New Format Gets Midweek Magic Trial Run on Arena

Last updated on August 26, 2025

Two-Headed Hellkite | Illustration by Fajareka Setiawan

Magic's debuting the new Pick-Two Draft format with the release of Marvel's Spider-Man in September; in fact, the entire Spider-Man set was designed with this “Lightning Draft” format in mind. If you're interested in the logistics and want to get a taste for how Pick-Two Draft works before all the heroes and villains of the Spider-Verse hit the scene, be on the lookout for MTG Arena's Midweek Magic event this week, which will give players a feel for this new format before it officially goes live.

Midweek Magic: Pick-Two Foundations Draft

Twinflame Tyrant | Illustration by Xabi Gaztelua

That's right, you'll be able to dip your toes into the new format on Magic Arena this week, with Midweek Magic offering Foundations Pick-Two Draft as a free-to-play event on the platform. The event is scheduled from August 26-27 (Tuesday-Wednesday), though Midweek Magic events technically end on Thursdays at 2:00pm PT, so you have until the 28th to try it out.

But what's Pick-Two Draft all about?

Well, the elevator pitch is pretty simple: Draft in a pod of four players instead of the usual eight. The Draft flows and rotates between packs as normal, with the exception that players take two cards per pick instead of just one. Afterwards, players build their Limited deck from the cards they picked, and then branch off into a wider pool of players to play out their matches. Right now, it's unclear if a typical Pick-Two Draft event will have a different prize structure than your standard Traditional or Premier Draft, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of Midweek Magic, which has its own small-ball prize-out on account of being a free event.

Just to synthesize that into a single bite-sized headline: Pick-Two Draft is a faster Draft environment where players select two cards at a time. Note that Foundations isn't really designed with Pick-Two Draft in mind, but the format is pretty amenable to most sets.

Pick-Two Draft Advantages

Fortune's Favor | Illustration by Yohann Schepacz

You can get a feel for how Pick-Two Draft will work on Arena this week, but why should players consider this format over the other Draft alternatives that already exist? Well, there are some advantages to Pick-Two over the competition.

The most obvious is that the draft portion should be extremely quick, if that's something that interests you. Half as many players to wait on, and double-picks means you're probably spending roughly half as long actually drafting than you would in Traditional or Premier drafts. Remember, this format started out as something called “Lightning Drafting” that was offered as a fast-paced side event at large-scale Magic conventions.

That's not the only advantage though. How many times have you opened a booster pack in a draft and immediately thought to yourself: “Man, I wish I could take both of these cards!” Probably quite often, especially in the Play Booster era, where packs often have two or more rares in them. Being able to double-pick rares out of a loaded pack can give you some powerful starts to a draft, not to mention it's a great option for those interested in set completion.

Double-picking goes beyond the rares, too. Being able to snipe two synergistic cards for your deck from the same pack is a huge boon. Or being able to grab the 2-color mana fixer without having to compromise on the signpost uncommon for your deck is a game-changer for deckbuilding. Pick-Two drafting means you rarely have to “give up” anything super important for your deck.

Source: Draftmancer

Imagine opening this Play Booster while Two-Pick drafting Foundations. You get to snap up a solid rare with Kiora, the Rising Tide, and you have some solid choices for your second pick. You could try to stake an early claim on blue and grab the workhorse common Bigfin Bouncer. Or maybe you want to keep your options open and snag one of the black cards—Vampire Nighthawk and Stab are both high-quality cards. If you're feeling extra ambitious, you could even try to go in on Hare Apparent, which never really pans out in a normal draft, but might be easier to pull off when you can snag the rabbits without giving up a good pick for your deck.

There's a bit more nuance and strategy involved in Pick-Two Draft than it might seem at first glance. It's not just “let's get through a draft as fast as possible so we can keep firing them off”, though there's probably some element of that at play. If you're skeptical of the format, and wary of Spider-Man being fully designed around it, give Midweek Magic a shot this week and see how it feels. It's a free event, so no harm in testing the waters to see how the format feels to you.