Hey folks,

My EDH playgroup is starting a regular chaos draft, where everyone's required to bring three packs totaling no greater than thirty bucks and no less than twenty. Any sets, any combo of sets, etc. I went ahead and bought some Zendikar and Shards of Alara, without think they're pretty horrible to draft together. Anyone have any ideal combinations? I was thinking I might try a Shards + DGM + Dark Ascension draft. What would you wanna draft with Zendikar?

Gratzi.

I would bring packs from masques block, personally.

Why is there a money min/max? Like, if I wanted to open up two homelands packs plus other small pack sets for the entire draft, that would be awesome.

I think the money thing is to keep it somewhat serious, and also so players aren't rolling up with ten dollars worth of packs while expecting to draft with people who've paid 30+ bucks to draft sets.

Also, people choosing to draft homelands deserve every lynching they'll get. And yes, by implication that means homelands drafters deserve a minimum of two lynchings.

If you need rules to keep your friends from being cheap bastards you need new friends!

Draft Chronicles and Homelands, both dirt cheap and lulzy.

It's more like a protection from the "friend of a friend" rule. Like, have you ever thrown a party and your roommate asks if he/she can bring a friend and those friends turn out to be slobbering douchebags? This deters that. Hopefully.

I have a soft spot for Chronicles because it was the first box of boosters I ever bought. All the sets I missed in a single set? Sweet! I should've just spent the money on dual lands. Halcyon days, eh?

I've always wanted to put something like this together, but I never had the money to buy all the required boosters. Maybe I should slowly put this together.

SCG is having a sale on boosters. Start now!

I dunno, what if I want to draft dark ascension or something? Eventide boosters are still around $6, and they are the best set to draft.

Thanks for the heads-up, but last time I checked, I couldn't buy boosters there because I live in the EU. I'll check it out tomorrow.

Cool idea, but this is where I see Cubes being much more useful in the long run. It's chaotic, but you can control the direction it goes it, to an extent. And if you are concerned about always seeing the same few options, just make the cube over 360 cards so there is a big mix.

~SE++

I've always wanted to make a cube, but the only how-to guide I found didn't cover multi-color cards and if I can't put Alara in it, what's the point, really.

I was working on a multi-color clube with a buddy, and this was his input into it. I believe we had to swap Kitchen Finks out due to cost, but we grabbed one of the Return to Ravnica summoners from the Selesnya since it was a pretty nice bomb for draft. We also have decided to cut out all the mana fixing in there except for one copy of each guildgate due tot he fact that with so much available, ther was just too much fixing so players were ALWAYS doing four and five color decks. Sounds cool, but it really just meant people grabbed the best card with no regard for color choices. This is an old version, but it's a pretty good baseline to start with.

Or.... I can't post the attachment since it is an xls.... umm.... I dunno, maybe I can find my old thread on the WotC site....

Okay, here is the original list:



These are some changes:



Still haven't completely finished it, but it's a work in progress. Hope that helps a little.

~SE++

I don't know the first thing about cubes. For starters, I failed geometry, and then only got a C- in sarcasm.

Here's the problem. It doesn't matter what combination you bring and whether or not they "work" together. You're going to get 2 cards out of each of those packs, so even if there was any synergy between the sets in the abstract, in practice, you won't see it. Any synergy there might be is going to be completely flooded by the packs other people bring.

Overall, chaos draft is something that's fun and different to do every once in a blue moon, but it's not something you do regularly. Once the novelty of it wears off, it's a really **** format where all the decks are basically synergy-less good stuff decks. Tons of cards become completely useless because their role was originally to interact with the set's theme or mechanics, but are irrelevant outside of the set/block, causing the decks to be full of fillers.

Again, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't do chaos drafts at all, but I wouldn't make it a regular thing. As someone else suggested, a cube has a lot more lasting power.

I completely disagree. I've done chaos drafts and mixed sealed with M12-M14 and always had a fun time. It's a format designed to break people from relying on block/set archetypes to actually work on draft evaluation as they make their picks and build their decks--I think Ben Stark/LSV mentioned it at a convention recently, and I've heard Brian Wong and Marshall Sutcliffe say something similar. Chaos drafting develops your ability to look at a card outside of a vacuum and, specifically, its role in your deck. Good stuff decks might work when you're getting really **** packs or drafting with lazy drafters, but my group is aggressive and competitive as all hell--picking good stuff alone won't fly unless you're G-D lucky.

Which is to say, we're not drafting chaos packs out of boredom. We're legitimately competing.

I also get that asking for pack suggestions is a pretty narrow question considering the relatively minimal amount of cards from those packs--but so what? You have sets you like to draft, don't you? I'm just looking for suggestions, not comments about what I do with my free time. I get that I sound like a total dick right now, and I don't actually mean to, but I did ask a specific question because I legitimately missed a crapton of sets to draft. "Cube" isn't going to stop me from chaos drafting, so actual answers would be helpful bc I'm not building a cube this week.

My point here was that there's no reason to choose packs in relation to one another. For instance, if you liked original ravnica, judgement and darksteel, then it doesn't really matter if they have synergy or not. The more important part is probably the order in which you open them (in that example for instance, I'd end with darksteel since regardless of how my draft went, I'll probably be able to play the powerful artifacts I open!)

Do other players know what you bring or can you throw them a curveball by bringing an unexpected 3rd pack only you could prepare for?

I think big thing is make sure at least two people pick packs with great mana fixing. If three people pick dgm or alara or old ravnica sets you'll be fine no matter what other people pick. Any sets with hybrid seem really really good too.

Ah my bad. I guess the unspoken half of my question would be, since I missed a lot of sets between college and now, just a "cool" set to open would be sweet. And yeah, pack order would also be helpful--like, I'd open shards before Zendikar, I think.

Curveballs totally allowed!

When are packs revealed? At the start of the draft or as you open them? Imagine you bring torment, will everyone know about it while drafting, or can you keep it hidden until pack three and be the only one forcing black?

Also, what sets have you missed more precisely?

Anyway, these suggestions ignore the price of boosters completely because frankly, I have no idea how individual boosters of older sets are.

I personally liked TSP block a lot and I think they are very good for chaos drafts because although there *is* some internal synergy, a lot of the cards stand on their own perfectly well, or have potential synergy with just about anything. Among them, I would favor future sight in a chaos draft, but the presence of goyf might cause the boosters to be over inflated and out of your price range. Second choice would be TSP itself.

Any of the ravnica sets would be good to add some fixing into the draft. The original ravnica sets are better at this in that they have both signets and bounce lands, although the fact that they are larger may make the fixing actually more rare? I don't feel like doing the math on those. Maybe DGM would be better because of the automatic gate + the cluestones.

The original mirrodin sets inject a lot of artifacts in the mix which allows people to fill in their deck if their color combination wasn't very well supported by the packs in the draft. I'd favor the original mirrodin here because infect in the new ones would just cause too many cards to be complete crap.

Shadowmoor/eventide, much like mirrodin, have very permissive color requirements due to the abundance of hybrid mana. They also have a lot of cards that stand on their own or synergize with a lot of cards outside the block.

I would avoid lorwyn/morningtide because they are just too reliant on internal synergy. Same with kamigawa. I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing odyssey block sets, but when I chaos drafted them, I felt that most creatures are completely outclassed by modern creatures. Same with onslaught (which also has the lorwyn problem of being heavy on tribal elements).

I'm on the fence about shards. I don't think chaos draft usually have sufficient mana fixing to support the heavy 3 colored cards of the set, but at the same time, it provides a lot of fixing itself and outside esper, its mechanic play very well with cards outside of the block.

I think a pack of RoE might lead to some interesting stuff!