Grid Draft
| Grid Draft | |
|---|---|
| DCI Sanctioned | |
| Paper |
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| Magic Online |
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| Magic Arena |
|
| Rules | |
| Type | Limited (Draft) |
| Multiplayer |
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Grid Draft is a casual limited Magic: The Gathering format that allows players to draft with 2-4 people.
Description
Grid draft is most commonly used for drafting a cube, but can also be drafted using official sealed product or drafted online on fan sites. It is notable for being able to easily accommodate 3 players.[1]
A pile of 9 cards is laid out in a 3x3 face-up grid, from which the first player chooses a row or column and adds all the cards from that row or column to their pool. Most commonly, all players except the last are given a full grid to pick from, so if playing with more than 2 players, the empty slots left by the first player's picks are then replaced by new cards, and another player then picks a row or column. This continues until the last player is expected to pick. The last player to pick then has to pick from an incomplete grid and may choose a row or column with fewer than three cards. Any remaining cards are discarded and may optionally be shuffled back together to create additional "discard grids", which are drafted the same way as the initial grids and can reduce the number of initial packs needed to conduct the draft. The most common number of grids to draft is 18, giving each player 45-54 cards in their pool, depending on how many 2-card rows they pick when they are the last player in a round.
How the packs are constructed depends on what card pool is being used. When drafting from a cube, it is easy to build packs that have the correct number of cards to accommodate as many replacements as necessary for the number of players, so 9-card packs for a 2-player draft, 12-card packs for a 3-player draft, and 15-card packs for a 4-player draft. Play boosters have 14 cards, but in many sets, one slot is only filled with basic lands, and common dual lands are in the common slot, not the land slot. In this case, if the basic land and one additional card, whether it be one of the commons or a randomly selected card from the pack, are removed, a 12-card pack remains, the first 9 of which can be used to make a 3x3 grid, with the remaining 3 being used to replace the first pick. This is ideal for 3 players, but is also suitable for 2 players, giving both players a full grid to pick from.
Many features of the grid draft make it enjoyable to draft. Its easy scalability to theoretically any number of players is useful for small pods of 2-4 and especially the difficult 3-player pod, which may have trouble using other drafting methods. It is generally quicker and simpler compared to other drafting styles for small groups, such as Winston Draft and Winchester Draft, which can make it ideal for those who are less interested in the more tactical elements of drafting or newer players. This is at least in part due to its perfect information: at no point does any drafter get to conceal information from others, and at all times, every drafter can see every card taken by the others. For cubes, its volume of discards is a significant upside, which allows for more of a cube to be seen compared to drafting styles that use a small number of cards and leave much of the cube unseen during an individual draft.
Each player then builds a 40-card limited deck from their pool using any number of Basic lands.