MTG Salvation

As many people may or may not know, to run some narrow archetype and pet cards that I want to play with 360, I have introduced a house rule to my cube for quite a while now. I rarely play with it, but sometimes my playgroup would decide that playing with it could be fun. It happen about once every 5 drafts. Anyways, here's the simple run down of the rules.

1. The pack will consists of the cards that contributed to any single archetype. For example, Infect and Storm.
2. You'll have to give up your ENTIRE pack in order to use this special pack. You can pick which one, it can be pack 1, 2 , or 3. This is not a total of 15 cards, but it need to be a pack.
3. You can exchange the cards of that pack you give to be any cards of the same color in the special pack. This is 1-1 exchange. This rule is to prevent a pack full of hate pick. It also make sure that color wise things doesn't get too mess up. This will a lot of the time means that you'll have less than 45 cards in your final "draft" pool. But it'll work.
4. The cube special pack is still singleton, and must not overlap with cards already in the main cube.

These are my current pack.







And yes, I'm aware that this pack is not for everyone. It's probably not even for majority of the forum. But it's fun to play against these using your cube decks every once in a while, and I would recommend that people try giving it a go.

Wildfire and artifacts might be joining these packs. I'm considering cutting those from my cube. They're not play enough for my playgroup.

You should put exploration and fastbond in the land pack!

Hmm, that's a fine idea. I should hunt down a copy.

Wait, so I get that entire storm pack if I eschew my pack 1? I'd do that probably every time. I think you mean Tendrils of Agony too (not Corruption)

3. You can exchange the cards of that pack you give to be any cards of the same color in the special pack. This is 1-1 exchange.

Like it say here, no. You'll probably not even get most of it.

Example is that you draft 8 blue card and 7 red card (not likely, but just an example). You can will lost that pack and can gain up to 8 blue card and 7 red card of your choice from the special pack.

Have you got Lore Seeker in your 360, Luffy? If ever there was a cube crying out for the Seeker...

(And, for the record, this is how I reckon I'd use Lore Seeker if I ever stuck in in my cube... let's not muck about with that extra booster, let's make it full of incredible deliciousness...)

I don't, but Lore Seeker won't be that good anyways. You'll only be able to get 2 cards out of these packs. That's not really worth boosting your opponents' deck.

I'm not sure I understand how this works. Let's say I open pack 1 and it has 3 green cards, 2 artifacts and a land, besides other cards. If I want to include the land pack, I would remove the three green cards, one of the artifacts and the land, to include for example, Titania, Courser, Oracle, Zuran Orb, and Dust Bowl, and then proceed as usually by picking one card and passing the pack?

Or is it after I do all picks from a pack, I exchange the picked cards from that pack 1 by 1 for cards from the special pack?

Quote from voiddisciple »

I'm not sure I understand how this works. Let's say I open pack 1 and it has 3 green cards, 2 artifacts and a land, besides other cards. If I want to include the land pack, I would remove the three green cards, one of the artifacts and the land, to include for example, Titania, Courser, Oracle, Zuran Orb, and Dust Bowl, and then proceed as usually by picking one card and passing the pack?

Or is it after I do all picks from a pack, I exchange the picked cards from that pack 1 by 1 for cards from the special pack?

No, it is done after you finished the draft. It was then that you exchange one of the cards you got from pack 1, 2, or 3 for 1 for 1. Keep in mind that you lost every other cards as well. For example, if you have pick 5 green card and exchange only 3 of them for cards in the land pack, you cannot use the other 2 in your deck. Every cards in the "exchanged" pack is all gone.

I still don't understand at all how this works. Is it that you account for cards of a color you drafted in any given draft round, and once that round is over, you may exclude picks of any color for the inclusion of the cards of the color you wished for instead? I think we're a little lost in translation.

I think I get it.

1) The draft goes as usual. Every player has 3 packs à 15 cards.
2) A player can surrender one of the three packs. As an example, MaRo surrenders pack 3. It consisted of: 3 white, 2 blue, 0 black, 5 red, 2 green, 0 multicolored cards along with 1 land and 2 artifacts.
3) He can now target one archetype pack (say Storm) and switch cards from his surrendered pack with cards in the archetype pack.
4) In the Storm pack, there are no white cards, so he can't trade the 3 white cards he drafted. He also can't trade for any of the black cards in the archetype pack, because he drafted no black cards. But he can trade one of the green cards for Heartbeat of Spring and can get his hands on all 4 red cards in the pack, because he has 5 red cards in his surrendered pack. Overall, he can trade up to 15 cards, but they have to match the colors of the cards in the archetype pack. See it as a buying game with cards as currency. White cards in the archetype pack can only be bought with white currency, which is a white card out of draft pack 3. Same goes for all the other colors, lands and artifacts. After you bought everything you can/want, you have to get rid of all remaining currency (the rest of draft pack 3).
5) After he did all the trades/buys, all cards he surrendered are removed from the draft/packs/decks/game.

So you essentially remove yourself from the draft round, and Agent of Acquisitions a color-for-color replacement archetype pack while the rest of the people draft that round?

Not quite. Agent of Acquisitions removes you from the draft in the draft.

Luffy's system works different. I'll try the store/currency explanation:

After the draft, you have 3 packs à 15 cards. Now there are several stores open for you to buy cards. The Infect store, the Storm store and the Lands store. You can only buy cards from one store. You go to the bank and give the bank one pack you drafted and trade all 15 cards for currency. For each white card in the pack, the bank gives you one white dollar. The same is true for all colors. Lands give you land dollars, artifacts artifact dollars. Now you got your dollars to buy cards and enter a store. You can buy everything from the store, as long as you can pay the cost of the cards. A white card costs a white dollar, a blue card a blue dollar, and so on. The store doesn't accept dollars that don't match the card you're trying to buy. (So for example you can't buy a red card with a green dollar or a land card with an artifact dollar.) You shop until you're satisfied or can't buy anything else. You leave the store. You can now start deck building. (Any excess dollars are useless/lost/gone.)

I hope this explains the system well enough.

So you get to trade your worst picks in the draft for additional cards of a pool no one got to compete over? That's bogus.

So, you hate draft picks you can't plan on swapping out for the archetype you wanted or otherwise, draft 15 cards to sculpt the colors of cards you intend to swap in? This just seems like an imbalanced thing. I'd always take the archetype pack because it's guaranteed and you can make informed decisions in any given draft round to best optimize those picks to screw over other players in the process.

Or you just 1-for-1 swap a pack from any given round for your archetype pack (which is what Agent of Acquisitions essentially does) with the caveat that you may only take cards from the archetype that match the colors of your booster pack you're swapping out?

I feel like I've been such a hater reading my replies to this thread. I've just had a hard time understanding this, is all. And I'm not so sold on it, either!