Actually a silent auction is an excellent idea. It would completely remove dealmaking and add some major strategy elements.
A silent auction would only increase dealmaking, as masters would be unable to react to others' strategies. Therefore the temptation to plan and arrange beforehand would be greater. It would also take away from the dynamism of the auction process, which ultimately is the entire reason that we do it this way rather than just letting the masters pick teams.
I don't think you've thought about this thoroughly. Certainly I find it ridiculous to claim that a silent auction "would only increase dealmaking." If ScaredGirl had not intervened at the last minute in
this auction, there would have been a number of elite players sold to teams for very cheap thanks to dealmaking. A silent auction could actually be an excellent alternative.
In a silent auction:
All applications would be open to bids from any master and there would be no minimum.
There would be rounds of bidding, probably one round per day. After each round "won" players would permanently go to the team that won them.
Each round, every general would make as many bids as slots they would have to fill on the team: so, 8 each in round one. Those bids could be for any amount of cards. After the time is up, bids are revealed and won players go to a given team. Generals don't know of other generals' bids, so they are forced to make large enough bids that they think will win, but small enough so that they don't lose too many cards.
Dealmaking would be almost impossible for any good player because convincing 11 other people not to bid on someone is very, very hard unless you can give something in return. It is not worth the risk of not bidding on a strong player in a "deal" when you have to rely on 10 other people to do the same. Furthermore, even if all 12 generals agree on 12 players they are bidding on that are off-limits to the others, a single person who refuses the deal can break it -- because he can just bid on those players himself. Or, he can agree to the deal, get his free veteran, overbid on two other veterans and steal them from another team: after round-1 he would have 3 elite players, cheap. So when you say that not being able to react to other generals' bids helps dealmaking, actually I think it's the opposite: having silent bids makes it impossible to enforce deals before it's too late, making dealmaking not at all a good strategy. It's the fact that there is no RECOURSE that makes this method work. In the current system, even if someone breaks a deal by bidding on an "off-limits" player, that player can just be upbid by the original general -- and the offending general would have all of his players upbid as punishment. In a silent auction, the offending general would already have won the player, and thus stolen him, because players are assigned to teams each round automatically. And, no one would know which players the offending general would choose in later rounds, so there would be no enforcement of deals ... making it a very, very bad idea to rely on them.
The reality is that generals will realize it's all about strategy and not dealmaking. Veterans would go first, and for decent prices.
A few other rules would have to come into effect as well:
In the event of a tie on a player, both generals should simply lose their bid for that round and the player should still be available for the next round. What would be so fun about this would be that generally the auction process would see the "good" players go to teams in the early rounds ... people would watch the process as teams would be getting built in front of their eyes ... and occasionally a really popular player would last an extra round because the top bids would be a tie. Then the next round, bids would likely be even higher trying to win that player ... and other generals might be interested also since in a later round there would be fewer elite players to choose from overall.
Once generals would start building a roster, sooner or later they'd be down to needing just 1 or 2 players. Then they would only get 1 or 2 votes (correspondingly) in the round. Further, once a general's team would be "full," that general could no longer bid.
Let's think about all the strategy implications:
A general who bids very low overall has the advantage of probably not building a team quickly. Soon he gets to pick "last," after all other generals have their teams already, so he can basically get his whole team for 1 card (without fear of competition). However, the tradeoff is he clearly will not get a single advanced player.
A general who focuses on veterans first might preemptively bid very high, to blow other bids out of the water and guarantee himself a core team that's strong. After that point he could bid low and fill his ranks with others.
Yet another strategy would be scatter-shot bidding of medium-strength players for very cheap. If done early with bids, a general could grab many good-but-not-great players for cheap while the others are focused on the big names; and he could really build a strong team that way.
In summary: I think the possibilities are excellent. As for "dynamism," that exists with a round-by-round system. The only drawback to the silent-auction format would be that it would require regular deadlines for generals' submissions and take a good amount of time (probably 10 days of bidding).
There are also ways to improve the current bidding system without going silent that would remove dealmaking anyway ... so it's debatable whether it's worth switching. Either way it's definitely worth considering ... and not dismissing.
