Drafts? With a lot of difficulty.

I print out the visual spoiler, hide the rares and mythics, print it out again, hide the uncommons, print it out again. Cut up all those bits of paper, slip them into sleeved MtG cards, sort them by rarity, sort the commons by colour, make up boosters... and then try to get enough friends over to do a draft, which is even harder than all that first step.

I'd really like to enhance Multiverse to allow on-site drafting of custom cards. I've done quite some thinking about how it might work, how to architect the server-side code for it and so on, but it's a lot of work; even if I were working on it as my major hobby it'd be at least 6 months away, and I'm mainly occupied with playtesting my board game designs at the moment. (I got a contract offer from a publisher to publish a board game design of mine, which is rather awesome.)

It's worth noting that testing "precons" is a lot easier. Make your decklist, put it on a details page with ((cardname)) terminology, hit that details page's "printable" link, print it, cut it up, stick it into the sleeves of an already-sleeved deck you've got. Make a few more such decks, and then when friends come over anyway, you can just get them to play one or two games with your home-made cards, and get a lot of useful feedback that way.

For draft there is the "Random booster" option. That's what I did; though I also printed out the mythic rares and slotted them into the packs, because I deliberately wanted to see what would happen.

Getting printing at the right size is a pain.

Are there any Apprentice clones that hasbro hasn't foxed yet? If so, could we maybe get an exporter to that format?

I've yet to hold a formal 'multiverse' draft (got a few coming down the line, though), but when I drafted Magic 20XX, I set the card designer I was working with to make random packs, like Vitenka said, and printed them up. Afterwards, I saved the paper 'cards' and sorted them, so that when the second draft came, and I hit the random pack button, I wouldn't have to print so many cards.

It took a very long time. Like a 'no one will appreciate the work you're putting into this, so don't expect them to' long time. I'm still torn as to whether my method was better or Alex's method (print out a common sheet x5, and uncommon sheet x3 and a rare and mythic sheet x2 or x1, then randomly shuffle) is the better method. Alex's method is faster, but the packs aren't representation of what a real Magic draft is like. Sometimes, in a 16 person draft, one common will pop up 10 times, and another common will only pop up once. Alternatively, though, random booster generators (and I assume this applies to multiverse as well) don't take print runs into consideration. Boosters near other boosters will generally have a reasonable mixture of Magic cards in real life. And the print run is designed so that the colors are reasonably balanced in packs... something that a random generator won't duplicate.

So when 20XD6, 20XXs expansion comes to town, I think I'm just going to use Alex's method, but print a lot of commons. Like maybe 14x common sheets. Color sort 5x common sheets, and make sure at least one common of each color ends up in a pack, then randomize the rest. Again... a lot of work. But I do want as close to a sense of realism as possible.

On a separate side note, if you need to print a specific selection of cards, we talked about that issue here.

Multiverse's booster generator doesn't exactly have print runs, but it does ensure the commons are evenly distributed by colours. I tried to do this in a way that'd work in heavy-gold sets, heavy-hybrid sets, artifact sets and so on: basically we put the commons in cardlist order, split that list into ten / eleven, fudge those boundaries a little bit, then randomly select one common from each section. It probably gives rather better colour consistency per booster than might be ideal if I were strictly trying to match Wizards' boosters, but I don't think people really care.

"(I got a contract offer from a publisher to publish a board game design of mine" So that's what happened to the announced Multiverse releases XD

I hope that works out well for you.

Heh. Yeah, sorry. Board game design and playtesting is indeed occupying the largest part of my spare time at the moment. I am still working on updating Multiverse a bit, but I've been in the middle of a big port from Rails3.0 to Rails3.2 for a while, and that's been stopping me working on new Multiverse features.