Draft & Limited
Eight people, one booster box and about three hours. A modern box holds 30 packs, which is exactly eight drafters plus six packs of prize support. This is what to buy, how to seat it, how long each part takes, and which prize structures do not make anybody miserable.
A draft night is the cheapest structured Magic event to host, because the product is the entry fee and everybody takes their cards home. One box, a table and some basic lands is genuinely the whole list.
The pack maths changed recently and it matters here. Play Booster boxes held 36 packs until Aetherdrift in 2025 and now hold 30. That is still comfortably enough for eight drafters, but it is no longer enough for twelve, and any guide written before 2025 assumes otherwise.
Doors at 6:30. People arrive, get a drink, and you hand out three packs each and a deck box.
7:00, everyone opens pack one together. The draft takes about forty minutes across all three packs.
7:40, deckbuilding. Fifteen minutes, and announce it as fifteen minutes so nobody is surprised.
8:00, round one. Random pairings, best of three, about forty-five minutes.
8:45, round two, paired by record.
9:30, round three, paired by record. The last round decides the night.
10:15, hand out prize packs and open them at the table. This is the best part and it is worth not rushing.
Three rounds is the right number for eight players. It is what a store would run, it produces a clear top record most of the time, and it fits an evening. Four rounds is a long night for a weekday and rarely tells you anything three did not.
Six things separate a draft night that runs itself from one where the host spends the evening firefighting.
Seat people in the order they arrive rather than by skill. A draft table is a circle and any attempt to arrange it becomes a conversation you do not want to have.
Open all eight first packs at the same time and start together. One person opening early sees a pack nobody else has seen yet.
Use a timer if you have a slow drafter, and say so at the start rather than mid-pack. Forty seconds for the first pick, dropping as the pack thins, matches how stores do it.
Give a full fifteen minutes for deckbuilding. It is where the games are won and rushing it produces bad decks and a worse evening.
Pair round one randomly, then pair by record. Three rounds is right for eight players and takes about two and a half hours including the draft.
Keep every pool in its own box between rounds. Sideboarding in Limited is unrestricted, so a mixed-up pool ruins the rest of the night.
If your group is new to drafting, add one thing: before the first pack is opened, say out loud that picks stay face down, that everybody picks at roughly the same pace, and that all the cards they take are theirs to keep. Those three sentences prevent most first-night confusion.
The prize model is the single biggest decision about whether a recurring draft night survives, because it decides how the weakest player in the group feels at the end of the evening. Four models, in rough order of how well they suit a mixed group.
The default and the fairest for a mixed-skill group. With 6 spare packs from the box, hand one to every player for each match they win and keep the remainder as a small bonus for the top record. Everyone can win something, so the third round still matters at every table.
Split the spare packs evenly and open them together at the end. Removes competition from the prize entirely, which is the right call for a group where one or two players are much stronger and the others are there to hang out.
The most competitive version: everyone chips in, the leftover packs all go to the best record. Works in a group of similar strength and is actively unpleasant in a group that is not, because the same person wins every month.
Buy exactly 24 packs instead of a box, split the cost eight ways, and let keeping your cards be the prize. Cheapest per head and the least admin. More draft nights should do this.
Eight is the number draft is designed around and the hardest part of the evening to arrange. Below it, change the format rather than just running the same one short.
Four used to be the awkward number, handled by dealing extra packs and accepting a strange pool. Since June 2025 there is an official answer: Pick-Two Draft, built for exactly four players, where everyone takes two cards per pick instead of one. Four players taking two empty a pack at the same rate eight players taking one do, so three packs each still gives everybody about 42 cards. It works with any boosters, runs two rounds instead of three, and fits in about 90 minutes. For a weeknight pod of four, it is a better night than a stretched eight-player draft.
At two players, a cube is a better product than a booster box. Cube costs nothing per night once it exists and has real two-player formats, which sealed product simply does not.
A single draft night is a good evening. A monthly one is a different thing entirely, because records start to mean something: who actually wins, whether the person who always forces the same archetype is right to, and whether the new set is a better Limited format than the last one. None of that is visible from inside one evening, and all of it is obvious across six.
The obstacle is that draft decks do not survive the night, so there is nothing to look back at unless somebody wrote it down. TurnZero HQ tracks Draft alongside Commander and Standard, so the rounds get logged as they happen and the group ends up with a season's record rather than a vague sense of who keeps winning. It also handles the part that is genuinely tedious to do on paper, which is standings across three rounds while everybody is playing.
Three per player, so 24 packs for a full eight-person draft. A modern Play Booster box holds 30 packs, which covers eight drafters and leaves 6 over for prizes. Boxes held 36 packs until Aetherdrift in 2025, so older advice about a box covering twelve drafters is out of date.
Roughly the price of three booster packs each, since that is literally what you are buying. Splitting one box eight ways costs a little more per head than buying 24 packs, and buys you the prize support. Everyone keeps every card they draft either way, so the money is not spent so much as converted into cards.
Around three hours for eight players: forty minutes to draft, fifteen to build, then three rounds of about forty-five minutes each. Two and a half hours is realistic for a friendly group that does not play to time. Budget more for a first draft, because deckbuilding takes longer when nobody knows the set.
Yes. Six works well with three packs each. Four should run Pick-Two Draft, the official four-player format Wizards introduced in June 2025, where everyone takes two cards per pick rather than one and still ends with about 42 cards from three packs. Two players want a cube format like Grid or Winston draft instead, since passing packs between two people is barely a draft at all.
The newest one is the default and the easiest to buy. If your group has drafted a lot, a set with a reputation as a strong Limited environment beats a new one, and everybody knowing the set going in makes for better games. Once a group is drafting monthly, a cube costs nothing per night and never runs out.
Yes, and they are the thing most first-time hosts forget. Nobody drafts basics, so you need a pile of them sorted by color that everyone can take from freely. A few hundred is plenty and any long-time player has them spare.
Track a draft night as it happens and keep the season's record when the decks are long gone.
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