In my last Limited Destiny article, I talked about how I intended to go about building a cube draft set for Destiny following the release of Rivals and the rules for limited formats. I realized, though, that I may be using a lot of terms that card game players are familiar with, but others might not be. With that, let’s take a look at what “limited format” means for draft and other ways to play.
The word that I’ve been using regularly when describing the new way to play Star Wars Destiny is “limited.” Magic: The Gathering players certainly know what I’m talking about here, but if you’re new to to collectible card games (CCG’s) or just never played anywhere but your kitchen table, you might not be as aware. There are basically two umbrella formats for CCG’s: constructed and limited. Both of these refer to the restrictions on how you build your decks, not which sets are allowed to be used. That topic is covered under the term “rotation,” which has been talked about in a recent article on the FFG website.
Constructed is the basic way we’ve been building Destiny decks since the game came out. We know how it works: you buy boxes, boosters, and singles, and then you make your decks from all the cards that you own. Simple.
Limited is where we get into draft and sealed play. Limited means that you have a limited card pool to build your decks from. You don’t go off and pull cards out of your boxes from home when you play in a limited format game. Draft and sealed deck have both been described in an article on FFG’s site, but in a nutshell:
– In draft, you have six players (some would say eight is preferable, but we’ll see), each with their own copy of Rivals along with six booster packs. These packs, plus Rivals, make up the pool of cards you’ll get to pick and build from. Draft, as previously described, is where you crack your first three packs, pick one card, then pass to the left, taking a card from the stack handed to you, and continuing on like that until all cards are taken. You then take your other three packs, crack them, pick one, then pass to the right, until all of those are gone. You then have your own pool of cards pulled from all the packs at the table.
– For sealed deck, each player (there can be any number of players in this format) still has a Rivals pack, and then they each also have eight booster packs, rather than six. When the tournament organizer says, “Go!”, everyone opens their eight packs and those eight plus their Rivals pack form that player’s pool of cards to build from. There’s no worrying about what other people are picking, or only having a certainly amount of time to look over the cards that are in front of you for just a few seconds.
Now that we have a clearer definition of the two ways to make decks, we can start talking about how cards have different values in limited versus their value in constructed. We’ll also talk about some deck building theories for drafting and how to even pick cards when you’re drafting. I’m especially looking forward to diving into sealed deck building because that’s very much the nexus of constructed and draft.
Since this was a really quick article just to help shed some light on CCG terms that some of our friends might not be as familiar with if they’re just getting into Destiny, I really want to know what other questions readers/listeners have when there are phrases, words, or concepts that we bring up that aren’t clear. Don’t be afraid to ask us questions! I only really got a good understanding of the different Magic formats within the last six years myself. We’re always learning!