Formats – Draft

Draft is seen as the most skill-intensive format, by many experienced strategy card gamers. Epic offers several different draft formats, including our innovative two-player Dark Draft.

Dark Draft (2 players)

  • Shuffle a stack of at least 120 cards. Deal 5 to each player.
  • Each player takes 1 card out of their hand of five cards and drafts it, then passes the other 4 to the other (at the same time).
  • Each player takes 2 cards out of their new hand of four cards and drafts them, then discards the remaining two cards into a shared face-down discard pile.

Both players now have drafted three cards. Repeat nine times to get to a 30-card deck, shuffle and play.

This is a fun, fast, and skill-testing draft format for two players. Many of our competitive events use this format in the playoff rounds. This format is used in our World Championship.


 

Pack Draft (3+ players)

  • Deal out three 10-card “packs” to each player. Each player keeps them separated.
  • To start, each player looks through their first pack, chooses one card and puts it face down into a “draft pile,” and passes the other nine cards to the player on their left. Then, each player takes the pack that was passed to them and drafts another card, and repeats this process until the first pack has been drafted by everyone.
  • For the second pack, draft to the right. For the third pack, draft to the left.

Once everyone has a 30-card deck, shuffle and play!

This format requires 120 cards (just one Epic deck) per four players in the draft. It is a great way to have the draft format from trading card games without the expense of opening all of those boosters!


 

Open Draft (2 players)

  • Begin with a shuffled Epic card stack of at least 60 cards.
  • Decide which player goes first (who we’ll call “Player A”) and reveal four cards from the top of the stack.
  • Player A takes a card. Player B takes two cards, then player A takes the last card.
  • Repeat this process, alternating which player gets the first pick, until all of the cards are drafted.
  • Each player then takes their cards and builds a 30-card deck. Shuffle and play!

This format is a great way to bring a deckbuilding game experience to Epic. Your draft choices can be difficult, because you know every card both players are taking. Do you draft the cards you need, or do deny your opponent the ones they covet?


 

Epic Cube Draft (8 players)

Take three Epic card sets, and remove two copies of each card with a red gem in the lower-right corner. This leaves one copy of each red-gem card and three copies of each white-gem card. Shuffle this collection. (This can take a while, but it’s worth it!)

Randomly deal out three 12-card packs to each player. Players then draft according to the Pack Draft format (see above) until each has a pool of 36 cards. They build a 30-card deck, shuffle and play!

Players play a series of one-on-one matches with these decks, best two-out-of-three games wins the match. After everyone has played one match, pair off players with the same record (so, people who won play against others who won). After the second round of matches, pair off players with the same record again but make sure people do not play against someone they have already faced.

As of now the “official Epic Cube” is based on three copies of each Epic set. You can create a custom Epic Cube however you’d like, including promotional cards or with different amounts of cards. You could make a Cube with two of each red-gem card, or with only sage and evil cards, or however you’d like.

This format is used in our World Championship.