Play Boosters are Here: An Update to MTG Drafting at Vault Games

Firstly, I want to thank each and every member of the Vault Games community who took the time to fill out our recent survey on Drafting come Murders at Karlov Manor. As always, your feedback was important to us and served as the foundation of how we’ll be moving forward with Friday Night Draft once the set releases on 9 February 2024.

The Problem

On 16 October, Wizards of the Coast announced an update to the range of products happening in the new year with the release of Murders at Karlov Manor in February 2024. Namely, that Draft Boosters and Set Boosters are being discontinued and a new "Play Booster" is taking their place.

These Play Boosters are essentially the same as Set Boosters you can already get with some minor adjustments to the contents but at the same price as Set Boosters and will replace Draft Boosters for limited formats.

With the new Play Boosters being the same price as Set Boosters though, the sealed product costs of running limited events (that's draft and sealed format events) for game stores will increase by approximately 32%.

The Feedback Results

To help understand our final plans, I want to share the results of the survey with you so you know where we’re coming from and what we heard.

In the survey, we provided three possible event makeups with different prices that matched with the possible prize support. They were $50 Entry, 1x Booster per Round Win; $43 Entry, 1x Booster for Attending; and, $36, No Prize Support.

These options were then rated by respondents, which we gave the following scores to so that we could gauge the sentiment towards these options against each other:

+3 Definitely Will
+1 Probably Will
+0 Not Sure
-1 Probably Won’t
-3 Definitely Won’t

The results of this were as follows:

What Draft Looks Like for Murders at Karlov Manor

Now that we have the data, we’ve come to the decision to set the draft season of Murders at Karlov Manor to the following structure:

$32 Entry, No Prize Boosters.

That’s right. We’re going to be sticking with the current price of the regular FNM Draft Event (note: and yes, we know we asked about $36 above) but, given the increased cost of Play Boosters, and the responses we received to the survey, we’re comfortable we can stick to this price by removing prize boosters.

This won’t change promo packs by the way. When WOTC provides us with promo packs, we’ll continue to hand them out as we always have, foil packs at random to 3-0 results, regular packs at random to everyone else (the number of packs per week may change between sets as we are allocated by Wizards of the Coast).

Is that it though?

No. This is not what the final plan is for regular draft events. In fact, we will want your feedback after a few weeks of this structure to see if it's working, or what we need to adjust further.

On Friday 1 March, we’ll be launching another survey for you to fill out letting us know your thoughts on the current structure, and what we can look at adjusting, provided it doesn’t hurt the store’s ability to continue business.