A Winchester Draft is a casual drafting format where players draft from one large stack of cards formed by the booster packs used for the event. Winchester drafts are fast paced drafts designed for 2 players!
Setting up for a Winchester Draft:
Open the 6 packs being used.
Remove all basic lands, art cards, tokens, and ad cards.
Shuffle the remaining cards into one stack without looking at them.
Place the stack face down in the play area.
Take the top 4 cards from the stack and place each into the play area, forming the beginning of 4 separate piles.
Drafting:
Randomly decide who will draft first.
The first player chooses one of the 4 piles in the play area to add to their draft pool.
Place a card from the stack on top of each of the 4 piles, including the empty spot.
The next player will then draft an entire pile to add to their pool.
Once again, place a card from the stack on top of each of the 4 piles, including the empty spot.
Repeat this process until all cards have been drafted.
Once the drafting process is completed, each player will use the cards in their draft pools to build a 40 card deck. Make sure to include basic land cards from outside the draft pools as needed during this deckbuilding process.
Playing:
Randomly determine who goes first
Play a best-of-three match!
Players may utilize their draft pool as a sideboard to swap cards in between rounds.
The winner is the player who wins the best-of-three match!
OPTIONAL VARIANT:Play for keeps! To add another layer of competition to a Winchester Draft, you could agree with your opponent to play for keeps, where the winner of the best-of-three match takes ALL the cards used in the draft pools as their prize.