Last updated on March 14, 2024
End the Festivities | Illustration by Chris Rallis
Magic players are an innovative lot. We’ll find ways to play this game in a vacuum if we need to. One of the best casual formats players invented is Pack Wars, or Mini-Master, a small-potatoes Limited format where players each play with the cards from a single booster pack.
How do you play Pack Wars? What are the best variants for the format? Let’s take a look at the Draft booster’s best friend!
What Is Pack Wars?
Mirror Match | Illustration by Steve Prescott
Pack Wars (also known as “Mini-Master”) is an alternative casual Limited format for Magic: The Gathering wherein players play using only the 15 cards they pull from a booster pack and some basics.
You don’t need much to play Pack Wars, just a booster pack and three of each of the basic lands per player. Players open their packs without looking at the contents, shuffle it up with their basics, and proceed like a normal game of Magic. Since players don’t know what cards they’ve pulled, their strategy has to adapt to every new card they draw. The fun lies in discovering both what you pulled and whether that pull helps you win. Did you pull that mythic rare you were pining for? Will it help you win this match? It’s a heart-pounding battle of wits each time!
Once a player wins a match, they get an additional booster pack to add to their deck. From then on, deck construction follows the usual Limited rules – players can modify their decks and replace lands as they see fit.
Like most casual formats, Pack Wars has a ton of variations. Let’s take a look at some popular ones and some you may have never heard of!
No Libraries
The first variant I came across for Pack Wars eschews the library and basic lands completely. Instead, players start with all 15 Draft booster cards in their hands. Each turn, they may play one basic land from outside the game and put it into play. Effects that instruct players to draw do nothing, and players don’t lose the game for being unable to draw. This variant attempts to fix the issue of playing a 5-color deck, letting players get to casting spells quicker.
Face Down Lands
In another attempt to “fix” the mana issue in Pack Wars, the “face-down” style lets you play any card from your hand face down as a basic land of any type. You build your Pack Wars deck without any basics, and instead declare the type as you play the card, and you can’t change it later on. This helps smooth over the color-matching problem that can arise from a 5-color deck in a Limited format. Alternatively, it’s been suggested you can play a card face-up as a land that taps for all the colored pips in its mana cost. For example, a Niv-Mizzet, Parun played as a land would tap for .
Two Pack vs “Double Stack”
One pack not enough? There’s a simple solution: play with two instead! In “Double Stack” the rules are basically the same, except players start with two full Draft boosters. You can use the same number of basics as a regular Pack War or adjust up or down however you see fit. Just make sure you and your opponent agree on your deck size.
This variant has a few distinct advantages: First, 30 cards gives you a much wider variance than 15, and the ratio of lands-to-spells works out a bit better. Second, you get more cards! That’s double the chance to land a bomb rare. Third, 30 cards means you’ll have more time before you mill yourself out, making games last twice as long on average.
Type 4/DC10
Type 4 is a nearly forgotten variant Limited format played without lands. Instead, each player is assumed to have access to infinite mana but is limited to one spell per turn. Traditionally, this format is played with a specially constructed cube for players to draft from, but it can be combined with Pack Wars with surprising ease. This variant removes the need for land cards, but it can drastically favor one player or another, depending on the average MV of their pulls.
Multiplayer
Pack Wars would be nothing without a multiplayer variant. Like most Magic formats, Pack Wars can be grafted onto the typical multiplayer rules. Try using the typical EDH/Commander 4-player rules, Two-Headed Giant rules, or even the esoteric Emperor format.
Different Booster Types
The ultimate variant for Pack Wars and the inevitable evolution it must take in the coming years is trying it out with different packs. Set boosters and Collector boosters make for interesting Pack Wars duels – with a higher concentration of rares and mythics, games can swing back and forth like mad. However, you run the risk of playing an incredibly unbalanced deck when your opponent pulls all rares and you pull a bunch of extended-art commons. Sadly, with the elimination of the Draft booster in favor of the Play booster, this may be the new fate of Pack Wars.
What Are Some Good Packs for Pack Wars?
Obviously, there’ll be some sets better suited for Pack Wars than others. You wouldn’t want to try to play Pack Wars with March of the Machine: The Aftermath packs since they come with fewer cards and are generally unbalanced against each other. Larger sets designed specifically to be drafted and sets with a wide variance in cards are your best bet.
Innistrad
The original Innistrad block was where I got my start in Limited play, so please excuse my obvious bias. Innistrad was the large set that introduced the gothic horror plane to the Magic universe, followed by the expansions Dark Ascension and Avacyn Restored. Innistrad made a great Draft set for its focus on creature types and on the typical draft archetypes; white could play weenies, black could play aristocrats (the first real instance of this), blue played mill, green played fatties, and red could play aggro. It harkens back to what I think of as classic Magic, and it still has opportunities for big exciting pulls.
Return to Ravnica/Gatecrash/Dragon’s Maze
Return to Ravnica – Booster Pack
Hot on the heels of Innistrad was the Return to Ravnica block, made up of the two large sets RTR and GTC, followed by the supplementary Dragon’s Maze. With their focus on color pairs, these sets make a fun thematic Pack Wars game and can be mixed and matched with relative ease. Maybe you start with an RTR pack, your opponent starts with GTC, and you expand your decks into DGM in your second match. It’s starting to smell like 2013 in here.
Modern Horizons 1
MH1 and MH2 are excellent choices for a Pack War because they’re both high-powered and will always have something valuable inside.
Modern Horizons 2
No matter what you think of Fury and Grief, you can’t deny that the Modern Horizons sets are excellent Draft formats. I’ve probably drafted boxes of MH2 more than any other set (maybe Time Spiral Remastered has it beat just by a bit).
- 36 Modern Horizons 2 (MH2) Magic: The Gathering Draft Boosters
- 1 New-to-Modern reprint in every pack
- 1–2 Rares and/or Mythic Rares in every pack
- Just add lands and draft with up to 12 players
- Introduces powerful cards and beloved reprints to the Modern format
Mystery Booster
Want a really crazy Pack Wars experience? Get your hands on some Mystery Boosters. With over 2000 different cards, there’s basically no way to know what you’ll pull. Avalanche Riders? Mana Crypt? Who knows!
- Revisit popular and fun mechanics from years gone by
- Contains mostly reprinted cards from earlier sets
- 121 possible foil cards to collect
- This listing is for one single booster packet
Wrap Up
Clash of Wills | Illustration by Yan Li
Pack Wars is a cute and easy Magic format you can play in 5 to 10 minutes and has a lot of variance to expand upon. Perhaps best of all, it’s a wonderful psyop from WotC to get you to buy more sealed product. But you were going to do that anyway, weren’t you?
Have you ever played Pack Wars? What are your favorite sets to play with? Are there any interesting variants your playgroup has come up with? Let us know in the comments, or join the discussion on Draftsim’s Discord.
Thanks for reading, and keep cracking packs!
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