In Epic the Card Game Wise Wizard Games (WWG) came up with a draft format for two players called Dark Draft.

The following are the rules for a Dark Draft by WWG.

• “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.”

WWG finish by describing this draft format as “…a fun, fast, and skill-testing draft format for two players.”

I like this format because it gives that bit of mystery during the draft of you know what you handed over to your opponent. However you don’t know what they kept and what was discarded. So you have partial information.

My current thinking is take the 48 card cube I’ve created and use that as the stack to shuffle and deal the cards from. I’m also still using just two dice per card as per official draft packs.

I still want to have that team building element.

The way I see this working is starting with the basic action cards being drafted.

I can’t see this phase of the draft being anything other than a single draft round. It’s also the phase I think might need tweaking the most.

So each player gets dealt 5 basic action cards. Select one and pass the rest to the other player. Both players then select two basic action cards and discard the remaining two to a discard pile facedown.

Now onto the meat of the dark draft.

This takes place over 4 rounds and at the end of it each player has 12 cards to build a team of 8 from.

Each round both players get dealt 5 cards. They choose one to keep and pass the rest to the other player.

Each player now has a hand of 4 cards. They choose two to keep and discard the remaining 2 cards face down to a discard pile.

This is repeated another three times. Giving each player 12 cards.

Once the players have built their teams, and chosen the two basic action cards to use, they reveal their teams and then recruit the dice required as per rainbow draft rules.

In summary this Dice Masters Dark Draft requires a minimum of 40 cards to draft from for the teams. Is drafted over 4 rounds. Giving each player 12 cards to build 8 a card team from. It also requires a minimum of 10 basic action cards to draft from. These are drafted over a single round and give each player 3 basic actions to choose a final two from.

I do like the idea of using the pauper cube I built (or any cube) for this. It gives enough cards to use, plus a little variety as the whole cube is not being used.

Obviously this hasn’t been tested yet. But it will be at the first opportunity I get with (most likely) Dave.

If you do get a chance to try this out please let me know how you got on and what you thought. Or even if you haven’t what you think of this idea anyway.