[Loremaster]

Yeah, some people call it a Cube. (That name is kind of square, don't you think?)

A draft is when you have a certain amount of cards put into a box, and players use a method to draw and/or choose cards in which to build a deck and/or a temporary card collection. You play with these cards for a certain duration, then you can either draft more cards, throw some back, trade them, or just start all over.

The common Magic player goes out and buys some Magic cards out of packs or singles, sometimes also buying a preconstructed deck, trades with friends, and swaps in and out cards until s/he's happy with the deck arrangement, then plays against someone else's deck. The pool of available cards is random and very large, and limited only by how many cards the player wants to buy, and what the player may be able to trade with other players for. This 'metagame' element of players having access to these limited cards, is a central theme in Magic.

But with a draft, the only cards that you make available for a playing session are the designated cards that you have set aside for this purpose. It doesn't necessarily have to have balance, because each player has access to the same cards, however a variety of cards is nearly essential. You don't want to have one uber-powerful card that no other card or tactic can hope to deal with. But even so, everyone will still have equal access to any card. Anyway....

[Loremaster]

I am looking for more cards for these sets, to add to my draft:

8th Edition: you gotta have basic staple cards, to ensure that each color can still do
9th Edition what is typical for that color. Red has to have a Blaze, and black
Tenth Edition has to have a Dark Banishing, or it just wouldn't feel right.


Mirrodin: these sets are artifact-heavy, with plenty of cards that don't care about color,
Darksteel and a few multi-color or five-color cards
Fifth Dawn

Champions of Kamigawa: plenty of staple and slightly-expensive cards, with an interesting
Betrayers of Kamigawa Spirit/Arcane twist in which the player may get some synergy
Saviors of Kamigawa if s/he draft enough of the right cards

Ravnica: these sets are heavily multi-color, with nifty abilities common to certain pairs of colors,
Guildpact and some pretty strong enchantments
Dissension

Coldsnap: a stand-alone set with plenty of interesting creature a snow-permanent mechanic
that is hard to abuse with so many other sets involved

Time Spiral: reprints of old cards, and some nearly-unique abilities adds a lot
Planar Chaos of variety; the color-shifted cards give you access to things like
Future Sight counterspelling and discarding, even if you're shut out of a color

Shards of Alara: not as familiar with this set, but with LOTS of staple cards that work good
Conflux in draft, and more multicolored cards as well: "Fun, without being broken!"

(I'm not using the Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, Eventide, Morningstar sets that fall between Future Sight and Shards of Alara. I found that the many permanents that were particular to creature types that weren't plentiful in other sets turned me off, but I'm holding them in case I do some switcheroo in the future. I'm also thinking about removing Coldsnap.)

As you can see, there's a lot of potential cards here to play with. But I'm only playing ONE COPY of any one card. So if there is a Blaze in the draft, there is ONLY ONE Blaze, period. I don't want a draft of 20,000 cards. (When I find a double, it gets yanked.)

Also, I'm not big on collecting one of EVERY card; I don't have to have complete sets (but that would be nice). I'm focusing on the common and uncommon cards, instead of the rares that are either gamebreakers, or narrow-use combo cards. I'm using the rares that I have, but I'm more concerned that I have enough creatures of different sizes in each color, the typical spells, and not having say, all of the blue Kamigawa Moonfolk but none of the blue Kamigawa Ninjas. Besides, commons are a dime apiece.

WANTED LIST

Right now, I don't have much Coldsnap, I'm a little light on the main Ravnica block, all three Kamigawa blocks, Future Sight, and Shards of Alara. It's easier to catch up on the smaller sets, than the big main set at the start of each block. And I know there's plenty of Type II players out there that have Kamigawa that they're no longer playing with. I don't want their decks; I just want some of the cards they're never going to use (but one copy each). So I raided the Geek Out common box the other day and dropped $15 on several hundred cards. Now I've got about 400 cards in each color. If you can help me out, message me (not by posting here, just send me a private messge or email me at loremasterstl@hotmail.com ).

[Loremaster]

ORGANIZATION

It's simple. Get six boxes; I use the boxes that come in the fat packs (which also lately come with a full-color book with a picture of every card, and six (or now eight) packs of cards). Separate the cards like this:

1. White (thanks to the Alara block, each color now has its own-colored artirfacts, too)
2. Blue
3. Black
4. Red
5. Green
6. Non-colored Artifacts, multicolored cards, and non-basic lands
7. Basic land (which you don't draft from)

Whenever you choose a color, roll a six-sided die. That's the color you go with.


A QUICK 60-CARD, FIVE-COLOR DRAFT:

1. Each person blindly drafts ten cards blindly (facedown) from each of the six boxes.
2. Look at those cards. You should have 10 White, 10 Blue, and so on, and 10 Artifact/Multi/Non-basic Lands.
3. Take basic lands and make a deck of exactly sixty cards. Take as few or as many basic lands as you want. You might try to play all five colors, but you're going to keep at least three unles you run 50% basic land. Make a note: in drafts, having PLENTY of castable creatures is very important. A Hill Giant is a good card here: it doesn't have double-color in its casting cost, and you'll probably get plenty of use out of it. Cheap flyers are hard to deal with as well; by the time you get to play a big spell, you may have lost most of your life already.

You can also shuffle the 60 cards together without looking at them, along with 8 of each basic land, and do a blind, five-color, totally random deck against your opponent! But it's also fun to have SOME say as to what you get to draw....

I'll list more ways to play a draft in a future.

[Da Gamers Den Boss]

I dont know if you ever played my common deck game at the Den. What I did was used some basic common cards of each color and a few basic artifacts and shuffled them together in one large (about 500 cards) deck and then did the same with all five color of mana (about 200 cards). Each player was dealt 5 cards from the common deck and two cards from the mana deck to start. The decks were set in the middle. When a player could draw they could choose either from the commons, or the mana, which ever they wanted.

It was fun to do in a multiplayer setting and the game momentum could shift very quickly as some folks started with mana they could use, while others may not get a forest till they were almost dead and then BLAME out came a wyrm which was the dominant creature on the board. Some had fun and others thought it was worthless and stupid. I enjoyed doing it that way cause there was never a game that went the same way.

That is probably why I dont build power decks where you use 10 cards, 4 copies of each one. I prefer to use 40 different cards (maybe 3-4 copies of some functional, foundation card) so that the game isnt BORING everytime I play.

[Loremaster]

I made these changes to the composition of my draft, which now holds about 5,000 cards:

Eighth Edition: REMOVED (white-bordered, and many cards were still in Tenth)
Ninth Edition: REMOVED (white-bordered, and many cards were still in Tenth)
Tenth Edition: the basic staple cards, to ensure that each color can still do what is typical

Mirrodin: artifact-heavy, with the Sunburst mechanic that works good in multiplayer drafts
Darksteel
Fifth Dawn

Champions of Kamigawa: Spirit/Arcane mechanic, with plenty of Spirits outside of the block
Betrayers of Kamigawa
Saviors of Kamigawa

Ravnica: lots of two-color cards, and each color pair has a new mechanic; lots of mana sources
Guildpact
Dissension

Coldsnap: REMOVED (snow mechanic under-used, and I have few Coldsnap cards anyway)

Time Spiral: color-shifted cards give unusual twists to colors, and Suspend mechanic is GREAT
Planar Chaos
Future Sight

Shards of Alara: heavy multicolor, with three-colored and five-colored cards
Conflux

[Loremaster]

In response to Da Boss:

Yeah, I find that I prefer to play "fun" decks to "power" decks, and I've been of that opinion for a long time. I quit playing Magic around Tempest because of the power-escalation, and with the popular evolution of deck-building going from decks that were a cool idea, to decks that could win Type I tournaments. Too many fun cards that were no longer played because they cycled out of Type II or Extended, and too many cards that were broken from the get-go or were required to build the one kind of deck that everyone was playing at the time (see also: Tolarian Academy, Nantuko Shade, Skullclamp, Eight-and-a-Half Tails). I'd build a Minotaur deck (think Homelands), and run it up against someone's Panoptic Mirror deck, just to basically playtest their deck--and then I'd crack out the Survival of the Fittest/Recurring Nightmare deck that won championships, and it'd get beat too! The money investment never met the amount of fun I would get in return, so I never put down the money for it.

But I'm getting a ton of fun out of drafting. I finally got to play a War Elemental for the first time last night (RRR for a 1/1, gets a +1/+1 counter for every damage you deal to the opponent)! BTW, anybody got any Kamigawa or Ravnica block that they don't need? I've only got about 70% of the commons and well under half of the uncommons of those blocks.

I'm also figuring out how to GET cards for the draft, with the same method I always used to use: buy packs of what's current, and find people who have old blocks to trade that are also trying to build the current big decks. Pull a rare or two that they need, and theyll usually trade a fistful of old commons for that card that they suddenly won't have to pay ten bucks for! (Anybody need a Telemin Performance? I've got two!)

I also built some try-out cards of doubles that I have, just to get the cards some play time. I made five three-color decks, kind-of themed, not strong, just a deck of cards that has many cards that I haven't played enough to be very familiar with them or how to use them.

DGDB: I like that format, and I'm going to try it as well. When you can choose whether you draw from the random land stack or the non-land stack is a good idea. My opinion: NO CARDS where you search the library, unless you only fetch a land. I'd put non-basic lands in the land stack, too.

I gave what little Coldsnap that I had to my friend James. I hope he will make an Ice Age/Coldsnap draft, since he has a TON of Ice Age and the older sets through the Urza's block. But he wants to pull the muticolor sets together, and make a Planeshift/Ravnica/Alara block. He likes the domain mechanic. Right now, his favorite card is Matca Rioters (2G for an X/X, which are equal to the number of types of basic lands you have in play).

[Loremaster]

I want to plug two stores right now:

Geek Out in Washington still has quite a few cards, with books of rare cards and boxes of uncommons (25 cents each) and commons (10 cents each) to root through.

Surpise Shop in Sullivan (formerly Western's Surprise shop) is on Main Street by the railroad, near the Frick's, has also been dealing in Magic cards for some time, although few play there since Melvin passed away. He'll have bags of cards you can pick up for $1 or $5, as well as books of rares ($2) and uncommons. Since he goes by the newer sets' use of colored set symbols to determine rarity (and the old ones didn't), you may pull some rares from older sets mixed in with newer cards. Surprise Shop has a lot of targeted marketing gifts, i.e. sections of the store dedicated to one type of thing: NASCAR, dolphins, Indian goods, Betty Boop, Star Wars (lots of figs, still in pkgs), concrete statuary, dragons, John Deere, etc. So much stuff, it makes for some narrow walkways!

[Loremaster]

My draft is getting kind of big. Given that I'm collecting from fifteen sets, I guess I'm not surprised. I started to think of ways to thin down the set. I considered removing all of the rares, but thought against it.

I've got three of the Fat Pack boxes, with two colors in each, and a fourth box for land, dice and counters, and a plastic container to hold it all. The artifacts/multicolor/nonbasic land stack is over 500 cards, and crowding out the color with it; I may have to put each color in its own box soon, but my blue stack is only about 300 strong. But I want so many cards because of the variety it will bring. You're nopt just playing twith the same cards all of the time, like most people's cubes on the internet. Many of them make drafts of all-strong stuff, like some kind of All-Star draft. But that's the environment that they want; for me, I'd get burnt-out real fast. There are lots of good cards that don't get used, and this is how I can start figuring out, say, how to put Serendib Sorcerer or Tyrranax to good use.

I've got a strong amount of the Alara block (esp. Conflux), Tenth Edition, and the Time Spiral block. I'm missing over half of the commons from Betrayers of Kamigawa (I don't have a single Ninja!). And I'm finding a lot of commons that "I thought I had, but I don't".

So what do I do with all of my doubles? I've been building decks with them. I pulled my first Shivan Dragon -- out of FIFTEEN YEARS of playing Magic! -- and it went into my red-and-artifact deck that I've had since 2003. I'm trying to build fun decks that aren't real powerful, but about as strong as the Duel Decks they've been printing.

Sidenote: if you didn't know about them, Magic just put out a Divine and Demonic pair of Duel Decks. People have only been building Angel and Demon decks since the very beginning, so these are going to fly off the shelves. GET THEM! Even if you pay as much as $25 for them, you get an alternate-art Akroma, a Luminous Angel, a Reya Dawnbringer and a Reiver Demon, which are worth quite a bit more than the decks themselves!

[Loremaster]

I've been crunching numbers lately. Each of the colors has between 200-250 cards, the artifact/multicolor section being the biggest. I also ran stat percentages of commons and uncommons, and I'm got over 50% of all commons except for Betrayers of Kamigawa. Again, if anyone has some Kamigawa block that they don't want, I could probably use some.

Now, the major hurdle is cost. Most of the sets run about 30-40% of the possible uncommons, and although the best way to knock those out is to dig thru the uncommon box at the local game store, that's a fast way to spend a couple of hundred dollars that I don't have. That's when I try to trade... which can throw off the feel of the draft a little if you're strong on some sets and weak on others. The block has less Kamigawa, which makes Spirits more vulnerable, and plenty of Tenth, Mirrodin and Conflux. And I'm pondering if I'll bother buying more of the next set, which is supposed to be all-multicolor (Terminate will be back, for instance).

I do like the balance of the sixth set, the artifacts/multicolor/nonbasic land set. As I've said before, the colored artifacts (like the Capsules) are in their respective colors, but your standard colorless artifacts like Bonesplitter and mixed in with all cards that have more than one color in their cost, and all nonbasic lands. So drawing from that set is likely to give you something that is probably castable (artifact) or gives mana (land), but you may also pull a multicolored card that's cheap for its cost, but you can only use it if you can generate those kinds of mana. Makes it risky, but penty of rewards to find, from a fetch-land to a flying creature with a colorless cost.

[Loremaster]

"Draw 60"

-- Draw ten random cards from each of the six boxes. So you'll have ten art/multi/land, ten white, ten blue, etc.
-- Take as much basic land as you want
-- Choose from the cards you drafted to make a sixty-card deck.

"Draw 100 Blind": if you're into randomness

-- Draw ten random cards from each of the six boxes. So you'll have ten art/multi/land, ten white, ten blue, etc. DO NOT LOOK AT THEM.
-- Take eight cards of each of the five basic lands: plains, islands, swamps, mountains and forests.
-- Shuffle it together--well! You won't what you have until you draw it... or if you get to search your library.

Note: You will be paying with 40% land, so you should have enough land for most anything, but maybe not the right kinds of mana to empty your hand. Ten cards in your deck will be nonbasic lands, artifacts or multicolored to help you out.

"40 Monocolor": if you're NOT into randomness, like many Magic players

-- Each player decides who will each draft from one of the five colors, OR each will pull from the same color.
-- Each player draws 40 random cards from that color.
-- ALTERNATE: Draw 30 cards of the color, and ten cards from the art/multi/land box.
-- Take those cards and make a forty-card deck out of it.

Note: Build your deck around the combos that you can pull off, but keep in mind your opponent's playing style and color. If nothing else, go with landwalking!