The best part about Type 4 is that you can have fun playing with people of all skill levels. Friends, enemies, lovers. As long as they know how to play (read: understand the stack), all you have to do is hand them a pile of broken cards and watch the fireworks fly.

Half of the compliments I receive from my friends relate to the sense of wonder felt when they top-decked some crazy, jank old card they’d never seen before (or had long since forgotten) only to realize that in the world of infinite mana, it’s pant-on-head bonkers. That’s a fun feeling, and one of the beautiful things about Type 4.

Drafting can ruin some of the surprise. You see all of your cards ahead of time. Not counting a few cards, you see EVERYTHING. But I digress. That’s not the real issue at hand.

Query: How long do you think it takes people who are brand new to the format to assess a pack like this?

There are so many words! Is Intet’s ability good? What about Infernal Spawn? And just what the heck does Hellcarver Demon even do?!? And don’t forget, there’s no “locking into a color”. You have to read them all, every time.

Whenever I drafted Type 4, it usually took about two hours to get through 3 packs of 15 cards. And unless you go ham and pick every counterspell or fat guy, your experience isn’t going to feel any different than if you played sealed or stack.

Which is really the problem. In normal Magic, drafting is fun because you get to make tough calls about committing to a color and assessing cards that have different value depending on timing. In Type 4, this simply isn’t true. Drafting usually involves grabbing at the seemingly truly broken stuff, only to be disappointed when your 10th pick is “just a 9/9 shroud”.

Granted, everything I just said is wrong and drafting is essential IF you want to run combos in your cube, and I’ll discuss those in a later post. I don’t run any in mine, and it’s largely because I don’t believe the setup cost of a 2+ hour draft is worth it. Two hours is several games!

Compound that with how hard it is assess card value in Type 4 (and don’t forget the politics involved with it being FFA), and drafting Type 4 just isn’t a fun experience. I mean, how good can you feel when you open a pack with Reiterate and Memnarch and can only chose one?!?