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There's a popular fan-made format called Cube where you create a set of cards and people pick them for their decks, either by assembling virtual "packs" by grabbing random sets of cards or (more rarely) picking them one-at-a-time from the whole set kinda like how teams draft rookie players in professional sports. Because you tailor the card pool to your ...

Evan Erwin has an interesting article about learning to draft on Star City Games. He uses an acronym BREAD to remember the order you should be picking. Look for Bombs Look for Removal Look for Efficient spells. Look for Aggro (1-3 mana creatures to get in the early damage) Take the Dregs. I'd modify his acronym and make E also stand for Evasion. It's ...

Normally drafts are restricted to a single block. In sanctioned drafting (with sealed boosters), the distribution looks like this: Core set, the first set of a block, or a "big third set" like Rise of the Eldrazi or Avacyn Restored: three boosters from the same set, e.g. M12 / M12 / M12. The second set of a block: one booster from the new set, two from ...

You asked ghoppe for "the generals of bombs and efficient spells". I'll try to add my 2p worth, taking that as a starting point for the answer. The thing to remember about all Limited formats is that decks aren't going to end up anywhere near as finely tuned as constructed decks. This goes doubly so for Sealed Deck, where you just have to reduce the ...

Conventional wisdom is to run around 40% lands in Limited. This means around 12-13 lands for a 30-card deck, and 17-18 lands for a 40-card deck. Respectively, decks will typically to run 12/17 lands if running a typical two-color, standard-curve deck and 13/18 lands (if running a three-color or color-heavy cards). Mana fixing is always very imporant - ...

Usually, my draft decks tend to aim for 16-17, 6-7 other spells, and 17 lands. Generally, if you end up with 19-20+ creatures your deck is going to be aggressive but insufficiently versatile. If you end up with 11 or fewer creatures your deck may have lots of "answers" but a shortage of ways to actually win the game. As ever, striking a balance is key. ...

Creatures are what makes you win and what makes you lose games in Limited. Therefore I would consider the baseline types of spells for Limited not only creatures, but creatures + creature removals. Creatures with evasion are powerful in Limited, so sometimes the only solution to a sticky situation is a targeted removal. So, assuming a 23-17 distribution, ...

It's probably an error, as M12 only had 15 card booster packs (as can be seen in any online store catalog like this one). As far as I could find, the last core set to have smaller boosters was M11 with 6-card packs.

"BREAD" is key, but there is another technique that helps a lot in most Limited formats: Draft archetypes, not colors. The theory behind "drafting archetypes" is that a great Limited deck, like a great Constructed deck, is defined by the power, consistency, and efficiency of all its cards working together rather than any individual piece by itself. In a ...

It depends on whether you use the official rules or house rules. In appendix B of the MTG official tournament rules (not the same thing as the comprehensive rules) it gives recommended time limits for sanctioned tournaments: Each pick has an associated time limit, which starts at 40 seconds and drops by 5 seconds roughly every two cards. The total time ...

In my Innistrad drafts so far, I've noticed the following as dominating archetypes: Red-black vampires. This is a classic red aggro strategy, since there lots of small, fast vamps that get big to put a major hurt on your opponent, especially the Bloodcrazed Neonate and the Falkenrath Marauders. The bombs in this deck are the Bloodline Keeper or Olivia ...

To provide a different perspective on thesunneversets' answer: the most important concept in cube drafting isn't power level, it's synergy. It's easy to look at your deck after you've drafted - or while you're drafting - and say 'this is chock-full of great cards, it should be awesome.' The problem is that everyone's deck is chock-full of great cards; to ...

I think the question you should be asking is not "when to choose what colours I will play", but rather "when to stop choosing what colours I will play"? Magic, and especially Magic draft, is a game that favours the adaptable. When you make a first pick of a bomb in one colour, that does not commit you to playing that colour, but it suggests that you should ...

The key to Limited, like Constructed, is to build a deck with a gameplan. Your colors are a part of that, but not the totality of it: any given color can support multiple strategies, and focusing your deck around a particular strategy -- e.g. fast damage, 2-for-1 card advantage, evasive beatdown, just stalling long enough to drop your bomb, &c. -- is ...

In my experience, Avacyn Restored Limited is less dependent on drafting clear archetypes than Innistrad. In particular: None of the colors have a super-strong identity associating them with one particular strategy. For example, you could draft small aggressive white beaters, or you could draft Seraph of Dawn and Angelic Wall to try to win on board control. ...

You can draft at CCGdecks.com, or tappedout.net, and the free client Cockatrice is excellent for playing. This thread on the Cockatrice forums has a guide to this method

Magicprinter.net should solve your problem. They are running code that is found here, in case you'd rather just run it on your own computer. Print off what you need and put it in front of land / commons. Hope this helps!

A sensible method is to get hold of some commons - I know "your budgets are limited", but if there's a game store that does drafting near you, quite often people just leave their commons lying around on the tables for anyone who wants them, they're that desperate to get rid of them; and even if not, there are other ways to buy them in bulk for cheap - put ...

If you are on a budget, you probably don't want to buy any cards - by definition, for a Cube you need the best cards of all times. The power 9 alone would run you into the thousands of dollars. You do have 2 inexpensive options: Cube works with any set of cards, just take the best cards you have. No money involved, only time to decide on the cards. You ...

You pretty much answered this question already. While I haven't heard of 4-pack 30 card sealed yet,I would say this is the format that is the most dependent on luck. A single bomb in a 30 card deck has a much larger impact than in a 40 card deck, for 2 reasons: 1) With 4 packs, opponents have a lower chance to equalize a single bomb of yours with at least 2 ...

I recommend just straight-up reading the MTG Tournament Rules. You certainly don't need to do all of this stuff for a "casual" draft, but it'll give you some good ideas about how to run things. As Two-Headed Giant draft is actually an officially supported format, the MTR includes specific guidelines on how to run it. DCI recommends drafting as a team, then ...

To be contrarian: in my experience, if you're adding a sufficient number of new people (which it sounds like is the case here), I'd encourage not handicapping them at all. My recommendation would actually be to start not with drafting but with some form of sealed-deck play (maybe a simple three-round league or the like), so that the new players have fewer ...

@Alex P's answer is fantastic and explains in great detail why competitive drafting is always from the same block. In a friendly game that is less competitive the things you need to consider all: As he said, it will affect the metagame. Card drafting guides and strategies built up for drafting cards will be somewhat less applicable. Some cards are meant ...

Drafting with multi packs or with packs from all different blocks works just fine you just need to aim for certain archtypes (control, aggro, ect) as opposed to specific strategies (such as human tribal) and you'll have more success. In my experience the only rule you really need to have outside of regular draft rules is to ban the unsets. Sealed also works ...

Pro player Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa recently wrote an interesting article on the subject where he states: There are no archetypes This is kind of an exaggeration – obviously there are archetypes – but this is so different than previous draft formats that I think the exaggeration is warranted to get the point across. For most of the past decade, ...

Some tried-and-true picks... Fast aggro: The basic idea here is to overwhelm your opponent with repeated attacks by low-cost aggressive creatures, backed up by some efficient removal to clear the way, and maybe a bit of burn to finish him off. Fundamentally we're describing a Red Deck Wins strategy, so it shouldn't be surprising that red-black and red-white ...

Loosely speaking, I think strong Dark Ascension Limited (i.e. the official format, DKA-INN-INN) decks fit into one of three strategies corresponding to the three stages of play (which I have given these semi-descriptive labels): "Aggro": Try to win before your opponent can really get rolling. "Midrange": Build up a crushing advantage with powerful ...

The most obvious difference between large and small pods is in how often you will see the same pack returned to you. In a four-player draft, for instance, it's not that difficult to memorize a couple of "strong" cards you see in your first pack, which will give you a lot of feedback about which colors/archetypes are likely to be open fairly quickly (just ...

The traditional number is, of course, 8 players. This is the only pod size used in high-level tournaments as far as I know, but for something more casual like FNM, it's not uncommon to hold drafts with 6 to 10 players. Personally I've participated in (non-sanctioned) drafts with 4 players and with 9 players. Perhaps surprisingly, the difference in the size ...

I think it's rather self-evident that 6-pack 40-card sealed, has less of a luck component than 4-pack 30 card sealed. As mentioned by @Hackworth, you're much more likely to see a rare bomb in a 30-card pack than a 40-card one. It's definitely going to be hard to judge, but I wouldn't overestimate the gulf in “luck” between 6-pack sealed and draft. There are ...