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

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...

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...

[February 2018] Unstable Master Conspiracy

There may be underlying notions that chaos drafting is mostly about chaos . Mixing things up with no particular thought on what is exactly being mixed up. I'm generally OK with that, but to me, chaos drafting is more about mixing things up beyond the constraints of set design, with enough openness to allow for environments that may have some minimal cohesion beyond the fact that it's Magic cards (this too could be challenged, I think, but that's neither here nor there... for now). This being the case, I put together a draft session centered around three different types of sets: Unstable, Masters sets and Conspiracy sets. This time, every drafter got a fixed set of boosters to draft from (which you can see on the picture) with the idea that every booster would present specific options in how you draft them. Anyway, the packs were the following: Player 1 (Seba): • Unstable • Conspiracy 2 • Eternal Masters Player 2 (Rob): • Unstable • Conspiracy • Iconic Masters...

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