B.O.O. Draft

Don't do this.

The Build-Our-Own (B.O.O.) draft is a Magic: The Gathering draft organized by StarCity Games writer Noah Weil. The idea is that each player in the draft invents their own set of 45 new cards. The cards are randomly distributed into packs and drafted as usual.

A few Seattle players had tried this format before, although the experience was marred by a few ill-concieved cards (see right). This time, the eight players invited to the draft would review another player's set to make sure that the cards made sense and weren't completely off the hook. The sets were created using the awesome MtG Editor software.

The B.O.O. draft was held on October 15, 2005 at the Cardhaus tournament center and was a success! Noah Weil described the experience in an award-winning StarCity article.

For posterity, we've made our full card sets available for download below. Note that these cards are not an official Wizards of the Coast product.


Here's a sample card from each author:


Adam had a lot of bizarre and sometimes rule-bending cards with abilities like "Remove target card from the match" (inspired by an actual local Seattle player). The card shown above was a bit of a failure, since it invariably did one less damage than the creature's toughness.

Brett made a bunch of wacky parody cards ("Order of the Taco Bell") and unused Unhinged card names ("Mishra's Bling Bling"), and a cycle of mind-blowing four-way flip cards shown above.

Christian was all about the elephants.

Dan had a lot of cards with music-inspired names. He also flouted the review process by neither reviewing a set, or having his set reviewed. The above card got the "most broken" award, and was hit with a hefty activation cost for the second draft.
    

Eric had a big enchantment theme going on.

Mike's set had the largest number of first picks.

Noah's set featured a lot of mythological characters, and occasional snide reminder text.

Ricky's set is the amalgamation of years of saying "They should make a card that...". The above card is part of a cycle of four-color cards that do something that only the unused color can do.

B.O.O. 2 Draft

It happened again! BOO2 was a success and is chronicled by another Noah Weil article. Here are the files:


B.O.O. 3 Draft

The article and the cards:

Mechanic notes:


B.O.O. 4 Draft




Last modified: January 9, 2007
Brett Allen (allen@cs.washington.edu)