The draft tournament for this set was held in Sydney on April 4th 2008.

Results should be at CardDraft.com

Cards were printed as photos (two cards per photo), then cut out and grouped into boosters. Each booster had a paper wrapper which was glued together. Cover art for the booster was some art used in the set, and the booster cover design was done by our infamous resident budding graphic artist, David McLeish (thanks!).

Errata

• Somnolence has a spurious "2" in its bottom right corner, the result of a copy-and-paste error.
• Woodelf Warrior was missing an "until end of turn" clause which made it confusing.
• Woodelf Forester should have had a casting cost of , not .

Building a set

Cards were printed on photographic paper and cut out by scissors. This was a most time consuming process! But eventually I had several piles of commons, a pile of uncommons and a pile of rares. To save time, I only printed out the uncommons and rares needed for a box of 36 boosters, and didn't bother printing (or sometimes even finding art for) the remaining uncommons or rares.

Photographic paper produced a very nice outcome. All the cards looked crisp and professional. For the first time I could see tiny jaggies in the output of GenCard, because of the bitmapped fonts I was using for the card names, and the high quality of the prints.

Starting with a pile of commons, I laid out nine boosters:

I ensured each booster would have at least one of each of the six colours in this set:

Each booster had 12 common cards instead of the usual 11 (to try to avoid colour-skew as a result of having six colours):

After laying out the commons, I had the beginnings of nine boosters:

I then added three uncommon and one rare card above each booster. The uncommons were required to be of a different colour to each other (for these purposes "gold" and "artifact" were considered single colours too):

This had taken the better part of an hour to sort out. So then I quickly repeated the process for a second set of boosters:

And a third:

I seemed to have miscounted with the third set of boosters. There were 110 commons in the set, and by having 12 commons per booster, 9 x 12 = 108, so I should have had 2 leftover commons. This was true of the first two lots of nine, but in the third lot I was short one card, so I must have been short by three cards overall. I'm not sure how that happened. (I borrowed one of the previous lot's leftover cards and placed it in the 27th booster.) This is one reason why it's good to print several entire runs of the commons, I was able to discover there was a problem, (and if I'd had the time to examine the cards or these photos I could probably even have worked out what's missing).

There were also basic lands printed for each of the six colours in this set. Each land had two artworks, for a bit of variety:

Booster covers were provided by David McLeish:

Folding the cards into boosters took a little time. I experimented with two fastening methods, but the "picture dots" seen below were the least successful, because they only lasted a few minutes before popping open again. But they looked good:

Eventually opting for paperclips as a simple and effectively fastening method, the boosters were stacked into a Lorwyn box for transport to the tournament venue:

The draft tournament

Players in my local Magic group gathered at the venue, Mr Shellshear's house, for the tournament, unsure whether to be excited or afraid:

Some plays I saw or heard about on the night:

• Darren made good use of Laidly Worm's ability to grow things whenever he played a female card.
• Darren also placed a regeneration creature and an untapper into Elfhome using Fifty Foot of Rope which allowed him to gain three life per turn.
• I made a good tempo deck from purple and black. I found reagents vital to make up for the inability of crowns to count as mana.
• Kat whacked DMM with an Adventuress enchanted with Somatic Link. Unfortunately for David in this instance, he had splashed purple and was playing with Cities. Kat was on 27 life at last sighting.
• Andrew C played a demon only to have David Mc play a Public Library, forcing him to draw cards. Andrew was able to quickly play several spells to avoid behing beaten to a pulp by his own demon.
• Andrew S reportedly drafted a lot of buildings but ended up not playing them.

There were a few general comments about the set.

Andrew C felt there was insufficient removal. He may well be right, although there were some big removal effects like Ragnarok, Darken the Alleys and of course the usual red and black removal spells like Spectral Blaze, Exotic Danger which is a bit narrow, and Obsidian Chimera, but it won't be clear what was actually in the draft until we type them all in at CardDraft.com.

Andrew S said although he had drafted buildings, he didn't play with them, and Andrew C suggested they needed to be more powerful. I showed a Tavern and pointed out that it's a Death Ward replacement in essence. You're getting a single-use instant/sorcery effect, on a building, which counts both as a permanent with a colour (for the colour-advantage component of the set) and as a possible contributor to Victory Points. Another nice utility building is Boneyard of which I drafted two copies, so it's possible I was hogging the buildings which Andrew C might have otherwise seen (since he was playing black). I don't think buildings should be compared with Planswalkers, they are more akin to utility cards, cantrips or even enchantments.

Purple featured in suprisingly few decks. I thought with the colour advantage theme there would be incentive to at least splash some purple, even if it was just a reagent. Possibly the Citywalk cards cancelled out the potential advantage, and the land-drop problem which Cities represent may have proved too great a disincentive too. Nevertheless, some people did have a go at purple.

The built up of crowns on cities was an interesting thing to watch. Where there was a lot of purple in a deck, there would often be few if any crowns on the cities. But you'd only need to skip drawing purple for a few turns and suddenly those cities would be chock-a-block with crowns, making subsequent purple cards very easily played.

There were a few ideas about how to solve this (assuming it is a problem):

• David Mc had the idea of putting crowns onto permanents instead of into an abstract "treasury".
• Mott's Market in fact already treats crowns as counters.
• So, an idea I had was to specifically put crowns generated by a City onto that City.
• A further idea is to resrict spending of crowns so that you can only pay for one card or ability using the crowns from one permanent. This would mean a City could only be used to play a cost-6 card on turn six at the earliest, no matter how many other Cities you play in the mean time. This might be a further disincentive to playing purple... so I'm not sure if it's a good idea. It requires play testing and probably a differently costed set of purple cards to experiment with.
• Together, these ideas could make moving or removing counters more powerful and useful abilities. Cards like Spectral Time-Warp (which was designed with Quest and Suspend in mind), Werdna and Skymage would suddenly be a lot more powerful (in fact, Skymage would probably become broken under those rules).

Overall, I think the biggest flaw with the set (from a drafting perspective) was there were way too many ideas in there, which means each idea had little space to be properly explored or represented. In a drafting situation, this means it can be difficult for a player to obtain enough of a particular card to make that deck archetype playable. For instance, there are many constructed play opportunities in the set, from red's gender equality to white's patriarchy, buildings as Victory Points, purple's mage cycle, colour advantage, milling, elf-reproduction or demon-summoning, and the largely unused face-up-cards-in-library effect (this last of which I would rather had been excised earlier in the set design). But getting any of these to work in a draft tournament is tricky. The addition of purple also made this task more difficult. So if I was doing this again (and I won't!) I would remove some of those effects I think and concentrate on purple and buildings. I think those are the core ideas in this set, and deserve a bit more investigation.

Loki Patrick