The Ultimate Guide to Quick Draft on MTGA

Last updated on April 15, 2026

Training Grounds | Illustration by Caroline Gariba

Drafting is one of the best ways to play Magic, and MTG Arena is awesome at handling drafts. It’s very cheap and easy to get into drafts, and if you have a good win rate, you can even go infinite!

But sometimes drafting takes too long, or you don’t have that many resources to enter a Premier Draft queue. Well, there’s always Quick Draft. It’s the fastest way to draft on MTGA and to convert your gold and gems into cards, and it’s arguably better than buying Arena booster packs on the MTGA store.

You’re drafting with bots so there can even be a way to exploit them. Today we’re covering everything you need to know about Quick Draft on MTG Arena, so let’s dive in!

What Is Quick Draft?

Swiftfoot Boots | Illustration by Manuel Castañón

Quick Draft is a way that that you can draft a set on MTG Arena with bots only. Quick comes from the fact that you don’t need to wait for other players to make their Draft picks and pass you their packs – that's the main difference between Quick Drafts and Premier Drafts on Arena.

In fact, because you don’t need to wait, you can complete an entire Draft in under five minutes, while it usually takes about half a minute for each Draft pick with other players, multiplied by 45 picks.

Quick Drafts are exclusive to MTG Arena, while if you’re drafting on Magic Online (MTGO), you’ll always draft with seven other players in an 8-player pod. In Quick Draft, you’re not drafting in a traditional 8-player pod; for that, there’s Premier Draft. Also, Quick Draft is restricted to Best-of-One only games (BO1). If you want to play Best-of-Three (BO3) Draft on Arena, there’s Traditional Draft.

Where Do You Find Quick Drafts on Arena?

The quickest way to find Quick Drafts is when they’re showing on MTG Arena’s main screen.

Alternatively, we can go to play, then on this screen select Events, and highlight Limited, as indicated in yellow. You can see all Limited options, including Quick Draft.

Who Is Quick Draft For?

Quick Draft is awesome if you don’t have that much time to dedicate yourself to a Draft. Also, because it’s not simultaneous, you can get in a draft, make a couple picks, leave, and return to the same draft later.

Another nice feature is that while you can make your picks blazingly fast, there’s no time limit. If you’re new to Draft, having more time to ponder between your picks is a good idea. Joining a Quick Draft costs only 5,000 gold or 750 gems, half the price of a Traditional Draft or Premier Draft, and that tends to help newer players or free-to-play players enter more drafts.

Is Quick Draft Good for New Players?

Quick Draft has a few features that can help new players. First, you don’t have a time limit to make your picks, so you can post a print screen of your draft on Reddit, discord, Twitter or what have you and ask “What is the Pick?” if you’re not sure about something. Another nice feature is the reduced cost of entry, so if a Draft went wrong, it's not too expensive to get into another one.

Quick Draft Entry Fee

A Quick Draft costs 5,000 gold or 750 gems to enter. The cost for that number of gems is about $4.50.

When getting gems in a bundle, your Quick Drafts cost less, almost $4 a draft. But you don’t need to panic, as MTG Arena rewards you with enough gold to fire some Quick Drafts every three days or so if you do the 500 and 750 gold Daily Quests plus achieving some game wins here and there.

By the way: if MTGA has a problem during your run that causes you to lose or be unable to finish your run, you can file for a refund and get the entry fee back. Make sure it's a problem on their end and not yours, though.

Quick Draft Prizes

As we can see, Quick Draft events have you play a bunch of matches with your Draft deck, until you get seven wins or three losses. Depending on how many wins you get, here are your prizes.

Note that the Quick Draft prize structure only gives you more than you’ve paid for with six wins. Also, you’ll get one pack on average. This is very different from Premier Draft, where you’ll get 2.5 packs on average, and if you win five matches, you’re set for the next draft just with the rewards alone.

Do You Keep the Cards in Quick Drafts?

Yes, you keep all the cards you draft in a Quick Draft. Any Limited event you join on MTG Arena lets you keep the cards, and in fact, it’s one of the bigger incentives for drafting in the first place.

The only exception are Phantom events, and in these you don’t keep the cards. Arena Cube drafts are a kind of Phantom event, for that matter.

Is Quick Draft Actually Worth It?

Yes, Quick Draft can be a fun and rewarding way to draft. There are some advantages and disadvantages of doing Quick Drafts on Arena.

The first advantage is the reduced entry fee – half the price of a Premier or Traditional Draft. The second is that you can take your time between packs if you want to make the most assertive choice, reading about the card evaluation on Draftsim’s Limited guides on all sets, or using Draftsim’s Arena Tutor feature to grade the cards on the fly.

The main problem is that it doesn’t reward you particularly well. If you have a good win rate, like consistently 4-3 or better, Premier Draft or Traditional Draft is better for you in terms of rewards. You need to get 5-6 wins consistently to keep doing Quick Drafts, and the pack rewards are smaller, too. I’d say it’s excellent to practice and get used to the Draft format because even if you lose all your matches, you lose fewer resources. Some argue that Quick Draft is better for rare-drafting, too. 

Tips for Quick Draft

You Can Leave and Come Back at Any Time

Unlike Premier Draft, when you enter a Quick Draft, you’ll draft only with bots. That gives you additional freedom. You can make picks at your own pace, and you can leave and join the draft portion whenever you like.

Understand What’s Better in Quick Draft than in Premier Draft

When Throne of Eldraine came out, players often forced a blue mill deck because bots weren’t evaluating cards like Merfolk Secretkeeper and Didn't Say Please appropriately. Guilds of Ravnica had the famous “Dimirror” matches. In today’s Quick Draft formats, bots are better trained by WotC, so it’s hard to find a pattern or a consistently underdrafted strategy. Sometimes a strategy that leans on common and uncommon synergy gets better because the bots tend to draft cards at rares and mythic rarity, or the highest rated cards that don’t rely on synergies.

Rare-Drafting

You pay 5,000 gold to enter a Quick Draft, and that’s equivalent to five packs on the Arena Store. These five packs give you five rare cards. In the Play booster era, it’s more than likely that you’ll leave a Quick Draft with five rares or more since packs have more rares and uncommons and fewer commons, plus whatever rewards you get for winning and the other cards you draft.

Using Arena Tutor

I’ve just joined a The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Quick Draft with Arena Tutor to show you in a few screenshots.

Quick Draft gives me plenty of time to draft and write this simultaneously. There are some cards in consideration: Goblin Tomb Raider, Staggering Size, Thrashing Brontodon, Roaming Throne, Tinker's Tote. I’ll go with the rare and colorless option in Throne.

Now, pick 3. Because I have Captain Storm, Cosmium Raider, the two best picks for keeping in this strategy are Goblin Tomb Raider and Brackish Blunder. I’ll go with the 1-drop – goblin it is.

Pack 2 pick 1, I get a bomb in Chimil, the Inner Sun. Note that while I have good options in Dreadmaw's Ire and Sunfire Torch, it’s hard to pass this (it’s not the absolute bomb in this deck, but still pretty good). One more mythic to my collection, too (yay, rare-drafting!).

Here’s the screenshot for the final Draft and deck. This was almost 100% drafted via Arena Tutor, and it looks like a nice Izzet aggressive deck with some pirate and artifact synergies.

Can You Quick Draft Older Sets?

One downside of Quick Draft is that you’re only able to Quick Draft the set that’s available at that moment on MTG Arena. The format that’s available follows a schedule determined by WotC and older sets get mixed in frequently. They include a quick rundown of events and mention which flashback sets will be revisited during a set's release. For example, during Secrets of Strixhaven you'll see events that include Bloomburrow, Edge of Eternities, Murders at Karlov Manor, and Tarkir: Dragonstorm.

You usually have one to two weeks to draft the set on Arena on Quick Draft mode. This leaves Premier Draft and Traditional Draft as the only ways to draft a new set right after release, and after that they can “calibrate” or “train” the bots for Quick Draft.

History of Quick Draft on MTGA

When MTG Arena introduced Draft, there was only the Quick Draft option, only it was called Competitive Draft back then. That was when Dominaria was released in April 2018, while the game was in Open Beta. Starting with Guilds of Ravnica, the game offered Quick Draft for every single Magic set released on the client, although with different names like Ranked Draft, Competitive Draft and the like. It took some time to offer 8-player draft on MTG Arena, starting with Ikoria: Lair of the Behemoth in April, 2020.

Wrap Up

Quick Fixer | Illustration by Francis Tneh

Drafting on Arena is awesome, and one of the best ways to learn how to play Magic. MTGA has plenty of good options for drafting, no matter if you’re a veteran or newbie. Arena Tutor always helps you, and hopefully I made a good point as to why you should use it.

Each Draft option has its pros and cons, and you should try to Quick Draft if you’re low on resources or learning the ropes.

What’s your favorite Draft format? Or are you more of a Sealed Deck player? Let me know in the comments section, or over Draftsim Discord.

Thank you for reading, and may you ponder your Draft picks at your own pace.