Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it.

(This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn't be exploited in the metagame (aside from limited, or social formats like Commander).

But that aside, I think there are two relatively minor fixes which would go a long way:

- You can spend your "land for turn" to exile the land instead, and draw a card.

- Before your starting draw, Scry 1.

I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.

Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.

Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.

Alternatively you give everyone a free mulligan and if they decide to start with <3 lands in their hand or no mana ramp that's on them.

My issue with guaranteed lands is that they remove the randomness of some lands. I am not guaranteed to get my "no maximum hand size" land and my rogue passage to make my creature unblockable in a typical game of commander. I have to plan for it by using stuff like expedition map.

Interesting. I've been kicking around the idea of designing a similar game (probably in computer format tbh), specifically with the idea of mana being geographically located in a hex grid.

Any ideas for a more balanced version, or other thoughts about it? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be curious to hear more details.

You might be interested in the relatively new TCG Sorcery: Contested Realm. It’s a a game that plays lands to a grid and creatures on the lands, somewhat like the game you invented. Also has an artistic direction reminiscent of 90s era magic.

90s kids won at MTG by having the more convincing argument.

I don’t play much, but some people who play the “commander” format build decks that are carefully balanced against each other. My buddy and I had a blast collecting most of the Lord of the Rings set and playing games of Hobbits vs Sauron, Gandalf vs Galadriel, etc.

That’s how I first played it when I was 14 too. My friend hand a deck of each color and we just took turns playing them.

You might be able to find someone who has built 4 balanced commander decks and you can just play

New rules were always added to each set. I do think deciding on a common "power level" is an issue in casual play. To that end, the commander team set up power level brackets to categorize your decks. This is one of the reasons I like limited though, or if deck building seems daunting, jump start.

Magic is best played in a shared house. We all pretty much stopped buying cards when we went our separate ways. We do occasionally get a draft box in and have a night of it when we get the chance.

Pairs particularly well with cannabis and ample free time. God I miss Magic.

I play casually on rare occasion and mostly play unmodified or very slightly modified pre-constructed commander decks. Best way to play casually IMO.

It's a big reason cube is popular among people with a large enough card pool: I might not, reliably, find every card in my deck for every given game (barring a vintage cube with a lot of tooling to do just that), but the majority of my gameplan is going to work out, because the percentage of the deck you see is quite high.

The thing with commander is that it originally wanted unpredictability along with minimal bans: Any card you own, pretty much. A 40 card eternal constructed format would be extremely consistent: For most tasks, there's probably 3 or 4 cards that do the same thing with minimal differences, or tutors to go fetch them. So even if you were going to make an Underground Breach deck, something based on Doomsday, or even a random storm deck that kills everyone going infinite-ish. you'd get that, immediately. You could even get maximum consistency with lower power cards, after you make a big ban list. With 100, consistency is harder, although it does get a bit easier every year, given that they are releasing 6 or 7 new sets a year.

Wizards embraced commander because nobody else was playing anything else that used new cards, as Standard was way, way too expensive, and Modern accelerated so much it's almost vintage-adjacent. And it's not as if Wizards would make any money at all if they decided that no, pauper is where it's at. They have a big problem in their handsif they want to release enough cards to sell to collectors with infinite maws along with having a game that people actually want to play using the newest cards. The amount of sets you would print every year is completely different for both groups.

Powerful argument for Tiny Leaders as a format.

(I still want to make a Commander deck which can be split in half, have one or two Commanders added, and work as a Tiny Leaders/Duel Deck pair)

Huh, the more you know. I've seen Richard Garfield's name mentioned a bunch over the years, but somehow I've never seen this fact brought up before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield

Agreed. Playing the same pair of decks with a friend over and over is so fun -- you really start to learn the decks, and the early game becomes extremely tactical.

This is a pretty common format called cube.

You can grab a list from somewhere like cube cobra. Buy the cards, or use an online draft tool or print a bunch of proxies and play. Its a fun way to play with cards that are just sitting in bulk boxes and play without having to buy a whole booster box

> But at least with old cards you don't have to contend with Sephiroth, the Ninja Turtles, and My Little Pony.

I thought you were joking, unfortunately you weren't. Money really has no taste.

Check out the Cube Draft format.

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Cube_Draft

I had a friend back in 4th Edition who ran a blue/black deck stuffed with counters and discard stuff like Counterspell and that damn Hypnotic Specter, a flying creature that made you discard a card every time it hit you.

And not just a card: A CARD AT RANDOM.

We used to joke about how obnoxious a Specter equipped with a Viridian Longbow would be.

I've always enjoyed developing custom rules to existing games. I could easily start rambling here of my assorted inventions. One of my favorite means of playing MTG: the Hearthstone variant. This pretty much involves taking your constructed deck and removing all lands to a separate shuffled deck. Play proceeds as usual but with an additional step of drawing 1 land directly to the field. This means that by turn 7, you have 7 land available. I suspect I'm not the only one who's thought of this, right?

> No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells.

I have yet to find someone actually running land destruction in their deck, it's such a hated mechanic.

Or print outs of jpgs.

If you want to restrict yourself to cards printed before a certain date, why not ask your play group to do just that? If you need more inspiration, there are unofficial formats like 93-94, Old Frame Vintage, Premodern, etc.

ETA: I don't know what gameplay is like as you remember it, but you might be interested in Pauper, especially if you are looking for a more official format. A good number of old school cards are relevant in that format, and these cards won't rotate out. Sometimes new cards enter the meta, but because you're limited to commons, it's not expensive. You also can just keep a deck around for a while. It's ok if you're not at the cutting edge of the meta...