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In all seriousness, though, you may notice something a little different about today’s column. I’m doing a double dip. Today you get both a The Games People Play article and an Æther Pool article. Aren’t you lucky? This week’s column will look at some fun limited variations of Magic. Naturally, I have to start with a little story. A few weeks after Coldsnap came out; one of the stores where I get my cards from had a late “spring cleaning” thing and found a bunch of Champions boosters in the back room. They were selling them for a little over a dollar a pack. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I only had $15 on me, which came to 12 packs. But I didn’t want to just open the packs and sleeve the cards. I wanted to do something with them. If you follow any of my writings, you know that I love drafting. But 12 packs aren’t enough to do a full booster draft. So I got home, did my usual Magic site checks (MDV to MTGS to MTG.com) and I saw something on the MTG.com site that caught my eye. The Invitational had just wrapped up. This gave me an idea. I called up some friends, and soon we had a 6 person mini-invitational started. Now, like I said, I only had 12 packs, and two packs per person still doesn’t constitute a booster draft. But I did know a few variants that are two player games and require six packs (meaning two matches would be running simultaneously). Here’s how the tournament looked: Double Round Robin, so we played ten rounds. It took about a week to finish. We played five rounds of constructed and five of limited.
For each of the events that say draft, we used the same twelve packs. How? Well, patience, young grasshopper, let me teach you how to play each of the games first. Even though I’m talking about the limited formats today, I’m sure someone will E-mail me saying “what the heck is random vanguard auction?” so I’ll give you a brief explanation. Each player had a constructed deck (extended, I believe). We took all the vanguard avatars (see my last article for that list) and wrote their stats out on note cards. Before each round, six avatars were randomly drawn. A standard auction of the people ensued, and then the round was played. After the round was over, the avatars were thrown back into the hat and six were drawn at random again. Rules of the actual auction are an entire column by themselves, so I’m going to go into that aspect of it, but I’m sure you can formulate a reasonable guess from the word auction as to what it is. Solomon Draft The first limited format was Solomon draft. This format has actually been played at an actual Invitational before. It is probably the most simplistic of the three we played, but still requires a good amount of skill. It is a two player game with each player supplying 3 packs, meaning you need six packs or 90 cards (the equivalent of six packs). Shuffle the packs together and stack them in the middle of the table. Randomly determine who is player 1 and who is player 2. Player 2 draws the top 8 cards of the stack, and puts them face up on the table. He then splits them into two different piles. The piles do not have to be the same size. 5-3 splits tend to be more common than 4-4 splits. Player 1 picks one of the piles and collects those cards, while player 2 gets the cards in the pile Player 1 didn’t pick. Player 1 then draws eight and splits them, while player 2 gets his choice of piles. This goes on until the pack is exhausted. All of the math majors out there have probably already realized that with 90 cards being flipped eight at a time the last pack isn’t going to come out right. Good catch. To remedy this, what we did for the tournament was to randomly insert six cards from the appropriate set (Champions of Kamigawa in this case). We randomly added one common of each color from my collection, and then one of the uncommon double lands. Which commons and which lands were added was noted by the “Table judge” (there were two drafts going on and three matches per round, so the particiapants in the match that wasn't drafting each judged one draft), so they were taken out after each draft and a new random card was added in their places. After the draft, each player builds a minimum 40 card deck, adding any basic lands as necessary, you know the drill. Any cards that aren’t in the main deck are considered your sideboard. Note that because of the nature of the draft, rarely will each player have the exact same number of cards. Don’t worry about this. If they drafted the three pile every time, then it’s their own fault if they have trouble coming up with enough playables for a deck. Even if you did have a hand in drafting the five pile every time it was your turn to draft… Strategy
The only other rule of the format is that the player who didn’t draft first (in this case Player 2) gets the choice to play or draw in game one. So after three rounds of Soloman, in which a terribly exciting play (which I wish I could claim, but sadly I didn’t do) of Reach Through Mists splicing Glacial Ray to the dome, draws a second ray off the Reach, then Glacial Ray splicing Glacial Ray then hardcasting the second ray for lethal damage was performed, we moved on to the second draft format and the pivotal final rounds. That format was Winston draft. Winston Draft Once again, this format requires six packs shuffled together and placed as a stack in the middle of the table. Again, determine a Player 1 and 2. Player 1 takes the top three cards without looking at them and forms three piles of one card each, face down. That player then looks at the first pile, without showing it to player 2. If that player wants to draft the card, he drafts it and starts a face-down pile in front of himself. If the player doesn’t want the pile, he puts it back face down, adds a card from the top of the large pile face down, and looks at pile 2. Once again, he can draft it or add a card from the top. If he adds the card from the top, he moves to pile three. Same choice. If he doesn’t pick pile three, then he draws the top card of the stack as his draft. After Player 1 drafts, player two looks at all the cards in pile one. If he doesn’t want it, he adds a card and goes on to pile two. This continues, back and forth, until all the cards in the deck have been drafted. Strategy
I only did one Winston draft, because I was drawing into the top four in round ten (meaning that my opponent and I called our last match a draw), but I did learn very harshly that getting into a fight over multiple colors is not a good thing. I was firmly entrenched in blue (Sire of Storms, multiple Eye of Nowheres) and he was firmly red (double Glacial Ray, Earthshaker). We were fighting over green and black, and no one really wanted anything to do with white. Isamaru sat on the table for about 6 or 7 turns, and was only drafted because the pile contained the Earthshaker. But since we were both black and green, neither of us had much decent in those colors. I had a random Rend Flesh and Sakura Tribe Elder, and he had a Rend Spirit and Devouring Greed with a few Kodama’s Mights. In the end, both decks sucked. I got lucky and ripped Soratami Savant after digging with a Soratami Cloudskater and swung with both fliers next turn for the win. So after ten rounds of play, the top four was set. We shuffled the packs together one last time for our final draft of the tournament. This one was a little different than the other drafts we’d done. The finals draft was an Auction draft. Auction Draft The major difference between the Auction draft and the other two is the fact that auction drafts work best with four people, while the other variations are made specifically for two. As always, you’ll need three packs per player, but this time the packs aren’t shuffled together. Each player keeps their packs intact and in front of them. Positioning at the table should be that each player is sitting across from his opponent. Use some method to determine who is Player 1. We went with standings, but usually it’s done randomly. Once that is determined, the player to his left becomes Player 2, and likewise around the table. Each player starts with 200 “dollars.” Player 1 opens and lays out his first booster pack, just like a Rochester draft. That player then opens the bidding on one card. It can be any card he wants, with the minimum bid being one dollar. Once he bids, Player 2 may raise it. Likewise to Players 3 and 4. Once three players pass in succession, the card goes to the highest bidder. After that card has been drafted, Player 2 then selects a card from the pack and opens bidding on it. After that card is drafted, Player 3 opens bidding, then Player 4, and likewise until nobody wants to bid on any more cards. When you get down to the dregs of a pack, it is generally not worth it to spend even one dollar on those cards. When it is your turn to open bidding on a card, if you don’t see a card you want to bid on, you may pass. If all four players pass on opening a bid, the rest of the cards in the pack go to the person who opened the pack. After the first pack is gone, Player 2 opens his first pack, and he gets first choice of cards to bid on. Then Player 3 opens bidding on a card, and so on. After Player 4’s first pack is done, that player then opens the second pack and opens bidding on a card. The auction is the same, except the direction changes. So Player 4 makes the first bid, then Player 3 may make a bid, not Player 1 like normal. Once that pack is gone, Player 3 opens his second pack, opens the bidding, and so on. Pack three returns back to the left. There are only a few rules in this draft. First, each person begins with the same amount of money. You can make this any number you want, but make sure the amount is large enough to allow a decent deck to be built. I said $200 above, as that seems to be the number that works best. Bids have to be at least $1.00, and they have to be in round dollars. This means that you can’t bid like $1.65 or something like that. It has to be whole dollars like $1.00, $2.00, $5.00, etc. Strategy This can be treated a lot like Rochester draft. You know exactly what colors everyone is in, and you know what their good cards are. This should help you as it is generally is accepted to stay two colors in this format. In normal two color formats at least…Ravnica block is generally a three color block. Make sure that you don’t go full out with the bidding right away. Nothing is worse than going full out and then opening something like Yosei in the last pack and not having enough to go after it (from personal experience). Like I said, this format is most similar to Rochester draft, so with it come some rules from Rochester. The first one is this: play nice. Don’t hate draft, or at least only hate up one card. In booster draft, hating up cards is a little more accepted because the other person can’t see that you took their card. But in a Rochester draft everything is in the open, and the hate draft not only is going to make the person mad, but they may take it as a color jump. If they think you are moving into their colors, especially if you are ahead of them, they may jump colors, essentially throwing the whole table into chaos. Chaos is never a good thing at a draft table. General tips about playing casual limited I know the first thing that many people think of when they hear limited Magic is cost. Buying three boosters every time does get pretty expensive. But there is no rule anywhere that says that you need three unopened boosters every time (well, actually there is, but that only applies to tournament MTG). For the tournament I just explained, we used the same twelve packs for about twenty drafts. Yes, twelve packs is sort of expensive, but when you break it down it was two packs per person, which retail is like $7.50-$8.00 per person. I definitely got more than $8.00 worth of entertainment out of the cards. Any limited event can also be run for free. 3 booster packs is equivalent to 45 cards. So basically everyone supply 45 cards, shuffle them together, deal them out in face-down packs of 15, and you’re ready to draft. Now I’m sure you’re wondering how we managed twenty drafts with twelve boosters. It is quite simple, actually. After each set of two drafts was over, we took the twelve rares, shuffled them together, and placed them face down in two rows of six. Then we took the uncommons, shuffled them, and placed them in stacks of three on top of each of the rares. After that the commons were separated by color, shuffled within their colors, and distributed amongst the packs. We set it up so that there were never more than three cards of each color at common in the packs.
That also killed me in the final auction draft. One of the rares was a Yosei. In some weird irony or something, I had never seen the Yosei. In all of the drafts I did, he was in the other pile. The draft where I drew with my opponent and didn’t do the draft, he was in my pile, so when I watched the other draft he didn’t show up. So in the final draft, the other three players all started instantly fighting over white. I found this a little odd, as white usually isn’t that good in Champions draft, but just saw it as a chance for me to get all the good cards of a color that nobody wanted. Blue in this case. So it’s going well, I’m getting a decent blue/red deck put together, and then I found out why everyone wanted white: Yosei shows up. I looked at the guy who was “judging” the table and asked him if someone had switched a pack or something. Apparently I was the only one who had not seen the dragon yet. That’s all for the variations this week. I hope you liked the slightly different format this week, as we merged two columns together. Why the merger? Well, unfortunately I’m using this as a wrap-up column. I will no longer be writing either of the two columns that you see represented today. With a recent move, I no longer have the time to dedicate to writing the columns as often as you deserve to read them, and I also don’t have the time to play the variants that I describe to you. But, as the song says, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” I’m not done writing for MDV yet. I’m going to start writing about an aspect of Magic that this site hasn’t really acknowledged before: the pro game. Hey! Come back here. Don’t stop reading that fast… I know this is a casual site, so I know many of you probably don’t really care who won the most recent Pro Tour or who is player of the year. But the fact is these players are the best in the world. They know their stuff. If you want to become a better Magic player, the best way to do this is to learn from the best. So that’s hopefully what we’ll be doing. Learning from the best. That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the variants that I’ve thrown at you over the life of this column, and I hope that you find the creativity to start thinking up some of your own. ~Nate Lisko~ (lionden_56) You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here. Articles
Spotlights from 2006 |
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First
off, no, Marco Polo will not be discussed anywhere in today’s column. I looked
high and low for a Magic variant with that name, but couldn’t find anything. 
2
drafters + 5 colors of Magic = an uneven split. It’s not uncommon for you and
your opponent to fight over one or more colors, especially if the packs open
strongly in a certain color. Drafting two colors is almost impossible in Soloman.
Most of the time you’ll be in three, usually two main with a splash, or possibly
even four colors. Because of this, be aware of the fixers available. If you are
playing with a set like Champions, mana fixers are at a premium. I tried to go
Green in every draft, just for the Sakura Tribe Elder and Kodama’s Reach. Even
the double lands (Lanternlit Graveyard et al.), which are generally considered
fairly weak in limited, were being split into the five pile. In a set like
Ravnica or a full Ravnica block, the Karoos and Signets are a little more
common, so the lengths people will go to get them are a little shorter, but they
are still very good. 
One
of the key skills to this format is being able to decipher the information
you’re given. In Soloman draft, you know every card the other person drafts.
This is beneficial because you can figure out what bombs they have, how much
removal they are running, and most importantly what colors they are in. In
Winston draft, you know roughly half of what they have. You have to be able to
figure out what colors they are in based on what they leave you. Odds are you
aren’t going to see any of the bombs they draft, and if there is removal on the
table you should probably be scooping that up, so color guessing becomes
important. This is another format where you are more than likely going to be two
colors and a splash, so not fighting with your opponent over colors is key. 
What
we did was called “repacking” and it is a fairly common method amongst casual
players for doing multiple drafts. Repacking does lead to one problem, though:
after a while everyone knows what cards are floating around, especially the
rares. Our group got around that by the fact that each draft only contained six
packs, so you never knew which rares were going to be popping up.