General New Way to 2-Man Draft: Housman Draft

[Morphling]

(Myles Housman, creator)

So, Ryan Saxe (Author for SCG) has a friend named Myles Housman who developed this drafting format. We tried it out last night 2x with the Artifact cube and I have to say it is REALLY fun. We each built 2-3 color decks without much problem.

Completely forgot this was covered elsewhere. Check it out: https://luckypaper.co/podcast/89/

The Housman Draft

• Number of Players: 2
• Cards required: 171
  1. Create three piles of cards from the cube without looking at any. One pile should contain 81 and the other two should each contain 45. Each player takes one of the 45 card piles. The 81 card pile is shared between both players.
  2. Choose a player to begin the draft. Do this however you want- die roll, etc. After, to begin a round of drafting, take 9 cards from the shared pile and place them into a grid on the table, similar to how you would do a grid draft. The actual orientation or position the cards is unimportant, however. Each player draws a 5 card hand from their pile of 45.
  3. Starting with the chosen player, each player will take turns picking up one card from the table and placing it into their hand, then place one card from their hand onto the table. Each player will do this three times. After, each player adds their hand to their draft pool and the remaining grid of 9 cards is binned.
  4. Repeat this process, alternating who starts the draft round, until there are no cards left (9 rounds total). Each player will have 45 cards with which to construct their decks.

Pros:
• You get to see *a lot* more of the cube and that helps your drafting pool (and options) tremendously. This was by far the nicest thing. 99% of our drafts are 2-player and this has really been bothering me forever. Seems 100% solved.
• Seeing more of the cube means you have quite a bit more agency in the type of deck you build...archetypes feel easier to pursue. (Love this as well.)
• Going first or second has different benefit for each person, so that's reasonably balanced, and the alternation on every round further balances it.
• Games and decks were a bit more balanced & focused than usual and felt REALLY powerful. We had incredible matches.
• The communal grid sets up additional decisions where you have to consider what your opponent might (or might not) grab if you lay it down on the grid--makes the drafting process a bit more interesting than normal.

Cons:
• You will occasionally draw a hand where you want to keep every card. TOO BAD, you still have to swap one out, no matter what. You can always draft it back the next turn but you might also lose it to your opponent if they want that card. That's a tough spot and it did happen occasionally.
• If you go first in the draft, remember the other player gets final choice. Once they make their 3rd swap, you won't get a chance to pick up what they put down. (That is why alternating helps.)
• Probably has some scaling issues.

I would highly recommend this drafting format to anyone. We are probably doing it again tonight, lol. That is how much fun we had!!

 

[LadyMapi]

This sounds fun but time-consuming. How long did it take to do?

...

One potentially neat way to build a cube around this kind of draft would be to design your cube as some number of 18-card "deck cores" and 27-card "modules". Then each draft involves each drafter grabbing a deck core + a random module, with the central pile consisting of 3x modules.

The idea here is that the cards in the deck cores would be stronger than the cards in the modules, but the module cards would be more broadly useful.

 

[Morphling]

Yes, we tried it again last night (different buddy) and we encountered issues(!)..

• Time was an issue if you aren't drafting with someone who makes decisions quickly. It took us nearly one hour to complete the 2nd draft; not really ideal. Friday night, we basically burned through it. Didn't seem like it took so long. ??

• Also found there were definitely times where it felt counterproductive to force a pick versus just skipping a pick. Didn't really happen much Friday but it happened a lot last night. This added additional time and led to some sub-optimal draft picks and it was really aggravating by the 2nd draft. Also led to some silly stuff where we'd pick up a cards only to lay it back down the next turn. I'm not sure if excluding completely breaks things or not; may have to test it out.

 

[Modin]

Thanks for the suggestion! That looks like a really interactive way to grid draft.
The way that I like to do 2 player drafts (and have done 100++ times) is by doing 12 packs of 7 where you get two picks from "your" pack and one from the opponent's and discard the rest. Additionally, a card is discarded at random before the final pick.

It goes like this:
Pick 1 of 7 (own pack)
Pick 1 of 6 (opp pack)
Discard 1 card at random
Pick 1 of 5 (own pack)
Discard the rest.

This lets you see 12x13 = 156 different cards of which you pick 36. The method is relatively quick as you can just draw 7 cards each go and you pick from a relatively small amount of cards.

We've stuck to this method ever since we tried it because it emulates the drafting experience quite well and the emerging decks feel representative of the cube. However, like every method it has its flaws and is not comparable to an 8 Player draft.