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."
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.
(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
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...
> 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 have yet to find someone actually running land destruction in their deck, it's such a hated mechanic.
Seems odd when followed by every 40 card deck having all color-relevant moxen and sol ring...
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