dimensional Card Embeddings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drafting is a game mode in collectible card games where players build their decks from a restricted pool of cards. Throughout one draft, players are offered a series of selections, from which they must build their deck. Although drafting is a popular game variant inMagic: The Gathering, few machine learning models have been developed to learn card selection strategies. We model drafts with a Siamese neural network that is trained on real-world data and predicts human expert selection. Our model learns an embedding space of preferences by comparing cards in the context of a deck. We examine card representations, evaluate our model on a large-scale dataset, and show that our model achieves 45% zero-shot drafting accuracy on cards that are completely unseen in training. This suggests that the model understands general card semantics and is able to evaluate their strength. In addition, we provide an in-depth exploration of the embedding space. We find that card embeddings capture a significant amount of interpretable information, such as the sizes of decks, and the strengths of individual cards. We also find that the preference-conditioned embedding space learns the similarity of cards, which can enable downstream tasks in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".