In Magic booster draft, every pick is a trade-off between raw power, staying in your colors, and building a usable mana curve. This tool turns those three factors into a single score for each card in the pack and ranks them, so you can quickly compare close picks.
How it works
Each card’s score combines three weighted components:
score = power
+ colorBonus (on-color: +1.5, splash/colorless: 0, off-color: −1.5)
+ curveBonus (+0.5 if the card fills a mana value you are light on)Power (0–5) dominates so a true bomb is almost always the top pick. The color term reflects how likely you are to actually play the card once you commit, and the curve term gently rewards filling out your two- and three-drop slots instead of hoarding expensive cards. Cards are then sorted highest score first.
Example and tips
Suppose you are leaning blue-white. A power-4 blue removal spell scores 4 + 1.5 = 5.5, beating a power-4.5 green bomb that scores 4.5 − 1.5 = 3.0 once the off-color penalty lands — because the green card may never make your deck. Early in pack 1, trust raw power and stay open; by pack 2 the color bonus should dominate your decisions. Treat the curve bonus as a tiebreaker, not a reason to take weak cards.
The three-act structure of a booster draft
A typical booster draft follows a predictable arc across three packs of 15 cards, each passed to a different neighbor:
Pack 1: Evaluate everything on raw power. Take the best card in the pack regardless of color; your preferences are unknown and your neighbors are in the same position. Signal your direction through what you take.
Pack 2: Commit. By now you should have enough strong cards in one or two colors to identify your lane. On-color cards become significantly more valuable because they are nearly certain to make your 40-card deck; off-color cards, even powerful ones, often end up in the sideboard. This is where the color bonus in the tool’s scoring starts to dominate raw power.
Pack 3: Fill gaps. You know your deck’s shape. Use the third pack to find two-drops and removal spells your deck lacks. The curve bonus should guide borderline decisions here.
Reading signals from the pack
This tool ranks the cards in front of you, but it cannot see what is being passed upstream. Signals come from late picks — a powerful card arriving at pick 5 or later should have been taken by someone upstream, and its appearance tells you that color is open. If strong blue cards keep appearing in picks 5–8, the players passing to you are not in blue. If every blue card is gone by pick 3, blue is probably contested. Combine the within-pack ranking from this tool with your read on what is flowing through the table.
What power ratings look like in practice
The 0–5 scale is most useful when anchored to concrete examples:
- 5 (Bomb): a card that wins the game by itself if unanswered — a dragon that draws cards per attack, or unconditional mass removal
- 4 (Premium): strong unconditional removal at low mana, or a creature with clearly above-rate stats plus a relevant ability
- 3 (Solid playable): reliable, makes most decks, not exciting
- 2 (Filler): you play it when short but would sideboard it for anything better
- 0–1: barely playable, situational sideboard card at best
Be consistent within a session — the tool’s output is only as useful as the relative accuracy of the ratings you enter.