October 04, 2005
Running a Booster Draft Tourney for a bunch of 11 year olds
When a friend mentioned that his 11 year old's B-day party is coming up, I decided to save my friend some money in renting a clown for the afternoon, and instead have uncle Milton run a booster draft tournement for all the attending boys (for they are all aspiring Magic players).
Booster draft is new to all of the attending kids, and they loved the part about tearing open a new booster pack and then picking the best card for their deck (a lot of oooh and ahhh acompanied the process). I have to monitor the "passing of the cards" somewhat closely because some of the kids have tendencies to be out of sync with their neighbors (and some have issues with passing right and passing left also)...
Since there are an odd number of players, I am also in the tourney to fill it out to a round number of 8 players. There was consternation upon hearing this (uncle Milton has a reputation of a card shark you see), but everyone relaxed upon hearing my declaration that I cannot "win" the tourney. As it turned out, I needn't of worried.
Since I am not familiar with the latest card mix (we are using 9th edition packs), early on in the draft I decided on a deck that's simple to play and not too subtle. I opted for a green/red boomer deck, with a lot of mana generating creatures (various elves), and some big ass wurms that are game clinchers. Red provided some other flyers and a splash of direct damage.
It's a deck that simple to play, and if allowed to develope, will clinch the game in no time. ALl the game that I won kinda went the same way. Trouble starts when I hit a all black card denail deck or a blue/black permission deck since I don't have enough cards that can remove enchantments.
So final outcome? Uncle Milt came in 5th out of 8 (record is 3/4). 2 of my 4 losing games came out extremely close (as in the winner has 1 life when he killed me). The other two are blowout games (one of them to the B-day boy). B-Boy came out 2nd place so that was pretty good for the timbre of the party.
The kids themselves are also very interesting. Loud, inquisitive, smart (like all smart 11 year olds everywhere I guess), and a true international mix: We have Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, French, and German. Throughout the tourney I've only have to laid down the law once (someone got too rowdy), but otherwise a well behaved group. An experience I can be persuaded to repeat...
Posted by msoong at 09:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Magic Booster Draft format
My days of breathing and living Magic is long gone (I did that for about 2 years where Magic is pretty much the only game I played, for two years I didn't paint a single figure, imaging that...)
I am pretty much Magic free for until about last year, when I discovered the joy of playing with their prepackaged "theme" deck. So for minimal investment I can play with the latest releases, get a feel for the "typical" tactics of that block (each of the theme deck is usually design to highlight some deck archetype). So I became a "low grade" magic player (usually the deck comes out if on boardgame night the numbers do not work out).
This year I had the pleasure of playing in a booster draft format with my regular gaming group. It's the first time I am exposed to this format and I like it a lot, since it's a low financial outlay method of playing the game (3 booster pack per player for an evening's tournement), and it rewards different skills then constructed format.
For those of you not familiar with what booster draft means, this is how it works: All the players of the tournament sit around together, and each player will then tear open a fresh booster pack (containing 15 cards). Ea player then choose one of the 15 cards from his pack, then pass the other 14 cards to his left. Repeat this 14 times, then do the same with booster pack 2 and 3. At the end each player end up with 45 cards (hopefully in some semblence of usefullness), then he can use any number of basic land cards from his own collection to build a 40 card deck.
So spending a lot of money is out. This rewards be able to think on your feet and build a deck with what you have. It introduces a new element of strategy in the metagame and also keeps me free from obsessing about Magic in the off hours.
Posted by msoong at 09:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack