One of my favorite memories is me and a buddy splitting a box of AFR and holding a mini draft/sealed tournament with the Buy-a-Box promo as our grand prize. We did Winston drafting and it was so much fun! Much more satisfying than just cracking packs.
To speed it up a little my friend and I make a 120 card stack, and we add 2 cards to each pile it isn’t drafted or taken. When we don’t accept the final pile, we sometimes chuck a little rock paper scissors battle or dice roll in there. If you win you get 3 random cards from the stack instead of just 2.
used to play a lot of Rochester back in the early 00s when friends and I didn't have a lot of cards to make decks. Recently, a buddy and I have really gotten into playing games of Winston as draft is our favourite way to play, my new obsession is making a bunch of themed 90 card 2-player draft cubes. Next time we play I'll suggest trying the Winchester draft.
I read about Winchester 10 years ago in an article by Tom lapille. And it makes me remember how you guys used to have many ways to play articles back in the day. You should make more videos about it to reintroduce them.
I built a 2-person cube of 180 cards to do such drafts with. Winchester is by far the most convenient! The site that hosts my cube list also does grid draft, but it’s one that wants more than ~90 cards so that some can be thrown away which mocks them being taken by a phantom drafter. I also hear fact of fiction drafting called Solomon drafting (because you are splitting the pack like a baby), and it was always 8 cards per round so that it goes by a little faster. One neat one I saw online for 90 cards is minesweeper. You lay all 90 cards out face down in 9 rows of 10. Then you take the middle 2 cards and turn them face up. Players can only draft from the face-up cards. When a card is picked, the neighboring cards (not diagonals) are turned face up, kind of like in Minesweeper. Go back and forth drafting a card at a time. This takes a while and a lot of table space, but it sure is visually appealing to see the revealed cards spread outward and in unique directions. Like Winchester, the card pool gets revealed slowly, but it ends like Rochester in that you still are basically staying in your lanes except for hate drafting once enough cards are revealed.
Finally, some public discussion of Fact or Fiction draft! I spent a lot of time doing those with a friend during quarantine. I don't know if there's a canonical version, since we more or less made up ours as we went along; I've messed around with several variants and it's always a good time (resolving Fact or Fiction is fun and challenging, why not make a format out of it?). I'm not sure whether I prefer having the unchosen pile go to the opponent or be removed from the draft, for instance. I've also toyed with variants that let players select some cards to keep or burn before making piles (e.g. draw six off the top, keep one, FoF the rest for your opponent), there are a lot of knobs you can tweak until you end up with an amount of player agency that feels good. We moved away from Winston draft because, as strategically interesting as hidden information can be, it made drafting less fun for us because we couldn't chat about what was happening while it was going on. I prefer my 1v1 drafts to have public information so they can still be a social experience.
Hey Gavin, great primer! I've only done Winchester with eight total packs, and rather than a single pile to pull from, each pack is opened and shuffled face down to make its own pile to pull from. I do a lot of two-player drafting with cubes. Hexagon, Housman, Quilt, and Grid draft are our favorites, most of them have a special component limiting which cards you can take, which always adds a fun tension and can mislead the other player as to which card in the group was most important to you.
Well... I've picked up various ways at "Life Begins at 20" channel, and their "Cube for Two" series. My favorite of them being Grid Draft. Regular Sealed also works, as does pretty much any Draft, decks might be weaker but you're doing it for fun, and... you can always add in another booster, so that you're opening 4 instead of 3, if it's regular draft. About 99.9% of Drafts I've done was in two (over 200), only 4 Drafts total was in 4 people (2 Mystery Booster Drafts, 2 Commander Legends Drafts). Not counting Arena Drafts obviously. I've tried Pancake Draft with friend too, was kinda fun, but it ends up in hate drafting too much, we didn't like Rochester or Winston at all.
Finally got to give my nephews a taste of drafting, we did it traditional style first, from a three color mini-cube to keep it simpler, next time I'll be trying probably two of these and the next time the third and we'll see which one speaks to us the most. The traditional way wasn't the best translation of an actual 8-player draft since you only lost two picks from what you pass on each time, so it wasn't as risky letting go of something you might want, but it was still fun. Hopefully these will be even better experiences.
I did Winston Draft 2 times now and had much fun. Honestly I want to try all types of draft once, but... Rorchester and Winchester seem to reveal so much info that it might get boring very fast. If we drafted Rochester or Winchester that would be even more exposure of strategy. After 2 rounds of Winston with same deck, we reshuffled the draft pile and went for 'what card colour we pick first determines the most used colour of the deck'. It made a fresh experience, plus: the cards we didn't use in our decks yet got shuffled back into the pile and in the second go each of us saw cards they never saw before. So... for me it will stay Winston darft for a time. And even if it takes a bit to darft the cards... its so much fun : D
Two more incredible formats. Grid Draft: Shuffle all the cards together, then deal a 3x3 grid of cards face up. Player 1 picks a column or row, and takes all the cards. Player 2 picks another column or row, takes those cards, then just discard the rest. Player 2 picks first the next time. Do it a total of 18 times, roughly 11 packs worth, and you’ll each have about 45 cards, same as in a normal draft. Also, P A C K W A R S
Ooooo content for 2 and 3 player ways to do some things is definitely something I need more of, I have a 3 person play group xD so we do draft sealed product and do a 3 way free for all lol
Pack Wars was fun with my GF. We played 1 card each turn and possible instant on opponents turn, ignoring all mana costs. We did sleeve them face down first though to shuffle better, heh.
I watched Jim Davis do a 'date night stream' with his Fiancé where they drafted via grid, and you chose to either take everything in one row or column. seemed great at least for cube where synergy is key
This is great. I’ve been wanting to do a draft for a while but doing so is kinda hard as my mtg group is small and can’t alway get enough people to draft.
Before we found grid drafting and when we want to open packs we would draft normally but alternate packs like one pick from pack one then one pick from pack 2 and then one pack 3 and then go back to the first set of packs
Box drafting is fun. Each player splits the cost of a box. Then each player takes 18 boosters. Each player opens a pack and picks a card. Then those packs are exchanged and each player takes another card. Then the packs that were just drafted get put back in the box. Continue through all of the packs. Use drafted cards with unlimited basic land to build decks. Winner gets all of the cards or all of the remaining cards at the end depending on how cutthroat you want to be.
Always heartbroken that videos like this never go so far as to mention Solomon drafting, since it's definitely my favorite way to draft 1-on-1. Where's all the Solomon love at?
It's so dumb that people seem to think drafting "require this and that many players" You can winston draft on 4 people too, easy. You can sealed booster draft on 3-4 people too, easy. Why the hells bells fu**s do people say you need 7-8?! When I winston draft with 4 people for example, you chose to put 2(!) cards instead of one down into the three piles. Then when you need to refill you slap two new ones down. But still only one per "skip". And if you don't pick any pile, we use to look at the top 3 cards of the pile, pick 2 and put the leftover wherever you want to.
I enjoy Winston, though prefer to do it with 8 packs for stronger and more consistent decks. It especially helps with new sets where ever card is novel and interesting, and therefore pull excitement in many directions during the draft
I would also add Solomon draft. You look at the top two of the stack,pick one, and give one. Then they do it. So on until it's done.
One of my favorite memories is me and a buddy splitting a box of AFR and holding a mini draft/sealed tournament with the Buy-a-Box promo as our grand prize. We did Winston drafting and it was so much fun! Much more satisfying than just cracking packs.
I have done grid as well and enjoy it! Leaves each player with a same size draft pool that can become imbalanced in winchester
Are we the same person? Lol
Winston drafting is a format of kings. 10/10, would recommend.
To speed it up a little my friend and I make a 120 card stack, and we add 2 cards to each pile it isn’t drafted or taken. When we don’t accept the final pile, we sometimes chuck a little rock paper scissors battle or dice roll in there. If you win you get 3 random cards from the stack instead of just 2.
used to play a lot of Rochester back in the early 00s when friends and I didn't have a lot of cards to make decks. Recently, a buddy and I have really gotten into playing games of Winston as draft is our favourite way to play, my new obsession is making a bunch of themed 90 card 2-player draft cubes. Next time we play I'll suggest trying the Winchester draft.
I read about Winchester 10 years ago in an article by Tom lapille. And it makes me remember how you guys used to have many ways to play articles back in the day. You should make more videos about it to reintroduce them.
I built a 2-person cube of 180 cards to do such drafts with. Winchester is by far the most convenient! The site that hosts my cube list also does grid draft, but it’s one that wants more than ~90 cards so that some can be thrown away which mocks them being taken by a phantom drafter. I also hear fact of fiction drafting called Solomon drafting (because you are splitting the pack like a baby), and it was always 8 cards per round so that it goes by a little faster.
One neat one I saw online for 90 cards is minesweeper. You lay all 90 cards out face down in 9 rows of 10. Then you take the middle 2 cards and turn them face up. Players can only draft from the face-up cards. When a card is picked, the neighboring cards (not diagonals) are turned face up, kind of like in Minesweeper. Go back and forth drafting a card at a time. This takes a while and a lot of table space, but it sure is visually appealing to see the revealed cards spread outward and in unique directions. Like Winchester, the card pool gets revealed slowly, but it ends like Rochester in that you still are basically staying in your lanes except for hate drafting once enough cards are revealed.
I'd heard about these styles of drafting, but wasn't quite sure on how they played out exactly. Thank you for the succinct explanations!
Finally, some public discussion of Fact or Fiction draft! I spent a lot of time doing those with a friend during quarantine. I don't know if there's a canonical version, since we more or less made up ours as we went along; I've messed around with several variants and it's always a good time (resolving Fact or Fiction is fun and challenging, why not make a format out of it?).
I'm not sure whether I prefer having the unchosen pile go to the opponent or be removed from the draft, for instance. I've also toyed with variants that let players select some cards to keep or burn before making piles (e.g. draw six off the top, keep one, FoF the rest for your opponent), there are a lot of knobs you can tweak until you end up with an amount of player agency that feels good.
We moved away from Winston draft because, as strategically interesting as hidden information can be, it made drafting less fun for us because we couldn't chat about what was happening while it was going on. I prefer my 1v1 drafts to have public information so they can still be a social experience.
Hey Gavin, great primer! I've only done Winchester with eight total packs, and rather than a single pile to pull from, each pack is opened and shuffled face down to make its own pile to pull from.
I do a lot of two-player drafting with cubes. Hexagon, Housman, Quilt, and Grid draft are our favorites, most of them have a special component limiting which cards you can take, which always adds a fun tension and can mislead the other player as to which card in the group was most important to you.
Well... I've picked up various ways at "Life Begins at 20" channel, and their "Cube for Two" series. My favorite of them being Grid Draft. Regular Sealed also works, as does pretty much any Draft, decks might be weaker but you're doing it for fun, and... you can always add in another booster, so that you're opening 4 instead of 3, if it's regular draft. About 99.9% of Drafts I've done was in two (over 200), only 4 Drafts total was in 4 people (2 Mystery Booster Drafts, 2 Commander Legends Drafts). Not counting Arena Drafts obviously.
I've tried Pancake Draft with friend too, was kinda fun, but it ends up in hate drafting too much, we didn't like Rochester or Winston at all.
Finally got to give my nephews a taste of drafting, we did it traditional style first, from a three color mini-cube to keep it simpler, next time I'll be trying probably two of these and the next time the third and we'll see which one speaks to us the most. The traditional way wasn't the best translation of an actual 8-player draft since you only lost two picks from what you pass on each time, so it wasn't as risky letting go of something you might want, but it was still fun. Hopefully these will be even better experiences.
I did Winston Draft 2 times now and had much fun. Honestly I want to try all types of draft once, but... Rorchester and Winchester seem to reveal so much info that it might get boring very fast. If we drafted Rochester or Winchester that would be even more exposure of strategy. After 2 rounds of Winston with same deck, we reshuffled the draft pile and went for 'what card colour we pick first determines the most used colour of the deck'. It made a fresh experience, plus: the cards we didn't use in our decks yet got shuffled back into the pile and in the second go each of us saw cards they never saw before. So... for me it will stay Winston darft for a time. And even if it takes a bit to darft the cards... its so much fun : D
I've had a stack of Zendikar Rising packs that i've been waiting to do this with. Happy to be back in touch with other players.
Two more incredible formats.
Grid Draft: Shuffle all the cards together, then deal a 3x3 grid of cards face up. Player 1 picks a column or row, and takes all the cards. Player 2 picks another column or row, takes those cards, then just discard the rest. Player 2 picks first the next time. Do it a total of 18 times, roughly 11 packs worth, and you’ll each have about 45 cards, same as in a normal draft.
Also, P A C K W A R S
Grid Draft sounds fun and fast, I presume you refill the column/row when it gets picked?
@@Triceratopping Think you both just pick once, dump rest and make a new grid with new cards.
This is still a great video to come back to!
Ooooo content for 2 and 3 player ways to do some things is definitely something I need more of, I have a 3 person play group xD so we do draft sealed product and do a 3 way free for all lol
It sounds like Winchester could be expanded to 3 players pretty easily. Rochester definitely could. I don't know about Winston though...
Pack Wars was fun with my GF. We played 1 card each turn and possible instant on opponents turn, ignoring all mana costs. We did sleeve them face down first though to shuffle better, heh.
Called the number…got offered free road side assistance from an unnamed company…
Are you sure you didnt just misunderstand their offer for an "oil" change?
@@ksn3224 🤣
I got America's hottest talk line
@@juseschrustfush same
Just tried Winchester with my partner who is new to Magic and it was great they got a sick BR deck and the games were all close!
I watched Jim Davis do a 'date night stream' with his Fiancé where they drafted via grid, and you chose to either take everything in one row or column. seemed great at least for cube where synergy is key
Great now I just need a video on how to make one friend.
I'll be your friend!
@@GoodMorningMagic Uhm, About that, Uh, any other takers before I say yes?
@@jackjackson2912a bit late bit i gotchu 🤝
@@monthusibuchanan Thanks Fam!
This is great. I’ve been wanting to do a draft for a while but doing so is kinda hard as my mtg group is small and can’t alway get enough people to draft.
I love two player drafting when my brother and I crack a box.
Very interesting, thank you!
FoF draft? I've never heard of it!
Cool video!
Before we found grid drafting and when we want to open packs we would draft normally but alternate packs like one pick from pack one then one pick from pack 2 and then one pack 3 and then go back to the first set of packs
Parfaitement bien expliqué. Merci beaucoup M.Verhey
I wish I had this video when I started playing!
Why is 'dude you just met at the airport' so relatable
Winston is so fun, I’m definitely gonna try out Winchester asap!
Box drafting is fun. Each player splits the cost of a box. Then each player takes 18 boosters. Each player opens a pack and picks a card. Then those packs are exchanged and each player takes another card. Then the packs that were just drafted get put back in the box. Continue through all of the packs. Use drafted cards with unlimited basic land to build decks. Winner gets all of the cards or all of the remaining cards at the end depending on how cutthroat you want to be.
Fact or fiction drafting sounds so fun😮
Is in Winston draft it’s possible for someone to have way more cards than the other if they take bigger stacks repeatedly?
Always heartbroken that videos like this never go so far as to mention Solomon drafting, since it's definitely my favorite way to draft 1-on-1. Where's all the Solomon love at?
what's Solomon drafting?
If I don't have basics from Unlimited, can I still Winston draft? - 2:10 for reference
I do 2 player draft with my wife. We play where were each like 2 players in the draft. And each draft 2 decks.
This options work to Cube draft with 2! There are plenty of other ways that the cube community has experimented with!
I do Winston drafts with my wife. She is a lot less picky than me and I can sometimes barely make a functional 40 card deck.
Oh no Gavin has been compleated
Gavinclex
my favorite 2 player draft is jumpstart. no draft just jumpstart
Flip cards are just always known then right?
Do these formats tend towards 3/4 color decks?
Gavin please get some consideration on the double masters collector booster box this is getting ridiculous.
are there any 4 player draft formats?
I called the phy rxia number and they said press 1 if i am older than 50 and 2 if i am under, and then it hung up when I pressed 2 lmao
But with this draft format you don't have the same amount of cards, or did I understand something wrong?
Any chance we get another "Gavin tells us stories of random cards" ?
Yes! For sure
It's so dumb that people seem to think drafting "require this and that many players"
You can winston draft on 4 people too, easy.
You can sealed booster draft on 3-4 people too, easy.
Why the hells bells fu**s do people say you need 7-8?!
When I winston draft with 4 people for example, you chose to put 2(!) cards instead of one down into the three piles. Then when you need to refill you slap two new ones down. But still only one per "skip". And if you don't pick any pile, we use to look at the top 3 cards of the pile, pick 2 and put the leftover wherever you want to.
I enjoy Winston, though prefer to do it with 8 packs for stronger and more consistent decks. It especially helps with new sets where ever card is novel and interesting, and therefore pull excitement in many directions during the draft
Winston cube drafts are about 75% of the magic I play
Thumbs up for Gavin saying "your mom" 👍
I’d like to share with you the fun ways I’ve played 2 player limited. Is there a way to email you? An explanation in the comments might not fit 🤣
I don't think I will trust the Phyrexians with my car insurance.
🧿🙏🧿
fact or fiction draft... hmmmmm...
Sure would of been nice if you were to get Mark from lifebeginsat20 for this video
:)
Next time, please show us methods that not everyone knows. That would be great.