[Loremaster]

STANDARD DRAFT: Actually, the typical way I play.

-- Take a 20-sided die and set it on "20". Get two six-sided dice ready.
-- Roll to see who goes first, and roll of to see which box you draft from first.
(1) White
(2) Blue
(3) Black
(4) Red
(5) Green
(6) Artifact/Multicolor/Nonbasic Land
-- Reveal and bring to the table as many cards from that box as there are players, plus one. Three players = four cards.
-- The player whose turn it is chooses one of those cards to draft.
-- That player then rolls the dice. If those dice roll no doubles, replace the drawn card with a new one, and the next person will pick.
-- If the dice DO roll doubles, swipe the remaining cards and put them back in the box.
-- Reduce the d20 die by one count. When this reaches zero, the draft is zero.
-- The number shared by the doubles is the color box you now draft from. A pair of 2s = Blue.
-- Reveal and bring to the table as many cards from that box as there are players, plus one, and continue again.

-- When the counter reaches zero, the draft is finished. Players may take as many basic land cards as they want and build a sixty card deck, with as few or as many colors as they choose.

Note: The draft will take about an hour for two or three people. More people would probably require more than twenty turns.

[Loremaster]

(First, an aside.)

I love tactical games that also have a lot of randomness as well. I'm not big on pure tactics, like Chess, or pure randomness, like War or Fluxx, even though each is good for variety or with certain kinds of people. I'm also not the most tactially-savvy player, and it doesn't bother me at all because it prevents me from being burnt out.

People who know me also know that I avoid powergamering: ruthless playing styles, games with unbalanced game mechanics, games where you *must* punk the opponent at every opportunity or you give away the game. I play competitive games like Magic, but you understand why most people won't like to play against the same old Rich Little Snot and his four-thousand dollar deck of You Ain't Gotta Chance in Hell. Where I will make a deck titled something like, Jellybeans and Handgrenades (just try to guess!.

(Back to the point.)
I'll come back and add more later, but here's the brief: in a large-volume draft like I'm building, you're likely to try to emply the same tactics as you would if you were playing in a Tournament or Starter Deck draft: the Sealed Deck, which came with perhaps 75 cards, land inculded, for which you built your deck, sometimes with a pack or two thrown in also. Now in the playing styles I've already described, you're either drafting head-to-head, possibly pulling cards just so your opponent doesn't get them, or you're pulling cards just for you and trying to make the best with what you've got. But here's a good starting place for what you want to look for:

FATTIES: big creatures are their own gamebreakers. You won't get them early, and they won't make it through your opponents blockers on the first try, but there's a lot to be said for an efficient source of damage that can take a beating, like a 6/6 or even a 4/4.

FLIERS: what your opponent can't block unless s/he gets some fliers on the table too. Small ones are arguably better than big ones, because if you get them out early, they'll give you a lot of bang for the cost you pout into them. Nowadays, every color has a couple of cheap fliers.

CREATURE THEME: I look at it like this. You're playing a creature-based deck (attack with your strong ones, block with your weak ones) unless and until you get cards to help you variate from this basic theme. If you have the luck to draft a creature every time, DO IT. Having more creatures in play than you're opponent is frequently an advantage that's hard to combat against. You have to ask yourself if the spell will make more of a difference in a batltle rather than yet-another 2/2. If your opponent skips spells and goes all creatures, what are you going to be able to do about it?

More on this later.