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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 ...
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
"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 ...
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
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
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 ...
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 ...
11
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 ...
11
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 ...
11
You can draft at CCGdecks.com, tappedout.net, or drafts.in, and the free client Cockatrice is excellent for playing.
9
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 ...
9
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 ...
9
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.
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
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 ...
7
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 ...
7
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 ...
7
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.
...
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
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
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 don'...
6
You can use Magic Workstation.
It works well and you always find player of different levels.
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
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 ...
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
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
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 ...
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 ...
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