Last week, I played Stone Soup Draft for the first of what will assuredly be many times.
Here’s how the format works: each player brings 45 sleeved cards (the sleeves do not have to match) and 25 sleeved basic lands. The basic lands are consolidated to serve as the community land box, and the actual cards are all shuffled together and dealt out as 15-card packs, which are then drafted traditionally. For our Stone Soup, no further instructions were given, and so you had folks bringing multiples of crucial cards like Evolving Wilds; you may wish to restrict it to singleton or non-acorn-stamped cards depending on how outre you think your play group is likely to get.
The format takes its name from the old European folktale. In the best-known version, Marcia Brown’s 1948 retelling for children, a troupe of starving soldiers convince a suspicious village to share their food by brewing up a pot of “stone soup,” which is just water and stones. Curious villagers each come by and contribute a small amount of food to bolster the thin broth until there’s a massive pot of soup large enough to feed both the soldiers and the villagers. It’s a lovely little fable about how you can trick people into acting like a community by appealing to their natural curiosity.
Stone Soup Draft isn’t exactly one-to-one with the old tale, as everyone at the Stone Soup table contributes more or less equally, but it’s a catchy name for a communal format. It’s essentially a collaborative Cube that reveals something about each person through their picks. In our Stone Soup last weekend, there were Death & Taxes staples whose black borders had been painstakingly erased, gold-bordered World Championship cards, and multiple copies of Cube staples like Fact or Fiction and Counterspell that went way later than their pedigree would suggest.
The visceral feeling of shuffling a dozen different sleeves together was a unique experience, and the shuffled deck ran along a wild gradient that felt transgressive. Magic’s culture is, to an extent, about preserving some kind of purity, whether that’s the “high fantasy” aesthetic purity of a Tolkien-influenced milieu without Spongebob Squarepants or Power Armor or the actual physical integrity of one’s cards. We double sleeve our pack-fresh foils out of some pack-rat notion of preserving their value, even if we have no intention of ever selling them. I certainly felt a pang while pile-shuffling some absurdly crispy Revised duals, but this is what Stone Soup is about. If someone wants to drop a couple pounds of Wagyu beef in the pot right next to my undersized potatoes, the whole community benefits.
There were a couple of logistical issues—e.g., any Control Magic or Sheltered by Ghosts effect becomes a bit fraught when you’re all playing with the same sleeves—but in general, the games were fantastic. A friend’s deck ran both Stoneforge Mystic and Miss Demeanor and I saw a Dosan’s Oldest Chant float by in the same pack as a Baneslayer Angel.
My first pick was a gold-bordered Recurring Nightmare, and I didn’t deviate from the strategy much, snapping up an early Palinchron and utility targets like Manglehorn and Coiling Oracle. A late Flash and a Griselbrand finished off the deck, which went a respectable 2-1. My favorite card I saw played was the humble Shadow Rift, which is excellent Snapcaster fodder, a trigger for Monastery Mentor, or an exceptional way to make your attacker unblockable or your opponent’s best creature unable to block.
My personal Stone Soup cards were nothing special, aside from a Beta Pestilence that I used to employ as a bookmark before I looked up the price. It was mostly midrange Cube staples like Pyrogoyf and Grim Lavamancer with a few quirkier but still generically good cards like Mutable Explorer (a Lhurgoyf itself) and Elegy Acolyte. The next time we convene, I intend to bring something with a bit more of my personality and playstyle, now that I know we’ll have more than enough Brainstorms and Llanowar Elves to go around. Forty-five cards equates to five of each color, one of each bicolored pair, and ten flex slots for mana fixing or artifacts, which is a surprisingly tight window. You’ll have to make tough cuts and accept that your personal forty-five can only encapsulate part of your Magical identity, rather than the whole spectrum.
Partially encouraged by this recent draft, I’ve been revisiting my own Magical identity lately. This week, I’ll turn forty years old. This means I’ve been playing Magic in some capacity for just shy of three decades, or for 75% of my life. I’ve drafted thousands of times, built and dismantled over three dozen Commander decks, bought and sold thousands of cards to churn towards an engagement ring or a plane ticket or an insurance premium.
How much damage have I taken off Dark Confidant in the last twenty-one years? How large of a fraction of that same damage have I taken off of Darkstar Augur and its offspring in the last two? How many games have I demonstrably lost by flipping up a Huntmaster of the Fells when I was at three life and how many games have I subtly lost by flipping up a Thoughtseize on a pivotal turn? Once you’ve played enough matches of Magic, these are the questions you have to ask yourself. I could have learned another language with the time and mental RAM I have instead dedicated towards Magic; learning that language, however, was less certain to make me lifelong friends. Prufrock doled out his life in coffeespoons; I have doled out mine in increments of forty.
Forty is a number with some resonance in Magic. Forty was the original minimum deck size, back before Wizards published the official tournament rules of Magic, and remains the ideal size for a Limited deck. Most Magic players these days play games starting at 40 life, thanks to the dominance of Commander. Forty is a good, well-rounded number for variance in Limited and gives enough padding to get the usual game of Commander up and running for all players before they start flirting with twenty.
Statistically, I’m past the midpoint of my life, but if I’m even slightly lucky, in half a decade, I’ll have five more cards to perfectly populate a Stone Soup pool. I’m starting my forties differently than I expected. I’m in the same job I took a decade ago as a health insurance gig. I have lived through pandemics and economic crashes and all evidence points to more of both before I’m eighty. I’m too old to be a debut novelist and have officially aged out of any “40 Under 40” lists, caliber of my work aside. And yet: I’m still here. I still will keep showing up to the table, a stack of forty cards in my hands, and will sit down across from a dear friend or a new rival. Whether it’s Stone Soup or Cube or Commander, there will always be a pair of spindowns set on 20 or forty empty sleeves ready to receive new draft picks.
Forty is just a number. It just turns out it’s one of the most important ones.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.