I played in a MtG draft tournament once, and it was great. It gives everyone a level playing field (barring chance) and adds another whole level to the game. I got my butt handed to me in the "real" tournament. I've since run little draft tournaments with friends on occasion, and it's been a lot of fun -- nobody has to invest any more money than the packs they buy for that day; and nobody has to invest time play-testing decks to have a decent shot.

I tend to spend my time on other things these days, but if I wanted to get back into it, going for draft tournaments would be the way to go.

I only net deck in both MtG and Pokémon. :sweat_smile:

Yes. Yes, it's frustrating some times, but the cool thing is that if you play against an experienced played that deck is only gonna get you so far. Also, there are many archetypes and to get a deck that can be competitive against all is pretty hard.

+ I also enjoy events where you build your deck on the fly from boosters. Those are definitely a lot of fun.

You can't cut and paste in Draft or Sealed, which were my games of choice.

I found constructed to be far more pay to win and copy-based for my tastes. But draft forces you to make due with the cards you get at random.

------

Cards are uniformly random according to rarity, but picks are not. If you get passed a rare and 3x uncommons in the draft, you know the left-hand player picked a common card. After 8 passes, your original stack comes back and you can get a feel for everyone else's deck. When pack2 opens up, you start working towards the 'underrated' colors at the table and going for the meta strategy no one has picked yet.

any card game that is competitive and popular is going to have net decking in their constructed formats. this doesn't just apply to card games though... non-card games have this as well. world of warcraft has a metagame of arena compositions, league of legends has compositions of teams and roles. in a game that allows you to explicitly construct the composition of your deck or team before each match there is no other way for it to play out.

there are game modes such as drafting that introduce randomness and dynamism to deck construction that avoid this and most card games have this type of game mode.

Those who enjoy the deck design challenge tend to play draft games (construct a deck by drafting one card at a time from three packs of 15, and then play a tournament with it) rather than open “bring a deck” games.