by Klaxas
another way you could possibly do it is this. first give all players thier mage only cards.sort all cards by school (in case of multiple schools go with the more dominate one)
shuffle each school together and deal them out face up in piles of 5 cards so the schools are grouped (hope i am explaining this right. so all the fire spells are in this area, if there are 30 fire spells there would be 6 groups of 5) the last group in each school may have fewer cards.
all piles are face up and public knowledge. so looking around first mage picks one pile, then all mages in order pick 1 pile, last mage picks 2 piles, then it reverses at 1 pile each back to first player who then picks 2 etc. till all piles are picked then make your spellbooks from that.
order example
player 1- 1 pile
player 2- 1 pile
player 3- 1 pile
player 4- 2 piles
player 3- 1 pile
player 2- 1 pile
player 1- 2 piles.
as more sets come out you could make the piles larger, 10 cards, 15 cards. in order to keep drafting down to a reasonable timeframe.