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Burn Draft

Burn Draft, an attempt to mimic an MTG full pod draft for 2 to 6 players by 'burning' cards using two different methods.

At A Glance

  • Players: 2-6
  • Setup Overhead: Low
  • Minutes: 20
  • Core Concept: A twist on Booster Draft for smaller groups that emulates more players by “burning” (discarding) cards from packs.

Burn:

To Burn a card, you discard it and remove it from the draft preventing it from being drafted or used by anyone.

Setup Requirements

These are the steps that need to happen before you can start the draft:

  1. Gather enough cards for the desired card-pool size * the number of players * 2 (So 45 cards * 4 players * 2 = 360 cards).
  2. Shuffle the entire cube thoroughly!.
  3. Distribute randomized “packs” of cards to each player, face down (6 packs of 15 cards is most common).

How To Draft

There are 2 different approaches to when to burn cards, either after each pick, or at the tail end of each pack once 8 cards (or half the pack size) have been drafted. Both approaches will leave each player with a 48-card pool plus any additional basic lands from which to construct their minimum 40-card deck.

Burn After Each Pick

The aim of this approach is to simulate other players taking good cards out of each pack but there is no requirement for the burned cards to make a cohesive deck so it just ends up being like drafting with bad AI drafters rather than other players. Burned cards just end up being a pile of “cards I don’t want to play against” and “cards that are part of a combo I want to break up“

  1. Open a pack of cards distributed to you.
  2. Select 1 card from your pack to add to your draft pool face down.
  3. Select another card from your pack to burn.
  4. Pass the remaining unpicked cards to the player on your left.
  5. Pick-up the card pack passed to you from your right (Which will have 2 fewer cards in it than your previous pack).
  6. Continue steps 2 through 5, selecting a single card and burning another card from each pack and passing the remaining cards until all cards from the pack have been selected or burned.
  7. Repeat this process for the remaining packs, switching the direction you pass for each new pack (Pack 1: Left, Pack 2: Right, Pack 3: Left, etc.).

Burn At The End Of Each Pack

The aim of this approach is to eliminate the zero opportunity cost hate drafting present in the Burn After Each Pick but it doesn’t do well at simulating other drafters at the table as the burned cards are just the worst

  1. Open a pack of cards distributed to you.
  2. Select 1 card from your pack to add to your draft pool face down.
  3. Pass the remaining unpicked cards to the player on your left.
  4. Pick-up the card pack passed to you from your right (Which will have 1 fewer card in it than your previous pack).
  5. Continue steps 2 through 4, selecting a single card from each pack and passing the remaining cards until 8 cards (or half the pack size) have been selected and burn the rest.
  6. Repeat this process for the remaining packs, switching the direction you pass for each new pack (Pack 1: Left, Pack 2: Right, Pack 3: Left, etc.).

Recommendation

I personally prefer to just use 5 packs of 9 for smaller groups instead of trying to emulate a full pod draft by burning cards, but I can see this being a necessary approach if your cube archetypes are particularly reliant on a critical mass of specific cards to even function and there aren’t redundant copies of so you NEED those cards to be present in the draft (like storm).

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