Preparing for your first in-person draft? Great choice. What do you need, though? Let's separate the must-haves to the nice-to-haves.

The Basics of the Draft Format

Draft is a format where players receive three booster packs and build their deck from the cards contained inside. Hold on, though. Don't crack those packs just yet. There is a little more to it than that.

Draft is different from sealed. In sealed, you would just open your packs and get on with deck building. In draft, you have a little more control over what ends up in your pool. Each player simultaneously opens one pack, chooses the card they want, and passes the pack to the next player to their left. Do this again and again until there are no cards left to pass, then move on to pack two.

Everyone can probably guess what comes next. You open pack two and do the same again. In pack two, the process is identical except cards are passed to the right. In pack three, you go back to the left again.

Don't forget to remove any tokens or rules cards. You don't draft those. You might want to hang onto the token, though. They can come in handy.

Fundamentally, that's it. You will have 42 or 45 cards in your pool (depending on the specific draft format), which you turn into a deck of 40 cards or more. Time to shuffle up and play.

Tip: Don't Draft Basic Lands

New drafters wasting picks on Basic Lands is a meme as old as time. You do not need to draft Basics. You can grab as many as you want after the draft. You do not need to draft Basic Lands. Other Lands, yes, you need to spend a pick on them, but Basics are free.

What do you need for a Magic: The Gathering draft?

One of the best things about Draft is that the barrier to entry is extremely low. You can show up to your Local Game Store (LGS) with nothing but an entry fee. No deck required.

Booster Packs

There are various accessories that are useful to have, but very few that you must have. The only thing you absolutely need is access to booster packs. This is usually going to mean an entry fee at your LGS but there are other options. It could mean bringing boosters to a friend's house. If you're really lucky, it might just mean showing up to play with your friend's packs. The point is you need some packs.

Something To Track Life Totals

One thing that often goes overlooked is that someone should have a way to keep score. There are levels to this, but you can't go wrong with a pen and pad. Other options include dice and the official Companion App. The specific method doesn't matter as much as the fact that you have something to keep track of life totals.

Sleeves, Playmats, & Dice (Optional)

You don't need sleeves, but they are strongly recommended. They make shuffling easier and they protect your cards. If you're lucky enough to open a cool rare, you will be glad you kept it safe.

Similarly, a play mat is nice, but it's even less necessary than sleeves. The same goes for a deck box: definitely worth having, but certainly not crucial.

Some amount of dice is handy for keeping track of things like +1/+1 counters, but they fall strictly under the "nice to have" category. Beyond that, everything else is increasing levels of luxury.

Companion App (Optional)

If your first draft is going to be at your LGS, downloading the Companion App beforehand is highly recommended. It is used for most official events and has a lot of handy features. It's easy to use, but even if you don't understand everything, LGS staff have years of experience with it. They should be able to help. Again, you don't strictly need this, but it's very useful.

How many players do you need to draft?

Typically, there are eight players involved in a draft. You don't have to have eight players, but Draft is designed with eight players in mind. You can still run drafts with fewer players; Magic is a versatile and robust game. A six-person draft is still fine; it just isn't quite optimal.

Deck Building Basics

At this point, you are ready to go. You have everything you need to enter a draft. Hang on, though. If you want to actually win some games, you might want a little bit more help. Now, we will discuss about how to turn a pile of cardboard into a functioning deck.

Deck construction is its own portion of the draft. If you are playing at your LGS, this will be a set period of time, usually 30 minutes. Realistically, you should be thinking about the final deck during the draft itself. This is a skill you will develop over time, but there are a few easy rules of thumb you can take into your very first draft.

Stick to One or Two Colours

In 90% of Magic sets, draft is designed around two-colour decks. The biggest reason for this is that you simply will not have the fixing to play more than two colours in draft. You receive as many Basic Lands as you want, but if you want Lands of multiple colours, you're going to have to draft them. To draft them, you have to see them in the first place, and that isn't always guaranteed.

Even a "splash" (playing one or two cards in another colour) is not recommended to beginners. Draft mana bases are notoriously unreliable, and the juice of a slightly better card is rarely worth the squeeze.

Stick to 40 cards

It can be difficult to know what to cut from your pool, especially when you're just starting. Surely, playing one extra card doesn't make that much difference. Why else would you have so many cards to choose from?

Try looking at the same issue from a different angle. Is it worth making your deck more inconsistent for the sake of a mediocre Creature? A lot of the time, drawing your best cards in a draft game can be the difference between winning and losing. The more chaff you add to your deck, the more you dilute its power. The odds of drawing your best cards go down every time you add another, worse card.

Have a Plan

This can be difficult for a beginner, but there are a few helpful tools to help. We already covered the fact that Drafts are designed with two-colour decks in mind. These two-colour pairings usually have a specific game plan in mind. You can find these strategies on the Wizards of the Coast website and they are posted all over the internet, as well as being on the packaging.

In the same vein, you will see "Signpost Uncommons" in the draft. These are two-colour cards that are specifically designed to play nicely with their colours' strategy. Iron Man, Master of Machines is a great example of this from the recent Marvel Superheroes set. He tells you very clearly that you should draft - and then play - lots of Artifacts.

Classic Ratios

One of Draft's greatest strengths is also what makes it intimidating for newer players. Every draft is different, and no two decks are identical. Great. But how do you know what to play and what to cut?

There are some tried and tested ratios that can help you out. In a 40-card deck, you traditionally want 17 Lands and 23 spells. Those 23 spells typically break down into 15-19 Creatures and a handful of noncreature spells. You will almost always be winning Draft games via Creatures, so they should make up the bulk of your deck.

You should be very choosy about what noncreature spells to put in your deck. In most formats, an average Creature is going to be more useful than an average Instant or Sorcery. Spells that remove opposing Creatures are most likely to make the cut, especially if they are relatively cheap to cast. Some amount of card draw is usually decent, but you can easily over-index on it. Remember that in a typical Limited format, board state is king.

Do Your Research

As a new drafter, there are tons of resources at your disposal. Obviously, this article is about the basics and logistics, but there are plenty of content creators out there who make set-specific content for limited. This is an excellent starting point, but it is just that: a starting point.

You can put as much energy into this research as you like. Just know that it is out there, and that other players are using it.

Onwards and Upwards

We covered the basics of drafting here, but there is a lot more to discover. Every new set that comes out brings its own mechanics, archetypes and rules of thumb. Learning how to apply old heuristics to new environments is one of the most enjoyable things about draft. Feeling things click into place is extremely satisfying.

Sometimes you have to throw out your old guidelines completely. A set like Secrets of Strixhaven had a heavy focus on Instants and Sorceries, making the classic ratios mentioned above almost obsolete.

You will figure out when to do that over time, but it starts with your first draft. And never forget the most important guideline of them all: have fun!