Hi Everyone,

I noticed a discussion here about how to handle being the only one of your friends that owns any cards, and thought I'd present to you a solution that I've come up with that I think should be pretty fun.

We are going to run a "Booster Draft" or "Sealed Deck" sort of tournament. Right now I am planning on having 6 players. We are going to use my old CCG cards. I am planning on having one draft round each for AE, UT, FR, EE, MN and FC booster packs. In each round, each player will open a "Booster Pack" containing 7 Commons, 3 Uncommons and 1 Rare card. They will select one card to keep and then pass the remaining cards to the player to their left. This will continue until all of the cards are taken and then we'll open the next set of Booster Packs. In the end, each player will have 66 cards with which to make a deck of >=50 cards. I might increase the number of rounds in the draft, but we're going to try this the first time around. Then we will square off in some sort of tournament format and have some fun.

If anyone has any experience running these sorts of Booster Draft tournaments in the Call of Cthulhu CCG and would like to offer some advice, I would appreciate it. The draft format could be tinkered with, notably by adding more rounds/booster packs. I think that what I have described here should be fun enough though! We can tinker with the format after we see how it plays out. It is easy enough for me to modify the R script. The drafting strategy should be fun and interesting. Settling on two or three factions will make it easier for you to get your resource matches and make your deck play a bit faster, but I imagine you'll have to be flexible and see what factions are being selected by other players, what cards are in the packs that you get to open and therefore get first crack at, etc. I think it will be fun!

Obviously I don't have lots of unopened Booster Packs lying around, so I have written a computer script (using the free R statistical package: http://www.r-project.org/ ) which will randomly reconstruct 6 Booster Packs from my collection of cards for each set/expansion. I've already run the script and pulled all of the cards out of my selection, so we are going to have our little tournament soon. I would be happy to email people the R script so that they can try this for themselves. It requires having a spreadsheet of the cards in your selection for each set/expansion in a particular format, but many of you probably already have something like that handy. If you are interested, I can go into further details on how it works. Right now it will occasionally put the same Rare card in multiple booster packs, even when I don't have mutliple copies of that Rare card in my collection. This is easily fixed but it happens so rarely that I haven't bothered. I could also force the script to include only one copy of any given card, making it one huge "Highlander" style tournament where every card is unique. Maybe I'll try that in a future tournament and see how that works out. I'll let you guys know how it turns out!