So, a normal Magic draft has 8 players opening packs of 15 cards, picking one, and passing the rest along. Rinse and repeat for 3 packs.
45 cards per player.
24 packs at the table.
Each player sees 18 packs 2 times with choices to make and 6 packs only once or with no second choice.
This is the way it has always been… but is it the way it should be?
One day when trying to figure out if we could draft commander decks from our cube with only 4 players, we set up a draft with packs of 15 cards and had each player pick two. This “pick two” had three very interesting effects. First, as expected, it allowed us to draft 90 cards per player twice as fast as some variant that would have players select one card at a time (a huge boon when the goal is to get to playing Magic quickly before people have to leave for the night).
Continue reading “Let’s Be R&D: Are we drafting the wrong number of cards?”