Three weeks ago, I got together in a group of six and we did an Emperor Draft with Battlebond packs (3 packs per person). (Background on Emperor; background on drafting Emperor.) It was extremely fun, mostly because we deviated a bit from the usual plan for Emperor Draft.
Normally you sit in the same spots you're going to play, except that the two emperors swap places so they're sitting between the two opposing generals. Then everyone drafts cards, just as though it's a six-person draft pod. (Although this is a limited team format, teammates cannot share pools during deck-building.)
I was really excited to try this format out with the Battlebond set. The importance of teammates in the cards promised to be really cool. I mentioned this excitement to my friend Phil who lives across the country, and he agreed. Then he suggested a Battlebond-relevant change that made a world of difference: sit with your team.
Part of the fun of Emperor Draft is that you have to balance your picks against taking things your opponents want. Each lieutenant is sitting next to their opposing lieutenant and the opposing emperor, so if they're passing to the emperor, they may have to take something to prevent the emperor from getting it. Part of the problem, however, is that it would be really nice to know what your team is doing so you can plan around that a bit. This is especially relevant in Battlebond because if you see one partner card in a pack, you don't know who has taken the other one. (Even though Battlebond is designed around taking two cards per pick, for Emperor Draft, you only got one pick each time.) That could be pretty frustrating.
So, for drafting we wanted teams to both sit with each other so they could collude and be alternating with their opponents so you can't just stack three picks each round. Phil suggested that we just include a semi-confusing passing sequence on top of the team seating.
We did it. It was great. It was so fun to talk to the team about every pick, and working together, we could deduce exactly what others were taking. One of the players, Don, suggested a cool method of placing packs in between the players using rules cards that we flipped between draft rounds. I put together some arrows that you can put down on the table to help organize things. I highly recommend using zone drafting to prevent confusion; there should only be one pack of cards on the table between two players at any time.
Here's the printable PDF. The first page has the arrows with spots for the cards; the second has a diagram to show how people should be sitting.
Happy Magicking!
