Welcome back to the How to Play Magic: The Gathering series from Star City Games. If you need to catch up, check out the previous article, on Magic: The Gathering tournaments, or start at the beginning with The Basics.
This article will teach you how to do a Booster Draft, or “draft” for short. Drafting is one of the most fun and interesting ways to play Magic, and it doesn’t even require having a deck with you before you start. Draft is one of two ways to play what is called Limited. Unlike Constructed, where you bring a deck made of cards of your choosing to play, you build one on the spot by opening a set amount of Draft Booster packs in the draft.
How Drafting Works
You and seven other players all get three Draft Booster packs of a set, such as Kaldheim.
Each person opens up their first pack and looks through all the cards before picking one card that will hopefully be the start of their deck. You then pass the remainder of the pack to your left.
From there, you take the pack that was passed to you and look for another card to select to add to your pool of cards to build a deck. You do this until all the cards are gone from the first packs everyone opened.
Next, everyone opens their second booster pack, selects a card, and passes the pack to the right. Repeat until all the cards have been selected.
Then you will open the last booster pack, select a card, and again pass the remainder of the cards to the left. Repeat until all the cards have been selected.
How to Build a Draft Deck
Once all the cards have been drafted, each player then wants to build a deck out of their pool of cards drafted. The goal is to build a 40-card deck to play with, usually breaking down to about 23 spells and about seventeen lands. And you don’t have to worry about drafting the five core basic lands, Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest, as they are provided to you.
Of the 45 cards that end up in your pool, you’ll want to construct a deck of your best 23 or so cards, normally breaking down into two colors, though sometimes it can be only one color or up to three, four, or even five colors. When drafting, you normally want to try to get around fifteen to sixteen creatures for your deck, with the remaining cards being removal spells, combat tricks, or permanents like enchantments and artifacts.
What to Pick Early
Removal spells tend to be high-priority picks, as each color usually only has a few options in the set. Try to snag a few early ones before they dry out. Creatures with evasion are also great picks to make sure your deck can close the game, so look out for flying creatures, creatures with trample, or ways to make creatures unblockable.
Don’t Get Too Expensive
You also want to keep in mind the mana curve of your deck. Try to avoid having too many cards that cost the same amount, and limit the number of cards that cost six mana or more. You’d like to have a variety of casting costs so that you can try to cast something on most of the turns of the game, not overloading on too many cheap cards that get outscaled in the late-game while also not missing out on any key early players so that you can survive to reach the late-game.
After Building Your Deck
Once you have your deck built and ready to go, face off against other players who drafted with you and enjoy!
Thanks for reading this How to Play Magic: The Gathering article, and we hope you found it helpful. We look forward to teaching you more in our other How to Play articles from Star City Games.
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