Rotisserie Draft
Rotisserie Draft is a unique way to play Cube that facilitates asynchronous drafting with players that don’t need to be in the same place and facilitates robust table talk. It’s like drafting from one enormous pack — the entire cube at once.
One at a time, each player makes a pick from the entire cube. Rather than drafting in a circle, picks snake back and forth, with the 8th and 1st player taking two picks in a row. This mitigates the advantage of picking first, and adds some interesting texture to the draft.
Most often, 8 players draft and the draft ends after each player has picked 45 cards.
The actual draft can be facilitated in two ways:
If you’re up for it, get everyone together for the draft, lay the whole cube out on a big table, and draft in person. This can take two or three hours, depending on how quickly players draft, so make an event of it.
Rotisserie’s greatest advantage is that it is easy to draft asynchronously and drafts are most often organized remotely. You’ll never have so much fun with a spreadsheet.
All players have access to a shared spreadsheet and the list of cards in the Cube. As players make their choices they fill in the card name in the next slot on the sheet and notify the next player to make their choice. Our template takes care of the setup and makes it easier to keep track of who’se up for the next pick and which cards have been chosen.
An asynchronous draft can take a matter of weeks (depending on the group), but is a great way to play when not everyone can be in the same space. Set up a group chat so each player can ping the next in line to pick. See our article about asynchronous drafting for details on using the spreadsheet template.
In the spirit of keeping things asynchronous, and getting the most gameplay value out of decks that took hours to draft, games are most often played in a round-robin. Each player plays each other in a best of thee match. Whether you’re playing virtually, over Spelltable, or meeting up at your LGS, games can be played all at once or as schedules allow.
Rotisserie’s structure is extremely flexible. 8 players is typical, but it works just as well with other group sizes. For very small groups, players can also each draft multiple decks at once to emulate more players.
There are many fewer ‘dead’ picks compared to a booster draft, since the public nature means you’re less likely to switch lanes and you don’t have irrelevant picks late in packs. This makes it reasonable to stop drafting well before the 45th pick without affecting deck quality. Agree on the number of picks before starting the draft.
Late picks can become streamlined as players ‘find their lane’. Some groups prefer to switch to players taking two cards at a time after some number of picks. Double picks speed up the draft and later in the draft has relatively little effect on the draft. Note that players on the ends will effectively take 4 cards at a time.
Lucky Paper Radio podcast episodes about Rotisserie Draft:
- Episode 139 with Justin Parnell on a roto draft with Magic pros.
- Episode 35: Spreadsheet the Gathering on a draft of Anthony’s Regular Cube
- Episode 9: Rotisserie Rundown on a draft of Andy’s Bun Magic Cube