Stone Soup

Like participants in the proverbial stone soup, players each bring their own contribution to the pot: a secretly chosen stack of cards. The result is an unpredictable but exciting draft experience with fun elements of surprise and collaboration.

How to Play

Have each player bring 45 cards of their choice to the draft. Shuffle all the cards together and deal them out into 15 card packs for a standard booster draft!

Also have each player bring 5 of each basic land to build a basic land station.

In concept stone soup is very simple, but there are some logistics to contend with and there’s a big question of what cards you should include in a pool.

Un-Sleeved

The easiest way to run a stone soup is to simply play without sleeves. You could have players bring their own sleeves just for their deck, or just play old school on the pavement as Garfield intended.

This works fine if you intend for players to keep the cards they draft, otherwise re-sorting out the cards would be an onerous task.

Mismatched Sleeves

Some players might be skeptical, but another option we’d recommend is to have every player bring their contribution sleeved in a different color. Shuffle the mismatched sleeved cards together and shuffle each type of basic as well so players get a mix.

In theory players could gain slight advantage, but for a casual game night it’s much less of an issue than you might guess. It makes it easy to redistribute everyone’s original cards at the end of the night so players are free to build a pool of cards they wouldn’t want to part with or get damaged. The pile of mismatched sleeves is also a fun spectacle in itself.

Choosing a Card Pool

But what sort of cards should players actually bring? It’s recommended to keep your pool secret so players don’t know what to expect opening their first pack. It’s a fun surprise.

Some amount of trust is necessary. Generally it makes sense to bring a good mix of colors, mana costs, card types and effects, a few fixing lands — in other words, imagine you’re just bringing one random slice of a cube, Exquisite Corpse style. Contributions could be of wildly different power level, but this still can lead to an interesting draft. This is also mitigated if you’re playing with people who’s Magic tastes you understand.

Foremost, bring cards you enjoy and want to play with. It’s a great way to make use of that special stack of cards that’s sitting on your desk you just haven’t found a way to play with otherwise.

Number of Players

Stone soup works great with 8 players for a standard draft and three rounds of matches. But, a beautiful thing about it is since everyone brings enough cards for a draft pool, playing with any number scales easily. You could also use the stone soup pool with any other draft format that works best for the number of players, or even do a single pod with many players, leaning into the spectacle.