Don't mind me, just preppin for some epic chaos drafts. pic.twitter.com/bgWhIyu6Sx

— Kendra Smith ? MF Madison (@TheMaverickGal) May 7, 2019

This week I tweeted out a really sweet little receipt on some Magic product I purchased right here on CoolStuffInc.com. On it is some particularly sweet booster packs from all over the game's storied history. You'll see there are recent ones like Dominaria and Hour of Devastation all the way back to the likes of Tempest and Urza's Saga. This is for what we call a Chaos Draft.

If you're unaware of what a Chaos Draft is, longtime CoolStuffInc.com writer Vorthos Mike wrote a great piece on the format a few years back. Essentially it's a draft format where anything is possible. Players grab whatever packs they want or, if they're like me, put together a big super special pool of cards that they can use to play with. You too can play it just by going to your local shop, buying three packs of whatever floats your fancy, and jamming them with friends against their favorite sets.

This format is so popular that even Magic Online got in on the fun, providing phantom Chaos Draft events last year. It was so popular they even brought it back at least once thus far, and will likely continue to do so every few months moving forward if I had to guess.

Why is it so fun and so popular? For some, stores don't always have what they want in stock. In the past, stores couldn't sanction Limited events unless they fell into certain guidelines such as being all of the most recent set. In these cases, when a new set would drop, stores couldn't run sanctioned events. Some likely did anyways, but at mine they wouldn't allow it so as to abide by the rules Wizards and the DCI had set in place.

When the store would run out of packs for a sanctionable draft on a Friday night, we would all just say "whatever," grab a mix of packs off the shelf, and go to town. Other times, one of us might buy a box of random packs to open for some variety and some friends might get together to draft it. Back when you might do this, packs were significantly cheaper. Urza Block packs could be purchased for $20 or less at the time, and that's to say nothing of packs like, say, Time Spiral that could easily be grabbed for $6. All of this added up to some relatively affordable boxes with a vast assortment of boosters.

Today, this is much more difficult. Packs are more expensive than ever now, due in large part to scarcity, history, and even the desire to draft them away through things like Chaos Drafts. One pack of Urza's Saga opened up is one less in the wild, and there's very few left to go around. If you took a look at the various packs I picked up for a Chaos Draft I'm hoping to host in the next week or so, you might've noticed that the total on those packs comes to roughly $500! It's a very expensive endeavor for most that I personally was only able to obtain by accruing store credit over a length of time.

If you can draft it, however, it's very worth it. Let me show you a couple decks (one with sideboard and one without) that I was able to put together during my last two Chaos Drafts. The first of these was at a meetup arranged by the Masters of Modern podcast with a pod featuring such names as content creator Shivam Bhatt and Wizards R&D member Jules Robins. The second was my one and only draft from the Magic Online Chaos Draft event.

Izzet Aggro | Chaos Draft | Masters of Modern Meetup at MagicFest LA

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Balduvian Horde
• 1 Burning-Tree Emissary
• 1 Desert Cerodon
• 1 Ghitu Lavarunner
• 1 Gnat Alley Creeper
• 1 Mage-Ring Bully
• 1 Mulldrifter
• 1 Mystic of the Hidden Way
• 1 Phantom Warrior
• 1 Subterranean Scout
• 1 Thermo-Alchemist
• 1 Voldaren Duelist
• 1 Warbringer
• 1 Wojek Bodyguard

• Instants (5)
• 1 Dynacharge
• 1 Electrify
• 1 Incinerate
• 1 Piracy Charm
• 1 Staggershock

• Sorceries (3)
• 1 Fight With Fire
• 1 Flame Jab
• 1 Limits of Solidarity

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Cartouche of Knowledge

• Lands (17)
• 10 Mountain
• 7 Island

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Look at this deck! This list actually came out looking closer to a Constructed deck more than it did a Limited one. All kinds of sets are represented here including Lorwyn, Eldritch Moon, Planar Chaos, Dominaria, Dissension, Masters 25, Tenth Edition, and so on. Despite the vast differences in power level, it's still clearly quite possible to build a very strong deck across such a wide swath of sets.

Grixis Fliers | Chaos Draft | Magic Online Chaos Draft League

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Aven Surveyor
• 1 Aviation Pioneer
• 1 Basilica Screecher
• 1 Bonded Fetch
• 1 Dreadwing
• 1 Hinterland Drake
• 1 Hoverguard Observer
• 1 Khenra Scrapper
• 1 Phantom Monster
• 1 Sabertooth Outrider
• 1 Stronghold Confessor
• 1 Tattered Haunter
• 1 Tempest Caller
• 1 Torch Slinger
• 1 Walking Corpse
• 1 Wind Drake

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh

• Instants (3)
• 1 Flatten
• 1 Forbidden Alchemy
• 1 Make Obsolete

• Sorceries (2)
• 1 Daring Demolition
• 1 Stitch Together

• Artifacts (1)
• 1 Armillary Sphere

• Lands (17)
• 3 Mountain
• 5 Swamp
• 7 Island
• 1 Bloodfell Caves
• 1 Submerged Boneyard

• Sideboard (19)
• 1 Cabal Trainee
• 1 Crawling Filth
• 1 Cruel Deceiver
• 1 Deputy of Acquittals
• 1 Devouring Rage
• 1 Driver of the Dead
• 1 Gaseous Form
• 1 Glintwing Invoker
• 1 Infernal Caretaker
• 1 Jawbone Skulkin
• 1 Mistblade Shinobi
• 1 Neurok Prodigy
• 1 One With The Wind
• 1 Razorfin Abolisher
• 1 Samite Censer-Bearer
• 1 Shifting Loyalties
• 1 Tragic Poet
• 1 Vampire Lacerator
• 1 Wetland Sambar

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This one looks super spicy. It started leaning heavily on Blue and Black, picking up a Red card here and there before picking up Nicol Bolas, God-Pharaoh at the start of pack 2. This draft pool is a bit less all-in aggro, but still focuses on the creatures to chip away at your opponent's life total. This is aided strongly by the number of fliers, as well as creatures with enter-the-battlefield abilities that do things like bounce opponents' creatures to their hands. If you can't take them down the old fashioned way, you can always stare them down until you hit the ol' Nicky B.

There's some more unusual sets that showed up in this draft pool, though. Champions of Kamigawa and Betrayers of Kamigawa both showed up despite being tremendously parasitic sets. Virtually all the cards that rely on you having Arcane spells or Spirit creatures are going to be in those sets or in Masters sets, meaning you'll get next to nothing to craft a proper archetype. A similar case could be made for the likes of Kaladesh and Aether Revolt due to the Energy mechanic. Even various Mirrodin sets, from either block, have been known to show up even though they have such a tremendous focus on artifacts, making them not play well unless you bring a lot of these sets to the table.

As such, there's no one true way to build a Chaos Draft, and that's the beauty of it. You could make it true chaos by putting in whatever or structure it for maximum playability. You could even go dig up grab bags and bulk lots and put together 15 card packs, all bulk rare packs, and so on that you could do as a fun draft with friends at an affordable rate. If you want an idea of what you should try to be bringing to make these events as wild as possible, Lucas Buccafusca over on Cardsphere has your back with an excellent Chaos Draft tier list.

The biggest problem with doing Chaos Drafts and similar is the cost. Even one draft with just one or two rare packs can cost $30 or more, and when you get into ones like I'm doing here for fun, you can forget about accessibility to the general public. What's worse is that with the slow disappearance of these packs from the wild, it's going to get even pricier as time goes on.

This is where I'm going to propose something new: a Chaos Draft Cube.

If you're unfamiliar with what a Cube is, there's plenty of resources at your disposal. Even right here on CoolStuffInc.com there's plenty of articles from a multitude of authors. The general gist of it, though, is that it's a preconstructed draft format. These Cubes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from a simple 8-player 360 card Cube to 700+ card Cubes to even single-set Cubes designed to recreate entire draft formats. These Cubes can end up roughly in the range of 1500 cards depending on how you build them, and are in a way serving to set us up for this Chaos Draft Cube.

The idea of a Chaos Draft Cube is simple: rather than shelling out tons of cash on a rare sealed booster pack, you buy some cards from that set and mimic a sealed pack instead. After all, that pack of Urza's Saga I purchased is more than likely to have little more than a few dollars of cards in it and I dropped $100 on it. While the nostalgia and historical factor definitely contribute their own weight to that price tag, it's just not worth it. Instead, go to a draft simulator website like Le Bestiaire, TappedOut, or similar and generate some random packs. Let's try this with the aforementioned Urza's Saga pack a few times and see how we fare.

This pack is great from a drafting standpoint! There's lots of reasonable value creatures with solid stats and some excellent spells in the mix too. There's even a few cards with Cycling in the mix that you can throw away when they won't be useful for you, smoothing out your draws. On the value side, though, there's little to nothing that's truly desirable here. Temporal Aperture is about $6 thanks to a unique effect, being used in some historical decks, and being on the Reserved List. The rest, however, totals just over $5, meaning that whole $100 booster pack created about $10 in actual payout. Not exactly the best gains.

In pack two, we once again have some solid value in cards like Turnabout, Dark Ritual, and Exhume, but like the first pack, this one barely crosses the $10 threshold. While both great cards in their own right, Eastern Paladin and Urza's Armor were both reprinted in Core Sets later on, dropping any potential value to nothing. This pack isn't even nearly as good either, with only some playables and some downright awful picks like Healing Salve.

Looking at one last pack, we see something close to the worst of both worlds. There's absolutely nothing here in terms of value and very little is playable. As an aside, I did actually run a pack before these three that had a Gaea's Cradle and nothing else in it. Even then, though, it wouldn't have reached $400 in value for four packs, and that's a best case scenario! This is just how it goes with cracking boosters of any kind, though is magnified multiple times over by the cost of the pack itself.

Instead, if we bought the contents of these simulated boosters, our cost would be roughly $25 total and we could have a prepared pool that's enough for three potential packs of Urza's Saga. It's likely best to swap out the few duplicate commons between these packs and maybe a few bulk rares and uncommons to round out your starting pool for this set. If you did $25 for every set of 24 sets - enough for a basic draft with each set being different - it would cost you approximately $600. But that's a high-end example.

More recent sets are going to have less overall potential for incremental value meaning even your average booster from, say, Khans of Tarkir isn't going to have $5 of value in it, never mind $25 across three packs. Picking up Standard sets is basically break even just opening the packs themselves, as they'll usually be only about $3 on their own. What's more, by covering ground from multiple sets, odds become good you already own some of these cards in some form or fashion. That means you might not even need to buy so many actual singles, making your initial investment even cheaper.

By crafting your packs this way, you also have options of how to craft each sets' pool. You could go the traditional route and generate truly random packs through simulators like above. Like I mentioned previously, though, some sets are just terrible for draft. Generating a true pack of Revised, for example, will leave you with a major pile of basic lands. You can cut them out here with this kind of draft. You can also fix low power sets like the Kamigawa and Masques block so that they play a little better, much like the Magic Online-only Tempest Masters. It can even allow you to take a somewhat different and less traditional sets Fallen Empires or Chronicles, which have less than 15 cards per pack, and add them to the mix by giving them a proper pack distribution.

There's even some alternate ways to get started at a somewhat affordable rate and keep the variety together without the hassle of piecing together a collection slowly. I'm talking about those really neat Instant Collection products you can find in various places online, including right here on CoolStuffInc.com!

Now I know what you're thinking: these kinds of products generally aren't meant for the average player. That's only somewhat true. In fact, the average player is actually a much more casual player who just wants a big old pile of cards to play with friends. They make good gifts or otherwise a cool way to do something fun. In fact, an old LGS when I lived in Tampa used to shrinkwrap some stacks of about 100 random cards at a dirt cheap rate that we'd use for janky sealed decks.

The same logic can be applied here to this Cube. By taking large quantities of random cards and sorting them out, it's not hard to get a ton of draft-worthy commons and uncommons to make simulated packs out of, only needing to buy some rares to round it out. Even if you don't need half of the cards, taking out what you need to establish a base to work off of is well worth the value alone more often than not. When you're done, you can even do something neat with the excess like donating it to a school or a library so a whole new generation of players can learn the game you've come to love and adore. If you're not sure where to look, groups like Weirdcards can help you out!

If you've done the math by now, you may have realized that even just a Chaos Draft Cube pool of 24 sets with roughly, say, 55 cards in each is going to add up to a big number. In fact, it's 1320 cards! That's a lot of sleeves already but it becomes even more when you start adding more sets and widening pools to be more than 55 cards. Because you're only picking cards from specific sets, however, you're less likely to need to shuffle your overall Cube, instead picking at random from the pool. This can help mitigate costs by only requiring you to sleeve the actual draft decks as opposed to your entire Cube.

To give it a real, genuine feel, and make it so that players won't know what they're going to get when they're handed a pack, check out Cubeamajigs. These are some amazing reuseable Cube packs you can use to seal up the contents and distribute them randomly. That way your playgroup won't be so inclined to fight over who gets the Ravnica: City of Guilds or Future Sight pack.

Once you're set, pick 11 random commons, 3 random uncommons, and a random rare, and distribute them accordingly in the packs. You can add foils if you want, but it's not necessary unless you're trying to perfectly mimic something like a Masters set. Once they're set, pass them around and have a great time!

There's tons of ways to build this kind of Cube, nearly infinite really. It's a great way to have a blast with all those years of draft chaff you may have lying around and an excellent time for everyone involved. I can't wait to hear about what sets you'd love to build around. Obviously you know some of the sets I'm excited to play with, but I'd definitely love to fit some sets like my childhood favorites Urza's Legacy and Unglued into the mix. After all if we're going in on nostalgia and fun, we might as well go all the way.