I was going to just post my rules in the Cubing With Two thread (last updated in 2019) but then thought someone might want to comment after all and it'll be a mess; so:
I was experimenting with 2-player Limited formats back around 2010 when only Winston, Winchester and Solomon were widely used. Seems that this is still kind of the case, Grid Draft perhaps coming closest to contesting their popularity. I had meant to write an article on the subject then, but never got around to it. Having returned to the (casual) game for the nonce, I've now gone through the library of formats presented in said thread, and, after some more testing and deliberating, arrived at a family of formats that I find quite promising. I'm sharing my favorite, which I'm naming "Thrift" because you take as many cards as you like from a pack and because it's for small, cheap Cubes of (mostly but not strictly) Commons and Uncommons. It fits the Hand Drafting category, i.e. packs change hands, although, in Thrift, each pack gets passed only once. It's nothing revolutionary.
Rules:
2 players. 30-card decks. Six 15-card packs randomly drawn from a Cube separated into Commons and non-Commons (this latter category may include Rares too). First a Draft phase in 3 rounds, then a small Sealed phase leading into deck building. One pack per Draft round and per player. The number of non-Commons per pack should be zero in the third round, medium (3-5) in the second round and high (7-10) in the first round. Players choose freely how many cards they want from each pack (0 also possible), but, in total, each player may pick at most 20 cards during the entirety of the Draft phase. All picks remain secret. In each round, the players each decide which cards they want to pick, then both make all their picks simultaneously. The remainder of the pack is passed to the opponent, and players again choose and pick as many cards as they wish. All cards that still haven't been picked are placed on a single facedown discard pile. At the end of the Draft phase, this pile usually contains 50 cards (20 having been picked by each player). For the Sealed phase, each player is dealt 15 cards from the shuffled discard pile. From this (secret) pool of 15 plus 20 cards, each player builds a deck of at least 30 cards, adding as many basic lands as they want. They may set aside up to 6 cards as a sideboard. What remains of the pools and the discard pile gets removed from the play area without further inspection by either player. The winner is determined in a best-of-5 match.
Very efficient use of a small Cube; should even work quite well with a standard Sealed pool e.g. brought home from a prerelease. High replayability if the Cube is a bit larger than just a Sealed pool. Fast setup, Draft/Sealed procedure and deck building. Easy rules, easily remembered. Classical Limited gameplay in between Sealed and Draft – thus also instructive for tournament Magic – and a little in the direction of precon decks. Important that the matches are fun too, not just the Draft and deck building. An interactive process, but one that largely discourages disrupting the opponent's Draft strategy and rather focuses on constructive, creative deck building; closer to Sealed than to Draft in that respect. Players get only indirect, imperfect information about the opponent's deck, enough to make them aware of each other's main colors before long, give some sideboard cards an occasional maindeck use and to avoid a very one-sided matchup (e.g. a very slow deck against a very fast one); but not enough for Rochester-like predictions of the opponent's picks, and with some surprises in store for the games.
• If separating a Cube according to rarity is not an option, then the pack sizes can be adjusted instead to increase the impact of the first round and decrease the impact of the third: 17 cards in the first round, 16 in the second, 12 in the third. However, an uneven distribution of card rarities is preferable in my experience. Having the bulk of the powerful and complex cards in the first pack induces archetypes that the players would otherwise rarely choose without necessarily having them pick so many cards that a color switch becomes disastrous. Whereas the possibility of a powerful third pack encourages players to keep their options open and conserve picks, leading to less focused decks and to a bigger element of luck.
• If Booster packs are used, then very powerful Rares should arguably be removed. They'll appear more consistently with 30-card decks than with 40-card decks, and powerful individual cards make stubborn competition for a color more likely. Without spoiler Rares, it may also make sense to reduce the amount of removal spells a bit. Some like it when the game revolves around answering powerful threats, but this format aims more at cards working together. Peasant Cubes should work well if they resemble typical Limited environments.
• For decent replayability – specifically to prevent players from pretty reliably inferring the contents of their opponent's deck –, the packs should be drawn from a Cube of at least 125 cards, for high replayability something closer to 200.
• When a player is unable to draw a card, they don't lose the game, they just don't draw anymore cards (which is already quite punishing). Or maybe they suffer "card burn," losing 1 to 3 life per card they're unable to draw, or even for any card they're unable to move from the library to any other game zone. Alternatively or additionally, some of the mill cards and cards that make wasteful use of a player's library could be removed from the Cube.
• Card holders – or just some flat box to lean the picked cards against – could be helpful. This might be true for any Draft format that has players juggle secret packs along with secret picks. For Thrift Draft, upright cards have the additional advantage of being easier to count. A life counter can convey the number of picks made even more clearly.
• Sideboards could be larger or be dispensed with entirely. Due to signaling, decks are already pre-sideboarded to an extent. Sideboards do give players a chance to correct any minor blunders that become apparent during the first game.
• As a baseline for the number of picks to make per pack, I would suggest aiming at 5-6 from one's own pack in round one and 2-3 from the remainder of the opponent's pack; 4-5 and 2-3 respectively in round two and 2-4 and 1-3 in round 3.
• Before choosing any cards from a pack passed by the opponent, it's worth trying to read color signals. It's not obvious what to do when apparently sharing a color with an opponent, but being open to (partly) switching to or leaning more heavily onto an uncontested color is generally helpful.
• At the start of round one, without any information yet about the opponent's colors, making a strong commitment to two colors is risky, e.g. 2 or 3 cards in each, some with double-colored mana costs. This warning way not apply when the initial pack contains some key cards for a fringe archetype that may not suffer much from a color clash. A safer approach is to more or less commit to one color, with maybe one more card in a second color that can easily be abandoned or splashed. Flexible openings of e.g. three cards in three different colors, some splashable, plus an artifact also seem to work well.
• When deciding how many picks to save for the end of round three, it's worth considering whether a color is shared with the opponent and how many picks they have left.
• The cards received for the Sealed portion have all been rejected before by both players. There can be some small gem from round one whose usefulness wasn't yet evident then or a couple of decent cards missed in round three when running out of picks to make, but, mostly, those cards will be chaff to save players who are coming up short on playables. So players will want to play most of the 20 cards they've picked. If those include one mana source, then the aim should be to play all but 2 of them (and 12 basic lands). This leaves a little bit of room for exploration at the start of the Draft phase, and very little room for off-color hate picks (i.e. to deny a card to the opponent). Uncertainty about the opponent's color choices additionally discourages hate picks.
• Doesn't really work well with just unadulterated booster packs, i.e. with 1 Rare, 3 Uncommons per pack in all three rounds.
• It's not exceedingly fair, especially when played with powerful Rares, as the majority of the cards picked have only ever been seen by one player.
• Clashing color choices seem to usually get sorted out without too much frustration, but can, occasionally (rarely?), wreck the decks even if both players draft competently.
• Some Cubes and expansions probably don't work well at all with 30-card decks.
I could easily run through a solo example (me playing both sides), but I'm hardly familiar with any recent sets, so this would probably not be all too useful. For most of my tests, I've used my old Peasant Cube of two full Innistrad (the 2011 original) Common sets and one Uncommon set, with two problematic or boring Commons per color reduced to a single copy and one Uncommon removed entirely for balance reasons (Butcher's Cleaver).
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I was experimenting with 2-player Limited formats back around 2010 when only Winston, Winchester and Solomon were widely used. Seems that this is still kind of the case, Grid Draft perhaps coming closest to contesting their popularity. I had meant to write an article on the subject then, but never got around to it. Having returned to the (casual) game for the nonce, I've now gone through the library of formats presented in said thread, and, after some more testing and deliberating, arrived at a family of formats that I find quite promising. I'm sharing my favorite, which I'm naming "Thrift" because you take as many cards as you like from a pack and because it's for small, cheap Cubes of (mostly but not strictly) Commons and Uncommons. It fits the Hand Drafting category, i.e. packs change hands, although, in Thrift, each pack gets passed only once. It's nothing revolutionary.
Rules:
2 players. 30-card decks. Six 15-card packs randomly drawn from a Cube separated into Commons and non-Commons (this latter category may include Rares too). First a Draft phase in 3 rounds, then a small Sealed phase leading into deck building. One pack per Draft round and per player. The number of non-Commons per pack should be zero in the third round, medium (3-5) in the second round and high (7-10) in the first round. Players choose freely how many cards they want from each pack (0 also possible), but, in total, each player may pick at most 20 cards during the entirety of the Draft phase. All picks remain secret. In each round, the players each decide which cards they want to pick, then both make all their picks simultaneously. The remainder of the pack is passed to the opponent, and players again choose and pick as many cards as they wish. All cards that still haven't been picked are placed on a single facedown discard pile. At the end of the Draft phase, this pile usually contains 50 cards (20 having been picked by each player). For the Sealed phase, each player is dealt 15 cards from the shuffled discard pile. From this (secret) pool of 15 plus 20 cards, each player builds a deck of at least 30 cards, adding as many basic lands as they want. They may set aside up to 6 cards as a sideboard. What remains of the pools and the discard pile gets removed from the play area without further inspection by either player. The winner is determined in a best-of-5 match.
• If Booster packs are used, then very powerful Rares should arguably be removed. They'll appear more consistently with 30-card decks than with 40-card decks, and powerful individual cards make stubborn competition for a color more likely. Without spoiler Rares, it may also make sense to reduce the amount of removal spells a bit. Some like it when the game revolves around answering powerful threats, but this format aims more at cards working together. Peasant Cubes should work well if they resemble typical Limited environments.
• For decent replayability – specifically to prevent players from pretty reliably inferring the contents of their opponent's deck –, the packs should be drawn from a Cube of at least 125 cards, for high replayability something closer to 200.
• When a player is unable to draw a card, they don't lose the game, they just don't draw anymore cards (which is already quite punishing). Or maybe they suffer "card burn," losing 1 to 3 life per card they're unable to draw, or even for any card they're unable to move from the library to any other game zone. Alternatively or additionally, some of the mill cards and cards that make wasteful use of a player's library could be removed from the Cube.
• Card holders – or just some flat box to lean the picked cards against – could be helpful. This might be true for any Draft format that has players juggle secret packs along with secret picks. For Thrift Draft, upright cards have the additional advantage of being easier to count. A life counter can convey the number of picks made even more clearly.
• Sideboards could be larger or be dispensed with entirely. Due to signaling, decks are already pre-sideboarded to an extent. Sideboards do give players a chance to correct any minor blunders that become apparent during the first game.
• Before choosing any cards from a pack passed by the opponent, it's worth trying to read color signals. It's not obvious what to do when apparently sharing a color with an opponent, but being open to (partly) switching to or leaning more heavily onto an uncontested color is generally helpful.
• At the start of round one, without any information yet about the opponent's colors, making a strong commitment to two colors is risky, e.g. 2 or 3 cards in each, some with double-colored mana costs. This warning way not apply when the initial pack contains some key cards for a fringe archetype that may not suffer much from a color clash. A safer approach is to more or less commit to one color, with maybe one more card in a second color that can easily be abandoned or splashed. Flexible openings of e.g. three cards in three different colors, some splashable, plus an artifact also seem to work well.
• When deciding how many picks to save for the end of round three, it's worth considering whether a color is shared with the opponent and how many picks they have left.
• The cards received for the Sealed portion have all been rejected before by both players. There can be some small gem from round one whose usefulness wasn't yet evident then or a couple of decent cards missed in round three when running out of picks to make, but, mostly, those cards will be chaff to save players who are coming up short on playables. So players will want to play most of the 20 cards they've picked. If those include one mana source, then the aim should be to play all but 2 of them (and 12 basic lands). This leaves a little bit of room for exploration at the start of the Draft phase, and very little room for off-color hate picks (i.e. to deny a card to the opponent). Uncertainty about the opponent's color choices additionally discourages hate picks.
• It's not exceedingly fair, especially when played with powerful Rares, as the majority of the cards picked have only ever been seen by one player.
• Clashing color choices seem to usually get sorted out without too much frustration, but can, occasionally (rarely?), wreck the decks even if both players draft competently.
• Some Cubes and expansions probably don't work well at all with 30-card decks.