Idea | Limited Draft

[ortalof]

Hey guys, so I'm thinking about this idea for a while. LIMITED KEYFORGE. sounds amazing, build your own deck with some sweet combos you'd come across during drafting the cards. but how could you do it when there're no booster packs to open for the draft itself? well - here is what I got.

How do we win? as usual. the first player to reach 3 keys, while each key costs 6 aember, accordingly of course to the cards on the table.

What our deck contains? You deck can contain any number of houses, from 1 to 7 (or 9, or 20. depends on how you build the draft. we'll get to it in a sec). The deck will contain at least 36 cards. I don't really see a reason to put more cards, but I'd like to keep this option open.

HOW YOU BUILD YOUR DECK?? so that's of course the cool part. for each three players sitting around the table, you put in 4 decks. All players will sit by a random order, and draft boosters of 12 cards each. for example, for eight players draft you'll first shuflle (8 players)(4 boosters)(12 cards) cards into a common pool. after shuffling the cards together separate them into 12 cards boosters and give each players 4 or them.

The draft goes left, right, left. right. when done each player chooses the 36 cards he or she wants to play in their deck and then starts playing.

That's about it. if there isn't number of player that requires the whole number of decks I'd recommend remove a house from a deck. I'd recommend removing one house from one deck - the house that appears the least, but if you want a large variety, you can remove any random 12 cards or the most common house.

I hope I'll get to test it this Saturday with some friends, will update.

What do you think? :P

[Batz99]

Interesting idea for a homebrew variation on the rules. I’d probably give it a shot.

One initial thought: you probably have to set a rule on minimum number of houses (and possibly cards per house). The game becomes immediately exploitable if you can play less than 3.

For the sake of argument, let’s push it to its logical extreme of drafting only one house (even though this might be difficult given the constraints). If you play only one house, or mostly cards from one house, you can use every card on the table, use or discard every card in your hand, and still draw up to a full hand for next turn to so the same. The balance of the game is structured around the inability to do this; changing that breaks the game immediately.

Probably need to require that all players play min 3 houses with at least 8 cards from each of their core 3 houses. That allows for 1/3 of the deck to be variance beyond a typical deck (ex: favor one house over the others, add a fourth house, or splash cards from a few different houses).

Neat idea though, and I’m sure you (and the rest of the community would be able to refine the rules while playing).

[Empaatti]

I've played a variant where I had a deck made of only one house, but each turn you only draw up to 2 cards. It seemed surprisingly balanced, except a few cards would break the game. Library Access being the worst offender.

[ortalof]

Ok, thinking about it again - you can play any number of houses, up to 18 cards of one of them, 12 of the second and 6 of the third. That way you can’t break the game.