Draft & Limited
Booster draft is the standard Limited event: eight players, three Play Boosters each, one card taken per pack and the rest passed on. You build a 40-card deck from about 42 picks, play three rounds, and keep every card you took. This page covers the event itself, what is in the packs and what a seat costs.
Booster draft is the format almost every Friday night Magic event runs. Eight players sit around a table, each opens the same booster pack, and everyone takes one card and passes the rest along. Three packs later everyone has about 42 cards, builds a minimum 40-card deck out of them with as many free basic lands as they want, and plays three rounds against three of the other seven.
It is the most played competitive format in Magic and the one Wizards designs every set around. When a set preview talks about "draft archetypes", it means the ten two-color pairs this format is built to support.
This page vs. the draft guide
This one is about the event: the packs, the money, the prizes and the etiquette. How to actually pick cards, read signals and build the deck is a separate page, because they are separate questions and cramming both into one article serves neither.
How to draft: picks, signals and deckbuilding →Wizards replaced Draft Boosters and Set Boosters with a single Play Booster in 2024, so a modern draft pack is not the pack most older guides describe. There are 14 cards to draft, plus a token or art card that is set aside and never enters the draft.
Contents as of August 2026. Wizards has changed booster configurations before and will again.
You draft 15 cards per pack and end up with a 45-card pool.
That was the Draft Booster, retired in 2024. A Play Booster gives 14 picks, so three packs is roughly 42 cards. The advice built on the old number is still fine, but the arithmetic in it is not.
Two slots surprise people. The foil is fully draftable and is not a bonus card sitting outside the draft, so a foil bomb is simply a bomb. And the land slot is often a common dual land rather than a basic, which in a set built around three-color decks can be one of the better picks in a weak pack.
Entry is close to the retail price of three packs plus a small fee for running the event. The number that actually matters is what comes back, and that varies more between stores than the entry does.
Prize structures fall into two shapes. Some stores pay packs per match win, which rewards showing up and keeps the last round meaningful for everyone. Others pay a larger prize to the top records only, which is better if you win a lot and worse if you are learning. Neither is wrong, but they suit different players, and it is a fair question to ask before you register.
Every card you pick is yours at the end of the night. Not just the deck, the whole pool: the rares you never cast, the off-color bomb you passed on playing, the foils. This is the part that makes draft a genuinely reasonable way to acquire cards, because you are paying pack price for packs and getting an evening of Magic thrown in.
It is also where rare drafting comes from. Taking a valuable card you cannot play is legal, ordinary, and a straightforward trade of win rate for cardboard. Worth knowing which one you came for, since drafting a pile of unplayable rares and then being disappointed by a 0-3 record is a decision, not bad luck.
A draft has rules of conduct that are rarely stated out loud because everyone at the table already knows them. Five of them, so your first event is not the one where you find out.
Keep your picks face down and do not fan them out. Showing your deck to the table is a real advantage handed to your neighbors.
Pick at roughly the pace of the table. A draft stalls if one player agonizes over every common, and most stores use a timer for exactly this reason.
Do not look through a pack after you have passed it, and do not count the cards in a pack coming to you before you pick.
Tell the judge or organizer immediately if a pack arrives with the wrong number of cards. It is fixable at the time and not fixable later.
Sideboarding in Limited is unrestricted. Every card you drafted and did not play is legal to swap in between games, including basic lands.
If you have never been to a store event at all, the practical advice is to arrive twenty minutes early, say it is your first draft, and let them seat you. Every store runs one and every store is used to it.
A draft deck exists for one evening and then goes back in a box. What is worth keeping is the result: the colors you were in, the archetype you built, and how the three rounds went. One night says nothing. Ten nights say quite a lot about whether you keep forcing a strategy that does not work at your store.
TurnZero HQ covers Draft alongside Commander and Standard, so the rounds get logged the same way any other night does and the run is still there next month when the deck is not.
A booster draft is a Limited event where eight players each open three booster packs, take one card at a time and pass the rest around the table until the packs are empty. Each player builds a 40-card deck from the roughly 42 cards they picked, adds free basic lands, and plays three rounds. You keep every card you drafted.
A Play Booster contains 14 Magic cards, all of which are drafted, plus a token or art card that is not. As of August 2026 the 14 break down as six commons, one common that is sometimes a card from The List, three uncommons, one rare or mythic, one wildcard of any rarity, one traditional foil of any rarity, and one land.
Roughly the price of three booster packs plus a few dollars of event fee, so most stores land somewhere between fifteen and thirty dollars depending on the set and the region. Prize packs offset part of that for anyone with a winning record. Ask what the entry includes before you sit down, because some stores fold prize support into a higher entry and some do not.
Yes. Every card you pick is yours after the event, including the rares and foils, whether you win a match or not. That is a real difference from most other competitive formats, and it makes drafting one of the cheaper ways to build a collection while actually playing.
Taking a card for its resale value rather than because it improves your deck. It is legal and it is common, and it costs you win rate in exchange for cards you keep either way. If you are drafting to play, take the card that wins the match; if you are drafting to collect, take the rare and accept the record.
14 draftable cards, plus a token or art card. Play Boosters replaced Draft Boosters and Set Boosters in 2024, and the old 15-card Draft Booster is where the widely repeated figures of 15 picks and a 45-card pool come from. With Play Boosters it is 14 picks a pack and about 42 cards.
Log a draft night in the same app that runs your Commander pod.
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