Greetings all Destiny players! Been playing this game since the beginning and really trying to find a great way to play this game in a blind booster style format. I know that a lot of people have been trying different things and FFG has yet to release anything official. After some research on other formats and doing some testing, Ive come up with this document I wanted to share.

This is a living document so I may be making updates based on your feedback:

Star Wars Destiny: Limited Format

Would love to know what other people think and even better if you guys are willing to give this a try and see if you like it. Im not a fan of formats that change the rules of Destiny either by allowing Villain/Hero characters/cards in the same deck or making the deck size smaller (favors mill). There is no way to make Destiny draft closely match a Magic draft in pricing and consistency. So this is modeled a little closer to something like a HeroClix 2 booster sealed/floor type event. I think the use of non-unique characters actually matches very well with the theme of this game! And its super fun to play cause even if there are some action cheats and such its not over the top, the games are slower and the decks are way more diverse and interesting.

Especially with the new release of EAW coming out next week its an exciting time for this game and may be a fun format to use for the weeks at your local groups following the release.

Looks fun! Very complete and well-written rules.

It might be just a little complicated. I have also come up with complicated rules for a Destiny draft, and that format looks fun too, but too many rules makes it a bit hard to pick up. I'm also worried that $30 might be too steep an entry fee for most folks, and it's not really a sealed format if you're letting people bring all kinds of additional cards.

In my area, we've been testing out a format where you open six packs and that becomes your deck. Extra characters (more than 30 character points) become supports in your deck that cost (character cost)-7 resources, and if you pull one or fewer characters, supports become characters with (support cost)+7 health. Extra battlefields become 0-cost supports. If a card has a restriction (spot a character, remove a dice color, etc.) that refers to cards or dice you don't have anywhere in your deck, just ignore the restriction.

I know those rules sound stupid, but it's actually very fair and balanced. A friend and I tested it out a number of times, and it always came down to the wire. In our last game, yesterday, I pulled a mill deck and he pulled an aggro deck. He just barely won by using The Price of Failure to kill his own Chirrut and prevent my Jabba from rolling in discards, and then discarded his last card to rerolls Vader(SoR)'s dice and kill Jabba with no cards left in his deck or hand! It doesn't get closer than that.

It's funny you posted this, because I was going to try running my bare-bones sealed format at my FLGS once EaW hits, and see how it goes! If it doesn't work out as planned, I'll come back and look at your rules!

Thanks for checking it out and providing some feedback! Yeah I agree the fewer rules the better. Might try just doing 4 each of any upgrades/supports/events (regardless of color - max 1 copy) that you can include to make it simpler. (thats max. 12 cards you can include) Depending on the store you could potentially do 9 packs for $25 to get people to play. I think thats pretty affordable for a tournament and getting 9 boosters. Thats the min. i think though you could do and still play a 30 card deck. As much as I dont really like lowering the deck size since a 3 character list can be quite a lot health, i may try doing 8 packs and 25 card deck (3 of any type can be included - max 1). There may be a sweetspot in there somewhere!

Your format is really creative and sounds like it could be pretty fun! We will have to give that a try sometime. Seems like ti would be quite a different game though using supports as characters but thats kinda cool too. I love it when games are super close and in Destiny I have had more games that go that close than a lot of games.

Well if you do end up giving this a try post back here and also if you think there are any tweaks to make while still keeping the core rules.

Hey guys just to give you an update I have updated the rules to make it simpler and less complex. Can include 4 Upgrades/Supports/Events Max: 1 of same in deck. So this is simpler and still gives you potentially 12 cards to add to your deck with 4-8 being dice if you need them. We are playing this tomorrow and will be filming and let you guys know how it goes!

So we tried this out a couple times. I will say it was a lot of fun but does require more time, id say 30 minutes to build decks. We did some videos of deck building if you want to check it out.

Last Saturday we had fun with this format:

Check that out.

It is reasonably cheap and simple.

Tried out just the simple sealed format this weekend! It worked great - everyone had a good time, and the games were relatively balanced - Thrawn kinda mopped the table with us though!

This IS NOT cheap. 9 boosters (at MSRP) is $27 and tax. Then there is the cost of the "allowed" outside cards the player brings. This has been the problem with every draft idea I've seen. Would I try this once when a new set came out? Sure... sounds like fun. Would I do this on a regular basis? No.

I do LOVE this idea for a friendly set launch get-together among friends and may try it soon. Thanks for sharing!

13 hours ago, Stone37 said:

This IS NOT cheap. 9 boosters (at MSRP) is $27 and tax. Then there is the cost of the "allowed" outside cards the player brings. This has been the problem with every draft idea I've seen. Would I try this once when a new set came out? Sure... sounds like fun. Would I do this on a regular basis? No.

I do LOVE this idea for a friendly set launch get-together among friends and may try it soon. Thanks for sharing!

Do you think 6 boosters is a good compromise? We did twice that and with the pick of dice according to standings in the end.

You always get a number of dice equal to the number of boosters you buy but if you craft a good deck you "shape your fortune" (choose the content of those boosters)

13 hours ago, Stone37 said:

This IS NOT cheap. 9 boosters (at MSRP) is $27 and tax. Then there is the cost of the "allowed" outside cards the player brings. This has been the problem with every draft idea I've seen. Would I try this once when a new set came out? Sure... sounds like fun. Would I do this on a regular basis? No.

I do LOVE this idea for a friendly set launch get-together among friends and may try it soon. Thanks for sharing!

Lots of people are happy to buy 9 boosters. $27 can be a bit much for some people however so the objection to the high buy in is understandable. Nine boosters does make the draft a little less like a lottery as to who wins for the night. As for the extra characters, they are optional and you don't have to show up with all of them, just the ones you have, or even still, just the ones you would like to play with. Most of them are just cheap $2-3 rares.

This seems to be a good solution for the draft problem with this game.

Another option is to encourage all players to bring either one of the original starters or the new 2 player box as their base deck.

Then players are split into groups of 6 and each purchase 6 boosters.

Players then pick a faction (hero or villian) and may suppliment their starter decks with any characters or deck cards from the boosters.

There is no exchange of cards or draft type system. As i can feel for the guy who pulls 4 legends in 6 boosters and has to give most away...not cool.

5 hours ago, blackholexan said:

Do you think 6 boosters is a good compromise? We did twice that and with the pick of dice according to standings in the end.

You always get a number of dice equal to the number of boosters you buy but if you craft a good deck you "shape your fortune" (choose the content of those boosters)

5 hours ago, Mep said:

Lots of people are happy to buy 9 boosters. $27 can be a bit much for some people however so the objection to the high buy in is understandable. Nine boosters does make the draft a little less like a lottery as to who wins for the night. As for the extra characters, they are optional and you don't have to show up with all of them, just the ones you have, or even still, just the ones you would like to play with. Most of them are just cheap $2-3 rares.

This seems to be a good solution for the draft problem with this game.

The problem is that it's not "just" 6 or 9 boosters. It's 6 or 9 boosters plus your private collection. A draft is suppose to put everyone on equal ground. You cannot spend to win in a draft and a collection of cards is not needed.

1 hour ago, Alphastealer said:

Another option is to encourage all players to bring either one of the original starters or the new 2 player box as their base deck.

Then players are split into groups of 6 and each purchase 6 boosters.

Players then pick a faction (hero or villian) and may suppliment their starter decks with any characters or deck cards from the boosters.

There is no exchange of cards or draft type system. As i can feel for the guy who pulls 4 legends in 6 boosters and has to give most away...not cool.

I think this is about as close as we can get to a draft right now. I posted in another forum the following idea:

I do think a 20 card deck (as seen in starters) is one change that could be made. The characters are the hard part though and the 30 point cap should stay in place. Unless everyone has access to all of the non-unique characters, there won't be much room for diversity (or fairness). Also, there should be something different about drafts for this game. This is not MTG.

• My idea for a draft currently starts with a yearly "Draft set" which every player will need (and can reuse throughout the year long season) that includes a rainbow of 40 neutral cards and 10 character cards (2 unique heroes, 2 unique villains, 3 non-unique villains, and 3 non-unique heroes). This gives every player a fair base.
• The actually drafting requires 4 or 8 players and each player to purchase 3 boosters. Packs are opened and the players KEEP the rare or Legendary cards and dice in their own packs.
• All common and uncommon cards are shuffled together and then stacks of 4 are created. Each player gets an equal number of draft stacks (3 stacks of 4 cards). 1st round: Players pick a card and pass to the right, 2nd round: players pick a card and pass to the left, 3rd round: players pick a card and pass to the right.
• Before play beings, there is 15 minutes of Trade Time; players may trade drafted cards among the players involved in the draft.

I did a cost analysis of how many character points you should expect to open per booster.

For each set, I took the number of rare characters and divided that by the number of rare cards. I did the same for legendary. Within each rarity, I did two calculations: I averaged the cost of one of every character at that rarity, then I doubled the appearance of every rare and ever aged the cost of each character die (the elite version of the die was the difference between elite and non-elite, so Bala-Tik first die was 8 and Bala-Tik second die was 3 while both First Order Stormtroopers were 7). After having those values for each rarity, I multiplied it by the percentage of cards at that rarity that were characters, then I multiplied the rare value by 5 and added the legendary value and then divided by 6 to get the average per booster based on expected collation.

The two die average was consistently lower than the one die average, but all three sets were fairly consistent in terms of each value relative to the same version of that value in a different set. It tended to be just under 3 points per pack for the two die average and almost 4 points for the one die average, so I just called it 3-3.5 character points you could expect to open per booster regardless of set.

(This does not take into account hero/villain restrictions)

The FLGS near me ran a sealed league early in the summer. I didn't participate but heard it was lots of fun and went well. This is roughly how they ran it...

-Players chose to use either the Rey or Kylo starter sets.

-The first week players opened 6 packs, then every week after was 2 (or 3?) packs.

-Trading was allowed

-Ran 6 weeks I believe

This also isnt cheap, but most that were in it, already played in the weekly constructed. It wasn't really an issue as everyone had starters and this was a way to crack some packs when their wasn't much going around for boosters.