Community Draft

Con of the Rings 2019 introduced a new draft format that will also continue at the 2021 con.

But we always need your help! One does not simply create a card draft from our wonderful, but also vast, card pool alone. We will need the might and knowledge of all those willing to aid us in our time of need.

We need members of the community to create draft packs. If you have ever played a Magic: The Gathering draft, think of a draft pack like one of the boosters that you open at the beginning of that draft. To run our draft, we will open some number of these “packs” and shuffle them all together (digitally, of course!).

The most important attribute of a draft pack is that it is synergistic. The cards in a pack should combo with one another, help each other out, or share thematic cohesion. Imagine taking an excellent deck that works well and splitting it up into four or five slices, each one capturing a sub-theme or mechanic of that deck.

Draft packs should follow some common-sense guidelines.

  • The cards in the pack should usually match the spheres of the heroes in the pack, otherwise the pack is relying on other packs to pick up a resource match.
  • A pack should include three copies of each card, which gives players a chance during the draft to build a deck with some consistency. If a card is “Limit one per deck”, a pack should include two copies of that card instead of three.
  • Think of the heroes in a pack as substitutes for each other as opposed to teammates.

The only hard and fast rules are that a draft pack must include one, two, or three heroes and the number of non-hero cards is determined by the number of heroes in the pack:

  • 1 hero: 6-12 other cards
  • 2 heroes: 12-18 other cards
  • 3 heroes: 18-24 other cards

To build a draft pack, simply create a RingsDB deck with the cards that you want to include in your pack. Do NOT publish your draft pack. Remember, draft packs are NOT real decks and we do not want to clutter up the beautiful collection of real decks that RingsDB gives us.

Before submitting a draft pack, please go to the “Edit account” page on RingsDB and be sure that the “Share my decks” checkbox is checked. If it is not checked, we will not be able to access your draft pack.

To submit your draft packs, send an email to conoftherings@gmail.com with a subject line of “Draft packs”. In the body of the email, include the deck IDs of all draft packs that you want to submit. To find a deck’s ID, look at the URL of your draft pack. It will look something like “http://ringsdb.com/deck/view/123”. The “123” at the end is all we need.

As a convenience for those with a lot of draft packs to submit, you can alternatively put all of your draft packs under a single user on the RingsDB site. Please make this a new user and not your existing user with real decks. Once your draft packs are set up under one user, you may submit all of the decks by going to “My Collection”->”Decks” to pull up the “My private decks” page, and then saving the page as html and sending us that html directly. To save a page as html, right-click on the page, select “View page source”, and copy the content out of the new window and into a new text file. Attach that text file to the email and we will go through the page and pull out the deck IDs for you.

If you want to make any updates to a draft pack that you have already submitted, please email us and let us know which packs need updated. We will download it fresh from RingsDB.

Thank you very much for helping us put together a draft for this year’s Con of the Rings! We want this to be a community effort and a community reward. Please contact us at conoftherings@gmail.com with any questions that you have.