MY PLAYGROUP HAS SWITCHED TO GLIMPSE. THANKS @ WTWLF123 FOR HIS CHANGES TO BURNFOUR.
We invented a simple 2-player draft format for cube that replicates many qualities of an 8-man cube draft.
During the draft:
* Both players have access to almost any archetype they'd like
* Both players have near-perfect hidden information from their opponent (so neither player knows what the other is drafting)
* Both players can easily influence the other person's available card pool and draft strategy
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you our favorite 2-player cube drafting format. We have been calling it BURNFOUR or BURNING.
1. You make 24 packs of 15-cards. (12 per player) 2. You take one card face-down from a pack. 3. You remove "BURN" four cards face-down from the draft. 4. You pass that pack (now 10 cards) to your opponent.
Your opponent has done the same thing. Repeat this process with the 10-card pack you just got from your opponent until you run out of cards/packs.
Step 1) Shuffle your cube and make 12 packs of 15-cards for each player. (24 packs total / 360 cards total). Step 2) Each player looks at a new pack of 15 cards. Step 3)TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Each player adds 1 card from that pack face-down to their deck/card pool, and then removes ("burns") 4 cards face-down from the draft. The burned cards will be completely removed from the pool and will remain hidden. Step 4) Each player passes the remaining 10 cards from the pack to their opponent. Step 5)TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Repeat Step 3. Step 6) Each player passes the remaining 5 cards from the pack to their opponent. Step 7)TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Repeat Step 3.
Then you start over again with a new pack until all of your packs are exhausted.
You'll end up getting a high-value card and a low-value card out of each pack you open, and a medium-value card out of the pack your opponent opens, kind of like an 8-player draft. You get an opportunity to wheel a card out of each pack you open, kind of like an 8-player draft. You will be removing "burning" four cards each time you take a card. The goal of burning cards is usually to remove powerful cards your opponent wants. These "burns" simulate other players drafting the cards. Burning THREE would actually simulate six other players beside you and your opponent (most similar to an 8-player draft), but we found Burning FOUR is a better play experience.
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Our playgroup has experimented with probably every 2-man drafting format for cube out there. We drafted with Winston for years before moving to Winchester, Rochester, and Tenchester sprinkled in here and there. In the past six months, we've been using Grid with 180 cards (half the cube) as our drafting format of choice, although we had experimented a bit with Quilting.
We created BURNFOUR about a month and a half ago when trying to figure out how to create a 2-player drafting experience that would be most similar to an 8-player drafting experience. It has quickly become my playgroup's favorite way to draft between two people.
We invented this format to best replicate the drafting experience of a 8 man draft while attempting to keep things as simple as possible. While there are certainly more complex ways to do the burning from pack to pack, I wanted to keep the draft format simple so it was easy to explain to a new player.
This format has more strategy and mind games in it compared to any other 2-man drafting format.
Most of the strategy comes in the form of figuring out what you're playing early, and how to burn cards best from your opponent.
DRAFTING STRATEGY:
Because the information is basically completely hidden, you'll have no idea at any point what your opponent is playing. The cards you burn will likely be in multiple archetypes in the pack you open, and the pack of 10 you receive can be very odd burn targets.
I may burn a Eureka, Stoneforge Mystic, Necromancy, and Sulfuric Vortex from my opening pack after selecting my card. I don't know what strategy my opponent is in, but all of those cards are strategies I may not want to play against, or give him access to.
On the other hand, in early packs, I may want to send him a Sulfuric Vortex with very little other incentives, assume he took it, and then make a conscious effort to remove all mono-red cards from any packs I send back to him.
In yet another vein of thought, I may open a pack that has many cards I want to wheel in it (at any point in the draft). I may burn four of the weakest cards from the pack in order to ensure I get at least one card to wheel for me.
36 CARD POOLS INSTEAD OF 45:
The end result is a card pool of 36 total cards. This is smaller than the common 45 from a winston draft, or cube draft with more players (4/6/8/etc). We strongly prefer the smaller card pool, as it allows for easier decisions in what to include in your deck when it comes to deck construction. We've found that nonbasics go very late in this format and are rarely burned, another benefit of having a smaller card pool.
It may sound initially like 36 total cards in your card pool may be too few, but I would recommend doing a draft described exactly as above before making judgments or changes.
If you are planning on using some variations to the format, I would strongly recommend doing a draft described exactly as above before attempting to change things.
You can adjust the amount of cards burned, the amount of packs, and the size of the packs. This may be more desirable if you have a different cube size, or want a different drafting experience. If you have a larger cube size, I would recommend using larger packs, burning more cards, or combining the two. (So, if you have a large cube, use 20 card packs instead of 15, or use 24 card packs and burn seven instead of four). Do the math before hand and make sure people are getting around 36 cards for their card pool. Slightly more (going up to 48) is probably fine, but I wouldn't recommend dropping below 36. Anything in between 36 and 48 should be fine.
GLIMPSEDRAFTING:
(Glimpse drafting is named such because of its similarities with Glimpse the Future)
I have an adaptation of this format that we've been experimenting with. We call it "Glimpse Drafting" (based on Glimpse the Future) and it's essentially a hybrid between my old 9x9 drafting variant and Colby's Burnfour draft.
Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
The three main differences were:
1) The quality of the 2nd and 3rd picks are substantially better, and made them more important to your deck construction. Instead of having the player that opens the pack taking the best card and ripping the next 4 best cards (removing the top 33% of the pack) you have to pass packs with 12 remaining cards in them, only allowing for the top 20% at best to be axed.
2) You still wind up with 45 cards in your pool, like a regular draft. This made drafting fixing lands, utility lands and other cards that replace basics less impactful on your draft (about the same as a normal draft) and it also gave more tools to aggro. A lot of the 4th and 5th picks in the packs are great filler cards for aggro decks, and we found it much easier to draft better manabases and better aggro decks during our Glimpse Drafts.
3) The decisions were harder. When faced with the decision between removing the two most broken cards or the two most functionally important cards for a specific strategy from the pack, you're forced to pass one of the two. We found that in Burnfour we could take what we want and eliminate pretty much every important/broken card that we were afraid of seeing on the other side of the table. Only being able to eliminate two of those cards before passing the pack made it a lot harder to prohibit the opponent from seeing certain cards, and as a result, archetypes became easier to draft.
Less information is hidden this way, but we actually found that to be an upside. It made signaling a thing, and reading what the opponent is doing is more important in a format where they'll be collecting more cards from each individual pack.
Both formats were fun, and I thank Colby for sharing this variant here. I combined what I liked from this format and what I liked from the 9x9 format we'd been experimenting with and came to something we're pretty happy with.
So basically, it's a 2-person draft format that actually drafts packs (allowing the Conspiracy cards to trigger, etc):
1. Shuffle the cube. Each player makes 9 15-card packs at random from the pool.
2. Crack each pack, one at a time.
3. Take 1 card from the pack and add it to your pool.
4. Before passing the pack, remove 2 cards from it, and add them back in the cube box (removing them from the draft entirely).
5. Pass the pack to your opponent, and then repeat steps 3 and 4 until the whole pack is drafted/removed. You should have 5 drafted cards per pack.
6. Do this for all 9 packs. Each player should have a 45 card pool to construct a deck from.
Thanks again to Colby for the Burnfour idea he shared. We merged our favorite parts of that draft with our favorite parts from the 9x9 draft we've been working on and landed on "Glimpse Drafting" as outlined above.
If you're playing a lot of Winston/Sealed deck, I suggest experimenting with both Burnfour and Glimpse Drafting and seeing if you enjoy one of the two more than the old ways of 2-man drafts.
BURNFOUR:
12 packs of 15 cards. (24 packs total, 12 for each player)
Take 1, Burn 4.
GLIMPSE:
9 packs of 15 cards. (18 packs total, 9 for each player)
Take 1, Burn 2.
Everything else is the same.
Note: You can change stuff up however you want according to your preferences.
I'm fine with calling any variant of this GLIMPSE, it's a catchier name, and there's an actual Magic card that models the draft format.
The thing I'm most apprehensive about is that the "burn four" step will take a ton of time if you're drafting with someone who takes a "perfectionist" approach to the draft, i.e. someone going to 10 different permutations about which cards to remove before settling, and then second-guessing themselves before handing the cards over, repeat ad nauseam.
We've found even with perfectionist players, the drafting process is fun enough to warrant the extra time taken. There are definitely a lot of choices to be made, but we've found one of the best burning strategies is to give your opponent access to certain archetypes when you need to, but then realize what they might have access to and cut them off in the future.
Once you start seeing what burning strategies are best (even though there is a bunch of different stuff you can do), the drafts go quicker. The first time anyone drafts the cube this way, it takes the longest amount of time. After that, the drafts go pretty quick.
It does take longer than other draft formats, but not significantly longer after people figure things out. I'd say that's true of almost anything. The first time someone learns Winston, Tenchester, Rochester, or Quiliting, it's gonna be significantly longer than the latter iterations of the draft. Hell, even a first time Winchester or Grid can take a really long time. Our Grids (our primary draft format before switching to BURNFOUR) actually started to take longer and longer as people got more interested in hate-drafting cards from their opponent. The opposite is true with BURNFOUR because everything is hidden information, so you just develop ways to 'hatedraft' your opponent in a vaccum and you get better at understanding the differences and subtleties of your cube. Actually, since we started doing BURNFOUR as our primary way of drafting the cube, we've seen the actual draft portion last about the same time as an average Grid draft, which is one of the quickest ways of drafting (but my group started to become slower and slower with grid).
The burning choices are very cube-specific, so we've realized in my cube, it's really easy to negatively affect a ton of strategies by burning fatties like Hornet Queen, Myr Battlesphere, etc. It's very difficult to negatively affect aggro in general, but easier to affect a color of aggro. It's actually made cube managing much more interesting, as I get to see entire strategies in my cube on a big, macro level and can adjust it based on that.
Intersting. Should lead to some cool decks. I think id prefer this in a non-powered cube environment, as the p1p1 decisions are more likely to define a powerful archetype than just "Take power -> burn 4 cool cards".
I think you'd be surprised at what cards are taken over power.
We think Worldknit is actually the strongest card in the entire format. I've taken it over Sol Ring mid-draft and was happy with my choice. Because the card pool is smaller than normal, and the card quality is much better, you get to do some really interesting things with Worldknit decks. Worldknit is obviously stronger the earlier you get it. I would say Worldknit gets played around 25% of the time, and has only lost a few times when it is played. Moxes are much weaker in this format than in others, because often times you will absolutely want to take a card that is more important to your archetype.
Some P1P1 decisions are super easy, and other ones are incredibly hard. I mean, sure, if you get an Ancestral or a Lotus or something in your P1P1, you're going to slam it and move on, but there are lots of times when your choice is between Mox Pearl, Time Spiral (remember we support storm), Sulfuric Vortex, and Survival of the Fittest. The Mox isn't necessarily stronger than any of those other cards, but it may be the safest option. Based on the cards you burn, you know it's probably best to go another strategy (but your opponent doesn't know that yet).
If it was between those exact options, I would figure out if I want to play one of those archetypes. We draft the entire cube, so I'm likely going to be able to make whatever archetype I'd like work. If I take Survival, I'm going to definitely take Recurring Nightmare or possibly even a fatty over a Mox or Time Walk in subsequent packs too.
I think you'd be really surprised at how deep and complex the P1P1 choices are.
Intersting. Should lead to some cool decks. I think id prefer this in a non-powered cube environment, as the p1p1 decisions are more likely to define a powerful archetype than just "Take power -> burn 4 cool cards".
This isn't the case with regular powered drafting, so I wouldn't expect it to be the case here. If anything, you'd probably be more likely to take the interesting "build-around-me" kinds of cards in this format, because you can just burn the power instead of passing it.
This isn't the case with regular powered drafting, so I wouldn't expect it to be the case here. If anything, you'd probably be more likely to take the interesting "build-around-me" kinds of cards in this format, because you can just burn the power instead of passing it.
Exactly!
It's really difficult to burn a Lotus (I don't think I ever have, actually), but we burn Moxes all the time. I've burned Moxes for Backup Plan, Double Stroke, Power Play, Sulfuric Vortex, Jitte, etc. Way too many cards to count. Both P1P1 and mid-draft.
Intersting. Should lead to some cool decks. I think id prefer this in a non-powered cube environment, as the p1p1 decisions are more likely to define a powerful archetype than just "Take power -> burn 4 cool cards".
This isn't the case with regular powered drafting, so I wouldn't expect it to be the case here. If anything, you'd probably be more likely to take the interesting "build-around-me" kinds of cards in this format, because you can just burn the power instead of passing it.
I guess I believe that on average ,
P1 of a pack is less interesting than p2 or p3, due to power.
Since the ratio of pick 1's to pick 2+'s is much higher in this format it would lead to more automatic picks.
Maybe my first assumption is flawed,
Or the effect of a greater number of power in decks is miniscule to the drafting experience.
I think first picks in cube are more interesting, due to the powered cards. The picks are a lot more automatic when you can snap pick a Recurring Nightmare and not have to pass a Mox to get it.
That would be even more the case in this format, for the reason I explained above.
The one thing I don't like about this format: It uses up too much of the cube for a two player draft. If my friend and I run a Winston or Grid draft, the draft is over in about 10-15 minutes and we've only used a small chunk of the cube. We play our match in about an hour, give or take, and then we're ready for another one. On any given night, after work, we can run two to three drafts and go home happy. With this format, not only will it take longer to draft, but I'm using up enough of my cube that I can't draft again that night without shuffling. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, as it does seem like a fun format, but I don't think it's right for a group (if you call two people a group) who wants to maximize on time and get as many drafts/matches in as possible in one 3-4 hour session.
Also, how often do you end up fighting your draft partner for a specific color? If you open something like Recurring Nightmare, is it proper strategy to burn the other black cards or cards that combo well with Nightmare in the pack?
Intersting. Should lead to some cool decks. I think id prefer this in a non-powered cube environment, as the p1p1 decisions are more likely to define a powerful archetype than just "Take power -> burn 4 cool cards".
This isn't the case with regular powered drafting, so I wouldn't expect it to be the case here. If anything, you'd probably be more likely to take the interesting "build-around-me" kinds of cards in this format, because you can just burn the power instead of passing it.
I guess I believe that on average ,
P1 of a pack is less interesting than p2 or p3, due to power.
Since the ratio of pick 1's to pick 2+'s is much higher in this format it would lead to more automatic picks.
Maybe my first assumption is flawed,
Or the effect of a greater number of power in decks is miniscule to the drafting experience.
It might seem that way off the bat, but you're also getting 12 packs per person. The value of most pieces of power really drop when you're trying to draft a cohesive archetype deck. For instance, if I'm already in aggro, Moxes go down as first pickable options a good bit. I've taken Winter Orb over Moxes because I know that card is not coming back, and it's more important to my deck. My P1P1 would probably be a Mox over a Winter Orb, but because I'm already in the strategy, I'll be taking the more powerful card over the piece of power without a second thought.
I think first picks in cube are more interesting, due to the powered cards. The picks are a lot more automatic when you can snap pick a Recurring Nightmare and not have to pass a Mox to get it.
That would be even more the case in this format, for the reason I explained above.
Yep. The fact that you don't have to pass a Mox to an opponent is even more incentive to take something else. In the above example, if we had no burning, I would take the Mox, pass the pack, and almost be assured that the Winter Orb will wheel because unless my opponent is in aggro as well, he's going to pass me the card back and not hate it. The fact that my opponent gets to burn cards also does some interesting things to how it affects your wheeling strategy.
The one thing I don't like about this format: It uses up too much of the cube for a two player draft. If my friend and I run a Winston or Grid draft, the draft is over in about 10-15 minutes and we've only used a small chunk of the cube. We play our match in about an hour, give or take, and then we're ready for another one. On any given night, after work, we can run two to three drafts and go home happy. With this format, not only will it take longer to draft, but I'm using up enough of my cube that I can't draft again that night without shuffling. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, as it does seem like a fun format, but I don't think it's right for a group (if you call two people a group) who wants to maximize on time and get as many drafts/matches in as possible in one 3-4 hour session.
We found that once players get used to how the draft works, it takes about the same amount of time as a Winston or Grid. Grids actually take significantly longer for my playgroup than Burnfour's do. Our draft format choice actually seems extremely similar to yours, in that our two preferred draft formats were Winston and Grid. We've been really happy with this draft format and wanted to share it with people exactly like you, that may be looking for something other than Winston or Grids.
I prefer Grid to Winston as I like the larger card pool. I don't like that both formats take a long time to draft, particularly Grid when people are looking to maximize hatedrafts from their opponent. Winstons are much more random in that they only use 90 cards (1/4th of my cube), have a lot more chance factors involved in what you and your opponent have access to (one Grid my opponent had 6 pieces of power to my 0), and not every archetype is available. The decks in Winston are also severely underpowered, which is fun if you enjoy three-color very odd decks, but we tend to like our archetypes coming together often when we start going down a road.
You can also use variants to affect how quickly the drafting portion takes by altering the amount of packs, size of packs, amount of cards burned, etc. The more cards that are burned, the less time the draft takes.
Shuffling the entire cube for a draft is a time concern, but we've found the quickest and easiest way to do it is the following:
1. Halve the cube. You take one half, your future opponent takes another half.
2. Pile shuffle the half of the cube you're given. I personally make 15 piles and then take three piles and riffle shuffle them twice x5 piles.
3. Take the pile-shuffled cards from you and your future opponent and count out 5 cards, make another pile of 5 cards, and another pile of 5 cards. Then return to the first 5 card pile and give it another 5 cards, etc etc until you have all your packs made.
The entire shuffling process takes about 5 minutes when you have someone helping. Really not that long, and the packs are really randomized.
If you're running 3 drafts and use half of your cube to Grid, you're using the same amount of time for shuffling. If you're only doing 2 grids, it's true that you will be spending an extra 5ish minutes shuffling for this draft format, but my playgroup agrees that they think 5 minutes is worth it.
You may have really slow players in your playgroup if you're only drafting twice in a 3-4 hour period. We can get at the very least 5 Burnfours in a 3 hour time period. Maybe it's because we've become accustomed to the drafting and shuffling process and get it over pretty quick.
Also, how often do you end up fighting your draft partner for a specific color?
Because of the nature of the drafting format, concerns like this are actually much less important than other ones. For instance, if both my opponent and I want to be blue, we're each seeing 180 cards of our own, in addition to the cards our opponent passes us. In the entire draft, I never see 60 of the cards in the cube, which means I'm seeing ~83.4% of the entire cube. There will always be blue cards for me to choose from.
We've had Burnfour's where both my opponent and I are in the exact same archetype. The decks are weakened for sure, but the games play out interestingly because of that reason. You really have no idea what your opponent drafted until deck construction (if you choose to show each other during the building process, we do).
If you open something like Recurring Nightmare, is it proper strategy to burn the other black cards or cards that combo well with Nightmare in the pack?
It depends on the pack and if I take the Recurring Nightmare.
If I take it, I may open a sweet pack for me that has 7+ cards that would be great in my deck. In that case:
1. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and burn 4 completely unrelated cards that are not good in my deck. My opponent's 10 will have 6 cards that are good for me, and 4 that are not. He may get a great card out of this pack for his deck, but he will definitely be passing me back at least one card that I want. 2. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and burn 4 of the best cards for any given deck. This might be something like Natural Order, Mox Pearl, Goblin Guide, and Fact or Fiction. Even though I'd like the Mox Pearl and Fact or Fiction (and maybe even the Natural Order), I'm limiting his choices of archetypes to enter, as well as figuring out what strategies I may have hurt more than others. If I'm aware that a Goblin Guide has been cut, I'm not likely to switch from my plan when I open a Sulfuric Vortex next pack. My opponent, on the other hand, might jump ship not realizing I've cut a Goblin Guide for that exact strategy. There are also mind games involved in passing your opponent cards that are strong, but that he wants to play against you. So, let's say that pack also had a Eureka or Show and Tell in it. I'm not going to be upset if my opponent plays either of those cards against me when I'm a Recurring Nightmare deck. I'd rather burn 4 cards in other strategies and signal to him that Eureka and Show and Tell is open, because if he plays those cards against me, I may be able to put a Griselbrand or Hornet Queen into play and run away with things. 3. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and pass him cards that are good for me, but I might only have a mediocre chance of wheeling, in addition to cutting off a bunch of strong cards. So, this would be like cutting the Goblin Guide and Mox Pearl, but passing the Natural Order and Fact or Fiction. This is particularly important mid-draft and late-draft, but can also be done early. By mid-draft my opponent is already cemented in a strategy, and it's likely not mine. He may pass back a card I was looking to wheel. I've had Strip Mine wheel in a pack where I took Skullclamp because the pack was very good. 4. However, I will DEFINITELY be burning cards that are good against me. I don't want him having access to that stuff.
If I pass it to my opponent: Here are where even more mind games come into play.
If I pass my opponent a Recurring Nightmare early on (let's say in pack 1)
1. I MAY make a conscious effort to burn cards that work well with it in future packs such as Survival of the Fittest, Entomb, Necromancy, Bazaar of Baghdad, Deranged Hermit, etc. 2. I MAY make a conscious effort to pass him one or two cards that are decent with it, but not incredibly powerful to cement him in the archetype. I may pass him some black discard outlets like Oona's Prowler, Pack Rat, etc. After I think he may be cemented in the archetype, I will burn multiple cards in that archetype instead of just the best one in future packs. 3. I MAY completely ignore the reanimator spells I'm passing him to cement him in the archetype and draft cards or an entire archetype that works well against that strategy. (Scavenging Ooze, Disenchant, Timetwister, start drafting the Storm Deck, etc) 4. I MAY pass him strong cards in a variety of different archetypes shortly after to give him access to different decks, but lose out on earlier picks. Sulfuric Vortex, Winter Orb, Time Spiral, etc.
He really has no idea what I'm doing. I don't know what he's doing either. Maybe he first picked a Jitte and burned the Recurring Nightmare so he took something completely different and all my weird reanimator-centric efforts are in vain. Part of the beauty of the format is there is so much guesswork involved, and so little information coming back as to what your opponent is playing that it's difficult for you to be sure you're hating him out of powerful cards, and he feels the same way about your deck.
The entire drafting experience is fun because all the information is hidden, and we've found that makes the actual drafting process go much quicker because people aren't as concerned about hate-drafting.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to type up such an informative response. I do really like the sound of the format and I'll probably eventually give it a try. I just don't know if my normal Winston/Grid drafting partner would be the right person to try something like this with.
Grids actually take significantly longer for my playgroup than Burnfour's do.
What we've found with Grid drafting is that we enjoy more with the C/U cube than with the Powered list. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it seems to be consensus. We also found that Grid drafting takes more time to set up, but less time to actually draft than Winston drafting. Some picks are tough, but we rarely take very long to tank over them.
I prefer Grid to Winston as I like the larger card pool.
This is why Winston takes longer for us, because we draft with a larger than normal card pool. Drafting with 90 cards watered the decks down so much that was almost just not even worth the the time to draft, so we went up to 100 cards. Now I split my 555 card cube into fourths and we Winston with approximately 1/4 of the cube or ~138 cards. A draft will take about 15 minutes, give or take, depending on deck building. We like doing it this way because the larger card pool makes for a better deck. We are also quite casual with it. By that I mean it's not uncommon to know your opponent is in blue, pull up a pack with nothing for you and a JTMS, and just be like, "Ooh, something good for you here" and move on to the next pack. Hidden information just isn't that important for us.
Shuffling the entire cube for a draft is a time concern, but we've found the quickest and easiest way to do it is the following:
1. Halve the cube. You take one half, your future opponent takes another half.
2. Pile shuffle the half of the cube you're given. I personally make 15 piles and then take three piles and riffle shuffle them twice x5 piles.
3. Take the pile-shuffled cards from you and your future opponent and count out 5 cards, make another pile of 5 cards, and another pile of 5 cards. Then return to the first 5 card pile and give it another 5 cards, etc etc until you have all your packs made.
The entire shuffling process takes about 5 minutes when you have someone helping. Really not that long, and the packs are really randomized.
We sort the cards after each draft, so at the end of four Winstons we have a fully sorted cube - sorted by WUBRGALM of course. When I shuffle, usually alone at home while watching TV or a stream, it takes about 20-30 minutes. I shuffle each colored pile to mix it up from the last draft. Then I shuffle one colored pile into another colored pile so I'm left with four piles of two colors each. I then do it again and I have two piles of four colors. Finally I do it again and I have one pile of all eight colors, aka a fully shuffled cube. My Winston draft partner isn't the best at cube shuffling, so I'd honestly just rather do it myself.
If you're running 3 drafts and use half of your cube to Grid, you're using the same amount of time for shuffling. If you're only doing 2 grids, it's true that you will be spending an extra 5ish minutes shuffling for this draft format, but my playgroup agrees that they think 5 minutes is worth it.
When we Grid we'll usually just put the undrafted portion back in the box and shuffle it back up. So we get a few grid drafts out of the cube.
You may have really slow players in your playgroup if you're only drafting twice in a 3-4 hour period.
It's not slow players so much as it's the nature of the get together. I Winston draft with my cousin, who moved in with me and my family when he was 19 and I was 13, so growing up he was like the big brother I never asked for. Now that I'm 32 and he's 38 it's still a similar brotherly bond. He's got an 8 year old daughter now as well, so going over there means it's not just cube time, but it's also family time. We hang out and play Magic, his wife cooks dinner, the kid's there showing me the cool things she can do on her DS, it's just a nice evening. So between conversation, stopping to eat, talking to and playing with the kid, we're lucky to get three Winston drafts in between 530 and 10. I rarely stay after 10 o'clock because us old folks have to get up for work the next morning.
Anyway, thanks again for the sharing the idea. I'll definitely be giving it a try, but I don't think it'll replace our current go-to formats.
You may have really slow players in your playgroup if you're only drafting twice in a 3-4 hour period. We can get at the very least 5 Burnfours in a 3 hour time period. Maybe it's because we've become accustomed to the drafting and shuffling process and get it over pretty quick.
Now I feel a bit strange. Does everyone do multiple drafts a night? My group drafts once, and we use those decks for the rest of the night.
I've drafted some decks that in no way would I want to play them for the rest of the night. I'm not proud of it, but it happens. I like being able to get multiple drafts in.
We typically get two drafts done in one night with a group of four people and do it bracket style in matches with three games. If there are two of us we can usually get three drafts done and play five games per match.
First of all, thanks for this. There cannot be too many 2-player draft formats!
When we draft 2P (recently either our own mixture of Winston/Grid drafting or Winston/Quilt), we usually get at least two drafts in. However, we keep our decks from each draft, and play the decks from different drafts against each other, to determine an overall winner for the night. It's pretty fun to play against decks from a different draft...
If you'd like to use half the cube instead of the full thing, it would be possible to do two BurnTHREE's with the size of your cube. You'd end up with a draft pool of 32, which is slightly smaller than the 36 I recommend, but likely still doable.
You could make 16 packs of 15 (240 cards total). Do the above stuff and take ONE, burn THREE. This will make it so you and your opponent get two cards out of each pack you open (32 total cards in your card pool).
You can then play those decks against each other from different drafts at the end to determine an overall winner. BurnTHREE and BurnFIVE are the best draft variants of Burnfour, IMO.
To chime in, I did a couple of mock drafts in this format on my own, and I found that ending up with 36 cards leaves almost no room for deckbuilding. My list has about 1/6 of cards that replace a basic land during deck building (lands plus fast artifact mana), meaning that on average you end up with 6 of them, leaving you to select 23-25 cards out of 30 to include in your deck.
I did take fixing highly (as I always do), but I was also aggressive in burning fixing, so that kind of evens out.
I can confirm that it is possible to draft highly focused and very powerful decks (which makes sense since all or most of the power is divided over two decks).
I like this idea Colby. My friends and I will have to check it out. I came up with my own 2 player draft format you might be interested in. Each player starts with a 15, 13, 11, and 9 card pack. Each player looks at the 15 card pack and takes a card. Then you switch packs with your opponent and you each take a card from that pack which has 14 cards now. Set that pack aside. Then do the same thing from the 13, 11, and 9 card packs. After that you will have packs that have 13, 11, 9 and 7 cards left. Burn 6 from each of these packs which simulates the 6 other players. After that you will do the same thing as before but with 7, 5, 3, and 1 card packs.
Repeat that process two more times for a full 2 player 8 man simulated draft. If my math is right you will see the same amount of different and total cards you would see in an 8 player draft.
The only problems we have with it is that it does take a while to setup and the burning of cards can lead to you getting some cards back that wouldnt have tabled in a real draft.
To chime in, I did a couple of mock drafts in this format on my own, and I found that ending up with 36 cards leaves almost no room for deckbuilding. My list has about 1/6 of cards that replace a basic land during deck building (lands plus fast artifact mana), meaning that on average you end up with 6 of them, leaving you to select 23-25 cards out of 30 to include in your deck.
Yep, we like the smaller size because it helps deckbuilding go quicker. BurnTHREE gives you 48 total cards in your card pool at the end, which is three more than at an 8-man if you prefer that more.
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Repeat that process two more times for a full 2 player 8 man simulated draft. If my math is right you will see the same amount of different and total cards you would see in an 8 player draft.
The only problems we have with it is that it does take a while to setup and the burning of cards can lead to you getting some cards back that wouldnt have tabled in a real draft.
Yep, we started with this system but decided it'd just be easier and simpler to explain by doing a straight BurnTHREE or BurnFOUR draft.
I was really excited when I read this for my 2-man travel cube to have a new format. But having to draft 360 cards kills it for me. Is there any adaptation that lets you draft with 180 cards? (Which, I believe, is the size of most 2-man cubes.)
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I have an adaptation of this format that we've been experimenting with. We call it "Glimpse Drafting" (based on Glimpse the Future) and it's essentially a hybrid between my old 9x9 drafting variant and Colby's Burnfour draft.
Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
The three main differences were:
1) The quality of the 2nd and 3rd picks are substantially better, and made them more important to your deck construction. Instead of having the player that opens the pack taking the best card and ripping the next 4 best cards (removing the top 33% of the pack) you have to pass packs with 12 remaining cards in them, only allowing for the top 20% at best to be axed.
2) You still wind up with 45 cards in your pool, like a regular draft. This made drafting fixing lands, utility lands and other cards that replace basics less impactful on your draft (about the same as a normal draft) and it also gave more tools to aggro. A lot of the 4th and 5th picks in the packs are great filler cards for aggro decks, and we found it much easier to draft better manabases and better aggro decks during our Glimpse Drafts.
3) The decisions were harder. When faced with the decision between removing the two most broken cards or the two most functionally important cards for a specific strategy from the pack, you're forced to pass one of the two. We found that in Burnfour we could take what we want and eliminate pretty much every important/broken card that we were afraid of seeing on the other side of the table. Only being able to eliminate two of those cards before passing the pack made it a lot harder to prohibit the opponent from seeing certain cards, and as a result, archetypes became easier to draft.
Less information is hidden this way, but we actually found that to be an upside. It made signaling a thing, and reading what the opponent is doing is more important in a format where they'll be collecting more cards from each individual pack.
Both formats were fun, and I thank Colby for sharing this variant here. I combined what I liked from this format and what I liked from the 9x9 format we'd been experimenting with and came to something we're pretty happy with.
We invented a simple 2-player draft format for cube that replicates many qualities of an 8-man cube draft.
During the draft:
* Both players have access to almost any archetype they'd like
* Both players have near-perfect hidden information from their opponent (so neither player knows what the other is drafting)
* Both players can easily influence the other person's available card pool and draft strategy
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you our favorite 2-player cube drafting format. We have been calling it BURNFOUR or BURNING.
1. You make 24 packs of 15-cards. (12 per player)
2. You take one card face-down from a pack.
3. You remove "BURN" four cards face-down from the draft.
4. You pass that pack (now 10 cards) to your opponent.
Your opponent has done the same thing. Repeat this process with the 10-card pack you just got from your opponent until you run out of cards/packs.
Step 2) Each player looks at a new pack of 15 cards.
Step 3) TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Each player adds 1 card from that pack face-down to their deck/card pool, and then removes ("burns") 4 cards face-down from the draft. The burned cards will be completely removed from the pool and will remain hidden.
Step 4) Each player passes the remaining 10 cards from the pack to their opponent.
Step 5) TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Repeat Step 3.
Step 6) Each player passes the remaining 5 cards from the pack to their opponent.
Step 7) TAKE ONE, BURN FOUR: Repeat Step 3.
Then you start over again with a new pack until all of your packs are exhausted.
You'll end up getting a high-value card and a low-value card out of each pack you open, and a medium-value card out of the pack your opponent opens, kind of like an 8-player draft. You get an opportunity to wheel a card out of each pack you open, kind of like an 8-player draft. You will be removing "burning" four cards each time you take a card. The goal of burning cards is usually to remove powerful cards your opponent wants. These "burns" simulate other players drafting the cards. Burning THREE would actually simulate six other players beside you and your opponent (most similar to an 8-player draft), but we found Burning FOUR is a better play experience.
We invented this format to best replicate the drafting experience of a 8 man draft while attempting to keep things as simple as possible. While there are certainly more complex ways to do the burning from pack to pack, I wanted to keep the draft format simple so it was easy to explain to a new player.
Most of the strategy comes in the form of figuring out what you're playing early, and how to burn cards best from your opponent.
DRAFTING STRATEGY:
Because the information is basically completely hidden, you'll have no idea at any point what your opponent is playing. The cards you burn will likely be in multiple archetypes in the pack you open, and the pack of 10 you receive can be very odd burn targets.
I may burn a Eureka, Stoneforge Mystic, Necromancy, and Sulfuric Vortex from my opening pack after selecting my card. I don't know what strategy my opponent is in, but all of those cards are strategies I may not want to play against, or give him access to.
On the other hand, in early packs, I may want to send him a Sulfuric Vortex with very little other incentives, assume he took it, and then make a conscious effort to remove all mono-red cards from any packs I send back to him.
In yet another vein of thought, I may open a pack that has many cards I want to wheel in it (at any point in the draft). I may burn four of the weakest cards from the pack in order to ensure I get at least one card to wheel for me.
36 CARD POOLS INSTEAD OF 45:
The end result is a card pool of 36 total cards. This is smaller than the common 45 from a winston draft, or cube draft with more players (4/6/8/etc). We strongly prefer the smaller card pool, as it allows for easier decisions in what to include in your deck when it comes to deck construction. We've found that nonbasics go very late in this format and are rarely burned, another benefit of having a smaller card pool.
It may sound initially like 36 total cards in your card pool may be too few, but I would recommend doing a draft described exactly as above before making judgments or changes.
You can adjust the amount of cards burned, the amount of packs, and the size of the packs. This may be more desirable if you have a different cube size, or want a different drafting experience. If you have a larger cube size, I would recommend using larger packs, burning more cards, or combining the two. (So, if you have a large cube, use 20 card packs instead of 15, or use 24 card packs and burn seven instead of four). Do the math before hand and make sure people are getting around 36 cards for their card pool. Slightly more (going up to 48) is probably fine, but I wouldn't recommend dropping below 36. Anything in between 36 and 48 should be fine.
GLIMPSE DRAFTING:
(Glimpse drafting is named such because of its similarities with Glimpse the Future)
12 packs of 15 cards. (24 packs total, 12 for each player)
Take 1, Burn 4.
GLIMPSE:
9 packs of 15 cards. (18 packs total, 9 for each player)
Take 1, Burn 2.
Everything else is the same.
Note: You can change stuff up however you want according to your preferences.
I'm fine with calling any variant of this GLIMPSE, it's a catchier name, and there's an actual Magic card that models the draft format.
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The thing I'm most apprehensive about is that the "burn four" step will take a ton of time if you're drafting with someone who takes a "perfectionist" approach to the draft, i.e. someone going to 10 different permutations about which cards to remove before settling, and then second-guessing themselves before handing the cards over, repeat ad nauseam.
Maybe a chess clock can be useful there...
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Once you start seeing what burning strategies are best (even though there is a bunch of different stuff you can do), the drafts go quicker. The first time anyone drafts the cube this way, it takes the longest amount of time. After that, the drafts go pretty quick.
It does take longer than other draft formats, but not significantly longer after people figure things out. I'd say that's true of almost anything. The first time someone learns Winston, Tenchester, Rochester, or Quiliting, it's gonna be significantly longer than the latter iterations of the draft. Hell, even a first time Winchester or Grid can take a really long time. Our Grids (our primary draft format before switching to BURNFOUR) actually started to take longer and longer as people got more interested in hate-drafting cards from their opponent. The opposite is true with BURNFOUR because everything is hidden information, so you just develop ways to 'hatedraft' your opponent in a vaccum and you get better at understanding the differences and subtleties of your cube. Actually, since we started doing BURNFOUR as our primary way of drafting the cube, we've seen the actual draft portion last about the same time as an average Grid draft, which is one of the quickest ways of drafting (but my group started to become slower and slower with grid).
The burning choices are very cube-specific, so we've realized in my cube, it's really easy to negatively affect a ton of strategies by burning fatties like Hornet Queen, Myr Battlesphere, etc. It's very difficult to negatively affect aggro in general, but easier to affect a color of aggro. It's actually made cube managing much more interesting, as I get to see entire strategies in my cube on a big, macro level and can adjust it based on that.
Thanks for the post!
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We think Worldknit is actually the strongest card in the entire format. I've taken it over Sol Ring mid-draft and was happy with my choice. Because the card pool is smaller than normal, and the card quality is much better, you get to do some really interesting things with Worldknit decks. Worldknit is obviously stronger the earlier you get it. I would say Worldknit gets played around 25% of the time, and has only lost a few times when it is played. Moxes are much weaker in this format than in others, because often times you will absolutely want to take a card that is more important to your archetype.
Some P1P1 decisions are super easy, and other ones are incredibly hard. I mean, sure, if you get an Ancestral or a Lotus or something in your P1P1, you're going to slam it and move on, but there are lots of times when your choice is between Mox Pearl, Time Spiral (remember we support storm), Sulfuric Vortex, and Survival of the Fittest. The Mox isn't necessarily stronger than any of those other cards, but it may be the safest option. Based on the cards you burn, you know it's probably best to go another strategy (but your opponent doesn't know that yet).
If it was between those exact options, I would figure out if I want to play one of those archetypes. We draft the entire cube, so I'm likely going to be able to make whatever archetype I'd like work. If I take Survival, I'm going to definitely take Recurring Nightmare or possibly even a fatty over a Mox or Time Walk in subsequent packs too.
I think you'd be really surprised at how deep and complex the P1P1 choices are.
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This isn't the case with regular powered drafting, so I wouldn't expect it to be the case here. If anything, you'd probably be more likely to take the interesting "build-around-me" kinds of cards in this format, because you can just burn the power instead of passing it.
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Exactly!
It's really difficult to burn a Lotus (I don't think I ever have, actually), but we burn Moxes all the time. I've burned Moxes for Backup Plan, Double Stroke, Power Play, Sulfuric Vortex, Jitte, etc. Way too many cards to count. Both P1P1 and mid-draft.
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I guess I believe that on average ,
P1 of a pack is less interesting than p2 or p3, due to power.
Since the ratio of pick 1's to pick 2+'s is much higher in this format it would lead to more automatic picks.
Maybe my first assumption is flawed,
Or the effect of a greater number of power in decks is miniscule to the drafting experience.
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That would be even more the case in this format, for the reason I explained above.
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Also, how often do you end up fighting your draft partner for a specific color? If you open something like Recurring Nightmare, is it proper strategy to burn the other black cards or cards that combo well with Nightmare in the pack?
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It might seem that way off the bat, but you're also getting 12 packs per person. The value of most pieces of power really drop when you're trying to draft a cohesive archetype deck. For instance, if I'm already in aggro, Moxes go down as first pickable options a good bit. I've taken Winter Orb over Moxes because I know that card is not coming back, and it's more important to my deck. My P1P1 would probably be a Mox over a Winter Orb, but because I'm already in the strategy, I'll be taking the more powerful card over the piece of power without a second thought.
Yep. The fact that you don't have to pass a Mox to an opponent is even more incentive to take something else. In the above example, if we had no burning, I would take the Mox, pass the pack, and almost be assured that the Winter Orb will wheel because unless my opponent is in aggro as well, he's going to pass me the card back and not hate it. The fact that my opponent gets to burn cards also does some interesting things to how it affects your wheeling strategy.
We found that once players get used to how the draft works, it takes about the same amount of time as a Winston or Grid. Grids actually take significantly longer for my playgroup than Burnfour's do. Our draft format choice actually seems extremely similar to yours, in that our two preferred draft formats were Winston and Grid. We've been really happy with this draft format and wanted to share it with people exactly like you, that may be looking for something other than Winston or Grids.
I prefer Grid to Winston as I like the larger card pool. I don't like that both formats take a long time to draft, particularly Grid when people are looking to maximize hatedrafts from their opponent. Winstons are much more random in that they only use 90 cards (1/4th of my cube), have a lot more chance factors involved in what you and your opponent have access to (one Grid my opponent had 6 pieces of power to my 0), and not every archetype is available. The decks in Winston are also severely underpowered, which is fun if you enjoy three-color very odd decks, but we tend to like our archetypes coming together often when we start going down a road.
You can also use variants to affect how quickly the drafting portion takes by altering the amount of packs, size of packs, amount of cards burned, etc. The more cards that are burned, the less time the draft takes.
Shuffling the entire cube for a draft is a time concern, but we've found the quickest and easiest way to do it is the following:
1. Halve the cube. You take one half, your future opponent takes another half.
2. Pile shuffle the half of the cube you're given. I personally make 15 piles and then take three piles and riffle shuffle them twice x5 piles.
3. Take the pile-shuffled cards from you and your future opponent and count out 5 cards, make another pile of 5 cards, and another pile of 5 cards. Then return to the first 5 card pile and give it another 5 cards, etc etc until you have all your packs made.
The entire shuffling process takes about 5 minutes when you have someone helping. Really not that long, and the packs are really randomized.
If you're running 3 drafts and use half of your cube to Grid, you're using the same amount of time for shuffling. If you're only doing 2 grids, it's true that you will be spending an extra 5ish minutes shuffling for this draft format, but my playgroup agrees that they think 5 minutes is worth it.
You may have really slow players in your playgroup if you're only drafting twice in a 3-4 hour period. We can get at the very least 5 Burnfours in a 3 hour time period. Maybe it's because we've become accustomed to the drafting and shuffling process and get it over pretty quick.
Because of the nature of the drafting format, concerns like this are actually much less important than other ones. For instance, if both my opponent and I want to be blue, we're each seeing 180 cards of our own, in addition to the cards our opponent passes us. In the entire draft, I never see 60 of the cards in the cube, which means I'm seeing ~83.4% of the entire cube. There will always be blue cards for me to choose from.
We've had Burnfour's where both my opponent and I are in the exact same archetype. The decks are weakened for sure, but the games play out interestingly because of that reason. You really have no idea what your opponent drafted until deck construction (if you choose to show each other during the building process, we do).
It depends on the pack and if I take the Recurring Nightmare.
If I take it, I may open a sweet pack for me that has 7+ cards that would be great in my deck. In that case:
1. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and burn 4 completely unrelated cards that are not good in my deck. My opponent's 10 will have 6 cards that are good for me, and 4 that are not. He may get a great card out of this pack for his deck, but he will definitely be passing me back at least one card that I want.
2. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and burn 4 of the best cards for any given deck. This might be something like Natural Order, Mox Pearl, Goblin Guide, and Fact or Fiction. Even though I'd like the Mox Pearl and Fact or Fiction (and maybe even the Natural Order), I'm limiting his choices of archetypes to enter, as well as figuring out what strategies I may have hurt more than others. If I'm aware that a Goblin Guide has been cut, I'm not likely to switch from my plan when I open a Sulfuric Vortex next pack. My opponent, on the other hand, might jump ship not realizing I've cut a Goblin Guide for that exact strategy. There are also mind games involved in passing your opponent cards that are strong, but that he wants to play against you. So, let's say that pack also had a Eureka or Show and Tell in it. I'm not going to be upset if my opponent plays either of those cards against me when I'm a Recurring Nightmare deck. I'd rather burn 4 cards in other strategies and signal to him that Eureka and Show and Tell is open, because if he plays those cards against me, I may be able to put a Griselbrand or Hornet Queen into play and run away with things.
3. I MAY take the Recurring Nightmare, and pass him cards that are good for me, but I might only have a mediocre chance of wheeling, in addition to cutting off a bunch of strong cards. So, this would be like cutting the Goblin Guide and Mox Pearl, but passing the Natural Order and Fact or Fiction. This is particularly important mid-draft and late-draft, but can also be done early. By mid-draft my opponent is already cemented in a strategy, and it's likely not mine. He may pass back a card I was looking to wheel. I've had Strip Mine wheel in a pack where I took Skullclamp because the pack was very good.
4. However, I will DEFINITELY be burning cards that are good against me. I don't want him having access to that stuff.
If I pass it to my opponent: Here are where even more mind games come into play.
If I pass my opponent a Recurring Nightmare early on (let's say in pack 1)
1. I MAY make a conscious effort to burn cards that work well with it in future packs such as Survival of the Fittest, Entomb, Necromancy, Bazaar of Baghdad, Deranged Hermit, etc.
2. I MAY make a conscious effort to pass him one or two cards that are decent with it, but not incredibly powerful to cement him in the archetype. I may pass him some black discard outlets like Oona's Prowler, Pack Rat, etc. After I think he may be cemented in the archetype, I will burn multiple cards in that archetype instead of just the best one in future packs.
3. I MAY completely ignore the reanimator spells I'm passing him to cement him in the archetype and draft cards or an entire archetype that works well against that strategy. (Scavenging Ooze, Disenchant, Timetwister, start drafting the Storm Deck, etc)
4. I MAY pass him strong cards in a variety of different archetypes shortly after to give him access to different decks, but lose out on earlier picks. Sulfuric Vortex, Winter Orb, Time Spiral, etc.
He really has no idea what I'm doing. I don't know what he's doing either. Maybe he first picked a Jitte and burned the Recurring Nightmare so he took something completely different and all my weird reanimator-centric efforts are in vain. Part of the beauty of the format is there is so much guesswork involved, and so little information coming back as to what your opponent is playing that it's difficult for you to be sure you're hating him out of powerful cards, and he feels the same way about your deck.
The entire drafting experience is fun because all the information is hidden, and we've found that makes the actual drafting process go much quicker because people aren't as concerned about hate-drafting.
No problem! Let us know if you happen to do any Burnfours and how they went!
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What we've found with Grid drafting is that we enjoy more with the C/U cube than with the Powered list. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but it seems to be consensus. We also found that Grid drafting takes more time to set up, but less time to actually draft than Winston drafting. Some picks are tough, but we rarely take very long to tank over them.
This is why Winston takes longer for us, because we draft with a larger than normal card pool. Drafting with 90 cards watered the decks down so much that was almost just not even worth the the time to draft, so we went up to 100 cards. Now I split my 555 card cube into fourths and we Winston with approximately 1/4 of the cube or ~138 cards. A draft will take about 15 minutes, give or take, depending on deck building. We like doing it this way because the larger card pool makes for a better deck. We are also quite casual with it. By that I mean it's not uncommon to know your opponent is in blue, pull up a pack with nothing for you and a JTMS, and just be like, "Ooh, something good for you here" and move on to the next pack. Hidden information just isn't that important for us.
We sort the cards after each draft, so at the end of four Winstons we have a fully sorted cube - sorted by WUBRGALM of course. When I shuffle, usually alone at home while watching TV or a stream, it takes about 20-30 minutes. I shuffle each colored pile to mix it up from the last draft. Then I shuffle one colored pile into another colored pile so I'm left with four piles of two colors each. I then do it again and I have two piles of four colors. Finally I do it again and I have one pile of all eight colors, aka a fully shuffled cube. My Winston draft partner isn't the best at cube shuffling, so I'd honestly just rather do it myself.
When we Grid we'll usually just put the undrafted portion back in the box and shuffle it back up. So we get a few grid drafts out of the cube.
It's not slow players so much as it's the nature of the get together. I Winston draft with my cousin, who moved in with me and my family when he was 19 and I was 13, so growing up he was like the big brother I never asked for. Now that I'm 32 and he's 38 it's still a similar brotherly bond. He's got an 8 year old daughter now as well, so going over there means it's not just cube time, but it's also family time. We hang out and play Magic, his wife cooks dinner, the kid's there showing me the cool things she can do on her DS, it's just a nice evening. So between conversation, stopping to eat, talking to and playing with the kid, we're lucky to get three Winston drafts in between 530 and 10. I rarely stay after 10 o'clock because us old folks have to get up for work the next morning.
Anyway, thanks again for the sharing the idea. I'll definitely be giving it a try, but I don't think it'll replace our current go-to formats.
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Now I feel a bit strange. Does everyone do multiple drafts a night? My group drafts once, and we use those decks for the rest of the night.
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When we draft 2P (recently either our own mixture of Winston/Grid drafting or Winston/Quilt), we usually get at least two drafts in. However, we keep our decks from each draft, and play the decks from different drafts against each other, to determine an overall winner for the night. It's pretty fun to play against decks from a different draft...
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If you'd like to use half the cube instead of the full thing, it would be possible to do two BurnTHREE's with the size of your cube. You'd end up with a draft pool of 32, which is slightly smaller than the 36 I recommend, but likely still doable.
You could make 16 packs of 15 (240 cards total). Do the above stuff and take ONE, burn THREE. This will make it so you and your opponent get two cards out of each pack you open (32 total cards in your card pool).
You can then play those decks against each other from different drafts at the end to determine an overall winner. BurnTHREE and BurnFIVE are the best draft variants of Burnfour, IMO.
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I did take fixing highly (as I always do), but I was also aggressive in burning fixing, so that kind of evens out.
I can confirm that it is possible to draft highly focused and very powerful decks (which makes sense since all or most of the power is divided over two decks).
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Repeat that process two more times for a full 2 player 8 man simulated draft. If my math is right you will see the same amount of different and total cards you would see in an 8 player draft.
The only problems we have with it is that it does take a while to setup and the burning of cards can lead to you getting some cards back that wouldnt have tabled in a real draft.
Yep, we like the smaller size because it helps deckbuilding go quicker. BurnTHREE gives you 48 total cards in your card pool at the end, which is three more than at an 8-man if you prefer that more.
Yep, we started with this system but decided it'd just be easier and simpler to explain by doing a straight BurnTHREE or BurnFOUR draft.
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Each player makes 9 packs of 15. You draft a card and burn 2 cards rather than 4 before you pass the pack to your opponent (the OP advises against this, but we found it much more satisfying). Each player will get 5 cards per pack, and you wind up with 45 cards at the end of the draft. It fixed the three main problems we had with Burnfour when we experimented with the format, and was actually quite a lot of fun.
The three main differences were:
1) The quality of the 2nd and 3rd picks are substantially better, and made them more important to your deck construction. Instead of having the player that opens the pack taking the best card and ripping the next 4 best cards (removing the top 33% of the pack) you have to pass packs with 12 remaining cards in them, only allowing for the top 20% at best to be axed.
2) You still wind up with 45 cards in your pool, like a regular draft. This made drafting fixing lands, utility lands and other cards that replace basics less impactful on your draft (about the same as a normal draft) and it also gave more tools to aggro. A lot of the 4th and 5th picks in the packs are great filler cards for aggro decks, and we found it much easier to draft better manabases and better aggro decks during our Glimpse Drafts.
3) The decisions were harder. When faced with the decision between removing the two most broken cards or the two most functionally important cards for a specific strategy from the pack, you're forced to pass one of the two. We found that in Burnfour we could take what we want and eliminate pretty much every important/broken card that we were afraid of seeing on the other side of the table. Only being able to eliminate two of those cards before passing the pack made it a lot harder to prohibit the opponent from seeing certain cards, and as a result, archetypes became easier to draft.
Less information is hidden this way, but we actually found that to be an upside. It made signaling a thing, and reading what the opponent is doing is more important in a format where they'll be collecting more cards from each individual pack.
Both formats were fun, and I thank Colby for sharing this variant here. I combined what I liked from this format and what I liked from the 9x9 format we'd been experimenting with and came to something we're pretty happy with.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 49th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from MKM!