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Introducing New Custom Draft Formats

By Dekkaru |

The 5.3 release brought with it some long-requested draft features. Chief among them are improvements to the specification of custom drafts. In this article, we are going to explore how you as a user of Cube Cobra can take advantage of these improvements.

The Old

Maybe you're not interested in anything new. You liked the draft specification we already had and thought it was quite enough for anything you might need. Well, I've got good news for you! You can still build formats the way you're used to, and apart from some minimal UI changes, you won't notice a thing. While we're adding new ways to make your draft experience better, the core of our specification stays the same.

This also means that any custom draft formats you have already created were seamlessly converted into the new system. If you notice anything wrong with your existing draft formats, please let us now in the Cube Cobra Discord.

The New

The old system allowed you to specify very precisely what each pack in the draft looked like, but sometimes that's not enough. There are situations where you also want to change what happens to those packs during the draft. "Pick one card, pass the pack along" might be the default, but it is by no means the only way to draft.

That's why we're introducing the concept of steps. What is a step? In basic terms, a step is an action that's taken with a pack during the draft. Using these steps, we are now able to define exactly how the process of drafting progresses.

There are three basic kinds of steps: Pick, Pass, and Trash. Pick lets you pick a card from your current pack. Pass passes your pack to the next player (to your right in packs 1, 3, ... and to your left in packs 2, 4, ...). Trash removes a card of your choice from the pack (this is sometimes also referred to as "burning"). In addition to these three, Pick and Trash also have a randomized variant, where instead of you choosing the card to be picked/trashed, one is chosen for you at random.

Working with Steps

When you go to create a new custom draft, you'll notice that for each pack, underneath its slot specifications, you can now find a Steps for Drafting heading. Clicking that heading will open up an ordered list of all the steps that'll be taken with that pack.

example steps for draft

You can see in the picture above that Pick and Trash steps also have an associated numeric value next to it. This value indicates how many times that step is repeated before moving on to the next step. For example, the specification above would mean that after opening the pack, you pick two cards from it before passing it on. The "Remove" button next to each step can be used to completely remove that step from the sequence. On the other hand, pressing the "Add Step" button at the end of the list will add a new step at the end of the sequence.

When looking at the list of steps for the first time, you might be surprised to see it already contains some values. There's a very good reason those are there. If you don't want to modify the list yourself, it is automatically filled with a Pick followed by a Pass for each slot in the pack. That way, anyone who wants to draft the traditional way doesn't have to touch the steps specification at all!

If you do decide to define your own though, make sure you use all the cards in your pack and no more. If, for example, your pack has fifteen slots, you cannot define its steps for drafting in such a way that only ten cards are used, just as you cannot define steps that use twenty cards. Luckily, if your slot count and your step specification ever get out of sync, you will see a helpful message that won't let you save the draft until you rectify the inconsistency.

example error message

Examples

Now that we finally got through all the theory, let's build some draft formats! Here are a few examples of how you can recreate some of the more popular drafting procedures using our new specification.

Commander Legends

commander legends

Double Masters

double masters

Sealed

sealed
Note that we used Randomly Pick here instead of Pick. That way, the computer picks up all the cards for you and you don't have to manually select your pick fifteen times for no reason.

Glimpse/Burn

glimpse

Pancake

pancake

Wrap-up

And that's all there's to it! If you managed to get this far, you should now be able to create draft formats tailored exactly to your preferences. If you have some questions that weren't answered, feel like there's something we didn't cover, or just want to chat, you are always welcome in our Discord.

Happy cubing!