Last week, we held an advance booster draft practice for the upcoming Philippine Nationals with Team Iloilo. I have come up with the idea because of the constraints on the schedule. We are only having one week of preparation after the release of M19 to the date of the Nationals weekend. That one week would not be enough as we will still scramble for components from the new set to our Standard decks and the familiarization of drafting Core Set 2019. I believe that on-hand experience is much effective rather than just reading each of the cards and the possible archetypes in a draft. Being familiar with the signal and the colors that are open while doing the draft is also important.

That said, I looked for a booster pack generator online and found one that I used to visit last time when I was preparing for Grand Prix Hong Kong. I think that was during the release of Theros set. I then generated six boosters and copied each of the images to a specific folder with labels “B1” “B2” up to “B6”. The next task is to resize them to the actual size of a Magic card. That is 750 pixels by 1050 pixels or in terms of inches, 2.5” by 3.5”.

I posted to the MTG Iloilo group of this intent of an advanced booster draft practice. They were happy of the idea and is willing to help in the making of the booster packs. Tuesday morning a fellow play, Ian Lim, then messaged me that he has a printer available to print the proxy cards and asked on how I did the booster pack generation. I referred him to the website and he replied he will just do a trial print of six boosters. He was able to do it fast that afternoon. He messaged me the pics of the finished products and boy they looked great in the colored version. They looked more detailed than my Black and White printed copies. Anyhow, I just finished printing mine and here is the card comparison with the actual size.

It is looking to fit well and I got nine cards for a sheet of short bondpaper. Here are the pics that Ian Lim sent me.

We set the booster draft date to be Thursday night last week and gathered the participants which are mostly playing at the Nationals. Ian also brought his printed proxy cards which total to about 18 booster packs. Each was placed on a sealed plastic bag to separate them. We then distributed the packs by random to each of the players. I was then in-charge of calling the time of picks and draft review so I told the players to sit in ascending order according to the result of their dice roll. Here is the pic when I started the draft of the first booster pack.

Here below are the rest of the pics including the resleeving, deck building, and matches.

Overall, it was a fun but knowledgeable experience for the players as they get to learn on the correct archetype to draft while making mistakes on the way. Some admit that they got the wrong color signal, realizing it during the second booster picks and tried to correct the error. They still ended up with mediocre decks and with the third color splash from their early line of picks.

The Top 3 players after 3 rounds of Swiss were:

1st, Rei – Mono Blue Artificer
2nd, Oliver – Jund Midrange
3rd, JD – Black Green Fatties

We are planning on another M19 booster draft this week but this time we will be using real booster packs, thanks to the advance arrival of my preordered box which was part of the Prerelease kit package from Rei.

That is a wrap. Until the next post.