Index -> Miscellaneous -> Draft Play

Draft Play

Draft play is a type of Sealed Play in which all players start out with an unopened draft pack and three unopened booster packs, all from the same block, and must construct a deck from these cards prior to playing.

A draft tournament is entered like any other tournament, by joining the appropriate queue in the Tournament Lobby. Draft tournaments require more than just event passes to join, however: each draft tournament requires 2 event passes, 1 draft pack, and 1 booster pack from each set in the relevant block (e.g. for a Fellowship draft tournament, 1 booster from each set in the Fellowship block is required. For special draft matches, and for current blocks, for which all sets have not yet been released, booster requirements are listed in the pop-up window that appears when you join a queue).

Each player must also bring a "foundation deck" to the draft tournament. This deck must contain Frodo, a copy of The One Ring, and an adventure deck of 9 sites. All cards must be from the correct block. You will be asked to specify this deck when joining the tournament, the same way you are when joining a constructed tournament.

The draft pack is opened first, and then each booster pack is opened, in set order. After the draft pack is opened, players have 5 minutes in which to consider their cards, and decide what sort of cards they want to draft during the upcoming drafting process. After this time, the first booster pack is opened, and players may not look at their cards again - either the card from their draft pack, or the cards that they draft from booster packs - until the drafting process is finished.

When drafting is over, each player is presented with a limited deckbuilder screen that contains only their drafted cards (including their draft pack). They then have 15 minutes in which to make a deck to play with. This deck may be changed between rounds of the draft tournament, but may only contain cards that were drafted. You may leave the limited deckbuilder and move to other areas of the game during this deckbuilding period, but if you do not have a valid deck when the games commence, you will be given a loss for that round. Your deck will be saved and validated upon clicking the ready button at the top of the deck builder.

You may return to the limited deck builder between rounds to change your deck, but must have a valid deck by the start of the next round in order to play in it.

There are several other differences between draft play and normal constructed play:

• Your draw deck must contain only 40 or more cards, rather than the 60 or more for normal construted play. The Shadow and Free Peoples sides must still be equal in number.
• Your draw deck may contain more than 4 of the same card.
• Each player may reshuffle their deck once per game, when they have no cards left in their deck. This can be accomplished by right-clicking (ctrl-clicking for Macintosh users) on the playmat when your draw deck is empty.

Reflections Drafting - With the release of Reflections, we have introduced a new type of Draft play, Reflections Drafts. Like regular Drafts, Reflections Drafts are block speciic. So for instance, you may see a queue for a Fellowship Block Reflections Draft. For this queue you would need 2 Event Passes, 2 Reflections Booster Packs, 1 Fellowship Block Draft Pack (or whatever block the draft is) and a "foundation" deck like the one you would use for a normal draft. One notable difference between regular Drafts and Reflections Drafts is that for Reflections Drafts the only part of your deck that needs to validate for the block is the Adventure Path.

See also Constructed Play, Sealed Play, and Limited Deck Builder.