Rotisserie Draft

Rotisserie Draft is a casual limited Magic: The Gathering format, invented by Mark Rosewater. It incorporates elements from Fantasy Sports.

Rather than each drafter opening a random assortment of cards from a pool, often with cards appearing multiple times in the same draft, every single card of a subset of Magic cards is legal and every card only appears once.

A Rotisserie Draft requires one or two complete Magic: The Gathering sets (one copy of each card), and a number of players such that the number of cards divided by the number of players is somewhere around 40 or 50. Each card is placed face up on a table in collector number order (or, for older sets without collector numbers, alphabetically by color). The players then roll dice to determine who will get to pick first, second, third, and so forth.

The first player chooses a card and it is removed from the pool of available cards. This continues for players 2 through 8. However, rather than passing over to the first player, the draft snakes back and forth and the second round picks are made by players 8 through 1 in that order, the third round starting with player 1 again and so on. Especially interesting is that all the rares in a set are represented, and they show up with the same frequency as the commons!

After each player has made forty-five selections, players make 40 card decks out of the cards they chose and any number of basic lands, which is provided to them.

Rotisserie drafts are often played in a round-robin format, meaning each player plays every other player once in a best-of-three matchup. Players also know every pick every other player has made, and thus can reasonably guess the exact contents of their opponents decks. In this way it is similar to Rochester draft.

One of the more popular Rotisserie draft formats is played with every Vintage legal card. An example is the Northwest Vintage Rotisserie Draft Series created by Shotgun Lotus.