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.
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.
Other games to look at include the Undaunted [1] series by Osprey Games:
- They use deckbuilding-esque mechanics to simulate squad level combat in WWII.
- They also have staggered tiles creating a hex-like board. When I first saw undaunted I thought, "oh, I did that years ago with Mana cards!"
- There are little punch out tokens representing the cards in your deck. Who you have in your hand each turn represents who you can give orders to on the board.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/63557/series-undau...
Thanks for the reference too. There doesn't seem to be a lot of data on that page but I'll look into it as far as I can.
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."
(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.
to point, your land for draw is kinda implemented with trade routes https://gatherer.wizards.com/9ED/en-us/108/trade-routes
And that has an additional mana cost to balance it (though it does have additional bonus). So you could kinda say "everyone gets trade-routes already in play" but like any "free card" fix does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken" ?
exactly, that's why it probably isn't feasible other than casual/social play: there's no change to the fundamental rules that doesn't end up warping the meta-game. (Particularly if the fix relates to mitigating mana flood/screw with consistency: I suspect it rewards combo lists, whose win-cons are indistinguishable from "find three specific cards".)
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.
Cards release more slowly than the FFG era, but the current stewards (Null Signal) have been doing a great job for the last eight years.
There's a community app to play against an AI, which has a good tutorial if you want to dip your toes in: https://chiriboga.sifnt.net.au/
Just play blue, that's not a problem then.
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.
this would be balanced for both players.
If course with magic the lands pile would have to have rules like no lands that turn into creatures or something.. maybe even just basic lands .
but each person gets a land each turn - been thinking that makes the game better.
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.
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.
So is it "on me?" Or is it just that the game just is high variance?
Besides, with a 37 lands commander deck, the chances that in 4 hands (if your limit is bottoming 2, 5 cards in hand) starts getting low. Around 1 in 10 and that's ignoring mana rocks (2 lands + 1 mana rock) which probably brings it much closer to 1 in 14+.
If you add the chances of more than 4 lands (also fairly undesirable) your odds of a bad forced hand climb to 1 in 7, which is still pretty far from the 50% chance the original post is talking about.
Without the free mulligan you would be at 1 in 4, which is why I said free mulligan is the way to go.
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.
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.
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...
The canonical MtG lore is not exactly deep and refined anyway.
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
