Practice · drafting

A card is revealed for six points and gets a point cheaper every time it comes round. Four players, the turn moving clockwise. Take it or leave it: decide what it is worth, and whether you can afford to wait.

How the points draft works

• The pile. Twelve boosters, one rare and three uncommons and ten commons each, shuffled together: 168 cards, 12 of them rare. Four players, one card revealed a turn, so your part in it is 42 turns and you finish with a deck rather than a handful. Rarity is not marked on the line, and that is deliberate: what a card costs you is its price and what it is worth is its category. A rare is often filler.
• The track. A card enters at 6 and steps one place cheaper every time a card is revealed: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, +1, +2. A price written +1 or +2 pays you that many points for taking the card. A card that passes the end of the track unbought is gone.
• The turn moves clockwise. One card is revealed, one player decides, and the turn passes. You are one of four, so between your turns three more cards are revealed and the other three each take a turn. Anything you leave will be four rungs cheaper when it reaches you again — if it is still there.
• Thirty points each. That is the whole budget, and points left at the end buy nothing. You are never obliged to buy: passing is always allowed.
• What a card is worth. Cards fall into categories by the cost/benefit test. A — the top quarter of its colour, worth the top of the track, six. B — a playable, worth three. C — filler, worth nothing beyond the points it hands back. The guide’s fourth grade, D — a card that does not belong in a deck at all — is not in this pool: every card on the table here is one you could play.
• The other three. They draft by a fixed rule, and you are told it: each takes the card whose price has fallen furthest below what it is worth — an A at 6 or less, a B at 3 or less, filler at 0 or less — and where two are equally far below, the better card. They take one card a turn, so a card at 0 or past it — free, or paying — is taken unless something worth more is on the line. So whether a card survives all three of them is not a guess — it can be worked out from what is on the line. Only a card revealed after your turn is hidden from you, and it is hidden from the arithmetic too.

This exercise practises The Art of MTG Drafting, Part I.