Practice · draft strategy

Draft the same eight packs twice from the same seat: first as a booster draft, seeing only the pack in front of you, then as a Rochester draft, with every pack face up. Then compare the two, pick by pick.

The two formats, and what the exercise measures

• Booster draft. Everyone opens a pack, takes a card and passes the rest. You see fourteen packs in all, each one already picked over by the seats before you; the only thing the table tells you is which colours keep arriving and which dry up.
• Rochester draft. One pack at a time is laid face up on the table. The seat that opened it picks first, the picks go round the table and then back the other way, so the opener and the next seat get one card from that pack and the other six get two. Every pick is public, so at any moment you know exactly what every seat holds.
• The same table twice. The packs are dealt once, and the other seven are the same seven players in both drafts: each has its own temperament, drawn once with the packs. They draft the way a skilled player does — quality first, settling into two colours as the pile grows, filling the curve and the creature count, leaning into the set’s synergies — and each reads whatever its format lets it see: in the booster draft, which colours keep arriving; in the Rochester draft, what the other seats hold. So the only thing that changes between the two drafts is what everybody, you included, can see.
• The letter on each card. A is the top quarter of its colour — the bombs that win a game on their own sit at the top of it, though not every A is one. B is a solid playable, C is filler, and D is a card that does not belong in the deck at all, not even as filler: too dear to cast in a limited game, or waiting on conditions that rarely come, or needing a combination you cannot build in forty cards. A nonbasic land carries a letter too, by the same test; a basic land is not graded. It is quality, not rarity.
• What is compared. The two colours each draft ended in, how many of the fourteen cards fit them, the quality of those playables, and how many other seats were fighting you for each colour. The pick-by-pick table marks every pick where the two drafts differ, and beside each Rochester pick it shows what the other seven held at that moment — the column a booster draft never lets you see.

Which set do you want to draft? Choosing one deals a new table.

This exercise practises The Art of Drafting, Part II.