So we ran a Justice Cube draft today that went swimmingly… for those interested in emulating, here was the thought process that went into it beforehand.
Because of the limitations on dice count in the campaign box and in the corresponding Doom Patrol & Mystics team packs, the recently introduced double rainbow draft format didn’t seem like an option for us because it requires even more dice than a traditional rainbow draft.
So we opted to use the standard rainbow draft formula, which requires that each player start with two stacks of 12 cards (24 total cards in total) – which means that each player requires a team pack worth of cards (we’ll get to die count below). The campaign box for Justice comes with 63 character/non BAC action cards, which is enough cards for 2.625 players (I know there’s no such thing as a .625 of a player… bear with me.) The basic idea is this… once you know the number of players attending the draft, multiply that number by 24. That will equal the total number of cards you’ll need to make the draft fly. Purchase slightly more than that number of cards, remove the BASIC ACTIONS, SHUFFLE THE REST and randomly subtract the excess number of cards to bring the total # of cards down to a number divisible by 24. I made a chart with different configurations of purchases (# of players, # of boxes, # of team packs) see below to give the TO options on the day without any math headaches.
As for dice counts… in the campaign box there is 1 less die for every character than the total # of cards for that character. The same goes for team packs. So to pull off a Justice Draft (LA Style) someone will have to be willing to bring an extra die per character, per box or team pack. Once the tournament is over that player recollects those dice. Effectively, this means that someone is going to draft a card and borrow a die for the tournament only… but that didn’t become an issue for us as we were able to horse trade dice after the event. These supplemental dice are added to the rainbow after the other dice for that character are all removed. Someone would shout out “I need a Black Adam from the reserve…”
In our case, we had eight players, so we purchased 2 campaign boxes (126 cards) and 3 Team Packs (72 cards) which gave us a total of 198 cards. At our store that worked out to $16 a head. Fortunately, I had anticipated that we would have approximately that # of people so I had packed 2 supplemental dice per character which would be enough to fill out 2 campaign boxes and 2 of each of the team packs. We only needed 192 cards (8 X 24 = 192) so we removed the basic actions, shuffled all the cards (mixing box cards & team pack cards) and then randomly removed 6 cards. We then reshuffled some more. We then shuffled the basic actions and dealt those out (making sure no one got two of the same BAC). We built a rainbow with all of the dice, reminding everyone that there would be 6 left over unclaimed dice at the end of the drafting process because of the removed cards. We dealt out all 192 cards, each player getting 2 stacks of 12 cards in front of them. Then we passed and drafted as usual. When it came time to match dice to cards, if a player couldn’t find a die they needed, they would ask to borrow from the dice surplus (making a note to return it at the end of the draft).
This format worked well for us. The draft didn’t take too long. People were happy to play the new set with the surprising interactions found only in a draft and the randomness that gave every player a shot. It definitely involves more of a set up and more thought going in… but for us it was worth it.
‘Nuff Said.
