The Ultimate Guide to Rotisserie/ROTO Drafting

Free-Range Chicken | Illustration by Mike Raabe

In sports leagues, each year there’s a player draft, where the General Managers of the teams/franchises can draft new players among the most promising college candidates, in full view. They must adapt their strategies on the fly, based on their needs, on which players are available, and on what strategies the other teams are most likely to pick.

A Draft in Magic bears many similarities, but what if we could replicate this open draft excitement with a pre-defined pool of cards? This is known as Rotisserie drafting, or ROTO drafting, and it can be a very skill-testing, novel, and challenging experience to spice up Drafts, mainly Cube Drafts. Today, we’ll take a deep look at ROTO draft, its origins, and the tools players use to ROTO online.

What Is Rotisserie Draft?

Campfire | Illustration by Edgar Sánchez Hidalgo

Rotisserie Draft, or ROTO Draft, is one of the many MTG Draft variants, one with total open information. The main idea behind ROTO is that, instead of picking up a booster or Cube pack and picking a card in secret, said pack is opened face up and everyone sees everyone’s picks. Thus, reading people’s draft picks and signals becomes extremely important, and you should adapt your draft strategy on the fly based on which cards are still available and what people are most likely to pick next, given their strategies and available cards. It’s very skill-testing, and as such, it’s recommended for veteran players. Although ROTO Draft can be done with a variety of player counts, it’s best in the 4-8 player range.

Strategies in a ROTO draft can be very different based on your initial idea and what everybody else is doing. You can start a draft by picking flexible mana fixing, like fetch lands, then value creatures, and later change into something like blink or Birthing Pod.

Cards that go into multiple archetypes tend to be contested. If a player goes for Swords to Plowshares early, they can play white aggro, midrange, or control. The same goes for other flexible cards like Preordain and Thoughtseize. Meanwhile, specific cards like The Wandering Emperor or Blood Artist can go much later into the draft, once everyone's cemented into an archetype.

There’s a few different ways to set up for Rotisserie Draft:

1. Booster Draft Rotisserie, where players are drafting opened booster drafts from a given set, one at a time.
2. Whole Set Rotisserie, where players opt to ROTO draft a full set (usually singleton cards).
3. Sets Rotisserie, where players agree on what sets are being drafted, and they can pick any card from these sets. It can be sets that are legal in Standard, or, say, all Ravnica sets.
4. Cube Rotisserie, the most common way of ROTO drafting. Players will draft a whole Cube, or a good chunk of it.
5. All MTG Cards Rotisserie. As the name implies, you can choose any card in MTG. That’s a huge challenge. Usually players will, instead of doing this, choose a Vintage Powered Cube to restrict the options.

Who Is ROTO Drafting For?

ROTO is a skill-testing format perfect for MTG veterans. In the 90s, it was a Pro Tour Draft format as well. Sometimes you have a smaller 90-180 card Cube for anything between 2-4 players, and you want to draft it that way. Of course, it works wonders in a regular 360-450 powered/unpowered Cube. ROTO is awesome for thematic cubes (like graveyard cubes), or cubes with color restrictions, like mono-blue cubes or Grixis cubes, since those tend to have archetypes with a lot of intersection.

One specific advantage where ROTO shines is when players can draft online from their homes via an online spreadsheet and only meet in person to assemble the decks and play the matches, or even play the matches online. This is often called asynchronous drafting. Sometimes, playgroups only have 1-2 hours to play a match or two, and drafts won’t fire because there’s not enough time or people, so you can try to fix that by drafting prior to the local games.

ROTO Draft Rules

The rules for ROTO drafting depend on whether you're drafting one pack at a time (Booster or Cube) or if you're drafting the whole Cube. The main difference is that, in the first case, you're opening a pack and drafting that pack alone. In the second case, any card from the whole Cube (or set, or even MTG itself) can be chosen.

The draft proceeds in a “Snake pattern”. This is where the name Rotisserie comes from (alluding to the back-and-forth nature of drafting). Player 1 goes first, then players 2, 3, 4…. until player 8. Player 8 then picks two cards, and it goes back to player 1 in descending order: 8, 7, 6, 5… all the way to 1. Player 1 then picks two cards, and it goes back in ascending order. This also applies if players are drafting through an online spreadsheet.

An important thing to note that’s very specific to ROTO draft is that, since all picks are made with perfect information, it’s common that players try to cut other players from their picks, so it can be cutthroat. All players know which colors and archetypes the others are trying to draft, so a good strategy can be to stay open and flexible. There’s a nice advantage for the player that gets two picks in a row, because they can get a 2-card combo that would otherwise get cut. Some examples:

• Mindslaver + Academy Ruins
• Entomb + Reanimate
• Entomb + Griselbrand
• Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek
• Thassa's Oracle + Demonic Consultation

Sometimes you will draft cards that will specifically hose you, like Mystical Dispute against blue, or a one-sided wrath against a creature-heavy deck. Sideboard-specific cards can be better than usual when you know what they’re doing and can be worth spending some middle picks on.

Where to Play Rotisserie Draft

Rotisserie Draft was a Pro Tour format for a long time, back when MTG legends like Kai Budde (RIP) and Jon Finkel played in the 90s. But today, it’s restricted to casual playgroups.

One common way that people play ROTO draft online is by using spreadsheets in an asynchronous way. You simply write on a spreadsheet which card you're picking. This card should be in the Cube list, or it can be simply any card from MTG’s history, depending on the cardpool you're drafting from. Online MTG clients like MTGO and MTG Arena don’t let you ROTO draft, but you can meet your friends there to play matches, if you have the cards available (or some wildcards/tix to spare).

How to ROTO Draft a Cube

The Moment | Illustration by Patrik Hell

While you could physically lay out every card from the selected cardpool on a table, the most common way people ROTO draft a Cube is by drafting the whole Cube online via spreadsheets. It’s not the most practical thing to put an entire Cube face up on one surface (we’re usually talking about 360 cards minimum), and it takes a lot of time. In asynchronous fashion, people can draft the Cube at home and assemble the physical decks only when they actually meet. If a playgroup meets regularly once every week or so, there’s plenty of time between meetings to draft online.

Interestingly, you’ll know their lists, strategies, and you can plan a main deck and sideboard accordingly. It’s also possible that, a few picks into the Draft, players start to pick two cards at a time. Usually, the most fought-after picks are the first 5-6 picks each player makes, and in an 8-player ROTO Draft, these are the most powerful or archetype-defining cards.

This spreadsheet was made by Lucky Paper’s Anthony Mattox. Here, you can import your cube list, enter player names, randomize seats, track the picks in the actual cube lists, and more.

Here’s an example of what happened in a real ROTO draft using a Cube with cards available on MTG Arena, drafted via spreadsheet. The whole cube was drafted, 450 cards, 10 players, 45 picks total. You can check the whole spreadsheet out here.

Player Aspi was firmly in the reanimator seat right from the start, while Drewshaver was basically the only white weenie player. Rocketman and W1dcrd battled back and forth with blue picks based on what the other was doing, and so on. Another interesting note is that Nova got Stoneforge Mystic very early in the Draft, but actually spent late picks on the good equipment that goes with it, like Kaldra Compleat and Batterskull. In a regular Draft, they would probably get the premium equipment at the first opportunity.

Rotisserie Draft Products

There’s not a specific Rotisserie Draft product on the market right now, in the same way that WotC doesn’t actively support Cube. That said, some products can help you ROTO draft. Let’s see some examples:

• A good-ol’ Play Booster box from one of your favorite Limited sets can be used. Just open one booster at a time and ROTO draft it.
• I’m not praising Marvel’s Spider-Man by any means, but the set was made to draft in smaller player counts, two picks at a time, so it might be an ok-to-good ROTO Draft experience.
• Draft Night, on the other hand, is a product tailor-made for drafting with four players, and you can choose Lorwyn Eclipsed. It comes with 12 Play Boosters, 3 for each player.
• Any set can actually be ROTO drafted, and you can create your own restrictions, like max one of each rare/mythic and uncommon, one/two of each common. Sometimes, specific archetypes that demand a high density of rares can be especially good in this format.

ROTO Draft Communities

• Lucky Paper is a community that promotes ROTO online and Cubing in general. They recorded podcasts on the subject, and they even developed a cool spreadsheet. You can check their website and spreadsheet here, as well as more information about the format.
• MTG communities like Loading Ready Run and Limited Resources have videos and podcasts with their own experiences.
• Jank Diver Gaming is a Discord-based community that runs occasional ROTO drafts as well as a multitude of other Cube events.
• Reddit’s r/mtgcube subreddit has plenty of posts regarding Rotisserie Drafts, and it’s a source of cube drafting in general.

Wrap Up

Rotisserie Elemental | Illustration by Leonardo Santanna

Rotisserie Draft can be exactly what your playgroup needs to have a novel draft experience. ROTO can even shape people’s cubes, encouraging more loose combos or interesting build-around cards that aren't usually consistent, or that are useless when drafted late. If it looks complex, try ROTO drafting booster packs or a given set.

Let me know your ROTO experiences in the comments section below, or if some aspect wasn’t very clear. We also have our own Draftsim Discord to discuss everything MTG and Limited.

Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there, folks.

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