What is Draft Play?
A popular format for weekly in-store events, draft play involves you selecting (“drafting”) individual cards out of a limited pool of booster packs and then building your deck as you go. The nice thing about draft play is that everyone starts off on equal footing and must build their decks using whatever they can get!

To draft in Star Wars: Unlimited, each player sits around a large table and opens three booster packs apiece. First, everyone takes out the leader cards from those packs while keeping the remaining cards in their separate stacks (without looking at them).

Once everyone’s ready, each player simultaneously chooses one of their three leaders to keep and passes the other two to the right. Then, each player chooses one of the two leaders that were just passed to them and passes the other to the right. After this point, everyone should have three leader cards: one that they started with, and two that were passed to them.

Next, each player chooses one of the booster packs that they opened. The common base/token card from that pack is placed in a pile at the center of the table, and then each player simultaneously chooses one card to keep from the pack before passing the other cards to the player on their left. They then draft their next card from the cards that were just passed to them. This continues until all cards from the first booster pack have been drafted.

You can probably see where this is going. After the first booster pack is done, everyone repeats the process with their second pack, except this time everybody passes their cards to the right. Once the second pack has been completely drafted, the process repeats one more time, this time passing everything to the left again.

At the end of this process, each player should have drafted 45 cards (three leaders plus 42 other cards). These are the cards that they can now use to build their deck. The deckbuilding rules for draft (and sealed) play are slightly different from the normal rules:

For starters, a draw deck must have a minimum of 30 cards instead of the usual 50. In addition, there’s no limit to how many copies of the same card a player can include in their deck. If someone drafts five copies of Cell Block Guard and wants to include all five in their deck, they can do so!

A player can use any of the three leaders that they drafted. Their base can be any common base from the set (regardless of the bases in the packs they opened), or it can be a rare base that they picked during the draft itself. Finally, a player is free to change up their deck between rounds, so long as they stick to the cards they drafted.

That’s all there is to it! These events feel fresh and exciting each time you play, since the pool of available cards will be completely random. We highly recommend giving draft play a try at your local game store!