General Designing for 3 to 5 Players?

[MULRAH]

Hi everyone,

My group is almost always just 3 to 5 players. I already make smaller sets (270 cards) focused on specific planes, but even these are probably ideal with 6. I'm wondering if anyone has ever designed their cube for 3 to 5 players. I read the threads on these forums for how to draft with fewer players, and we have done stuff like use smaller packs, grid drafting, and sealed-draft hybrids. Those variants have been fine, and we'll stick with them if nothing better comes along. However, I'm hoping to craft something unique that actually takes advantage of the player count.

The only thing I've come up with so far is to embrace the fact that we so frequently have 3 or 5, and maybe imbue sets with a multiplayer emphasis. With an odd player count, we can just do a multiplayer game, and if we have four, we can do 2HG, and most of the multiplayer cards will still make sense. However, we all prefer 1v1 matches, so I'm pretty hesitant to go all-in on this kind of design. I'm interested in hearing others' ideas on designing for smaller groups.

- Chris

 

[RavebornMuse]

My cube is made for 3 players, with the occasional 4th. Feel free to check out my thread on my cube; my draft method is there, which allows for a 270 cube pretty easily (mine is currently 280 as I test some things).

 

[Jason Waddell]

From my experience drafting with 4 players, the biggest issue I've run into is lack of competition for cards. For two player grid drafting, one thing that really helped was cutting a color from the cube entirely. Just pick four colors that you think work well together, and you'll greatly increase card competition. With fewer players sometimes the draft can feel a bit 'on rails' if you're the only person in a given color.

Another thing I did once when we had 5 players, which was actually quite fun, was to assign each player a shard. Before the draft, each player got a small 'starter package' of cards containing some shard lands and 2/3 color cards from that shard. Then we drafted as normal and did 1v1 games, but each player had kinda spicy 3-color decks because they were given the incentives and supporting lands to do so.

 

[MULRAH]

My cube is made for 3 players, with the occasional 4th. Feel free to check out my thread on my cube; my draft method is there, which allows for a 270 cube pretty easily (mine is currently 280 as I test some things).

Thank you! I've dipped into your thread on occasion, but I somehow didn't realize your format was for 3. Sounds perfect!

From my experience drafting with 4 players, the biggest issue I've run into is lack of competition for cards. For two player grid drafting, one thing that really helped was cutting a color from the cube entirely. Just pick four colors that you think work well together, and you'll greatly increase card competition. With fewer players sometimes the draft can feel a bit 'on rails' if you're the only person in a given color.

Yes, we've done cutting colors for 2-player grid drafting, and that works very well, in my opinion. The 270-card cubes work very well for this, as I usually cut two colors and have just about the perfect amount of cards for a typical grid draft.

Another thing I did once when we had 5 players, which was actually quite fun, was to assign each player a shard. Before the draft, each player got a small 'starter package' of cards containing some shard lands and 2/3 color cards from that shard. Then we drafted as normal and did 1v1 games, but each player had kinda spicy 3-color decks because they were given the incentives and supporting lands to do so.

Very interesting! My more recent designs have focused on 3-color themes in each set, so this could be very appropriate. Thank you!

 

[whydirt]

I like doing team sealed with 4 players. Give each pair about 7-8 packs worth of cards.

 

[MULRAH]

I like doing team sealed with 4 players. Give each pair about 7-8 packs worth of cards.

Yes, although I didn't say it in the OP, this approach--which we have yet to try--was an underlying impetus for my question. If we're almost always going to do a multiplayer format (necessary for 3 or 5 and done in teams with 4) and we do sealed every time, then the format seems like it would be a considerable departure from the 8-player draft formats that most cubes are designed around. It seems fairly straightforward to try to include cards that have an uptick in value in multiplayer formats, but designing for sealed is not something I've thought about much. It might be even more worthwhile for us since a couple of my player are less interested in drafting, so sealed cuts that process down.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I don't think yo need to run multiplayer with 3-5 players. Those are number where you can actually think about doing a round robin tournament, where each player plays against every other player.

My favorite draft format for four players is silent auction, by the way. That's been such a blast every time I played it I did one with an unpowered power-max cube not too long ago, which was hilarious. I was out of money with four packs to go, but I still won the draft with an GU concoction with a lot of busted cards

 

[MULRAH]

My favorite draft format for four players is silent auction, by the way. That's been such a blast every time I played it I did one with an unpowered power-max cube not too long ago, which was hilarious. I was out of money with four packs to go, but I still won the draft with an GU concoction with a lot of busted cards

That looks amazing. It's probably too much for some of my players, but we can definitely mix it up with this at some point!

I don't think yo need to run multiplayer with 3-5 players. Those are number where you can actually think about doing a round robin tournament, where each player plays against every other player.

Yes, that's actually how we usually do it, and I think the group as a whole prefers this to multiplayer. Typically we do a sealed-draft hybrid, wherein each player starts with 27 "sealed" cards to start with, and then we draft the other four packs (of 9 cards each). This is totally fine, but it always feels a little disappointing that part of the set isn't drafted and just handed out at random, since they are all designed with drafting in mind. I think I'd feel better if I'd designed the whole thing for this hybrid approach in the first place (or go all-in on sealed or all-in on a pared-down 180-card draft format).

Actually, the way I put these sets together might lend itself to a hybrid approach, though it will be more painful to set up. I typically have my lists broken down into two "tiers" of cards: 1) more powerful, flexible cards that want to go in any deck of their color (e.g., removal) and 2) "archetype support" that's generally weaker, able to shine in the right deck but filler/cut the wrong one. I could distribute group #1 as the sealed packs and then draft only the cards in #2. It seems like you definitely don't want #2 in the sealed packs since it's all too likely that cards for specific strategies won't show up large enough quantities to be appealing. On the other hand, maybe having them the only cards in the draft would make it seem too "on rails" or unexciting...

 

[sigh]

I often run about four players. We usually vote in the beginning whether we are doing multiplayer or round robin, to let people make better picks during draft/sealed/whatever. That way everyone knows ahead of time 'ok, I'm playing against 3/4 other people, I need to build for the long game' etc.

 

[Jason Waddell]

When I ran 4-player cube nights we always just round-robin'd it or ran Team Sealed.

Team Sealed gives you a bit more 'drafty' decks than regular sealed (9 packs each will use your whole 270 pool), and then we'd run two rounds of 1v1 matches. If the score is tied 2-2 after those games you can resolve it however you want (play 1 more round, a 2-headed dragon round, each team elects a champion to represent, flip a coin, go home with a tie).

 

[MULRAH]

We finally tried team sealed last night, and I must confess results were mixed. I think this is largely due to the fact that I am putting new sets in front of my players so often and is exacerbated by their relative inexperience with Magic in general. When handed 135 cards from my Core Cube, one of the two teams felt completely adrift with all the options before them. I'm pretty sure at least six decks were made over the course of an hour before they finally settled on the two they'd play with. I actually didn't mind the time it took, but it was those players who gave the most lukewarm reviews of the format at the end.

In retrospect, I am now seeing some clear advantages for my group of the sealed-draft hybrid approach:

1. By starting out with a small pool of "sealed" cards (27 in our case), less experienced players are provided with an anchor that can help guide their draft. It might be a splashy rare or the prevalence of a linear theme in their pool, but anything is better than nothing.
2. Unlike diving straight into a draft, where a player might feel forced to take a powerful rare in a color he doesn't like, a small starting sealed pool gives options for what a player can pursue in the subsequent draft. A more experienced player might realize there are multiple paths available in a pool and/or see that there is a more optimal strategy to aggressively pursue in the draft, but there is typically enough variety in a sealed pool for a newer player to find something they like to latch onto.
3. There's also more for me--as the cube "designer"--to explore during a sealed-draft hybrid. I am typically interested in seeing if niche archetypes I'm trying to support in the set are actually tenable, and I'll sometimes go so far as to completely ignore my sealed pool and pick up all the milling cards (for example) that nobody wants during the draft to see if that deck works. The support for these niche decks is very likely to be split between the pools in a team sealed event, so I either have to make them less niche by design or just accept that they aren't ever going to get played, which probably means they should be removed. The hybrid approach allows me to keep these strategies in the set.

With that in mind, it becomes an interesting design challenge to consider how a set might be purposefully designed around the fact that you know you will be giving every player 27 cards at the start before embarking on a draft. Jason's shard starter package (noted above) comes to mind as inspiration. Maybe the sealed pools are assigned colors, and players can pick pools based on color preferences. Maybe the sealed pools are all uncommons and rares, and then we draft the commons.

Perhaps (now we're getting creative), the sealed pools are all one color for the entire group (e.g., everybody gets Green) and then the draft is about finding your lane among the other 4 colors that you're going to pair with the first one...which seems appropriate for a 4-player format.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their feedback so far, and let me know if you have any other ideas!