2026 Comparison
The short answer: TurnZero HQ is our pick, free on iOS, Android and the web. It deals the packs (booster, Glimpse, Winston and six-pack sealed), grades the draft against what else was in each pack, and then does the thing every other simulator stops short of: the pool becomes a real deck that gets played and tracked, so you find out which archetypes you actually win with. The others are each better at one job: Draftsim for free bot packs on a brand new set, Draftmancer for drafting with real people in a browser, Cube Cobra for cubes, MTG Arena for real drafts with real stakes, and 17Lands for the data underneath all of it.
Our pick
Best overall: bot packs in four formats, and the only one that keeps what you drafted
Three fifteen-card packs, seven bots, forty-five picks, and a grade at the end that marks what you took against what else was in the pack, call-out by call-out. The bots draft at three strengths, so a format you have beaten does not stay easy. Beyond ordinary booster draft it runs Glimpse (take one, burn two, nine packs, nothing wheels) and Winston (two players, three piles, take or pass), and it opens six-pack sealed pools. Help while you draft is a setting, off by default, and at its most useful in the middle position: the best card in the pack is revealed once you have already taken one, so it arrives too late to pick by. What no other simulator on this page does is the end: a finished pool saves as a deck in one tap, either the suggested forty or all forty-five, and from there it is an ordinary TurnZero HQ deck. It gets versions, it gets played, and because Draft is tracked alongside Commander and Standard, the record of how it did survives the night the cards went back in the box. Free on iOS, Android and the web. The honest limits: no multiplayer, no cube, no timer, no format-wide win rates, only sets our catalog can fill packs from, and packs are the classic fifteen-card booster rather than a set's real Play Booster slots.
Best free bot draft for learning a brand new set
Draftsim is the tool most people mean by draft simulator: free, browser-based, no account, and up within days of a new set so you can take 42 picks against bots before the prerelease. It runs sealed as well as draft, shows pick suggestions as you go, and lets you open simulated packs endlessly. The bots are the known limit, as they read a card's raw strength better than a table's signals, so a Draftsim pod rarely punishes you for forcing a color the way eight humans will. For the specific job of walking into a new format already knowing what the commons do, nothing else is this fast or this free.
Best for drafting with real people in a browser
Draftmancer runs a real draft between real people with nothing to install and no accounts: one person opens a session, shares the link, and seven friends join. It handles retail sets, cubes, custom cards and the variants nobody else bothers with, including Glimpse, Winston, Rochester and grid draft, and it fills empty seats with bots when only five of you show up. If your pod is scattered across three time zones and wants to draft the new set together on a Tuesday, this is the one. It is a drafting engine rather than a teacher, so the games afterward happen somewhere else, usually a webcam and paper proxies or a client.
Best for cube owners, both building the list and drafting it
Cube Cobra is where cubes live: you build and version the list, look at its curve and color spread, browse thousands of other people's cubes for ideas, and then draft yours in the built-in simulator or hand it to Draftmancer for a multiplayer pod. For a cube owner the analysis is worth as much as the drafting, since it answers whether the list is actually the shape you think it is. What it does not do is remember how the games went, which is the question a cube owner needs most when deciding what to cut.
Best for real drafts with real stakes
MTG Arena is not a simulator, it is the real thing, and that is the point: Quick Draft pits you against bots and then queues the deck into games against people, Premier and Traditional Draft put you in a human pod from pick one, and both cost gold or gems. Because there is an entry fee and a prize wall, Arena punishes a loose pick in a way no free simulator can, and the deck you build gets tested across a full run instead of ending at the 40. The catch is the cost of repetition: practicing one format ten times is ten entry fees, which is exactly the gap free bot drafting fills.
Best for the data behind the picks
17Lands is the aggregate record of millions of Arena Limited games, so it can tell you a card's win rate when drafted, when played, and how the format's archetypes are actually performing this week. It offers practice drafts against models trained on that data, and the community overlay reads Arena's logs to show the numbers live in-pack. Treat it as the reference rather than the classroom: it is the best answer to what is this card worth in this format, and no answer at all to how your own paper pod drafts.
Four of these are better than our pick at one specific thing, and it is worth saying which. If your pod exists but the people are in four cities, Draftmancer is the answer and nothing here competes: TurnZero HQ drafts against bots only. If you own a cube, Cube Cobra is built around the list itself and TurnZero HQ cannot open one. If you want to know a card's win rate in this format rather than what our ratings say it is worth, that is 17Lands. And if you want the picks to cost something, Arena charges you, which is a real teaching tool a free simulator cannot reproduce.
What our pick answers is the question underneath most of them, which is whether any of this practice is working. A bot draft ends at the deck, so it can only ever tell you what a model would have taken. A TurnZero HQ draft ends at a deck you keep: save the forty, play it, and because Draft is tracked alongside Commander and Standard, the result is still there next month beside the last five. After a season you know which archetypes you convert rather than which ones read well, and that is the number that changes how somebody drafts. Build the list in the Deck Lab → if you want to tune it further, and run the paper night with a Gathering → when the pod is real people around a table. The drafting itself, pack by pack, is written up on the Practice Draft page →.
A bot pod is a patient teacher with one blind spot. It will happily show you a format's commons forty times over, which is genuinely the fastest way to learn a set, and it will never once punish you for ignoring what the table is telling you. Bots do not cut a color because they noticed you are in it, and they do not abandon an archetype because three packs came through empty. Signal reading is the one skill no bot pod can test, whoever wrote the bots, which is why the honest recommendation for a real pod is Draftmancer or eight chairs at a store.
The other gap is evidence, and it is the one our pick was built to close. A draft deck lives for one night and then goes back in the box, so unless somebody wrote it down there is nothing to look back at: no record of the pool, the build, or whether the three-color pile was the mistake it felt like. Practice against bots to learn the set, then keep the ones that count, whether they were dealt by the app or opened at the store. Both end up in the same record.
Our pick is TurnZero HQ: three packs against seven bots at your choice of three bot strengths, a grade on what you took against what else was in the pack, Glimpse and Winston as well as ordinary booster draft, six-pack sealed, and a finished pool that saves as a deck the app then tracks through real games. It is free on iOS, Android and the web. Each of the others wins on one job: Draftsim for instant free bot packs on a new set, Draftmancer for drafting with real people in a browser, Cube Cobra for cubes, MTG Arena for real drafts with stakes, and 17Lands for format-wide card data.
TurnZero HQ and Draftsim are both free, and they answer different questions. Draftsim needs no account and covers a long back catalog of sets, so it is the fastest way to take 40 practice picks right now. TurnZero HQ asks you to sign in and covers the sets its card catalog can fill packs from, and in exchange the draft is graded, the formats include Glimpse, Winston and sealed, and the pool becomes a deck it keeps tracking. Draftmancer is free too and is the one to use when the other seven seats are real people.
They are very good at teaching a new set's commons and uncommons and at building the reflex of reading a pack quickly. Two things they historically miss: reading signals from human neighbors, which bots cannot reproduce and real pods can, and knowing which archetypes you personally convert into wins, which needs a record that outlives the night. TurnZero HQ closes the second one by saving the draft as a deck and tracking what it does; for the first, draft against people through Draftmancer or at a store.
Yes, in TurnZero HQ, once the card catalog holds enough of the set to fill packs. A fully spoiled set that has not been released yet sorts to the top of the list, which makes the week before a prerelease the most useful time the feature has: everybody wants to know the format and nobody has opened a pack. Draftsim is usually up within days of full spoilers too.
Yes. Sealed opens six packs and hands you the pool with its color counts and a suggested build, and it carries no grade on purpose, because a grade measures picks against the rest of the pack and sealed has no picks. The draft variants are Glimpse (take one, burn two, across nine packs, so nothing ever wheels) and Winston (two players, three piles, take or pass), and Winston carries no grade for the same reason. Cube and multiplayer drafting are the two things it does not do.
In TurnZero HQ, yes, and it is the difference that makes it our pick. A finished draft or sealed pool saves as a deck in one tap, either the suggested forty or all forty-five cards, and from there it behaves like any other deck in the app: versions, games, and a record of how it actually did. Every other simulator on this page ends at the pool.
Practice the new set against bots, save the pool as a deck, and find out which archetypes you actually win with.
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