It is clear from reading about Flesh and Blood that the developers spent a lot of time thinking about the sealed and draft formats of the game. For those new to TCGs, the sealed format is where you open six booster packs and build the best deck you can from the cards you have. In contrast, draft has you in a pod (typically of eight players) where you open a pack, choose a card, and then pass the remaining cards to an adjacent player (on the first pack, the player to your left). You receive a similar pack from the player on your right. This continues until all of the cards in the pack have been chosen. The process is then repeated with two further packs, the direction of passing changing each time. Your deck in each format has to have a minimum of 30 cards (excluding heroes, equipment and weapons). The Cracked Bauble token (after which this blog is named) is designed specifically for these formats and provides a card that can be pitched for 2 (with no attack or defence value) where a player is unable to make a legal hand of 30 cards from those in the packs.
Both formats are very different from the Blitz and CC formats and quite different from each other. With sealed, you know the full range of cards you have available to choose from, and so you can select your hero with the knowledge you can (hopefully) put together a really strong deck. Draft is very different in that you never know what cards you are going to get passed. Deciding early to go for a particular hero does mean you can start to select the best cards for that character from early in the game. The downside of this, however, is that if you decide too early and other players are also selecting cards for your hero, you can quickly run out of strong cards to choose from. As I was very new to draft, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos and reading the forums to try and get some useful hints and tips. The main points I took from this research (and which I applied on the day) were:
- choose strong generic cards for the first few rounds that can be used with any hero
- keep a close eye on what cards are being passed to you – this will give you a good idea of what other players are choosing, e.g. if on turn four or five, you are still seeing strong Prism cards (we were playing Monarch draft), you know that not many players are choosing the Illusionist
- don’t forget about equipment – this can make a big difference, especially if you can pull the equipment best suited to your hero
While it would have been easy to go into the draft thinking I would focus on Prism, as this is the hero I knew the best, I did in the early turns stick to my plan of selecting strong generic cards (but always with half an eye on Prism cards). However, it became clear quite early that not many people were choosing her – I was still getting passed really strong Heralds and Prism auras, for example.
I therefore made the decision to go with what I knew best. I think overall, this was the right decision as ultimately only one other player went for Prism, so we had the pick of some great cards. I was also lucky enough to pull great equipment – Dream Weavers and Halo of Illumination – which really helped my deck.
In terms of results, I was very pleased with my two wins and one draw. For my first draft event, six weeks or some into playing the game, I thought this was a very respectable result and was a testament to the value of preparing properly for new formats.
Cracked Bauble 