This is a companion to this gist which explains how to participate in a draft hosted this way.
We may all be quarantined at home, but I'm not going to let that get between me and my weekly cube draft night. I bought an entire copy of my cube on Magic Online so I could keep drafting and iterating on it even while we can't gather in person. Is it more of a pain than drafting a first-party cube? Without a doubt. But you can do it with your friends, at any time, using your cube list.
This document will walk a cube owner through the process of hosting a cube draft where decks are drafted on dr4ft.info. It was written in May 2020, and some details of how things work may change in the future. Feel free to post updates in the comments, or even just fork this and modify it as necessary.
To begin, here are two optional things you can do. These require a few more external resources, but they will substantially simplify a number of aspects of the process.
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Have a non-drafter host. My wife likes to spectate cube drafts, but she doesn't want to play in them, so she's volunteered to act as host. This means she can spend time trading cards to drafters while I'm deckbuilding and so on.
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Have a separate account with only the cube. If the Magic Online account owns no cards but the cube you're drafting, it makes it much easier to get exactly the same cards back and verify that you've done so. Otherwise, if you have two copies of (say) Jace the Mind Sculptor, Magic Online won't automatically add the one you traded away to your wishlist when it's time to trade back.
For this document, I'll assume you're doing both of these, but I'll also try to give you a heads up in places where the process might change if you're not doing one.
You'll need to do a few steps before you're ready to start drafting. Fortunately, these only need to happen once!
Before you begin drafting, you'll need to get a digital copy of your cube. Be prepared to lay down some cash for this. I bought mine from MTGO Traders. Cardhoarder is another reasonable option, but I found it difficult to import my full cube list to their website. Each website will walk you through its particular process of getting the cards you buy into your account.
CubeCobra is the cube-tracking website that dr4ft.info looks at to load your cube list. Create an account, and click "Create New Cube" in the drop-down under your username.
Choose a name for your cube and click "Create". Then go to the "List" tab, click "Import/Export", and upload your cube list in whatever format works best for you.
Back under the "Overview" tab, make a note of your Cube ID. This is what you'll give to dr4ft.info to get it to load your cube list for the draft.
This step should be done by someone who's actually drafting, so if the host isn't drafting assign someone else to do it.
So you've got a copy of your cube in a MTGO account and you're all ready to start running a draft. How do you start? Go to dr4ft.info, select "Cube", type in your Cube ID from CubeCobra, click "Fetch Cubelist", and then click "Create Room".
The page will update to a waiting room. Copy the URL from your browser's URL bar and send it to the players you want to draft with. They'll start to show up in the Players box.
Once all your players have joined, click "Start Game" to begin the draft.
Note that these steps can be done at different paces for different players depending on how quickly they get back to you.
After the draft is done, have each drafter export their deck and send it to you.
Import each deck to Magic Online. I strongly recommend ensuring that each deck's name matches the drafter's Magic Online username (which they should have set as their dr4ft.info name). Once each deck is imported, it may have a few cards with striped caution-tape borders. This means that the version of the card Magic Online thinks you want is different than the version the cube actually has. If there are stripe-bordered cards, right-click the background of the deck and click "Update with version(s) in collection."
Once you have a deck with the appropriate card versions, export that deck again. Right-click the name of the deck, and click "Export".
Save the file. Note that although the filename is the same as the .txt decklist, this is a .dek file instead. That's super important: it means the file includes the versions of the cards as well as their names.
Now you import the deck you just exported, but this time as a binder rather than a deck so you can trade it away. Click the binder icon in the lower left corner of the screen.
The rest of the process works like importing a deck, except that you need to make sure you're loading the .dek file rather than the .txt file.
It's finally time to trade cards to the drafter! Unless you're Magic Online buddies already, the easiest way to start a trade is to click the people icon in the top right of the window and click "Join/New Chat Session".
Once you have a chat window open with them, click the small person icon, right-click the drafter's name, and click "Trade".
This will open a Trade Request dialog. Select the binder you just created and click "OK".
Because you chose the binder made from the drafter's deck, they'll only see the cards from their deck. Make sure they've taken exactly 45 cards, and then click "submit" and "confirm trade" as described here.
Once a drafter is finished, they'll need to trade you back all the cards they borrowed. To make this work, you'll re-use each player's deck that you imported before.
Still on the "Collection" tab, select "Trade Binders" > "Wish List" just to make sure it's starting empty. If there are any cards in there, right click the background, select "Select All", then right click the background again and select "Remove Selected".
Navigate to the player's deck (not the binder). All the cards should be marked as missing, with caution-tape striped edges. Right-click the background and click "Add Missing Cards to Wish List".
Do this the same way as before. This time it doesn't matter which binder you select, but make sure that the drafter you're trading with selects "Full Trade List".
Once the trade window is open, click the "Search Tools" button in the upper left.
On the window that pops up, click "Select Wish List". This will automatically take all the cards from your wish list, which is exactly the set of cards you lent to this drafter!
Make sure you've taken exactly 45 cards, then click "submit" and "confirm trade" as described here. You've got your cards back!
@geometry dash world
I love the optional enhancements you've suggested, like having a non-drafter act as a host and creating a separate account with only the cube cards.