Play on Cockatrice
If you haven't already, you should install Cockatrice and run through its first time setup.
- Right-click this link, select "Save link as..." and save it anywhere you like.
- Open Cockatrice.
- In the menu at the top, go to Card Database > Add custom sets/cards.
- Select the file you downloaded earlier and click "Open".
- Restart Cockatrice.
- (You can delete the file you downloaded earlier if you like. You don't need it any more.)
Now, when you start up a game, you should be able to see all the card images and text.
Print and Play
You can also draft and play in person.
- Click here to see the entire set, rarity distributions included.
- Use your browser's print dialog and check a few things:
- The background of the page should be black so the card edges go up to the corners. (This makes cutting them much easier later — you can just cut straight lines and they're ready to be sleeved.)
- The cards should already be sized to fit inside a sleeve in front of a Magic: the Gathering card, so check that scaling is set to 100%. Your sleeves and setup may differ though, so consider printing out a page now as a test run.
- Finally, adjust your margins to fit a good number of cards on each page. On A4, it should be pretty straightforward to fit in a 3 by 3 grid. (You may want to tweak the margins so there's not too much wasted black ink on the edges of the grid.)
- Once you've printed out the cards, cut them out and sleeve them up in front of actual cards. Hopefully you have a large junk cards collection!
You can just shuffle up all of the cards and form a cube for drafting! The distribution of rarities mimics actual boosters pretty well.
However, for a more realistic drafting experience, consider setting up boosters ahead of time. Try this:
- For the rare slot, shuffle the mythics and remove half of them. Shuffle the remaining mythics together with the rares, and then assign each booster pack a single card from this combined pile.
- For the uncommon slots, separate the uncommons into their colors (put multicolor and colorless uncommons into a single shared pile) and shuffle each pile by itself. Then, carefully riffle shuffle the piles into each other. Don't shuffle too much — this means the colors are roughly evenly distributed. Deal out the uncommons, three to each pack.
- For the common slots, separate the commons into their colors (again, put multicolor and colorless uncommons into a single shared pile). For each of your six piles, shuffle it and deal one card out to each pack. Once done, you should have six commons per pack, one white, one blue, one black, one red, one green, and one land/artifact. Then, riffle together the remaining commons (like for the uncommons) and deal them out, four to each pack. By the end, each pack should have ten commons.