A brand new way to draft called “Supreme Draft” is coming to Magic Online this week. It takes some of the best parts of drafting—opening packs and first picks—and dials them up to 18 for a unique draft experience.
Rather than queuing into a draft pod with seven other humans or bots, Supreme Draft is a single-player draft queue. Once you’re in the draft, you will be presented with 18 unopened packs, one at a time, from which you will pick two cards per pack.
After you choose two cards from a pack, you open the next pack and take two more cards, and so on, until you’ve drafted 36 cards from 18 total packs. You then build a minimum 40-card deck with your draft picks and play out your matches in a League format on Magic Online.
Supreme Draft will launch on Magic Online this Wednesday, August 26, with RAVNIXTRAVAGANZA. The event will draw two packs packs from each of eight Ravnica sets—Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, Dissension, Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon’s Maze, Guilds of Ravnica, and Ravnica Allegiance—plus two additional packs chosen at random from those sets. (War of the Spark will not be included.) While the order of the packs will be random every time you draft, you will be able to see the order of the packs once you join the draft.
RAVNIXTRAVAGANZA will be available until Wednesday, September 2, at which time the format will change to Modern Horizons Supreme Draft until September 9. After that, Supreme Draft will return sometime in November for a Chaos Supreme Draft event. Supreme Drafts will cost 10 tickets or 100 play points to enter and will be Phantom Draft events.
The Origins of Supreme Draft
Supreme Draft started its life as an answer to the question: “How do you draft with only two people?” Traditional draft pods require eight people, and the Winston Draft format is pretty clunky, so the Magic Online team came up with an idea: what if you didn’t need a pod and just opened a pack and made a pick?
The new proto-format was so popular, Magic Online’s Digial Product Manager Allison Steele said, that employees from outside of the Magic Online team were asking to help playtest and iterate on it—a first for a Magic Online format.
But what really made the format sing, Steele said, was changing the structure from one pick from each of 36 packs to two picks from each of 18 packs. Then Double Masters and its two-first-picks draft format came along, allowing the Magic Online team to spend the resources to implement the two-picks-at-a-time feature and let Supreme Draft piggyback off of that work.
The resulting Supreme Draft format will be the first Magic Online-exclusive format since 2015’s Tempest Remastered.