Seattle Table Top Games

Seattle Table Top Games

A draft is a type of tournament for the Magic: the Gathering card game. You don't need to own any cards in order to play (although you'll own some by the end of the night), but it does require a fair amount of strategy and understanding of the game that can make it a bit more challenging for new players than a sealed tournament.

This will vary by venue, but drafts typically cost about $15, which is slightly more than the cost of the three packs you will recieve; this money typically covers the cost of the prizes given to the winners. Everyone starts by sitting in a big circle around a table (or, in the case of larger groups, several separate circles). Each person is given three packs of Magic: the Gathering cards and everyone opens their first pack at the same time. Then, everyone picks one card from that pack that they want to keep (often a rare and rarely a common, but in order to do well you'll have to think more about the value of the card in a deck than on ebay) before passing the pack to the person next to them. (Usually you pass left for the first pack, right for the second, and left again for the third, but it'd probably be best to find out what your venue does. Similarly, most venues have you remove the token and land from your pack before starting, but some do things differently).

This process continues and you keep picking one card from each pack handed to you until eventually all the packs run out of cards. (You should see each pack at least twice, probably more, which is something to remember when picking which card to take). Once the first pack is finished, everyone opens the second and third and repeat the process.

Now you take your 45 cards (hopefully you had a deck idea in mind by the end of the first pack, and most of those cards work well together, or are at least in the same color range) and build a deck out of them. Lands are usually provided by the host. You won't be using all of your cards, as the minimum deck size is 40 cards, and you will almost certainly want a land or two (probably between 15 and 20 in a 40 card deck), which means that it's fine to make a few "mistakes" during the drafting, like picking up a legendary rare white angel when everything else you're drafting is for a blue/black zombie deck. You should draft about 20 30 cards you won't use, though that doesn't mean you should just grab whatever. It's a fine line.

Now that you have your deck, every other card you drafted becomes your sideboard. Depending on where you're playing and who you're playing with, the format may vary. but expect to play full gauntlets with the winner of the tournament determined by best win/loss ratio. At the end of the night the cards are yours to keep, and if you did really well, you might just walk away with some prizes.