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Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

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Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#41

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ "I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for wher…

Alternatively you give everyone a free mulligan and if they decide to start with 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.

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#42
i wish this gave more details about the format! would love to know what the overall card pool ended up being, and which decks performed best.

small plug but i run a format of magic of my own, a (non-Commander) multiplayer format that lets players play three games with side boarding. i think it's pretty cool, if anyone here wants to check it out! it's called Coalition, and we have rules and decks at https://mtgcoalition.com

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#43

> What is fun? > Here is a list of things that make a game of Magic The Gathering fun to us. > No Discard. It sucks to have no spells to play. > No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells. I've always enjoyed these kinds of house rules that let you customize TCGs to your own liking. A while back, I bought a bulk box of common Pokemon cards and put together some decks where I limited the cards to basic…

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.

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#44
post #9

FUN? How can it be fun without discard and land destruction? Sounds like Gen-Z mtg

Including Moxen and no hand interaction is certainly a choice. The Battlecruiser to battle all cruisers.

I do have to kind of chuckle a bit at no land destruction but Sol/Mox is fine. I guess it's fine if you're playing with proxies so the playing field can be levelled otherwise... RIP for the less wealthy opponent.

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#45
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My land destruction deck was fun for me .

Ya haha, I was going to say, land destruction is not particularly fun for anyone but the pilot. Never heard of someone getting Wasteland ed or Stone Rain ed over and over with a smile on their face. Lands used to be such a cool deck, too. Loam plus the occasional Marit Lage was such a badass concept.

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Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#46

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ "I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for wher…

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.

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#48
post #41

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ "I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for wher…

Alternatively you give everyone a free mulligan and if they decide to start with 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.

Only allow certainty for basic lands?

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#49

This is cool. 40 card decks are great! In addition to being physically ergonomic, I find 40 cards to be a fun deck-building size. With about 17 lands, you get 23 choices to make of what to include outside of that, which feels like a sweet spot between deck-building expressiveness and decision fatigue. As an aside, I'm convinced that a big reason WotC (and FLGS) are pushing commander so hard is because 100 card decks…

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.

Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40

#50
post #46

This is my favorite alternative form of Magic: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ "I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for wher…

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'…

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