By the time you read this, Avacyn Restored will be spoiled. As I write this, it isn’t. So, I’ll save my card review for next week and talk this week about one of my favorite types of drafting: the Deck Draft.

In my experience, casual players have a tough relationship to drafting. On one hand, it’s a fun way to extract value from boosters over a whole night while getting multiple people involved. On the other hand, few playgroups have the budget for regular drafting apart from someone keeping his or her booster box sealed until game night. Casual drafting also has few competitive translations; you can export a lot of in-game lessons from the kitchen to the store, but a Draft where everyone’s fine with showing each other their cards is so strategically different than a Grand Prix Draft that it might as well be called something else.

But drafting anything is basically fun. If Magic hasn’t taught you that, the popularity of fantasy sports would fill you in on the notion that people like to pick things and hold competitions about picked things. That makes it sound as though I’m in a garden, but the point is that drafting booster packs is only one type of drafting enjoyment. You can draft decks by pooling the group’s creations and see how the resulting competition turns out. I’ve only done it once, but it was so much fun that I wanted to write something about it.

My Version

I’m the guy who builds more decks than he can carry reasonably, never mind play in one night; consequently, others often borrow my decks. My Deck Draft was essentially borrowing writ large.

For my Deck Draft recipe you will need:

• People who want to play a round-robin tournament;
• n (n − 1) decks, where n is the number of players—four players would need 4 × 3 = 12 decks, while seven players (as my Draft turned out to have) would need 7 × 6 = 42;
• A list of the decks involved, preferably with short deck descriptions, so you can take them off the list as they’re drafted;
• Someone to keep score of who played each deck if you’re using a one-play sort of rule; and
• Three eggs—remember that eggs always taste best from someone else’s refrigerator, so be sure to borrow them. If you cannot borrow eggs, substitute olive oil, but do not use extra virgin olive oil. That’s too much virgin.

For the sake of coherence I’ve organized my night chronologically (well, time did that, but you know what I mean) so you can have a sense of what your Deck Draft could look like.

Assembling the Universe

Though it sounds like a Brian Cox show (bone thrown to my British readership there), you can assemble the universe of draftable decks any number of ways. Given the group style and that it was my idea, all forty-two decks were mine (and yes, the group came together often enough that people had generally seen all of them), but there’s no reason you couldn’t cull decks from several people. Get the five colors equally represented if possible—you have to please a variety of players, after all—but every knob of options can be twiddled here. I don’t build many aggressive decks, so I had to include every one of them and go easy on the midrange; multiple deck sources should mitigate this bias.

Determine the Game Format

I went with duels since it was the easiest to keep track of, but maybe you want to hold a multiplayer game of some sort. Two-Headed Giant ought to be fun in a Deck Draft. Your group’s favorite format probably has its decks tweaked toward that format anyway, so that format might be your best bet at first.

You must also determine if each deck will be used exactly once or if it can be used multiple times. I ran my Draft on a one-time rule, which made several fun choices. If I know I’m playing a particular person who took most of the red decks, do I play the life-gain deck against him or will he double-bluff me since he knows I have the life-gain deck? Regardless, decks should be valued differently on these considerations, so it’s best to decide such things before the Draft.

Hold the Draft

As with other fantasy endeavors (sports, not books), you can hold multiple types of Drafts. I did a basic serpentine draft—players A through D draft in that order, followed by D through A, and back again—for ease of administration and to help the idea feel fair to those getting used to the concept. If you wanted to be fancy, you could do an auction as in true rotisserie baseball, with an imaginary budget you had to spread out amongst the decks or bid life points and hand size like with the Magic Invitationals. How complex you can go with the Draft probably depends mostly on how much time you can spend on it and how much your group is into fantasy sports.

There’s plenty of strategic opportunity even in a serpentine Draft. Do you load up on the same deck style or do you aim for variety? How much do you respond to what others have drafted? My recollection is that several of my decks were hate drafted away from me—it didn’t matter how much the other people wanted to play it themselves; they just knew who shouldn’t play it.

This aspect probably is much more interesting if you’re bringing multiple players’ decks into the Draft. In my case, I want to keep the B/R decks away from my friend—who, conveniently for this hypothetical, goes by Buddy—because he’s at his most dangerous with a heap of B/R decks. To go back into sports terms, Buddy’s got a home-field advantage in Rakdos Carnarium. Then again, I’m bad with most B/R, so I might be hurting myself too much if I cut off an opponent.

Whatever the setup, you can discover a lot about players’ preferences from all these considerations. In the abstract, I’d make sure to pick up decks of my style and then decks in all colors, filling out my roster with some hate-draft picks.

Play the Games

I find drafting and building more fun than playing out games, in this exercise and generally, so I don’t have much advice. The main thing is to remember that even simple tournaments take longer than you think (until you think of them as longer than you once thought of them, I guess—it can’t be entirely Sisyphean, can it?). I would love to have enough time to run two-out-of-three matches, and if your group has time for that, great. If not, at least it’s easier to keep score for best-of-ones. However you run it, get as many people as possible to update their own results. If you’re the primary organizer of the Draft night, delegate so you can enjoy it as well. Then again, running the Draft is the best part . . .

Mix It Up, Get Feedback, and Do Those Types of Things

While my group never got around to hosting a second Deck Draft, it’s primarily because it never came together, not because we didn’t want to. Deck drafting is one of the most unique things I’ve ever done in Magic. It feels familiar to draft Magic-related items, but deck drafting takes most of its cues from outside Magic, so it’s a fascinating, highly customizable hybrid of things you might like doing already. Because of the thematic overlap, I’m surprised that I’ve never read anything touting the idea; I don’t think the idea’s that original, but it is quite fun.

(Side note: The word “original” is strange. You can use “original” to mean something’s innovative/daring/groundbreaking/new or you can mean something’s first/standard/classic/old. For example, you could say that original-flavor Chex Mix isn’t that original because it’s original, and not only would you be correct, but a fellow conversant would understand you. That’s another thing I haven’t seen discussed much. Deck drafting and the word original—that’s two things.)

Okay, Maybe I Should Talk About Avacyn Restored A Little Bit

I normally go too long on set reviews in part because I write too long about new mechanics, so I’ll do that now, before next week’s card analysis. In several ways, Avacyn Restored feels like YABTS (Yet Another Brian Tinsman Set), given that its Big Things theme’s been most prominent in YABTSs Rise of the Eldrazi and Scourge. Maybe it’s because Brian Tinsman has the initials of Big Things. Maybe it isn’t because of that. Who knows? Moving on, here are three thoughts:

1. Miracle will probably play very differently in casual than elsewhere. Few of the spoiled miracles (odd phrase) seem like build-arounds, so their most prominent use will be Commander depth, where they will combo with Vampiric Tutor and a little less with scry. They should be fair otherwise, since their normal casting is overcosted. I am generally of the camp that avoids cards requiring too much setup, and true miracle abuse (also odd phrase) seems finicky. If you’re using it with good library manipulation effects anyway, on the other hand, these are probably just better versions of things you’re already running. Crystal Ball gets all the press for such effects, but if you’re in blue, I’d consider Soothsaying.
2. Soulbond will take some getting used to in terms of understanding when a creature is or isn’t paired. I think it’s fairly viable in multiplayer—it’s like Slivers for two—so you might want to think about how you’ll mark paired creatures now before you put them in decks.
3. One of my favorite features of casual deck building is that unique junk rares can get their best parts printed on better cards and suddenly be tournament quality. Sometimes, if you’ve built enough decks over the years, you can find that quality before somebody else because you’re one of the few to play with its junk rare predecessor. That’s the case for my absolute favorite card in Avacyn Restored. It’s a lot like the card I’ve left out of this decklist:

"Single Card Strategy with . . ."

• Creatures (12)
• 2 Souls of the Faultless
• 2 Suture Spirit
• 4 Howling Banshee
• 4 The Thing I'm Not Naming

• Spells (26)
• 2 Candles' Glow
• 2 Horobi's Whisper
• 2 Terashi's Verdict
• 3 Ethereal Haze
• 4 Rend Flesh
• 4 Spiritual Visit
• 3 Devouring Greed
• 3 Exsanguinate
• 3 Tainted Sigil

• Lands (22)
• 11 Swamp
• 7 Plains
• 4 Orzhov Basilica

Buy This Deck

If you can figure out it (I have no idea if it’s easy or hard), you’ll have a week’s lead on my next article. Until then, I’m jealous of you who are reading this with the full spoiler up—I’d like that right now. Then again, by the time you’re reading this, I could look at the spoiler, too. Deadlines sometimes make weird things happen. Now you know.