We had played many tournaments together in our group, starting with a Mirrodin booster draft in 2004, followed by many more drafts in the next months. It was always the usual booster draft format: three rounds of 15-card booster pack drafting passing left, then right, then left again, to draft a total of 45 cards. Players must then make from their 45 card haul a deck with at least 40 cards including land. Usually the first game played against each opponent consisted of that same 40 card deck, but for the second and third games sideboarding was allowed. Each match between two players was decided as best-of-three games.

Booster Drafting

For those unfamiliar with booster drafting, it's a style of tournament play which involves each player opening a 15-card booster pack, selecting the best card, and passing that booster to the left. Simultaneously each player receives from their right a 14-card booster which they must take one card from and continue passing the now 13-card booster to their left. This continues until each player has selected 15 cards and the first round of boosters is done. The next round is the same, except we pass to the right instead, then the final round is passed left again. This means the person immediately to your right controls to some degree which colours you will see. It's a good idea to avoid their colours if you can get some idea what they are drafting during this stage.

One of the problems with drafting a well-known set like Mirrodin is there are many strategy guides to be found on the net. This means that players who have the time to browse these guides or read about successful deck archetypes from professional tournaments will have a much better idea of what cards or colours to draft, than those who have less time to research the set.

We once tried an Urza's Saga tournament, which afforded us an opportunity to avoid this "foreknowledge imbalance". There were very few guides to drafting the Urza's Saga set, perhaps because it was so long ago. The little information we could glean about the set was shared with all players, and it looked like in this set red was the worst colour to draft. We found that no-one drafted red during the draft, and, ironically, had one of us been bold enough to draft nothing but red, the supposed worst colour in the set, it is likely they would have ended up with all the red cards, and probably consequently been able to do quite well. As it was, we all ended up with a bunch of useless red cards that no-one was willing to play because no-one had enough of them to make it worthwhile to play red.

But Why Invented Cards?

But I digress. You wanted to know about the Invented cards. It was really an obvious idea since we'd played with various card sets, and had a lot of experience with constructed deck play too. Why couldn't we create our own cards? With new mechanics, keywords, and abilities? We'd learned from the masters of card design themselves, the Wizards of the Coast. We'd avidly followed the new sets as they were released, and were fascinated with the way new mechanics could be worked seemlessly into the old rules. Could we do the same?

One of our other motivations was the desire to simulate a real draft of a new set which none of us had seen before. What would it be like to draft cards without knowing at all what effects will feature in the next booster to be passed around the table? Finding unusual combinations of effects which no-one could anticipate! Seeing strange interactions during play because cards weren't play tested together! These were tantalising possibilities which in the worst case could render game play a bit broken, but in the best case would be incredibly fun to discover.

So, some level of design secrecy was agreed upon. Each player would make their set as balanced as possible, then they'd all be shuffled together and dealt into 15-card boosters, then drafted as normal.

Masked Magician

Along the way, an unusual thing happened: another player heard about this invention process, and submitted some cards anonymously to be included in the draft. This mysterious person became known as the Masked Magician. Indicating that they didn't actually want to play in the tournament, but merely wished to contribute cards, these cards were accepted into the tournament and provided much mirth and interesting game play.

We ended up adding a set-review stage and a card pre-release stage (see the Processes section for more details), and at long last in January 2006 the inaugural Sydney Invented Tournament began.