Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1195: The History of Drafting

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

This is another history podcast where I explore how an element of Magic came to be and evolved over time. This time, I look into the history of drafting.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. Okay, so today is on the history of draft. So there are many ways to play magic. A very popular way is draft. The most popular of draft is what's called booster draft. So I'm going to talk today about sort of the history of draft,

how draft became, talk a little bit about how we designed for draft, and then talk about a bunch of different ways to draft for somebody that might not have tried some of them. Okay, so the history of draft. So first, what is draft for those that don't know? The idea is, magic can be broken into two categories, limited and constructed.

Constructed means before I come to the tournament I'm playing in or wherever I'm playing, I build my deck ahead of time. There's some rules about how to build it. Limited means I do not play with, I do not bring cards to the event. I open cards out of usually sealed stuff that are cubes and things that are similar.

But the idea is that I don't have the cards ahead of time. I'm sort of having the cards. And then limited breaks into two categories sealed and draft. Sealed is I just open, I open what I open, you know, I have some number of packs, I open them, and I build a deck out of what I open. Draft means there's some means by which I'm choosing what I want to play with. And there's a bunch of different ways to draft. So today I'm gonna sort of talk about where drafting came from and how it became popular. Oh, I'll give you a little factoid to start off,

I'll talk about draft. Draft, I believe, is the one format that most correlates to how long you've been playing. What we've discovered over time is the longer you play Magic, the more likely you are to play Limited, especially Draft. And so Booster Draft in specific, the longer you play, the more likely you are to play Booster Draft. And the reason for that is when you first get into magic, you have a lot of time. You see you're a bit younger, but then as you get older, you get married, you have kids, you have less time, but you still enjoy playing magic.

And draft just takes much less time because you only need like, you don't have to do any prep. You just show up and then everything you need to do, you do there. So anyway, draft is very popular. Booster draft in particular is the most popular form of limited and one of the most popular formats overall. So where did draft come from? So let's go all the way back to what we call

the alpha play test. So when Richard first designed Magic, he needed to play test it. He knew that, you know, there are a lot of kinks to work out. And so what he did is he found a bunch of play test groups. One of them are what we now refer to as the East Coast play testers, Scafolius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petticris, Paige. He met them at his, at UPenn, University of Pennsylvania.

I think they were all in the math department. Richard was going to get his doctorate and he made friends. So that was one play group. Another play group is what they refer to as the bridge play group. It's Bill Rose, Charlie Catino, Joel Mick, Howard Kowenberg, Elliot Siegel, Don Feliz, Lily Wu. It is people he met while playing bridge. Richard likes to play bridge.

He's a gamer, surprise, surprise. And he met a bunch of people through bridge club. That was the bridge group And then also there was Barry Reich who I think was his neighbor Harms that sure where he met Barry, but anyway, he had different people to play test with And I believe it was the bridge group That was the first one to sort of experiment with some form of drafting. A bunch of them were fans of Strat-O-Matic baseball. So Strat-O-Matic baseball, for those that don't play, I've actually never played, but

if I understand correctly, the idea is you have cards that represent baseball players, real actual baseball players. And I think a lot of their stats, they print cards based on their stats of the previous year. So you're playing with, oh, this is the 1985 version of this player. And the idea is that you then pick players. And I believe they have players

from different time periods and stuff. So like I could draft the best version, this is the best Willie Mays or I can tell my lack of the baseball knowledge. And the idea is, you know, this is the best Willie Mays or my lack of a peaceful mode. And the idea is that you get the players and that one of the ways to play strata strata medic baseball is to do a draft. Much like in actual sports they often have drafts. And the idea is you would lay all the respective players out on the table and then you would draft them.

And this morphed into what I believe was the earliest Magic draft, which is what we call Rochester draft. I think it's called Rochester because I don't know if the people who originally came up it live in Rochester or the early place it got played in Rochester. It's named after Rochester, New York. But anyway, the way Rochester works in Magic is you open up a booster pack, you then lay out the contents of a booster pack. In the early days of Magic, there were 15 card packs, now there are 14 card packs.

So you would lay it out and then you have, usually it's an eight person draft, you would have eight people. Drafter number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So the way it works is you do what's called sneaking, which is player one drafts, and you lay all the cards face up. So player one can take anything they want of the 15 card slash 14 cards depending on the pack you open. They take the first card.

Player two takes the second card. Player three takes the third card. You keep going to get a player eight. Player eight takes the eighth card and the ninth card. Player seven takes the 10th card. Player six takes the 11th card, and you go all the ninth card. Player seven takes the tenth card. Player six takes the eleventh card and you go all the way back. With eight persons, if it's a 15 card pack, the last person, the person who picks first doesn't get a second pick. In a 14 card pack, the

first and second person don't get a second pick. So Roshester was the first type of drafting. I think they also messed around with booster drafting back during the Alpha play test days. The idea was Magic was very modular in nature and they recognized very early. The idea of playing sealed came very early. I just have cards and open them up and I build out of that. Because early Magic, when Richard was testing,

you would just get a group of cards. So early testing was a lot like sealed. Like you just got certain cards and there was some trading and stuff that could happen. But, um, so the idea of sealed was very obvious, very quickly. Drafting came about by just applying things they enjoyed in other games, like Draftmatic baseball, uh, to Magic. And so in the very early days before Magic even came out, uh, you know, sealed play and drafting was a fun thing to do. And when I got to Wizards, so I got to Wizards in 95, so October of 95, drafting was just something that R&D did for fun. They liked drafting and they're the two big ways that we drafted were Rochester Draft and Booster Draft. So in early 96, Scaff and I

helped Scaff like we started the Pro Tour. Scaff was the I don't recall it, the architect of the Pro Tour. But I had a lot of turning experience, so I helped Scaff. I was sort of Scaff's right-hand man helping with the Pro Tour. At least the R&D folk side of it. Anyway, the very second Pro Tour was Pro Tour Los Angeles. The first one was in New York at the Puck Building. The second one was on the Queen Mary in Los Angeles and we decided that R&D really wanted to introduce drafting. Now limited play happened. People would get packs, open them up and build. In fact, when I went to the Costa Mesa Women's Center, I did a whole podcast on this, mostly we did a lot of limited play. We were doing variants on limited play like the Grand

Master and the Mini Master and stuff but we weren't doing a lot of drafting yet. We were mostly like here's your pool of cards and then build something and then sometimes you won the cards when you play people like in Grand Master or Mini Master but and then you would rebuild but it mostly, we were mostly doing sealed play. It's when I got to Wizards that I started learning a lot of the way, a lot of the forms of draft. And R&D was like, hey, we know there's players out there, we know that limited play happens, especially sealed.

We would like to introduce drafting. We think drafting is a lot of fun. So the idea was part of having a pro tour was that, hey, we can dictate what people do because if the pro tour does that, people will want to emulate the pro tour and practice for the pro tour. So we said, OK, we're going to start doing draft. And we decided for the pro tour, the way we put the pro tour together was every other pro tour would be a constructed event and every other pro tour would be a limited event. So in the early days of the pro tour you played one event of the pro tour. Later on it revolved that you played both a constructed and a limited event. That's how they do it now. But back then you would pick one or the other. So the first pro tour in New York had a weird constructed format. It was kind of like standard but you had to play five cards of every set that was out because we wanted you to play Homeland, which was not the strongest set. The second thing was in LA and it was Rochester Draft.

Now I should say we were very excited. We thought Rochester Draft was going to be the hot thing. And we had Booster Draft because we thought we wanted some variety just to change up how things were so we introduced both Rochester draft and booster draft but by the time we really felt like the hot thing was Rochester draft it turned out not to be the case what happened was as we opened up sanctioning to stores we said hey here's two ways you can draft and we gave them two ways stores greatly preferred booster draft. Why?

Because players greatly preferred booster draft. There were two big reasons I think booster draft ended up winning out over Rochester draft. One is it just takes less time. Rochester draft just takes longer to do. And significantly longer to do, almost twice as long I believe. You just have to lay things out and then like,

like just the laying of things out takes time. And then people have to look at everything. And there's a lot more to process because you know, you're looking at, you're ideally not just tracking what you're taking, but what everybody else is taking and try to understand like, you know, just so you understand what colors are open. The second thing is Rochester is very public.

Meaning when you Rochester draft, everybody sees what you pick. Your choices are not private. And it was intimidating. Like if you are not a good drafter, it's really hard to draft where everybody's watching you because people can comment on you and you can feel like, oh, I did it.

It's hard when you start drafting. Drafting is a difficult thing. In booster draft, well, no one, no one's seeing what you draft. Maybe they'll see your deck at the end, but they're not seeing individual choice you make. Like let's say there's the chance to have, like there's a clear obvious card that you're supposed to take and you don't take it.

Like, why did you take that card? Where in the booster pack, okay, if they see you pass it, like I guess you had a better card you took. No one knows quite what you took. So anyway, for those reasons, booster draft would end up becoming the dominant draft. Also, what we found after hours of the Pro Tour is

people would draft, regardless of what the event of the Pro Tour was, the Pro Pro's like to draft, they do what's called the team draft. So team draft real quickly is, it's like a booster draft, but you sit three and three. So the idea is your team is sort of seeing the cards.

I mean, you are passing to your teammate until it passes outside. So there's a little more, I guess there's team Rochester draft and there's team booster draft. In both cases, you as a team are going to play against the other team. So you're working together. Obviously with Rochester you have a little more ability to work together, but even with booster you can figure what people around you are doing. Okay, so we figured out that booster draft was more popular. Okay, the story, here's an interesting story, one of my favorite stories from the Pro Tour. So when we decided we wanted to do a draft at the Pro Tour, we said, okay, and we talked

to our different, you know, we at the time, the DCI, sort of we ran the North America, but there was a European office. There was, I think a Japanese office. We had to talk to other offices to get them to run stuff in other places We ran North America. So North America was fine We were running drafts and what we found is players players took a little time to warm up to do But generally once they got a chance to play it was fun I mean I the reason I think we were pushing draft is dress fun. It's just a fun way to play

It's skill testing. I would argue in some ways the the purest form of magic Like it really there's a lot of skill testing to it and there's a lot of to play it's skill testing. I would argue in some ways the purest form of magic like it really there's a lot of skill testing to it and there's a lot of variety to it. The other reason I think people gravitate toward draft over time is hey if I don't have a lot of time to play I want a lot of variety. I want my play time to be different and drafts always very different that you always get to play a lot of different decks. Any play cards you wouldn't normally play. Anyway so we we say, okay, we're going to do this. The European office at the time were like, yeah, our people don't want to draft. And we're like, well, we get it.

Like, you know, it's not something they're used to, but what we find is when you play with them, you know, they'll warm up to it. It's a really fun format. And the European office is like, yeah, we're not going to do that. So before the first Pro Tour, the European office, they just didn't run drafts in Europe. So we get to the first pro tour, it's the Rochester thing. And the way it works is the top 64 advanced to day two. So what happened?

So North America, we had a lot of drafting. We did a lot of drafting. Japan did a little bit of drafting and Europe did no drafting, very little. There might have been a little spots here and there, but very much did not do much drafting. So what happened? Well, the cut today too was 61 North Americans, two Japanese, and one European.

And I think what happened was after the Europe officer to see how bad the Europeans did at the Pro Tour, it sort of got them to go, oh, maybe we should give this a second chance. And eventually they started doing drafts in Europe and it became very popular. Like I said, draft is a very popular format. Okay. So the very first set, so early Magic, really did not take limited into mind. And what I mean by that,

and what I say take limited in mind is, kind of what you wanna do when you're building for limited is, you really have to be conscious about, do you have the component pieces you need to play limited at common? Like is common supporting, and like for example, what my go-to example is in legends So legends was the first large set that was an expansion

Arabian nights then antiquities and legends and Arabian ice and tickets were tiny the very small sets But legends was a full-size set, but it wasn't made to play limited with and so For example, let's say I want to get rid of enchantment. I put a plate in enchantment That was a problem for me not an enchant world, but just want to get rid of enchantment. My opponent played an enchantment that was a problem for me. Not an enchant world, but just a non-enchant world enchantment. I had no way to get rid of that enchantment lower than rare. I think white rare, remove enchantments was that white rare. No, I mean, I did have like a bounce spell in common.

I mean, maybe there are a few tricks I could use, but there were just basic things missing. The other thing that you want is you wanna make sure that there's the right mix of creatures. So Ice Age, which came later, so Ice Age is the second large set to come out. They were a little more conscious of having the component pieces in it, but they really, they were low on invasion.

They just didn't have enough creatures. It was hard to win that, if you ever played Ice Age limited like you really had to be very judicious with your your evasion in fact there was a card called illusionary forces that had cumulative upkeep it was a flyer with four power but cumulative upkeep means you have to pay for each turn and it gets more and more expensive and so the rule in Ice Age Limited was if you had illusionary forces, which of course you played if you opened it, you did not play it until you had enough mana

that you could kill them with it. Because often that was your route to victory. And so like you would just hold it till you had enough that you could play Chumruvupki for enough turns that it could win. And usually sometimes it'd be an extra turn if you needed to be cautious. So anyway, the first set that we really built

with limited in mind at all, and we were thinking about draft, was Mirage. Mirage is kind of the first block. I mean, we sort of retroactively added a set to Ice Age, but the first sort of traditional normal block was Mirage. Mirage, Mirage Visions and Weatherlight. And the idea was that we came up with was the way blocks work is the first set comes out, you draft all three packs of the first set. When the second set comes out,

which is a small set, you draft two packs of the big set and then one pack of the small set. And when the third set comes out, you draft in order, first set, then second pack of the small set. And when the third set comes out, you draft in order first set, then second set, then third set. And that causes, by the way, that is how we drafted for a long time. It wasn't until Eric Lauer started working and like one day just off of, he's like, is there a reason we don't start drafting with the later set? And we're like, what do you mean? He goes, well, it's really, really hard. Like it was, you wanted to build themes into the third set, but it happened last and it was such as it was only one third of what you're drafting with that it just didn't have a lot of impact.

And so you had to make your theme so loud so they could have an impact on the draft. And Eric's like, we've just put it first. Meaning it's the first thing you draft. It'll just have more impact. It's the thing you start with And the second Eric said that we're like, yes, why didn't we think of that? So from then on we went it so that the latest set got drafted first The other thing that Eric was a big innovator so Early magic when we design we So, early magic when we designed, we more designed saying we're just going to do things and then, hey, draft the cards you're going to draft and, you know, it'll play the way

it plays because those are the colors and those colors. The idea of draft archetypes took us a while to get to. And the kind of way we got to them was sets like Invasion, where Invasion was a multicolor set and we had to make in it like Invasion, where Invasion was a multicolor set, and we had to make in it cards that were two color. And that kind of forced our hand, like, well, white blue is going to play a certain way because these are the cards that are white blue. And Invasion and Ravnica, like definitely we, we started thinking about archetypes as we started having sets that kind of forced us to think about archetypes.

And then kind of the modern approach to archetypes happened in Innistrad. Once again, this is Eric Lauer. He said, okay, hey, I want to make sure there's a certain number of things to draft. And Eric said, look, the default is going to be the 10 two color pairs. So I am going to make cards that direct you and show you, hey, I mean, he did cards that had flashback, we were off color. I mean, Eric would be the champion eventually of the gold signpost. But Eric really was the one that really sort of cemented the idea that, hey, we, the guys who make the sets, the people who make the sets have

to think in terms of the archetypes. And now, like when we hand off a file from vision to set design, one of the things we hand off is our first step of the draft archetypes. Now it will change, usually if we submit, you know, 10 of them, five to seven, maybe it'll stay somewhat where they were,

and then some will change, sometimes more than that, depending on how much the mechanics change. But one of the big things things another big thing about limited is the idea of a curve You want to make sure that at low rarities you are hitting so that the cards existed all Along the man all the all the different mana costs because when you're drafting one of the things you want to do is build a good curve And so yeah, that is definitely something that,

one of the interesting things to me of watching us over time is A, once we got drafting popular, it became a pretty popular thing. And then it was a matter of just finding, how can we lean into it? And we definitely, I played around a lot during blocks of like, can we change up how drafting works? Like content architecture is a good example where you drafted the large set by itself and the small set with the large set and then the small set with the

second large set and then the first large set, stuff like that. In the end, by the way, what we found was the best draft environments were the ones that were all the same set. That it was very, very hard to mix sets and maximize what people were doing. It was very, very complicated. And that's one of the reasons we moved to the current system now, where every set is kind of drafted by itself. It just makes for the cleanest, best drafting experience.

And that whenever we would poll people and sort of ask that people's favorites, usually there's a few exceptions, were just things by itself, because it's a few exceptions, were just things by itself because it was the tightest, cleanest draft experience. Okay, so the other thing I want to talk about today is there are a number of ways to draft. If you've never drafted, let me first say this, drafting is a lot of fun. It is a little intimidating when you first do it.

I get taking a pack and opening and reading 15 cards or 14 cards and trying to figure out what's the best card. The one thing I will say, so I'll give a few strategies for beginners. One is, state a two colors, pick two colors you want to play, figure out what it is, maybe the first pick gives you a multicolor card or maybe you have a real exciting card that's in one color and then you wait to see in the second pack what color it seems to be coming or whatever. But the idea essentially is you want to play, for beginners, play two colors, prioritize taking creatures and cards that get rid of creatures. Removal.

If your deck is nothing but creatures and removal, and normally you want at least 16 creatures, so limited decks are 40 cards, you want 17 lands, 16-ish creatures, seven-ish spells is roughly what you want. It's okay to play more creatures if you want, but you do want, as much as you can, you need some removal, you need some answers to creatures. Other things you can draft that are good,

stuff like card drawing, stuff that helps you get land. But in general, early on, if you're a beginning drafter, if you draft creatures and removal, that will get you pretty far. Okay, so now what I wanna do is I wanna talk to a bunch of ways that you can draft. So let's walk through these. Okay, first up, auction draft.

This is when we did the invitation all. The way this works is you have decks that are already chosen. A lot of times they're constructed decks. And the idea is you're auctioning off the deck itself. And the way it works is you bid a certain number of cards and life, starting hand and starting life. The way when we did it in the, this came from invitation hall.

Usually we let people start a little higher. I think we let them start at 25 life and eight cards in hand. And the idea is the next person, cards go first in life. So if I bid 8 cards, 25 life, you have to bid 8 cards less life or you can go to 7 cards. So if I have 8 cards, 15 life, you can go 8 cards, 14 life or you can go 7 cards, 20 life. Okay, it wasn't, I think we only did 20 life.

I don't think we did above 20. I think probably the easiest way for if you're starting is just do 7 and 20, but I know at some point we experimented. I think we were doing ones that had, we did an invitation where the decks were really bad so we left them draft higher, but if you want to just start with 20 life and 7 cards that's fine. Note by the way in limited you play with 40 card decks. Backdraft. Backdraft, we also did, we did the very first invitation, that is where you're trying to draft the worst possible deck, and then the way you play is you give your deck to your opponent.

I will say backdraft is super fun to draft and not that fun to play. There's commander draft, that is usually you play either in a booster or rotchester style, but you are making a commander deck. And so you need to draft a legendary creature to be your commander. Sometimes you have to follow color identity rules. Sometimes they make you say you don't follow color identity rules. That's commander draft. Conspiracy draft. There's a product called conspiracy and a second product called conspiracy take the crown. That's Commander Draft. Conspiracy Draft. There's a product called Conspiracy and a second product called Conspiracy Take the Crown.

In Conspiracy Draft, there are cards that affect the draft. That you can take this card and it does something in the draft or does something in the game and you choose during the draft. So I assume we will do another product that interacts with draft. I don't know if it will be Conspiracy, but I say we'll do that one these days. Continuous draft. Continuous draft is you take all your cards. Normally when you draft, by the way, you want about three boosters per person. That's normally when you draft. So in continuous draft, you and the other person each open three packs. Don't look at them. Shuffle them all all together so you have six packs all put together the first person takes off looks at top four cards they take one of the cards

pass the three cards the other player the other player takes two of the three cards and passes back and so one player gets the first and fourth card one gets the second and third card and then you alternate who who gets the draft. Reject rare draft is basically a Rochester draft where you bring the cards you want. Usually they're rares that you don't need that you think are bad or something, and you draft these bad cards. It's a fun draft because you're just drafting things

people don't usually play with. Reticere draft. This was a draft we invented for the Cape Town Magic Invitational. The idea here is you take a full set. It's kind of like a Rochester draft, but the way we would do is we take a full large set and put all the cards out. And then you're drafting, but you're seeing everything that's available for the whole

draft. Rochester, you're seeing it pack by pack. In Rotisserie, you're seeing everything. It works like Rochester that you're snaking. You go one through eight, then back down. Solid and Draft is a two-person draft. The way it works is, once again, you open up all the packs, don't look at them, shuffle them, and then the first person takes eight cards off the top,

and they divide those eight cards into two piles. And it could be seven and one, it could be four and four, however you want to divide, it's face up, then your opponent takes one of the packs. Then next they draw 8 cards off the top and they divide for you and you go back and forth. Winston draft, this is a draft invented by Richard Garfield. The way Winston draft works is once again, you take all the cards, don't look at them, shuffle them together, and then you take three cards and put them face down in three separate little piles.

And they start one card each. So what you do is first you look at the first face down card. So basically, imagine this, you have the pile of cards and then next to it is one card, then one card, then one card, kind of in a row. You look at the first face down card. Either you take that face down card and put it in your hand, or you take the top card of the library without looking at it and put it on top of that card. Then you look at the second pile if you didn't take the first pile.

Likewise, take it or leave it. Then you look at the third pile, take it or leave it. If you don't take the third pile, you just take the top card off the top of the library. For each pile you pass, you take a card from the library and put another card on top of it. And if you take a card, you replace it with a card from the top of the library and put another card on top of it. And if you take a card, you replace it with a card from the top of the library. The idea is piles grow over time, and so there's more to incentivize you to take it. So sometimes it's like, oh, no one took this pile and it grows.

Now there's four cards, now there's five cards. Maybe any one card's not enough, but combined they're enough to take it. Then there is Winchefter. Winchefter's a cross between Rochester and Winston draft. It is the same basic idea except it's public knowledge that the cards are faced up instead of being faced down. So those are, and these are not exhaustive, this is just a bunch of drafts. There's a lot of different ways to play draft. Another way that I mentioned early on is cube. So what cube is is you choose the cards that you want to play.

So it's kind of like you're making your own set, although cube is you're taking from existing cards that exist, and you make a cube. And then you basically shuffle the cube and then put them into 15 card packs or 14 card packs, depending on how you want to do it. Um, and then you draft them. And the thing about cube is you can draft however you want to draft. I mean, you can play cube limited to sealed if you want. Uh, but usually people draft cube. It's the same. You can Rochester it. You can booster pack. You boost your raft it. You would have whatever draft you

want. The only difference is instead of being sealed, it's pre-made ahead of time. And like I said, usually the key to draft that's important is that there's some amount of, I have to sort of make decisions on the fly and I don't, you know, even something like rotisserie where you know everything that's going to be in the draft, as people start drafting, it affects your choices and what you're going to do and so drafting is a lot of fun and that it really requires just requires a lot of skills one of the most skill testing in fact I think I've heard pro players call it the most skill testing format that draft is it really tests it because you have to know all

the cards you don't know what cards you're going to see and then you have to evaluate everything against everything. And it's constantly being reevaluated because you've already taken cards or in draft where you're watching other people. You've like even in booster draft, you can look at what the person to your left and right are doing only because you can sort of see what colors are being drafted. So there's a lot of part of drafting is understand what other people are doing. But anyway, if you've never drafted I hardly try drafting. I'm sure your local game store does boost probably boost your rafts

It's a very very fun way to play and if you never try it I encourage you to if you have it is something that has gone through a lot of evolutions It literally went through something that the People making this edge didn't really think about it all to something we think about very, very much. So anyway guys, that is the history of draft. I hope you enjoyed hearing it, but I'm now at work. So we all know that means it means instead of talking magic is time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.