Oh noes!
More horrible drafts to follow! Evil Sadin has spread much evil with this evil article! The sheer mischief! Oh, the great calamity!
I've said this many times in these forums before and I will probably say it many times again: people value hate drafting too highly. Particularly, noobs value hate drafting sky-high, as if it's the best thing you can do. Thus a draft with several noobs is usually totally ruined for most drafters and the winner is the one who randomly got least hurt by the hate (and mixed signals).
I think new players value hate drafting too much particularly because it's often one of the few things they've read about drafting. I think this is partly because proportionately too much has been written about it already, so noobs are more likely to come across it randomly, and secondly, because it does often get mentioned around playing a draft (e.g. showing off your side-board "Oh, and I randomly hated this P3P5, cuz that was just silly late for BombX.") and then the noob is intrigued and searches the internet for something to read about it.
The other side of why noobs hate-draft too much is that it is an advanced concept disguised as a simple concept: the concept itself is extremely simple, but the proper execution is extremely complex. This is usually not mentioned in the articles and it just assumed that everyone can learn from a few examples. This is not the case.
What I've noticed in people's hate drafting tendencies as a function of drafting experience is that first people hate draft way, way too much thus hurting their decks a plenty. Then gradually, the noob starts to get more experienced, and hate drafts less and less, as he notices how much hating has hurt himself, gets back over 1600, still hating less and less until somewhere at rating 1700-1800 they hardly hate draft at all anymore. Then gradually, after getting over the 1800-mark, they've finally understood when it is actually right to hate draft and start doing it again once in a while. I know this is a gross over-generalisation, but I believe it's true for many players, while not all.
I just tend to tell new players to forget what they've learned about hating, and that cooperation with your neighbors is key to victory. And largely this is true. Anyway, it's usually best for them if they learn hating only when they're good players already and ignore it until then - I've found that newbies tend to perform much better after getting this advice, if you've also explained to them the concept of signaling.
On which I want to say another thing I've said before: in pack 1, you actively want to signal and make your neighbor to the left go into a colour you are not it (usually anyway). Thus it helps if in pack 1 you pass good late picks in a colour you probably aren't in, rather than hate them away, as long as you're getting goodies yourself. Same is partially, but less, true for pack 2. Pack 3 it's ok to do what you want to signals, you don't care anymore. [Yes, it is sometimes, rarely, correct to purely hate even in pack 1, if you are also managing to signal simultaneously. Most of the time it's more likely to be about keeping your options open, rather than hating, though.]
Hate drafting is a very subtle business, with many, many things to consider, most of which are too subtle to understand without much experience. As the Limited Information column is often one of the only things new players read, I dread hitting a roughly month-long hate-winter, since at least at our club there's quite a mix of players of all calibre, who get randomly assigned to different pods.
Then about the concrete examples and where I disagree:
Hatedraft off-colour
Godhead of Awe
over on-colour
Puncture Bolt
? Really?! Me, rarely, if ever. Puncture Bolt is soooo good! Maybe I'd hate Godhead if my own loss was less, I'll admit. But, if your deck can't deal with Godhead at all, your best choice is probably just to hope and pray any way. [For illustration, the four times I've had an opponent play Godhead, I've won at least partially because of it. I know 4/4 is extremely lucky, and Godhead is a genuine bomb, but I felt the need to say it.]
And
Safehold Sentry
is a nice card in a format with too few 2-drops. Not to be spat on like that, unless you already have enough 2-drops. Still, many times hating away
Midnight Banshee
is the right call.
