Deliberately constructed decks can often destroy whatever you cast and deal you 20 damage really fast. It’s a fun challenge, but it often can’t match the fresh authenticity of improvising a deck from a limited pool of cards.

At a Sealed Deck event, you’ll receive 84 cards (6 packs). You select 22-24, then add basic lands to make a 40-card deck.

Booster Draft, a much more common format, is more interactive. The process for picking cards begins by dividing players into 8-person pods. Each player receives three booster packs (14 cards in each). Each player opens a pack, selects a card, and then passes the remaining cards to the player on their left. They select one from each pack until those cards are gone, the repeat with the other packs. The second pack is passed to the right after each selection. The third pack is passed to the left.

Each player drafts 42 cards, from which they choose the 22-24 to include in the deck. Although you have fewer cards than in sealed deck, you have seen more, so their coherence could be greater.

Since there will be 7 other players in your pod, and only 5 colors, you will be competing no matter which colors you pick. However, you can still guess which colors are being selected by drafters closest to you, or cut. This is because each pack begins with a nearly-perfect balance of colors. If you have made three picks, and the fourth pack you see contains the “best red card in the set”, you surmise that the three players to your right are not picking red cards. When you notice something good, you can ask, why is this still here?

It’s also ok to ignore the other players and just make the best pick from each pack to find cards that are good on their own, or good in conjunction with each other.

Each pack contains one rare, three uncommons, and 10 commons. In one of every eight packs, the rare is replaced with a mythic. Rarity is indicated by the color of the expansion symbol on the card, and the rare card is placed near the back of the pack, after the commons and uncommons, but before the basic land and the token (which is not a card but can be used to represent a permanent generated by another card). In one of every four packs, a foil card will appear after the rare; the foil may be of any rarity. One out of 129 packs will contain a masterpiece: a foil, specially-framed collector's edition of a beloved card from Magic’s history.

The power of a card does not necessarily correspond to its rarity. Often, rares are more powerful than commons — but they may be more circumstantial, and your deck may not provide the circumstances for them to shine. Still, they are often picked early, and drafting is a great way to get good cards - but if you take too many rares, you may not win as much. If you open a Masterpiece in a draft, you are allowed to use it, even though most are from old sets.

Uncommons play a special role in draft. They appear enough that you sometimes get multiples. Signpost uncommons are designed to push the draft in a certain strategic direction. This is particularly true for multicolored (gold) uncommons. If you get a gold uncommon in your first pack, and then select cards from those colors to go along with it for the rest of the draft, you’ll end up with one of the archetypes that the designers built into that set. When I had recently learned this, I was so excited to open a Nyx Weaver in a memorable draft - my Black-Green constellation deck had enough synergy for my opponent to say it seemed like a constructed deck. I was able to get value out of cards that others were passing over because of the special circumstances my deck created. I got to use Strength from the Fallen, and saw that it was great; a couple pros finally showed the strength in its complex power, over a year later.

Some rares or uncommons are good for building around, some are not. Sometimes, it’s wiser to take commons first and build around them. Choosing the best card in the pack is sometimes more important than the monetary value of the rare cards, because if you win more matches, you’ll win more packs.

Magic sets are designed primarily for this format. The designers and developers who craft each set make bold shifts in new directions while balancing strategies heavily against each other to draw out the tension between different approaches to the game - and they’ve continued to get much better at doing so over the past few years. Lots of articles are written about drafting, and it becomes well-known which cards seem to be the best. They will likely get picked early, so my advice is to build your deck around the first two cards you select. Over time, you’ll notice many different ways that cards can support each other, or get in each others’ way. Most of the players at any draft event will be happy to share their insights on drafting.

Therefore, you don’t have to select colors or a strategy before you begin, since it’s important to react to the cards you see in the first few packs. This makes drafting really refreshing - you wait until you crack the pack and look at the cards, before knowing what you’ll do.

Once you’re done drafting, you will have 20-40 minutes to prepare your deck, and you can grab as many basic lands as you like (usually, 17 is the recommended number in a 40-card deck).

After each game, you can exchange cards in your deck for other cards you drafted. Technically, you can update your deck before every single game. You can use more than 4 copies of a card if you happen to draft that many. But even without leveraging the special rules of the format, it’s impossible not to have fun when drafting.

Wizards puts their heart and soul into those commons for the draft format and they want us to get even deeper into those packs now because they’ve launched a new Magic League format where you open 3 packs and build a 30-card deck. Then every week, or after losing 3 matches, you can add a pack to your pool. Over time, you can iterate or rebuild from a gradually expanding pool. I have greatly enjoyed this challenge in Magic Duels, and without a doubt, the joys of a janky brew are much sweeter with actual cardboard in your hands.