Without Mistral, how would you get it to generalize to cards it hasn't seen before? I assume by "training a NN to draft without Mistral" you mean where the input layer is just a bitmapped vector of the cards in the pack, right? The killer feature of this experiment is that it works on sets the model has never seen before and has 0 training data on, using just the text of the card. I don't think you can do that without an LLM.