My 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 the format.
It was great fun, and also completely unbalanced. Once you knew your opponent's powerful card, it focused battles around the intersections where they could spawn. I've heard of other people doing similar things, but never an official format that used mana as a landscape game board.
We mostly did it that way because we didn't know the actual rules, which I recall being widely true of both Magic and Pokémon among kids who collected the cards in the 2000s.
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.
"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 where there is a ton of back-and-forth on both sides. I wanted to create a format that eliminated those unpleasant 75% of games that are unfulfilling and foster a format where ALL of the games were as interactive as possible."
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.
There’s a few modern TCGs who take this approach, like Riftbound (the League of Legends TCG that launched last year) and Sorcery Contested Realm.
Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.
This is similar to how VS system worked, it was a short lived superhero CCG in the mid 2000s, you could play up to one card per turn facedown as a “land”, but you still drew from one deck.
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.
Love that "land for turn", although I think it might shift the balance a little too much, in that you can make a deck with too much land and high cost spells and know you can cast them reliably. There needs to be a risk factor in building up to high mana to make low mana spells matter.
Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.
Well that's your "land for turn" not "replace playing a land". You can only play one land each turn, if other cards let you play extra lands...you can play extra lands!
Magic isn't really stingy with card draw, if I understand what you're saying. It might be a drawback in a specific strategy, but that's how the game balances itself. If weenie or burn decks had card draw (or selection) on par with control decks, they would be too good...
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.
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!
There is an interesting old article by Magic's creator about what the game environment was like during the early playtesting days - when card packs were handed out to a community of playtesters at UPenn, and they traded in a closed ecosystem, occasionally getting an influx of additional cards. It seems like this was a pretty successful recreation of that feeling:
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 means you get to sell more cards.
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.
My own lil custom 40 card format is actually explicitly designed to be backwards compatible with any existing commander deck! You can just take a deck, draft from it (or just split it down the middle after a good shuffle), give one of the decks to a friend, and start playing!
That looks really fun, the problem being deck assembly. My issue with modern magic is the complexity of the ever-changing rules and playing against people who have put time into it, that laugh maniacally as they combo you. The asymmetrical play makes board games more appealing.
I especially love the art and simplicity of revised and third editions.
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
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.
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.
> 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 or stage 1 Pokemon, no high-impact coin flips, and a single EX card per deck. I found that setup to be more enjoyable than the official format.
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 love 40 card MTG. It's one of my fav ways to play. If you play a bunch of games in a row with someone it starts feeling like chess, much more deterministic when you're used to their deck. Getting two foundations boosters and shuffling them is such a great way to play. I'll definitely take a look at this
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.
Random fact that I learned recently but I find it interesting: the create of MTG is a direct descendant of a US President. President James Garfield was his great-great grandfather.
Is there any reasonably practical way to play a "restricted" version of MtG with physical cards and a somewhat stable ruleset, reminiscent of what play was like in the late 90s (as I remember it)? I like what's being proposed here, but I don't have access to old cards.
I'm not averse to buying new cards, I just don't want to be on an infinite treadmill of buying new cards and learning new rules forever, it's just not fun in my opinion
You should look into "cube" formats and cube drafts. You might be able to go to your local LGS (gaming store) to set up a cube draft. If it's a cube that uses vintage cards you can usually print proxies for the ultra expensive cards
Yes: Premodern and Legacy. Personally I like Modern and don't mind having things shaken up fairly regularly, but if you want more stability play Legacy and if you want ultimate stability with no new cards ever, play Premodern.
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...
What I've done a couple times but it is kind of a pain because it messes up the sorting of my collection is to make "packs" out of my collection and draft with friends. It's a lot easier to just buy a booster box and draft from that. But at least with old cards you don't have to contend with Sephiroth, the Ninja Turtles, and My Little Pony.
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
Hmmm sounds cool, I had heard about this before and since forgotten. I think part of what I would like is to give some of the old and weird cards in my collection some play though, rather than just playing a well known cube- but then if they're too weird they might not work at all together.
You can absolutely make your own cube, even designed so that some weird cards have good uses, or are working combos. You can have a very low powered cube where people draft something janky like Chamber of Manipulation highly if you slow down the game enough. But at that point you need quite a bit of testing/game design skills, because cubes become unbalanced pretty easily. Hell, even the magic online cubes sometimes have big mistakes, with cards that never get played, or situations where a color combination is just too viable, while others are outright traps.
Don’t fret too much about it. I have a cube and it’s mostly a random collection of cards a friend and I had. Just separate the colours into roughly equal stacks and make sure each has a reasonable ratio of creatures to other spells plus a workable mana curve.
Play a few games and you’re bound to start finding combinations of cards you never thought of before. Then after a while you can tweak it if you find something is too unbalanced. For example, in an earlier version of my cube, enchantments were disproportionately busted, so we removed some and added some more removal.
One house rule we have is that if you pick a dual land (we just have the cheap ones), at the end of the draft you can exchange it for another from outside the cube that matches the colours you’re actually playing.
I groaned through the LoTR set (some of the cards were really cool), but I noped TF out at Final Fantasy with Spiderman on the horizon, and I'm 100% never going back. I've been playing on and off since 1993, so they're absolutely burning their brand.
Yep, I've sold my entire collection at this point (all digital on MODO) and will likely never go back. I think planeswalkers were the beginning of the end for me, and its been a non-stop slide of power creep and paid promotions ever since.
I loved the Warhammer 40k sets and the LotR sets. Didn't care about the others. Other people loved the FF or Avatar. Different people have different tastes (everybody hated Spiderman though).
The canonical MtG lore is not exactly deep and refined anyway.
On the other hand, the Final Fantasy set release was the most fun I’ve had at a pre-release event. Personally I’d have preferred Dragon Quest with some sweet Toriyama art, but you take what you can get. I met people who had stopped playing MTG decades ago but came back for the pre-release to see some of their favourite characters. Good conversations. I’ll also say that while in the big scheme of things of course FF MTG was a financial decision, the bulk of it felt like a labour of love in the sense of “how can we translate this FF idea to MTG” with some awesome results. Cards like Overkill¹ and the concept of summons² (a mix of creature and saga). They also made sure there was something for everyone. All FF were represented, go get your favourites.
I didn’t attend the TNMT pre-release but had fun speculating on e.g. what colour each turtle would be. Within the constraints, I think they got it right (even if Sneak VS Ninjutsu is unnecessary complexity). I’m curious about Star Trek too. I can imagine four or five legendaries for Rom³ (a secondary character) alone and they could all coexist.
So yeah, they’re doing it for money and I do think there are too many of them, but at least they’re not half-assing it every time and are letting the designers really work with the possibilities. There’s only so much you can do with a generic fantasy setting.
This is essentially just MTG limited -- draft or maybe team draft. Draft is my favorite part. Though I don't necessarily agree with the "things that make magic fun". Mill/Discard/Land Destro decks are fun, janky decks that rarely come together and it's fun to try and make them work.
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
yeah in multiplayer it’s quite different. also note that here, the player doing worst goes first in games 2 and 3, that advantage is an autobalancing mechanic that deliberately gives that first turn plus draw.
This deck probably costs as much as a down-payment on a home...MTG prices have really inflated over the past 2 decades ,especially for limited edition sets
Just 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.
It's light on details for talking about a "format". How many cards were in each packs? Did players get just one, or were many distributed to players? Were they randomly put together or seeded in some way? Was there a thought around rarity distribution like normal packs?
On the topic of fun 40 card decks, after my partner and I thoroughly (winston) draft through a bunch of packs in a set, I like to make a battle box of a few 40 card decks which are more coherent than the average limited deck.
I think people get too hung up on the formats in sanctioned tournaments. People says "magic is expensive", but that's not true! Modern decks in the metagame are expensive. You can play magic on the cheap an infinite number of ways. There's near endless opportunity for replay value in 3 packs per person!
See how the newest cards he gets to show there are... quite old. The moxes were great back in alpha, but what made them really broken was the increase in quality of what you could cast early. An environment where Serra Angel is viable is far more tolerant to moxes than, say, one where Flametongue Kavu is on the weak side. Oops, turn 1 blightsteel colossus off of tinker: You better have artifact removal!
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.
Ya haha, I was going to say, land destruction is not particularly fun for anyone but the pilot. Never heard of someone getting Wastelanded or Stone Rained 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.
I was about to say, it may not be fun for YOU to not be able to play any spells but making you submit by choking you out is fun for ME. Prison decks were always my jam.
It was great fun, and also completely unbalanced. Once you knew your opponent's powerful card, it focused battles around the intersections where they could spawn. I've heard of other people doing similar things, but never an official format that used mana as a landscape game board.
We mostly did it that way because we didn't know the actual rules, which I recall being widely true of both Magic and Pokémon among kids who collected the cards in the 2000s.
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 where there is a ton of back-and-forth on both sides. I wanted to create a format that eliminated those unpleasant 75% of games that are unfulfilling and foster a format where ALL of the games were as interactive as possible."
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.
Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.
(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.
Possible tweaks, maybe it has a cost (all lands have cycling 1 or 2 mana or life.) Or delay that draw until end of turn, which feels like about the right power level, but does have memory and execution issues.
Is Netrunner something you can get into these days, or is it hopelessly OOP? I remember hearing good things about it.
I sadly haven’t convinced my MtG playgroup (or family or other friends) to try it with me.
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.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/creation-magi...
As an aside, I'm convinced that a big reason WotC (and FLGS) are pushing commander so hard is because 100 card decks means you get to sell more cards.
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.
(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)
My own lil custom 40 card format is actually explicitly designed to be backwards compatible with any existing commander deck! You can just take a deck, draft from it (or just split it down the middle after a good shuffle), give one of the decks to a friend, and start playing!
Some more info here (if a little self-promo is OK, as a treat): https://scry.fish/microEDH
I especially love the art and simplicity of revised and third editions.
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
Pairs particularly well with cannabis and ample free time. God I miss Magic.
> 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 or stage 1 Pokemon, no high-impact coin flips, and a single EX card per deck. I found that setup to be more enjoyable than the official format.
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 have yet to find someone actually running land destruction in their deck, it's such a hated mechanic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield
I'm not averse to buying new cards, I just don't want to be on an infinite treadmill of buying new cards and learning new rules forever, it's just not fun in my opinion
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...
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
Play a few games and you’re bound to start finding combinations of cards you never thought of before. Then after a while you can tweak it if you find something is too unbalanced. For example, in an earlier version of my cube, enchantments were disproportionately busted, so we removed some and added some more removal.
One house rule we have is that if you pick a dual land (we just have the cheap ones), at the end of the draft you can exchange it for another from outside the cube that matches the colours you’re actually playing.
I thought you were joking, unfortunately you weren't. Money really has no taste.
The canonical MtG lore is not exactly deep and refined anyway.
I didn’t attend the TNMT pre-release but had fun speculating on e.g. what colour each turtle would be. Within the constraints, I think they got it right (even if Sneak VS Ninjutsu is unnecessary complexity). I’m curious about Star Trek too. I can imagine four or five legendaries for Rom³ (a secondary character) alone and they could all coexist.
So yeah, they’re doing it for money and I do think there are too many of them, but at least they’re not half-assing it every time and are letting the designers really work with the possibilities. There’s only so much you can do with a generic fantasy setting.
¹ https://scryfall.com/card/fin/109/overkill
² https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28type%3Acreature+type%3Asaga...
³ https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rom
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Cube_Draft
Seems odd when followed by every 40 card deck having all color-relevant moxen and sol ring...
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
First player draw The first player does draw a card.
Not sure if its a good idea? Gives first player a HUGE advantage.
On the topic of fun 40 card decks, after my partner and I thoroughly (winston) draft through a bunch of packs in a set, I like to make a battle box of a few 40 card decks which are more coherent than the average limited deck.
I think people get too hung up on the formats in sanctioned tournaments. People says "magic is expensive", but that's not true! Modern decks in the metagame are expensive. You can play magic on the cheap an infinite number of ways. There's near endless opportunity for replay value in 3 packs per person!
Sounds like Gen-Z mtg