Rochester Draft option?

By jerubbaal, in Star Wars: Destiny

I've been pondering how to draft the set considering the limitations of the boosters and I actually think that the solution is to make it a Rochester draft. For those who are unfamiliar with the format, it's a version of Magic draft where all the cards are placed in the middle of the table and, when it's your pick, you can pick any of the available cards. In general, this permits you to have more discretion in choosing your cards, so you can make sure to get enough in the necessary "colors" to make a functional deck.


Also, if we're just talking about doing these in a pickup format, as someone who has played a TON of pickup Magic drafts, the best format is easily 3v3. Having teams makes matchups easy, prizes simple (winning team gets all the cards), and gives you allies in the draft (which generally improves overall deck quality). Assuming teams r(red) and b(blue), you can either sit like:


rrr

bbb


or:


rbr

brb


proceeding around clockwise in either situation. Solution 1 obviously allows for more cooperation in team picks, while solution 2 is more hostile. IMHO, both arrangements can be fine, and neither breaks the draft.


I'm also assuming that 6 people will draft one booster box (36 packs) in a sitting. That comes out to six packs per person, which comes out to 30 picks, which will hopefully be enough to build a deck (I'll explain my solutions to characters later, since that's obviously a problem).


DRAFT RULES


Each player gets six packs. Starting with a randomly chosen player, that player opens two of his packs and displays all the cards face up on the table.


They then choose one of those cards and place it into their draft pile. Proceeding around clockwise, each player chooses a card in turn. Once the last player takes their first card, that player will take a second card and picks will proceed back counterclockwise for the remainder of the set of cards(the first two pickers will only get 1 card per set of cards - considering the rarities involved, I actually think this breaks down well).


As a courtesy, leave all cards chosen from the current "pack" face up in front of you. Once the "pack" has been completed, turn them face down.


Once those ten cards have been drafted, the next player (player to the left of the owner of the previous 2 packs) opens two packs and repeats the above process. Repeat until all players have drafted their first two packs.


Beginning with the last player to open their first two packs, open the next two packs and begin the draft counter clockwise, utilizing the same bounce to come back around clockwise. One a set of 10 has been draft, the next player counterclockwise opens the middle two packs and drafts in the same manner.


Once everyone has drafted their middle two packs, the last player to open their middle two packs (will be the same player to open the first packs of the draft) will open their final two packs, display them, and draft beginning clockwise, same as the first round. Repeat until all packs are drafted.


Each player should end up w/ 30 cards.


DECK BUILDING


In Magic, players may add basic lands at will to complete their decks. Obviously, the same system will not work for Destiny.


The deck itself must have a minimum of 20 cards, but may contain all 30 cards, if the player desires. It must be composed according to the usual deck composition rules of the game (only hero or villain, etc...) other than card total.


Amusingly, the card type which forms the basis for the "colors" and "alignments" of the deck (which would be land in Magic) is the characters in Destiny, so my proposal is that players may add any of the non-unique characters to their deck make the deck function. The characters available are:


Padawan (blue, hero)

Hired Gun (yellow, hero)

Rebel Trooper (red, hero)

Nightsister (blue, vil)

Tusken Raider (yellow, vil)

First Order Stormtrooper (red, vil)


Obviously, if people are drafting their first box, they won't have these characters available, but seriously, use proxies. The dice are a bit more of a pain, but you can easily use standard 6-siders and just correlate the numbers with the sides listed on the card. Once people have some collections built up, a "draft pack" which contains these characters and any other possible "fillers" can be built and used by the stores/hosts/attendees.


Also, I will propose two possible approaches to the character points available. Either:


1) Each player has 20 character points to spend on any characters drafted as well as generics, or


2) The character points available are equal to the number of cards in the players deck (minimum 20, of course). This would give a bit more flexibility in the precise totals which might be necessary to play certain characters, but adding cards to permit better characters will usually involve adding bad cards to your deck.


My reflex is that option 2 is better, but it's worth testing to see if being able to add character points is simply always going to make packing your deck with trash worth it.


IF players cannot build a legal 20 card deck, you can either disqualify them (this will discourage hate-drafting) or provide fixed-rarity cards from starter packs to fill in the gaps. I am concerned about this though, as it may encourage people to deliberately under-draft because they want particular cards from the starters. I personally would go with the disqualify action.


IF neither player in a game has a location, I would suggest using Frozen Wastes as a pretty generic location available through the starters, but another very generic location may be used if it is less likely to favor a particular build.


PLAY


This is the easy part - after you've built your deck, play each person on the opposing team. Team with the most wins total wins, and the way we used to play, gets all the cards opened. Usually, the winning team would draft those among themselves (with a bounce), player w/ the most wins choosing first. Obviously, do as you wish here.


VARIANTS


If you can get your hands on enough packs, you could always do 9 packs per player, three packs at a time, in the same format. This would obviously lead to much higher quality decks. If the original method suggested just produces trash decks, this is probably the best solution (but obviously costs much more).


Additionally, if more discretion would help but you can't get more packs, do three packs at a time rather than two and just go around twice, rather than three times. That will put a larger card pool on the table and give people more choice. This might even be a better method than 2-2-2 generally.


In a significant modification, you could simply open all the packs, display them on a table and just draft the whole box at once. You would do the bounce, as usual, but this would certainly be faster and permit people to specialize more.