How Limited draft works

A normal booster draft, with one thing most tools do not give you: you choose how many packs the draft holds and which sets each of them comes from.

Limited is Magic played from cards you opened rather than cards you own. You draft a pool, build a deck out of it that evening, and the deck stops existing afterwards. It is the format where nobody's collection matters.

Spellpod runs it in the browser for up to eight players, with bots filling any seat nobody takes.

Choosing the packs

You set two things: how many packs the draft holds in total, and which sets those packs come from.

The pack total steps by the number of players, because the packs are shared out evenly. Twelve packs among four players is three rounds each, which is a standard draft. Change the player count and the total re-snaps to something that still divides.

Then you compose those packs. One set for all of them is the ordinary case. But you can split them: six packs of one set and six of another, or one pack each of twelve different sets, which is a chaos draft. There is no cap on how many sets you use beyond the number of packs, since you can never need more sets than you have packs.

What a mixed draft actually feels like

When a set has enough packs to cover a whole round, everyone opens that set together and the round plays like a normal draft. Only the leftovers get shuffled across the table, so a round can have you opening one set while the player beside you opens another.

That means the common setups stay tidy. Twelve packs of one set is three ordinary rounds. Four packs each of three sets at a four player table is three rounds, one set per round. It is only when the counts do not divide evenly that seats start seeing different sets at the same time, which is exactly when you asked for chaos.

Drafting and passing

Everyone opens a pack, takes a card, and passes the rest on. The direction alternates each round, left for the first, right for the second, and so on. When the packs run out the round ends and the next one opens.

The host can change what a pick looks like:

• Picked cards per booster, one to five. Two is what the Commander formats use.
• Burned cards per booster, which removes cards from the pack after each pick without anyone getting them.
• Discard the remaining cards of each pack, which ends a round early once a pack is down to that many cards.
• A pick timer, fifty seconds, with an optional review timer before the clock starts.
• Hide picks, which keeps what everyone drafted secret until the draft ends.

What you end up with

A drafted pool saves as a Limited deck: forty cards minimum rather than sixty, duplicates allowed, and a table that starts at twenty life. There is no ban list applied, because a pool you opened cannot sensibly be judged against a constructed card list.

The format is a setting rather than a fact, though. If you would rather the draft produce something else, the format dropdown decides both what the decks save as and what ruleset and starting life the table uses when the pod moves on to play.

Host a draft

Bots

Empty seats fill with bots, so a draft never waits for a full pod. The bots draft on rarity and color, which makes them a reasonable pack-passing partner and a poor read on what is actually good. Solo against bots is the fastest way to try a set.

Common questions