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

[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...

Masters 25

This review will be very short, because so much has been said about Masters 25 regarding its value and the fact that, as a Masters set, it's not much of a synergy-based set. I agree on the first count: It's sad to pay full price for a booster and pulling, you know, a tree. On the second count, though, I'm not so sure. The set looks like a blast. And when it comes to chaos drafting, Masters 25 is a true dreamboat. Not too tight and parasitic and full of wonderful commons, some decent uncommons and fun rares. With morph as one of the main mechanics, you are granted at a minimum off-color, barely playable cards at almost all points within the pack, but also add to that some decent removal and useful cards that can fit in all basic archetypes. In this sense, it feels a lot like a core set (which is something I've seen mentioned online), but the main difference lies in that the power level of common cards is much much higher. A25 packs feel like they can fit at any point wit...

[March 2018] 4 players

After the more structured chaos draft we had during February with Unstable, Conspiracy and Masters boosters, I thought it'd be a good chance to go back to a more traditional sort of chaos draft. It seems that 4 players has become the norm, and well, it's hard to get a bigger group interested in drafting in a more or less regular fashion, so I'll take it anyway. This time the pool consisted of 12 different boosters, most of which were rather new, but with some extra spicy cards: • Rise of the Eldrazi • Return to Ravnica • Theros • Origins • Khans of Tarkir • Fate Reforged • Dragons of Tarkir • Battle for Zendikar • Eldritch Moon • Amonkhet • Ixalan • Iconic Masters To me this looked interesting enough, especially because of that ROE booster hopefully giving us some big bodies and dumb spells to play with. We took the boosters in a rather random fashion (and I can't recall who opened what for the most part). This time the games felt a lot closer, and three ...

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