Articles

I enjoy draft formats because cards may have different values than in a constructed environment. They reward good card knowledge and choices as well as play skill. Most of my drafting has been of the two player variants; it is difficult for me to make FNM’s and as a casual player not worried about a DCI ranking. Buying a box makes the cost of each booster pack a lot cheaper.

Sometimes, like myself, you may be wanting to play a draft format with less than the appropriate number of people, without boosters to crack, or both. While this article will include a few established draft variants, I also want to give you the tools to make your own draft formats, whether serious or downright wacky.

I think the key difference between sealed and draft is this:

During each selection round, a player chooses one or more cards from a small selection of cards, which will impact future picks on that player and others players in the draft.

I think that impacting on other players picks is a big part of this equation; each player could open a booster, select five cards from it and lose the other ten, and then repeat with another eight packs to get a total of forty-five cards in their pool. However that is more like a ‘super sealed deck’ than a draft. That format could be quite interesting, and some of what is discussed here may also be applicable to sealed variants, but it is primarily aimed at draft formats.

To define a draft format, it can be divided into 3 general categories; Card Pool, Selection Process, and Play Format. We’ll begin with the easiest - the Card Pool.

The Card Pool

For a normal draft, each player has three boosters from the relevant sets, so that each player will end up with forty-five cards before building their deck. While forty-five cards is the established number (including most established variants) it doesn’t have to be. If you want to go for sixty cards, ninety cards, or even 461 cards to give each player more deck building choices at the end of the draft, go for it. Reasonably, you want to make sure each player will have enough playable cards to make a functional deck for whatever format you decide to play. Your overall card pool also determines the power of each card within that card pool. For example, Devouring Greed would be a good card if your card pool had many spirits, but a poor choice if it had none.

You don’t need to follow the traditional sets. You can grab a pack from Darksteel, a pack from Onslaught and a pack from Tempest if you like. You could have a bunch of packs and let each player choose which ones they want to open..

But what if you don't have any boosters handy? Fear not!

You can make a draft box, something I have done with my Champions of Kamigawa and Betrayers of Kamigawa. I threw in two copies of each common and one copy of each uncommon. I’d give that rather large pile a bit of a shuffle, and then take forty-five cards for each player off the top to use as the draft pool. We knew what cards could be in there, but not exactly which ones. Your draft box can be whatever you like. Perhaps it is just any common you already have four copies of for your constructed decks or simply any card you no longer want. I prefer a little more structure but that makes it easy to maintain and add to later. If you are feeling pretty keen, you can aim for a draft like Ben Bleiweiss (store manager of Star City Games and previous writer for magicthegathering.com), whose draft box contains one of every magic card printed. Yep, you can draft a Black Lotus out of Ben’s box, if you happen across it out of the 7000ish cards currently available. A more achievable yet similar option is to have one card of a particular set, or if you prefer, a particular block.

Your card pool can also be cards of a certain type. For example, you could throw in only creatures, which would make creatures with creature destroying abilities or relevant combat abilities that much more valuable in that environment. An interesting variant Mark Rosewater used at one of the Invitationals was with a Solomon draft with a selected card pool; the cards were all multicolour or mana fixers, meaning players had to choose between the strong gold cards, and the cards that would enable them. Remember that in a casual environment, Unglued and Unhinged are fair game too! Maybe you are a Mark Tedin fanatic and only want to draft cards that he painted; go right ahead! Got your own cards that you’ve made up yourself? Draft them too!

As you can see, making up your own card pool gives you near limitless options. Just remember that each player will need to have a functional deck at the end of it. You should try to keep the colours reasonably balanced (this is not a hard and fast rule; you can eliminate a colour or two from the card pool if you like, that should make for an interesting lesson on what the missing colours would normally bring to the table). While booster packs may sometimes have awful cards in them, when making your own card pool, you can eliminate some of these if you want. For example, the good thing about my Kamigawa box is that there is plenty of synergy going on because of the spiritcraft, soulshift and arcane spells, but Ire of Kaminari would be useless as the only Kamigawa card in an otherwise all Ravnica draft box.

The Selection Process

We have a card pool. Now we have to go about selecting them. This is really the heart of the draft, and where your imagination can really go wild. It is difficult to give you guidelines because there are so many options available. I’ll give some vague ideas to get your wheels turning. Let’s just have another quick look at what I defined as a key element of draft:

During each selection round, a player chooses one or more cards from a small selection of cards, which will impact future picks on that player and other players in the draft.

A few elements will need to be established. How many selection rounds are there? How many cards will be revealed in each selection round? Are the cards revealed to all players? How many cards will each player choose from that pool? What happens to the remaining cards?

Those are the major questions that need to be asked. Some are a bit vague, and I will attempt to explain them somewhat, but at the same time I don’t want to stifle your own creativity in thinking up new ways to draft cards.

A simple way to begin to explain differences in drafts is the meaning of Rochester. Any form of Rochester Draft means that all players can see the cards at all times (except perhaps for those already selected). While it has never been done before (that I have heard about), this does not have to mean that only one player can select at a time (as is traditional for most Rochester formats). Each player at an eight man draft could open a booster and reveal them, then make a choice based on what you think might be passed to you in the next few packs (that definitely sounds like a complex and interesting draft variant!). Usually in Rochester formats, one pack or one segment of cards is revealed, and players take turns choosing until those cards are depleted, then another pack or segment of cards is revealed.

Cards do not necessarily have to be picked one at a time. Perhaps from any given selection you want to take three at a time to speed up the draft, and sometimes they are part of the function of the draft. For example, Solomon Draft (generally a two player format) shares the choices between two players. Player A divides the revealed cards into two piles, then Player B chooses one of those piles to keep, giving the remaining pile to Player A.

Instead of just choosing one card at a time, players can ‘pay’ for card choices. Cards can be worth points, and players have an allocated number of points before the draft begins. You can trade life points to draft extra cards. You can trade starting cards in hand to draft extra cards. Maybe skip your first turn (See Queue Draft in the examples later for a point-driven format).

You can also draft cards for someone else. You can make your aim to draft the worst card pool, which you then give to an opponent at the end of the draft, from which they must build their deck. Or you may be drafting for a team format and you have to draft for a team mate.

Something to consider when making a selection process is how many players does it suit? Some, like Solomon Draft, are best suited to two player drafts without reasonable modification. Others, like normal booster drafts, can be played reasonably well with 4-8 players.

The Format

For the most part, the format you choose to play won’t really have an effect on choosing a card pool or the selection process. Most types of draft can be applied to a variety of formats, such as Two-Headed Giant, Emperor, or other team variants. The format will influence which cards you will draft, as their power level may change for different formats.

Established Formats

Here are a list of some reasonably well known formats, a brief description of how to play them, and some possible variants. Where applicable, I am assuming that players will be forming forty card decks from around forty-five cards per player (plus basic land), which is the norm for most drafts.

Continuous Draft
Continuous Draft is a two player Rochester format. Open all packs or select 88 cards and shuffle them up (You may choose to look at the card pool first if you wish), then put the cards in a face down pile. Player A turns over four cards. He chooses one, then Player B makes picks two and three, and the fourth card goes to Player A. Then Player B turns over four cards, and repeats this process, so the players take turns taking the first pick. If you opened boosters, there will be three cards left over, which can be randomly assigned or left out altogether (Or drafted the same way where a player gets to pick one and the other player gets the remaining two cards - Ed). Once all the cards are drafted, build the best deck you can.

Solomon Draft
Solomon Draft is a two player Rochester Draft. Player A opens a pack. That player looks at the cards and divides the cards into two piles; these piles can be uneven and the cards in each pile do not have to have anything in common. Once divided, the second player then chooses which pile they would like to keep, and the remaining pile belongs to Player A. It’s like a ‘Fact or Fiction’ draft.

Rotisserie Draft
Rotisserie Draft is a Rochester format. You lay out an entire set on the table, then players take turns drafting the entire set. Players on the ends are ‘wheels’; when the draft reaches player eight (or the last person in the draft), they take 2 picks, then the pick order reverses, once it gets back to player one they pick 2 cards, and pick order goes back the other way again. This process is repeated until all the cards are drafted, and then players make 40 cards decks.

I tried this format with Champions of Kamigawa with a three player free for all. I think you really need 6-8 players to make this format shine. In our case, colours weren’t hotly contested, and thus a lot of picks didn’t require a lot of thought.

Note - this is a very time consuming draft process.

Queue Draft
In Queue Draft, each player begins with 60 points. All the boosters or your selected card pool are shuffled up. Player A turns over 1 card, and puts 6 counters on it. Player A can choose to pay 6 points to draft that card. If he doesn’t, Player B has the option, then Player C, and so on, until a card is drafted, or until everyone refuses to draft a card. Once either of these things happens, any remaining cards are moved across (in a queue like fashion), a counter removed from them, and then Player B turns over the next card and puts 6 counters on it. Player B may pay the appropriate points to draft one card on the table. If he doesn’t, Player C may choose and so on until a card is drafted or everyone refuses to pay the price for any card on the table. Players with zero points can only draft cards that are worth zero points. Once all the cards are drafted, each player builds a forty card deck.

Variant 1 : Backdraft - This is virtually the same as Queue Draft, but the play format is the main difference. Instead of using your points to select good cards, you are trying to spend your points on the worst cards. At the end of the draft, you give your card pool to someone else to build a deck with. I don’t recall the scoring method, but I think it may be that you get a point for every time the deck you originally drafted loses as well as wins you make with the crap you were given.

Variant 2 : Crap Bonus - Once a card has zero counters on it, you can put bonus counters on it whenever you turn over a new card. This can entice someone to choose a crap card so they get more points to select good cards. I think this method is actually more favourably used in Backdraft, where good cards you really don’t want to draft become good when it gives you more points to draft some absolute crap.

Winston Draft
The great thing about Winston Draft is that it is a two player format which has some hidden information. Most two player formats have very little hidden information; if you swap boosters back and forth, the only thing you don’t know is their first pick. Winston Draft is a little complex to explain briefly, so I’ll point you over to an article by Aaron Forsythe at magicthegathering.com (link to article), where I originally learned of this format.
.

Variants : To speed this up once, I added two cards to each pile instead of one whenever appropriate. This potentially adds more hidden information. You can also go crazy with the piles if you like, but three seems like the right number. I have only tried this with two players, but I don’t see why it couldn’t work with more (perhaps giving you reason to add more piles).

Reject Rare Draft
This weird type of Draft has a specific card pool in mind. All players bring forty-five ‘bad’ rares. They must be rare editions of the card, generally ones you don’t want and people aren’t screaming out to buy. These are put into the card pool and then shuffled. They are divided into fifteen card ‘boosters’ and then drafted as normal. It gives you a chance to play a bunch of crap rares you may never have used before or will ever use again. After the games are over, all of the rares are drafted by the players. It gives you the opportunity to turn the junk you didn’t want into something you may actually use. Or it sets you up with rares for the next Reject Rare Draft!

Variants : While the selection process is usually that of a normal draft, you can change that to whatever you want, such a Rochester format.

An Experiment

The purpose of this article is to give you some ideas about creating your own draft formats. I’d like to share an experiment I tried. I’ll be honest and say it didn’t really work quite as well as I would have liked; the idea seemed good, but in playing didn’t quite click. Perhaps in sharing it, others can offer tweaks to make it better, or others may love it as it is.

I tried something I dubbed ‘Azami Draft’, which, funnily enough, was inspired by Azami’s Familiar. My thought was, “What if you were drafting WHILE playing a game of Magic?” Bizarre!

This might be a bit hard to follow, but here goes. There is a land pile, and a normal card pile (in this case it was my Champions/Betrayers pile). Whenever a player would draw a card, they ‘draft’ one instead by looking at the top three of either pile, putting one into their hand, then putting the other two back on the bottom of the pile (hence the Azami reference). For your opening hand, you draft four cards and three basic lands.

I liked the idea of the format. Depending on what your opponent was doing, you could select the best card from the three revealed to deal with it or further your own plan. It would be a very active format, because you could always find what best suited the situation.

There were a few problems I ran into though. You were essentially in five colours. You could try to stick to three or so if you wanted, but sometimes the gods of Magic would frown on you and give you a card that you just couldn’t cast until you ‘draw’ the right land. Potentially being five colours, cards with two or more coloured mana in their casting cost were terrible. I felt this really came down to the lands. We tried having each land making two colours (the appropriate one plus the next one clockwise on the circle on the back of a Magic card) but it was annoying to have to keep checking, and trying to remember what mana your opponent may have available. Having them as three colour lands (able to make either allied mana as well as normal) was simpler but I felt was far too good. (Perhaps if you make the lands 'pain' lands for the two allied colours? - Ed)

I think I have come up with a feasible solution to the land problem. Use Ravnica common duals, but play them like Revised dual lands. Being common it won’t be hard to get as many as you need for this type of format. (Will have to wait for Dissension lands though).

A couple of other things to note about this format which we discovered when playing. Tutors are insane. I found an early Tallowisp in one game, selected arcane spells or spirits during my ‘draws’, then sucked every aura out of the deck and absolutely crushed my opponents board. Certain cards can be awkward because of the two piles, in particular those that do something when you reveal land/nonland such as the Deceivers from Champions of Kamigawa. While not a format I’m fired up to play, it was still a fun experience which led to some interesting board positions and drafting decisions.

Finishing Up

Perhaps you’ve got your own style of draft that you like to play. Perhaps you are excited to try something you’ve seen here. Perhaps the ideas here have inspired you to try something new altogether. Definitely try Winston Draft if you haven’t already, it’s my favourite format of those listed above.

While I’ve briefly covered some of the more well known draft variants, if there is more information you want to know, just ask in this article's discussion thread and myself (or someone else familiar with the format) will be sure to answer your questions.

Have fun drafting!

Michael Howell (Bacchus)

[ Email the Author | Discuss this Article ]