General Drafting with 6 or fewer players

[Soshi]

I've been looking at running 4, 5 and 6 person drafts with my small cube. However clearly the standard 15 card packs are going to result in multiple wheels worth of cards. Instead, I'm looking at running 5 packs of 9 cards.

Thoughts or feedback?

Apologies if this has been discussed and I missed the old thread.

 

[Jonas]

5 of nine is a good way to do it.

 

[Jesse G]

My group has found 5 of 9 works quite well, but recently we've been experimenting with a single 15 card pack to start off the draft. That way you get to look at a few more cards and see a few more signals before you really dive in and commit. The results have been good so far.

 

[Lucre]

I love six man tables in cube. The extra variance can be weird but team drafting options are fun and packs of 11 are damn cool.

 

[ahadabans]

Our group was doing 4 of 11, which is much better than 3 of 15.

5 packs is a lot and guys lose patience at a certain point (they just want to play). Even 4 packs was pushing things for us anyway.

 

[Eric Chan]

With six, we do four packs of 11, and I think everybody's been pleased with that. I haven't run as many four and five man drafts, but I recall doing five packs of 9 at one point with a very small crew.

If you're sufficiently curious, I think you could explore variant formats when you get as low as four people, as long as everyone's experienced enough to feel comfortable experimenting. There's Jason's Tenchester format for four, and you could try Rochester as well. Or something like 2v2 Team Sealed, where each team opens nine packs apiece and has to build two separate decks from the combined pool, with distinct sideboards.