General A new way to Cube: Color Draft

[blacksmithy]

My playgroup is pretty busy, and more often than not we don't have enough people to draft normally. But sealed sucks as a Cube format! What do?
Introducing Color Draft! Here are my hastily-scribbled notes on how to do it for 2-4 players:
Separate the cube into 5 monocolor stacks, 1 colorless stack, 1 multicolor stack, and 1 ULD stack. Remove draft constructs (and conspiracies if you wish). Put tribrids into the mono stack that shares their base casting color (for example, tasigur would go into black).
Each player is given 5 cards from the colorless stack.
Then going around the table in order, each player picks a mono stack and gets the top 15 cards from that stack. The last player to pick a color may then immediately pick a second color; then each other player picks a second color in reverse order.
Using the same back-and-forth method, each player chooses 4 ULD cards, 2 at a time (4 at a time for the pivot player).
Finally, each player is given all dual-color cards in the color pair they chose. If two players picked the same color pair, they divide the dual-colored cards evenly by drafting between themselves.
Once all cards have been dealt out, deck construction begins. Each player should have a pool of 40 cards, plus 5 duals and 4 utility lands.

 

[blacksmithy]

Tested this last night with a group of three drafters. I got smoked 2-0 with my bae Alesha leading a really bad Rakdos Aggro deck, but my other two drafters were heartily chuffed at how good their decks were (RG Ramp with both Titans, and UW Dork Beats + a bunch of shenanigans involving playing Scuttling Doom Engine over and over as reach—guess what deck went 2-0) and said they can't wait to try another Color Draft. Look for my full session report on the front page of BTP, ya right-wing bastitches.

...Anyway, my next step is to figure out how to enable 3+ color decks in Color Draft, although I suppose my immediate next step is to get another cube night scheduled so I can redeem myself from Scrub Status. I don't want to have to give away any more of my prized Giant Badgers!

 

[Aoret]

This seems cool. My only gripe is the amount of sorting work necessary (and I guess the implicit assumptions it makes about color balance, but I think this is pretty negligible). I routinely play with 2 or 4 players (in fact, it's almost all we ever do) as such, I have a couple of points that might be helpful:

1. Another plug for Wadds' 4 player draft variant with the 10 card packs, burn the pack at 6 cards (person who opened it gets to peek & burn at 6 for signaling purposes). If you're even decent at draft, this format results in significantly more consistent decks than a standard 8 man. Whether that is a good or bad thing is kinda situational, but if nothing else it represents a way to draft and play quality decks when you only have 4. I think it makes a good training wheels format too, which works great for me because I have 80% kitchen table converts in my playgroup.

2. If you've only got two people and don't want to invest the time in grid draft, doing "team sealed" with yourself as your own teammate works great. (and if you're especially short on time, just build one deck out of your 9 packs) again, consistency and quality are high enough in this format to avoid feel-bads and it also provides you with sufficient options in your pool that you feel like you're actually making choices about what to play that day (not how I feel about normal cube sealed)

That said, if I had somebody doing the sorting work for me, I'd happily play the format you described.

 

[blacksmithy]

Ooh, good point about the sorting. I have to admit that part of the reason I came up with the idea in the first place was that I hadn't cubed in months, my cube was already sorted from a long string of changes from DTK and ORI, and so I had the opposite problem to solve: "Mannnnn, I don't wanna have to shuffle this whole dang thing."
So that's a good note to make for people who cube more frequently and are more likely to have their cube in a base state of chaos rather than pre-sorted.

Two of the other perks my drafters noted were that they had near-perfect mana, and they could "build around" the stuff they pulled in their colorless pack and first-color pack—for example the UW guy, who usually drafts RW, got Scuttling Doom Engine in his colorless pack, picked White to fake us out, then went Blue and got Renowned Weaponsmith and Phyrexian Metamorph (and Buried Ruin from the ULD). My guess is he was shooting for Tinker but missed the stars and got the moon.