After getting some DC Justice League product early, I decided I wanted to do something fun for my local playgroup. Something that could preview the new set and be different. Something I will be doing with every set I can get my hands on early.

Enter the Rookie Draft!

A Rookie Draft is simple: Take commons and uncommons from a set, a total of 192 cards (with their dice), and draft it! Why 192 cards? You want to have enough to where you can have 8 players play. That’s my minimum. If you can get more people, just add 24 more cards/dice for each player.

For each one card, there needs to be one dice. If you have, say, 10 Captain Cold cards, you need 10 Captain Cold dice. 7 Deathstroke cards, 7 Deathstroke dice. You get the idea.

Balancing what you pooled together can be difficult. In my case, I was using all the extra dice and cards I owned from a set that hadn’t officially come out yet to make the Rookie Draft. There were a lot of Booster Golds, Katana, and Green Lanterns while there were little amount of Superman, Deathstroke, Swamp Thing, among others (especially starter dice). Which was actually okay, for the most part, because in my Rainbow Drafts that I played in prior, the spread was about what it was in the real drafts. I would still want to tweak it to where it would be a little more even, just so there wouldn’t be a pack with 4 Katana in one pack (this happened and it was horrible and hilarious).

After getting everything together: SHUFFLE SHUFFLE SHUFFLE. I mean it. Shuffle for 30 minutes straight then, shuffle some more. Afterwords, let someone else shuffle it. Then when you’re finally ready to do a Rookie Draft, draw 12 random cards (without looking), put them in a penny sleeve (or an old booster pack), then rinse and repeat until you have enough for two packs for each player. Then draft like normal!

We kept all dice in a box and then after drafting, we picked what we needed. We put together our teams, and played! Just like in a normal Rainbow Draft, you got to use whichever Basic Actions you wanted.

Even with the balance issues we faced (remember 4 Katanas in one pack?), we had a blast playing! Drafting with only the uncommons and the commons in the set definitely made use think differently about how we view some of these cards. It can definitely give new perceptions to the player who mainly uses Rare and Super Rare cards. But in the end it was just a load of fun, especially for the players who had never seen any of the new cards before. Plus they had the option of keeping what they draft because they were just extras!

I’ll definitely be doing the same thing if Age of Ultron is available for purchase at Worlds, or if I do a bunch of Rainbow Drafts!