What this blog is about

I really enjoy Chaos Drafting. For those who don't know what it is, Chaos Drafting is a way of drafting with random Magic: The Gathering packs. As you know, limited in MTG is designed with certain mechanics and interactions in mind. Limited is a tuned format that depends on randomness and evaluation skills within a specific framework. Chaos drafting, on the other hand, adds more randomness and removes the fine-tuning of limited formats. That doesn't mean that it becomes a luck-based format, but rather that card evaluation doesn't really depend on the specific format you're playing. Instead, you have to make ad-hoc judgments, sometimes as if the card were in a vacuum, sometimes by assessing the lack of synergy and parasitic interactions between cards from an underrepresented set within the draft.

So why is this fun? For one, as a player you have to adapt to an environment of little coherence (somewhat reminiscent of the old days of Magic). Cards that sometimes make little sense in a specific format can become excellent options during a chaos draft. Cards you'd rarely see suddenly appear as hidden gems you'd love to have in your deck. The unexpectedness of chaos drafts makes the format a lot more appealing to me: Unoptimized, raw and plain fun.

As I have amassed a decent amount of sealed boosters from different expansions, my idea for this blog is to keep track of my chaos drafts, its decks and fun pulls. Hope it's fun for anyone else interested in chaos drafting too!

Comments

Unstable

I've never been a big fan of Un- sets. They've always felt more like a curiosity than something to be played with, and that seemed to be the case for both Unglued and Unhinged. Looking through the cards form both sets now, there's a bunch of things that were playable or at least interesting, such as Lexivore , Fowl Play , Jumbo Imp , Strategy, Schmategy or Elvish Impersonators . Now, some of these cards may not be powerful enough and they have a big chance element associated to them, but the idea is going in a different direction from a regular Magic game. The problem with chaos drafting Unglued though lies in that you may end up getting half of the BFM or Bureaucracy , either stuff you simply can't play or stuff that makes games tedious and annoying. The same goes for Unhinged: some cards are fun and ok, but there's a whole load of cards that will only make you feel like you'd rather open a Saviors of Kamigawa pack full of Everminds , because honestly, who...

Iconic Masters

It's hard to judge Magic expansions for chaos drafting. The appeal of chaos drafting is that of randomness and possibility, and so every single Magic expansion has something good to offer. And chaos drafting is highly dependent on context. Drafting Khans of Tarkir with Magic Origins will feel fairly different from Khans of Tarkir with Invasion. So we can evaluate expansions in a vacuum—sheer power level of individual cards—while also taking into account the relative power of a single booster. Now, generally when chaos drafting you won't use but a couple of boosters from some expansions, so while it's useful to know how archetypes work within a certain environment (because of possible pointers you might get for building a better deck), in the end the most important part is knowing what you can do with a couple of random packs. So don't count on getting an Elesh Norn, but maybe you can hope for a Serra Angel! One good thing about Iconic Masters is that rares will general...

[June 2017] 7 players

Even though we didn't have enough people for a full 8-man, playing with 7 is still a strong enough number to get diverse and well-distributed decks. Most of the players were still beginners when it comes to drafting, and a couple of them hadn't played Magic for well over a decade I think. Yet I think it was a fun experience for everyone involved. The boosters we used for the draft were: • Nemesis • Return to Ravnica • Gatecrash • Theros • Born of the Gods • Conspiracy • Khans of Tarkir • Fate Reforged (3) • Origins (3) • Battle for Zendikar (2) • Oath of the Gatewatch • Shadows over Innistrad • Eldritch Moon • Aether Revolt • Amonkhet (2) I ended up picking a semirandomized set of boosters in order to avoid some more complex sets. For the most part I don't think players were confused with cards they had never seen before. Magic is an intuitive game too, so games flowed pretty nicely. Core sets usually help glue decks together because they usually lack para...

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