To the unpaid community hype fomenter and preening mafficker whose username is commonly Neon,

I read the rngeteral website that lists you among the staff, and within it a murkily phrased, near throwaway line sparked the thought in my mind that the community at large had come to consensus around an incorrect fact. I thought to leave well enough alone, until the deuce arose again, with the same or more authority, in a later text. Reason has no hold on the driving opinion behind you and yours, and from you does the community take their cue.

You do not get passed draft packs from real players.

Such an expectation strains the meaning of the word real to breaking. The cards you see in front of you in your draft are yours alone. No human player ever saw a pack that contained one more card than that and picked it. No one is there to send you signals (ludicrous as it would be in the first place to expect to pick up signals left behind by 11 people one mote at a time). The third pack is not from the same person as the first, because there is no such person and there never was. The mystery of where the seed packs came from—the creation myth to explain how the first player began the first draft—is founded on the faulty assumption that such seeds would ever have been necessary.

There is no one else passing you cards.

I hear every streamer I watch occasionally gape in disbelief over getting a late pick of some cherry they wanted to fit in their deck (or otherwise could not for being in the wrong colors for it) spending minutes on end chastising fictitious persons who let so good a card pass them by. This notion has even infected my friends.

Doesn't it seem odd that every pack that every person you have seen draft pops up immediately? If the game had to retrieve data from a library, presumably an extremely large one to fit all the needs of all active players, you would expect to at least sometimes, even a little, have to wait a second or two. We accept wait times in matchmaking, so why do we not expect wait times in the match between you and your library pack? There are no players and there isn't a wait.

I fear the community accepted this because that is how it works in Magic. So we're primed to expect this from Eternal, and then one person says so and that's that. I tried to trace back the legacy of this mistake, which you printed as, "You get the pack are from real people." All I could find were folk variously referring back to you or yours. The original idea seems to have come from nowhere and repeated until it became the truth. It is wrong!

I became curious about how drafting works in Eternal, so I asked a friend of mine, who used to work at DWD. They had this to say:

“ Anyone who thinks those packs come from other people is misinformed. The system creates a pack and then removes the appropriate number of cards, according to player profiles it has formed to simulate a Magic-like draft table. It uses these profiles to determine pick orders in an effort to simulate signaling. There was never any other real player involved.

My best guess is that someone from DWD said the words "player profile" to you and you interpreted that as "real person" and never thought twice about it. It makes no logistical sense for DWD to store so much information when a better solution is available. Hell, it may even be better at signaling than your proposed drafting situation is, because it represents a central pick order rather than 11 different ones influencing what you have available.

You have a profound effect on the thoughts and actions of Eternal card players; you may even feel you have rightly earned it. If you can be so wrong about something like this, it means you do not care to be right: to put in the work of discovering what the actual processes behind things are, or to use the advantages and connections you have to answer basic questions. You always post in small text in unimportant places that you aren't the official source of anything, but your avatar (Hell, your username) bear the logo of the real thing. Even the velveteen rabbit knew he wasn't real, and he had fluff for brains. It is high time you learned the same.

—Kaz