How many booster each players should crack for a 60 cards booster draft?

Question

I plan to create a 60 cards booster format. How many booster each players should crack for a 60 cards booster draft?

I think that 4 or 5 should works. Is there any existing format or math about this?

I made a small script in Python but I am bot sure that it helps:

import math

def fill_land(deckSize):
    return deckSize / 2.5

def count_booster_per_person(deckSize):
    boosterSize = 15
    landCount = fill_land(deckSize)
    noLandCount = deckSize - landCount
    return math.ceil(noLandCount / boosterSize) + 1

print(count_booster_per_person(40))
print(count_booster_per_person(60))

Try it online!

Answer 1

Depending on what your goal for your 60 card draft is, you might want to decide between 4 and 5 packs per player.

The MtG tournament rules recommend 3 booster packs per player for the default 40 card draft format. Accordingly, you would need 4.5 booster packs for a 60 card draft format to keep the average deck quality on a similar level.

There are no official Limited formats with deck sizes other than 40. I am not aware of official Limited tournaments which used a different number of packs than what is recommended in the tournament rules.

The draft phase itself and deck building afterwards take considerable amounts of time. Increasing the number of packs increases both, and might take significant drain on your players' mental stamina before the actual games even begin. On the other hand, drafting with a lower than recommended number of packs takes less time, but also lowers the average deck quality, since players will have to include more cards in their main deck that would otherwise go into their sideboard.

Answer 2

Each pack has 14 cards that are put into the pool (10 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare) giving everyone 42 cards to build their 40 card deck. About 40% of the deck will be land using the standard rules of thumb, leaving 24 cards out of 42 that are used in the deck, or 57% of the pool. To reach those same numbers the pool should be 63 cards, but that doesn't break evenly into packs, it is exactly 4.5 packs.

Both 4 and 5 packs are a good answer, for different reasons, it depends on what you want to focus on with the format:

• 5 packs allows for much more consistent decks. Drafting is unlike sealed because you get much more control over what's in your pool. 2 extra packs would let you stick to less colours and more consistent strategies, closer to what a constructed deck would look like.
• 4 packs still would force players to be creative in their deck construction. In drafts most people end up in 3 colours, 4 packs in a 60 card deck draft would be more likely to keep this happening. It will also keep cost a little lower if that's a concern.

It may also come down to what set(s) are being drafted if you need to round up or down, some sets are harder to build decks for (like all gold card conflux) vs sets which have clear colour distinctions and archetypes pushed by the card design (like Ixalan's 4 tribes).