The best version of MTG for experts is Mental Magic. The only thing you keep track of is the number of cards in your hand and how many lands you have in play. A card gets its identity when you play it. You can play it in a car with no board!
Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
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Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#82This 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…
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…
Sorcery TCG
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#83Just as a heads-up for non-magic players, each of those 40-card decks contains several multiple-thousand dollar cards. I wouldn't be surprised if those 240 cards cost over $50,000.
Or print outs of jpgs.
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#84My brother and I made up a version of Magic as kids where all the mana is laid out sideways in staggered rows between the players, creating a sort of hex grid landscape. You drew and played from your deck, but placed cards on the "map" created by the mana on the board, only where the adjacent mana matched their cost, and moved around attacking each other. Six adjacencies meant cards could cost up to seven and work in…
90s kids won at MTG by having the more convincing argument.
Too true. The idea that you could play instants during your opponents turn caused many a disagreement, especially over combat timings or unintuitive but real mechanics like “stack combat damage, sac mogg fanatic”
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#85> 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'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?
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#86This 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'…
> the game is fundamentally stingy with cards
Just play blue, that's not a problem then.
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#87My brother and I made up a version of Magic as kids where all the mana is laid out sideways in staggered rows between the players, creating a sort of hex grid landscape. You drew and played from your deck, but placed cards on the "map" created by the mana on the board, only where the adjacent mana matched their cost, and moved around attacking each other. Six adjacencies meant cards could cost up to seven and work in…
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.
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#88> 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.
List of black deck: three Hypnotic Specter cards.
Common...
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#89Try Canadian Highlander: https://canadianhighlander.ca/about/
Re: Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
#90This 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.
Drafting last Friday, my first hand was zero lands, my second hand was one land, my third hand (bottoming two) had three lands. However, I then kept drawing four-drop spells and no more lands for 8 turns.
So is it "on me?" Or is it just that the game just is high variance?