Live Booster Draft

Love drafting? Love playing Magic? Ever wish you could do both at the same time, rather than one after the other? I have. For ten years. I got a game published trying to make it happen. (Here's a diary of how that led somewhere else fruitful.) Last month, the idea struck me again, this time actually for Magic:

A draft format in which the first seven picks form your starting hand, and each following pick happens when you would draw a card mid-game.

— Jay Treat (@WizardsFamiliar) November 12, 2016

I don't hype my own stuff much. Today is different. This is the good stuff. You want to try Live Draft. Really.

Safety Techniques

Tabletop RPGs and LARPs have developed a number of safety techniques to help keep players safe during games. Some of them will adapt to tabletop games like Magic better than others, but they're all worth examination:

Welcoming Women into Magic

Women play Magic. That may not be your experience, but there's a reason for that. And we can do something about it. We must.

Knowledge from the Helvault (Part One)

Though you may have come to Magic design as an extension of previous and/or concurrent game design experience, one of the more challenging aspects of designing for this particular game is that much of what we consider to be "good design" is defined in less-than-equal parts by:

• Personal play-style / psychographic profile
• General game design philosophy
• Awareness of what Wizards of the Coast tells us is good design

It's this last quality that might be the most uniquely troublesome: having access to the actual designers and developers of the game is often a boon to our productivity, but it can also lead us to false conclusions and rigid behaviors, because as educational as Mark Rosewater and company can be, they can never give us the combination to the safe. So while we're operating from the perspective that the most recently released set is the One True Document and the Word of MaRo is absolute, each spoiler season has a habit of betraying our dogma.

It is with that in mind that I'd like to take a look at what we know of Avacyn Restored and pay attention to the designs and themes that are reshaping some of my design philosophy and get us all thinking about what the set might suggest about our future in Magic design.