Drafting is half of playing a cube. Some draft formats give rise to different archetypes more easily than others. Most cubers enjoy Winston for 2 mans, Rochester for 6 mans, and regular booster pack draft or sealed. Feel free to suggest a draft variant.
Booster Pack draft
# of players: 4+
# of cards: 45x total, x packs of 15 cards, where x is the number of drafters
time: 20-40 minutes
A booster pack draft is the most basic type of drafting. Each player personally opens their 15 card packs and picks a card and passes their pack to the left and continues this process until there are no more cards. Then next pack is opened and this time it is passed the right. Finally the last pack is opened and passed to the left. For smaller number of players the packs should be smaller and the number of packs larger, for 4 mans we've enjoyed 5 packs of 9 cards.
Rochester
# of players: 4-6
# of cards: 45x total, x packs of 15 cards, where x is the number of drafters
In Rochester draft one pack is opened face up at a time. Each player takes turns picking one card at a time. The last player gets to pick two cards instead of one. Then the order is reversed until the first player gets to choose, and this time he chooses two cards. Continue this until the last player gets the last card.
Rotisserie
# of players: 8+
# of cards: 45x total, where x is the number of drafters
In Rotisserie draft, also known as roast, the entire cube is laid face up. Each player gets to pick one card at a time until each player has 45 cards. Due to the time consumption of this variant, it is recommended that the drafters choose picks over Google Docs.
Sealed
# of players: 2
# of cards: 90x total, where x is the number of player
In Solomon draft, also known as Fact or Fiction draft, each player take turns separating seven card packs into two piles. The other player chooses one of the two piles while the other is given to the player who separated the piles.
In Winston draft all 90 cards are piled up and then 3 piles of one card face down are laid out. Both players take turns looking at the first pile, choosing to pick it and putting a face down card in place of the pile; or putting a face down card on top and passing it. If a player decides not to take the last pile they get a card off the top of the 90 card pile.
Would it be constructive to have pack size variant recommendations for atypically-sized groups? For example, I usually only get to play with groups of 4, to decrease the redundancy of our packs we usually do 5 packs of 9 cards for normal cubes, or 9 packs of 9 for edh cubing. I recall there being a thread a while back where folks chimed in with their preferred pack sizes, many saying they enjoyed drafting with non-15 card packs, regardless of the # of participants in their group.
Bear with me for a moment. This sounds way more complicated than it is
Long island 64 draft - 2 man draft
The name of the draft is a self contained reminder of how to do it
The player who goes first is player A. He kicks things off by picking up 6 cards, chooses one for himself, and puts the other 5 cards face up.
Then player A puts a new card, face up, on each of these piles. Five piles of two.
This restocking of piles is the "long" deal.
Player B takes one of these piles for himself and makes a new pile. Whenever player B makes a new island it contains the same number of cards as the others. So in this case, two.
Player A then takes a pile and puts a card on top of the others. Long
Player B takes a pile and makes a new one. Island.
At the end, player B will choose from 2 piles of 5 cards. Whatever pile he doesnt choose gets discarded and a new round begins. Player B goes first this time; pick up six cards, choose one, put the rest face up, put a card on top. Just like before.
4 rounds and you're done.
Note: Each player usually ends up with 22-25 cards that they want to play. Which is pretty good.
This also only takes 4-5 minutes.
I have seen a thing called Nintendo Draft suggested on these forums, and in the thread "designing a 2-player cube" there was a suggestion of a Grid Draft that's said to be pretty fun. I can't manage to link properly on my phone, so sorry for that.
Two-player Switch Rochester Draft is fun too. Basically you lay out a pack, then take turns picking for your opponent. We usually lay out the developing decks because it's a pain to remember everything and I like to discuss along the lines of "wait, now that you've given me that, I might as well switch to green". Very casual style, not for everyone.
Rooster Draft: You prepare for a sealed deck, but instead of just distributing the boosters, you open them and then rochesterdraft the boosters. In fact, the name rooster came up as a mix of rochester and rooster. Pretty fun to shake things up every once in a while. What's interesting is that you can change booster size. Instead of roosterdrafting 6 * 15 * x, you could also do 18 * 5 * x. I even think that's been done over these forums once.
Edit: nintendo is long island 64. Oh well. Reading is tech I guess.
Specialities about the cube: U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
2-man Rochester draft
# of players: 2
# of cards: 168
time: 30 min draft + best-of-5. Approx 2h in total.
It works this way:
There's two players A and B.
Player A lays 12 cards face-up on the table and picks one.
Player B picks one.
Player A picks a second card.
Player B picks a second card.
Player A picks a third card.
Player B picks a third card.
Discard the remaining 6 cards.
Repeat this process with reversed order for A and B for every booster. Continue this until the players have 42 cards each (you should have used all 168 cards at this moment).
You can change the number of total cards if you think 42 is too little or too many. 36 is a good number as well if you want a little less counter-drafting.
I probably play my cube 1v1 80% of the time, so we have gotten pretty creative with 2 man drafts.
Winston/Sealed:
-Start with a 2 pack sealed pool per player, then Winston draft as usual.
We like this because it gives each drafter a direction at the beginning of the draft and tends to overcome the fact that winston drafting tends to make weaker decks.
We also FoF draft with a 2 pack sealed pool to start, however when we FoF draft its 5 card packs face down, one player taking two and passing three.
Our goal with these is to build full draft quality decks with 2 players. It works pretty well.
Generalized Winston
An n-player draft format.
The various players sit in a circle. Between each two players around the periphery of the circle, there is a pile of 45 cards and three one-card piles. Each player does the Winston process in the set to his left (look at one pile, choose yes/no, if yes take it; if no put a card atop the pile and o the same with the second pile, then the third; if still no then take a card from the top of the deck). Once each player has finished, each player does the process in the set to his right. So you're Winston drafting against 2 players, one on your left and one on your right. I particularly like this for 4-man team drafts.
I have a captive audience of 2 other people 1 day per week who have expressed an interest in cubing. I was thinking 3-person Winchester but wondered if others have used other formats.
BTW Winchester has been mentioned a few times - it should be in the OP summary.
Me and a buddy used to draft 1v1 a couple times per week a while back, and we got pretty creative with the formats. Our favorite goes as follows:
Nordic Drafting
Each player makes six packs of 15 cards. A pick is always made by picking one card for your deck, and putting one card in the discard pile. To speed things up we'd draft 3 boosters in parallell.
So we'd both pick one card in the first booster for our deck, and put one in the discard pile, then pass that booster to our opponent. This is repeated for packs 2 and 3 before picking up the first booster from our opponent. The boosters are then drafted as they come, always picking one card, and discarding one. Once the first 3 boosters are empty, the procedure is repeated for packs 4-6.
Pros.
Very hard to judge what the opponent is drafting
Powerful decks (We like powerful decks)
Full archetype support, since a lot of cards are opened
Cool minigames in hate-picks, depending on opponent's favored deck, and packs with a lot of powerful cards
Very fast
A lot of first picks (We love first picks)
You can be cut, just like when more than 2 peopler are drafting
Pretty similar to normal pack-cracking and passing
Cons.
Powerful decks (If you like normal cube power)
There are more, but I can't think of them right now
Try it out, it's super-easy, the decks and games are really fun, and the drafting is dynamical and you get a really cool head-on-head interaction behind the scenes with a lot of thinking.
The credit for this one goes to someone on these forums, but it was a while ago and I don't know where I read it.
2-Man Draft, 18 pack of 9 cards.
Deal out pack one face up as a 9x9 grid. Player 1 picks all the cards from any row or column (getting 3 cards), player 2 then does the same (getting 2 or 3 cards). Discard remaining cards.
Repeat with packs 2 - 18.
Results in an average of 50 cards each to build decks with.
Never actually used this yet as I'm only just putting my cube together but it got some good feedback as it's fast and makes decent decks due to seeing 162 cards rather than 90.
The credit for this one goes to someone on these forums, but it was a while ago and I don't know where I read it.
2-Man Draft, 18 pack of 9 cards.
Deal out pack one face up as a 9x9 grid. Player 1 picks all the cards from any row or column (getting 3 cards), player 2 then does the same (getting 2 or 3 cards). Discard remaining cards.
Repeat with packs 2 - 18.
Results in an average of 50 cards each to build decks with.
Never actually used this yet as I'm only just putting my cube together but it got some good feedback as it's fast and makes decent decks due to seeing 162 cards rather than 90.
This sounds really interesting. I'm going to do some solitaire of it to see if I like it.
The credit for this one goes to someone on these forums, but it was a while ago and I don't know where I read it.
2-Man Draft, 18 pack of 9 cards.
Deal out pack one face up as a 9x9 grid. Player 1 picks all the cards from any row or column (getting 3 cards), player 2 then does the same (getting 2 or 3 cards). Discard remaining cards.
Repeat with packs 2 - 18.
Results in an average of 50 cards each to build decks with.
Never actually used this yet as I'm only just putting my cube together but it got some good feedback as it's fast and makes decent decks due to seeing 162 cards rather than 90.
This is what I do when 2 player drafting and the decks are definitely better and more focused than Winston or Winchester. I play this way at least once a week, and don't think I'll switch to another 2 player format.
I don't see any mention of Magic Poker here, so here's a bit about it
Magic Poker
- Any number of players, 1v1 matches are probably best, but it's up to you.
- Players take 5 (some do 7) cards at random from the cube.
- Of those 5, players discard any amount (some people limit this to 3, or another amount) of cards and then draw that many at random. This process is usually done twice, but can be done three times if you like.
- The 5 cards you end up with is your hand.
- There is no draw step.
- You may play one basic land of any type per turn. This DOES count as your land drop for the turn, so if you get stuck with a land in your 5, you can't play both in one turn.
- Draw spells don't do anything
- Some people like to start at less than 20 life, but I don't see much of a point in it.
Well, to answer my own question :), we tried a 3-person Winchester draft last night. We each had a pile of 50 random cards, and we each made 2 draft piles, adding one card to each pile before each pick. The draft went pretty quickly, which is good, but I haven't decided whether 6 piles was the best approach, or whether we should have done three piles (one each). I might try that next time just to see how we do. Some of the piles got pretty big, which generally means that when it's finally taken, there's a lot of chaff for whoever grabs it. My theory would be that with 3 piles, the drafting would be a little more fine-grained. I could be wrong though.
In the end, I was happy-ish with my deck though I had to splash a 3rd colour (which is fine, really) and didn't have all the tools I needed for my UB controlling strategy (went 1-1). The other two decks looked pretty solid, though, so I don't think the approach was terrible.
I'm also interested in some 3 player formats. Ill be sure to try out Winchester next time but am also open to any other suggestions. I was thinking about trying a grid draft where players take turns doing a grid, and them reverse the order. Or maybe an arrangement of cards other than 3x3 and all three players would draft at the same time. Like a weird shape or something, ill have to think about it.
I saw 6-pack sealed on OP's list, but I think 4-pack sealed should get a mention too as it's great for new players or those times when you want to squeeze a few more people into your cube session. Players open a pool of 60 cards instead of 90, and they have to whittle that down to a 30-card deck instead of the usual 40.
The grid draft format is the format I made up. Here's my proposal for the 3-play variant, from the other thread:
The other 3-player draft format that worked REALLY well is "Tenchester Drafting":
Wow thanks, we've been having a lot of fun with your grid format! These both sound like great solutions for three players. Replacing the 3 cards is a perfect solution. I'll be sure and try them out! Thanks
Each player makes 5 packs of 10. Player 1 opens a pack and separates it into 2 piles of 3 and 1 of 4, leaving one of these piles face down on the table and the other face up. Player 2 takes a pile, player 3 takes a pile, player 1 gets what is left. Player 2 makes the next pack, with player 3 picking first. Reverse the pick order whenever player 1 makes a pack.
I find this works best with higher-powered cubes, since the face down pile becomes even more of a factor. What did they hide under there while this Mox is still face up? Separating the packs into the 3 piles is really hard since you always get the last pick out of a pack that you open. I recommend this for when you have that extra person you can't figure out what to do with.
Did a four-person grid draft tonight with my Peasant cube. We did a 3x3 grid in which we replaced cards after the first and second players made their picks. We drafted 16 packs, which left everyone with roughly 45 cards and we were able to make some pretty good decks out of them. It took a few packs for everyone to get settled into what they wanted to do with their deck, but everybody ended up with a deck they were happy with in the end.
The Steal:
-Have teams with equal amounts of players
-Teams draft as normal
-After deckbuilding, a deck from team A is swapped with a deck from team B (this can be with open lists or in secret)
*It's in interesting twist. I've had a lot of fun with it. And it's cube so the cardpool is shared/same sleeves
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
That which nourishes me, destroys me
10th at SCG: Syracuse (2014), GP:NJ Last-Chance Grinder Winner (2014):: Former Legacy Mod
I mean, hell, we're all on a forum for something that most people would describe as a "children's card game"...do what makes you happy. You are never too old to enjoy yourself.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Booster Pack draft
Rochester
Rotisserie
Sealed
Solomon
Winchester
Winston
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
Long island 64 draft - 2 man draft
The name of the draft is a self contained reminder of how to do it
The player who goes first is player A. He kicks things off by picking up 6 cards, chooses one for himself, and puts the other 5 cards face up.
Then player A puts a new card, face up, on each of these piles. Five piles of two.
This restocking of piles is the "long" deal.
Player B takes one of these piles for himself and makes a new pile. Whenever player B makes a new island it contains the same number of cards as the others. So in this case, two.
Player A then takes a pile and puts a card on top of the others. Long
Player B takes a pile and makes a new one. Island.
At the end, player B will choose from 2 piles of 5 cards. Whatever pile he doesnt choose gets discarded and a new round begins. Player B goes first this time; pick up six cards, choose one, put the rest face up, put a card on top. Just like before.
4 rounds and you're done.
Note: Each player usually ends up with 22-25 cards that they want to play. Which is pretty good.
This also only takes 4-5 minutes.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Two-player Switch Rochester Draft is fun too. Basically you lay out a pack, then take turns picking for your opponent. We usually lay out the developing decks because it's a pain to remember everything and I like to discuss along the lines of "wait, now that you've given me that, I might as well switch to green". Very casual style, not for everyone.
Rooster Draft: You prepare for a sealed deck, but instead of just distributing the boosters, you open them and then rochesterdraft the boosters. In fact, the name rooster came up as a mix of rochester and rooster. Pretty fun to shake things up every once in a while. What's interesting is that you can change booster size. Instead of roosterdrafting 6 * 15 * x, you could also do 18 * 5 * x. I even think that's been done over these forums once.
Edit: nintendo is long island 64. Oh well. Reading is tech I guess.
450, Peasant*, unpowered**
Specialities about the cube:
U tempo, B aggro, R slow-ish are supported. G aggro is not.
Currently trying to support tokens in all colors but blue, in different ways: W pumps them, B sacrifices them, R suicides them, G has decent-sized ones.
cube list outdated
*literal C/U definition according to gatherer
**some cards are banned. Library of Alexandria, Land Tax, Sol Ring.
# of players: 2
# of cards: 168
time: 30 min draft + best-of-5. Approx 2h in total.
It works this way:
There's two players A and B.
Player A lays 12 cards face-up on the table and picks one.
Player B picks one.
Player A picks a second card.
Player B picks a second card.
Player A picks a third card.
Player B picks a third card.
Discard the remaining 6 cards.
Repeat this process with reversed order for A and B for every booster. Continue this until the players have 42 cards each (you should have used all 168 cards at this moment).
You can change the number of total cards if you think 42 is too little or too many. 36 is a good number as well if you want a little less counter-drafting.
My Tribal cube
My 93/94 old school cube
My Artifact cube
My Hearthstone Quiz App for iOS
Face-up Winston with 4 piles.
We usually do this as 2HG and keep all picks face up.
Winston/Sealed:
-Start with a 2 pack sealed pool per player, then Winston draft as usual.
We like this because it gives each drafter a direction at the beginning of the draft and tends to overcome the fact that winston drafting tends to make weaker decks.
We also FoF draft with a 2 pack sealed pool to start, however when we FoF draft its 5 card packs face down, one player taking two and passing three.
Our goal with these is to build full draft quality decks with 2 players. It works pretty well.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
A 2-player variant that combines elements of Winston and Winchester. Described here: https://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/143
Generalized Winston
An n-player draft format.
The various players sit in a circle. Between each two players around the periphery of the circle, there is a pile of 45 cards and three one-card piles. Each player does the Winston process in the set to his left (look at one pile, choose yes/no, if yes take it; if no put a card atop the pile and o the same with the second pile, then the third; if still no then take a card from the top of the deck). Once each player has finished, each player does the process in the set to his right. So you're Winston drafting against 2 players, one on your left and one on your right. I particularly like this for 4-man team drafts.
L2 Judge
I have a captive audience of 2 other people 1 day per week who have expressed an interest in cubing. I was thinking 3-person Winchester but wondered if others have used other formats.
BTW Winchester has been mentioned a few times - it should be in the OP summary.
My Cube
My Blog
Nordic Drafting
Each player makes six packs of 15 cards. A pick is always made by picking one card for your deck, and putting one card in the discard pile. To speed things up we'd draft 3 boosters in parallell.
So we'd both pick one card in the first booster for our deck, and put one in the discard pile, then pass that booster to our opponent. This is repeated for packs 2 and 3 before picking up the first booster from our opponent. The boosters are then drafted as they come, always picking one card, and discarding one. Once the first 3 boosters are empty, the procedure is repeated for packs 4-6.
Pros.
Very hard to judge what the opponent is drafting
Powerful decks (We like powerful decks)
Full archetype support, since a lot of cards are opened
Cool minigames in hate-picks, depending on opponent's favored deck, and packs with a lot of powerful cards
Very fast
A lot of first picks (We love first picks)
You can be cut, just like when more than 2 peopler are drafting
Pretty similar to normal pack-cracking and passing
Cons.
Powerful decks (If you like normal cube power)
There are more, but I can't think of them right now
Try it out, it's super-easy, the decks and games are really fun, and the drafting is dynamical and you get a really cool head-on-head interaction behind the scenes with a lot of thinking.
2-Man Draft, 18 pack of 9 cards.
Deal out pack one face up as a 9x9 grid. Player 1 picks all the cards from any row or column (getting 3 cards), player 2 then does the same (getting 2 or 3 cards). Discard remaining cards.
Repeat with packs 2 - 18.
Results in an average of 50 cards each to build decks with.
Never actually used this yet as I'm only just putting my cube together but it got some good feedback as it's fast and makes decent decks due to seeing 162 cards rather than 90.
Thread Cubetutor
My Other Cubes
Pauper Cube
One-Drop Cube
This sounds really interesting. I'm going to do some solitaire of it to see if I like it.
My Cube Blog @theCubeMiser on Twitter
This is what I do when 2 player drafting and the decks are definitely better and more focused than Winston or Winchester. I play this way at least once a week, and don't think I'll switch to another 2 player format.
Magic Poker
- Any number of players, 1v1 matches are probably best, but it's up to you.
- Players take 5 (some do 7) cards at random from the cube.
- Of those 5, players discard any amount (some people limit this to 3, or another amount) of cards and then draw that many at random. This process is usually done twice, but can be done three times if you like.
- The 5 cards you end up with is your hand.
- There is no draw step.
- You may play one basic land of any type per turn. This DOES count as your land drop for the turn, so if you get stuck with a land in your 5, you can't play both in one turn.
- Draw spells don't do anything
- Some people like to start at less than 20 life, but I don't see much of a point in it.
In the end, I was happy-ish with my deck though I had to splash a 3rd colour (which is fine, really) and didn't have all the tools I needed for my UB controlling strategy (went 1-1). The other two decks looked pretty solid, though, so I don't think the approach was terrible.
My Cube
My Blog
Wow thanks, we've been having a lot of fun with your grid format! These both sound like great solutions for three players. Replacing the 3 cards is a perfect solution. I'll be sure and try them out! Thanks
Each player makes 5 packs of 10. Player 1 opens a pack and separates it into 2 piles of 3 and 1 of 4, leaving one of these piles face down on the table and the other face up. Player 2 takes a pile, player 3 takes a pile, player 1 gets what is left. Player 2 makes the next pack, with player 3 picking first. Reverse the pick order whenever player 1 makes a pack.
I find this works best with higher-powered cubes, since the face down pile becomes even more of a factor. What did they hide under there while this Mox is still face up? Separating the packs into the 3 piles is really hard since you always get the last pick out of a pack that you open. I recommend this for when you have that extra person you can't figure out what to do with.
Level 1 Judge
CubeTutor: www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/72
Thread: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=512410
-Have teams with equal amounts of players
-Teams draft as normal
-After deckbuilding, a deck from team A is swapped with a deck from team B (this can be with open lists or in secret)
*It's in interesting twist. I've had a lot of fun with it. And it's cube so the cardpool is shared/same sleeves
10th at SCG: Syracuse (2014), GP:NJ Last-Chance Grinder Winner (2014):: Former Legacy Mod