Tournament procedures

Draft

Usually, three boosters are drafted, in reverse order of their release.
First booster is passed to the left; second is passed to the right; third, again to the left.
Players may look at the cards they have drafted between the boosters and, at Regular REL, during the draft.
Players should not communicate in any way.

Deck swap is done to minimize the potential for cheating via adding cards to your card pool.

The players open the packs, register all cards that are there in the total column.

Then judges redistribute the packs randomly. There are a few techniques to do that:

The simpliest one is the head judge telling players to pass the cards with the decklist a few times to the right, across, a few times to the left.
This option is prone to certain problems, as players have their card pools more or less nearby.
In addition to that, siblings are usually sitted next to each other, which may help them cheat.
Finally, the chance for a player to get his own cards back is miniscule in this situation. It is good when a few players get their own cards back, to prevent additional cheating possibilities.
The best one is rubber bands and zip bags. Simply pack cards with decklists, put all such card pools in one box, then distribute randomly.
Although there are a few techniques to fold the cards in the decklist, the resulting decklist is very untidy, as well as not firm.
The final technique requires all players to have finished registering their card pools. Judges then should take a random pile of cards with the decklist, go to another random table, put it there and repeat.
With enough judges this could take a minute and result in a perfectly randomly distributed card pool.

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