23
No, you cannot.
From the MTG Tournament Rules:
7.2 Card Use in Limited Tournaments
Players may add an unlimited number of cards named Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, or Forest to their
deck and sideboard. They may not add additional snow basic land cards (e.g. Snow-Covered Forest, etc)
or Wastes basic land cards, even in formats in ...
19
Make sure you know the policy on rares - will rares be re-drafted at the end? Do you keep all rares you draft? Is it a 'winner-chooses' system? Most of the time you'll keep what you draft, but not always.
Talking about the cards you're drafting is generally frowned upon - reading signals and predicting what your opponents are drafting is a big part of the ...
14
The two player formats I know of are:
Solomon draft
Winston draft
Winchester draft
Wizards has some information about these 'casual' formats.
Common Setup
Each of these draft formats uses a similar setup:
3 packs per player (6 total)
Open all the packs, without looking at them, and remove any basic lands then shuffle all the cards together. You should have ...
14
It's an acronym telling you which cards you should pick. Cards fall in one of five categories, and you should (usually) pick the card from topmost category (B > R > E > A > D) which is still left in the pack.
In a nutshell:
Bombs, powerful cards that win a game if unanswered. These can be something that generate an advantage every turn (e.g. The Immortal ...
12
Appendix B of the Tournament Rules provides required and suggested time limits for official events. Check this document for all the details you need.
In general:
Required minimum game time is 40 minutes. Recommended game time for typical Limited/Constructed Swiss rounds is 50 minutes.
WotC recommends giving players 30 minutes to register and construct a ...
9
You cannot. In the sets where they were available, you had to draft them from the packs.
In Limited events, you can play Wastes only if it's in your card pool. For Sealed Deck, that means you have to open a Wastes in order to play with it. In Booster Draft, you have to draft Wastes. Figuring out exactly how to pay those {C} costs will be a priority in ...
7
In my LGS it's solved this way.
6 players => 1 x 6
7 players => 1 x 7
8 players => 1 x 8
9 players => 1 x 9
10 players => 1 x 10
11 players => 1 x 11
12 players => 2 x 6
13 players => 1 x 6 + 1 x 7
14 players => 1 x 6 + 1 x 8
15 players => 1 x 7 + 1 x 8
16 players => 2 x 8
17 players => 1 x 8 + 1 x 9
18 players => 3 x 6
19 players => 2 x 6 + 1 ...
6
It is perfectly acceptable to observe other matches.
If you are not currently playing, and you are not a judge, then you are a spectator by definition. There are a few rules governing spectators mentioned in the Tournament Rules.
Players may request (via a judge) that you not observe their matches. You may not make notes while drafting. You may not place ...
6
Not only are you allowed to share cards, you are as a team considered to have a single card pool that you build your decks from. Section 9.6 of the Tournament rules says
Two-Headed Giant Limited Rules
All the rules for Limited Tournaments (Section 7) apply, except as described below.
The DCI recommends that each team receive eight boosters per team for Two-...
6
The card itself states what to do in the case of a tie. In the example of Council's Judgement, it says "or tied for the most votes". This means that if 2 different permanents gets 1 vote each, then both of them will be exiled because they both are tied for the most votes.
This is not only an issue in 2 players, but could occur with any number of players.
6
Marshall Sutcliffe has an interesting article about CABS Theory on magic.wizards.com. This post is a short extract of the original article. The original article offers much more ; go read it.
He uses an acronym CABS, which is short for "Cards (that) Affect the Board State", to remember what you should be picking.
Most people don't factor in whether a card ...
6
Yes, it would be cheating. Your tournament organizer must either provide the booster packs or randomly distribute them before the drafting phase. If that does not happen and you try to exploit that fact, you are cheating.
Since you are well aware that your packs would give you an unfair advantage, you would be cheating. Whether or not your tournament ...
6
The number of players in a draft certainly affects the draft, but the effect is symmetrical; all players are affected similarly.
One reason that 8 players is optimal is because the pairings work out perfectly; no one is going to get paired up/down.
From your opening pack you get:
the 1st, 7th and 13th pick in a 6 person draft
the 1st, and 9th pick in an 8 ...
6
Not at all.
The cards you're shown in a draft on MTG Arena are a simulated version of what you would see in a paper draft of MTG cards.
This means that, for each pack, with some exceptions, there will always be 10 commons, 3 uncommons, and 1 rare/mythic rare.
As the draft goes around, simulated players (these would be real players in a paper draft) pick ...
5
Since multiplayer games tend to run longer than single-player matches, it's hard to do as many rounds as you would for e.g. a standard pod of 8. The scheme we've come up with at my LGS is to run two rounds with swiss pairing and per-game prize support:
Do the draft itself. For convenience, I'm going to presume a perfect 8-person pod here.
Break into two 4-...
5
I had fun with Winchester Draft a couple of times. The article mentions Winston Draft, which I've never tried.
5
Wizards of the Coast designs sets for specific Limited environments.
The intended draft format for Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block was:
Lorwyn draft: 3x Lorwyn
Morningtide draft: 2x Lorwyn, 1x Morningtide
Shadowmoor draft: 3x Shadowmoor
Eventide draft: 2x Shadowmoor, 1x Eventide
Cards from the two halves of the set were not intended to be drafted together.
The ...
5
We wanted something more like a "real" draft, where there is blindness, but not as much randomness as in Winston. So, our approach: make two stacks of 42 cards (3 boosters), one for each player. Each player draws 5 cards off the top and selects one, then puts the remaining 4 cards aside in a new pile. Continue this until you have emptied the pile. In the ...
4
It depends on how you want to build your packs. If you plan to build proper packs then the choices are different then if you just want to grab random cards. The best experience would be from the former so I will go off it.
The double faced cards were seeded from a sheet with a single mythic, two of each rare, six of each uncommon and eleven and each common. ...
4
First off, what is a bomb? According to a Limited Information article it is ... a powerful, game-ending, stabilizing card." though the author does admit that other people might have slightly different definitions. The MTG Salvation Wiki describes a bomb as "...a card, generally used in conjunction with Limited play, that always makes a large card impact on a ...
4
I largely agree with esoterik's answer, however would like to elaborate on the strict number advantage, which I feel is the more accurate analysis and describes the inherent differences between player numbers in the format better without making assumptions about their skill level (which is how I read the question).
Basic Analysis of the Draft Format
The ...
4
The link you posted to Wastes on Gatherer has the answer you seek:
In Limited events (including Sealed Deck and Booster Draft), Wastes must be in your card pool to be included in your deck. You can’t add Wastes to your card pool in the same way that you can add other basic lands.
3
Can't answer number one but there have been a number of articles published regarding number 2. When designing sets Wizards takes a serious look at the rarity of each card and its effect on limited. Its okay for a mythic rare to be completely, off the wall busted in limited (though they do try to avoid it) because the odds of pulling that card will be so low ...
3
There is also grid drafting, a format designed by Jason Waddell where the rules are:
Start with 18 packs of 9 cards.
For each pack, lay it out in a 3x3 grid face up (just lay them out in order, >don't look at the cards and decide where each one should go).
The first player takes a row or column.
The second player takes a remaining row or column. ...
3
As hinted on in the comments, if you're not participating in a sanctioned event, this isn't covered by official rules and will therefore be at your store's disgression.
In a sactioned event, the tournament rules are in effect, handling this problem like this:
7.2. Card Use in Limited Tournaments
Cards must be received directly from tournament officials. ...
3
Expected value is obviously lower, but in an 8 player draft the last place player still gets the 8th most valuable card. Imagine that the value distribution is something like this
10 most valuable cards - $50 each
14 other cards - $1 each
The total value of the cards is $514, so you could say that the EV of each card is $21, and the total EV without re-...
3
Realistically, the simplest way to resolve having X players where X is odd, would be to treat it as if you were running an X+1 man pod and then someone dropped suddenly.
So you draw up the rankings with "Mr Missing" as the 8th players, and then the player that gets matched up with him gets a "bye", where you automatically win the round.
Obviously, this ...
3
Wizards of the Coast makes no official rules on timing the draft phase
The official tournament rules cover drafting in section 7.7 and do mention timed drafts, but make no mention how those timing rules look, so tournament organizers are free to implement their own.
3
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 ...
2
Last time we held a multiplayer tournament at my local store, we followed a procedure similar to the one below. It worked well, and was significantly shorter than the typical "Swiss draft followed by top 4/8/16 single elimination".
Players are randomly placed into pods of 8-9
Players draft with their pods
After drafting, each pod is randomly split into ...
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