When I first got started with Magic I only had one deck, a huge pile of I dunno 120 cards or something (Revised and Fallen Empires), I’m not sure. There were enough lands in there to cover everything too. So my neighbor and I played the then–well-known “both players draw from the same deck” format for a while and it sucked. We were beginners so we got board stalls until someone drew the Keldon Warlord and won. Burrowing and Iron Star were also good cards in the “format”.

So I quickly concluded that the right way to play Magic is that everyone builds their own deck like constructing a clever li’l machine and then we’d face them off.

Not so fast! Because I’m going back to same-deck formats (like Battlebox a.k.a. Danger Room for example) now that I’ve realized that it solves all Magic’s problems.

That’s a way of playing where both players draw from the same deck. (Danger Room also has a special rule for how to get lands—the deck is all action has no land, and players start with ten specific lands in hand that don’t count towards hand limit. That’s not what this article is about and I’m not a hater of Magic’s original mana system, but we often do play it wiwith this separate land system like Danger Room. It makes the shared deck easier to build, there can be more colors, and more cards can fit in the box. Some shared-deck formats like Forgetful Fish just shuffle all the lands in and they work fine.)

Save the Environment

Paper Magic is fundamentally not a sustainable game. There are climate culprits that are even worse, way worse, but the idea of indefinitely adding cards to a game, and most memorable usable keepable cards are surrounded by a bunch of draft chaff, one-time-use disposable cards. The fantasy equivalent of scratch ticket losers. With same-deck formats you can use old existing cards you already have and you can use them again and again.

Power Level

You can build it to be all-powerful or all-weak or anyhere in between. If there is any home for old Gray Ogres and Pearled Unicorns to butt heads once more, it’s here.

To me as someone nostalgic for those early days at the kitchen table when cards like Raging Bull and Headless Horseman actually were super cool and appealing and I wanted to play with them and see them in actual action, this is the way. This is something I like compared to Cube where those cards wouldn’t get picked.

At the same time, for those who enjoy powerful cards and “bombs”, same-deck Magic is a way to include them in the deck guilt-free because any player can draw them and the rest of the deck can be built around making them interesting but not oppressive.

No more pay to win

Constructed Magic can absolutely devolve to pay-to-win in many formats. Limited becomes pay to even play (and the more you do it the better you get at it).

Even lending decks to each other becomes awkward. Do you lend the best deck or the second-best deck or how do you even find out? Here, y’all draw from the same deck.

Now, cube (a weird word for “shuffling up old cards and drafting them or using them for faux sealed deck play”) is another solution. And I love it. And I’ve been playing mostly cube for many years now and I wish I had found cube long ago. Magic in high school would’ve been so much more fun with our tiny collections if we had had the idea to just shuffle up and redraft our cards.

No bad matchups

Bad matchups is an even bigger reason I don’t like Constructed than pay-to-win is. People don’t like mana screw? How about losing the game before even shuffling up? Not into it. Even limited can suffer from bad matchups. Same-deck Magic fixes it. Some people love the metagame analysis part of Magic. “Hmm control is big now so maybe I can run under it with a fast valuetown aggro”. Not into it.

The matchup problem is especially bad for kitchen table. Going to a larger context a couple of bad matchups are fine because you might have some good ones too but at home it just works so awfully and you end up teching against each other, it gets ridiculous.

A home for un-cards or home-made cards

Even the occasional un-card or home-made card (you can use “double-faced helper cards” a.k.a. substution cards to scribble your own rules text on) can belong here. You don’t have to risk a bunch of stickers or dexterity cards, just put in the specific cards that make the game better. One of the problems with home-made cards is that you don’t wanna make them too good or too bad but in a shared deck, any player can draw them so balancing them becomes easier. (Just don’t make “Target Sandra loses the game”.)

World-building & flavor

Normally in Magic you can’t really control what your opponents play. If they put in cards with a flavor or vibe you hate in their decks and on the table there’s not a lot you can do against that in your local FNM. But a shared-deck can be more curated if you want.

If you want all Sarpadia all the time, you can. All old-face? All Spider-Man? All Ravnica? We have a D&D-themed one.

This is optional and you can go the other direction and make it sprawling and wild and have people contribute mystery ingredients to the soup.

But what about deckbuilding?

People who love deckbuilding can pour that love into building shared-decks and danger rooms!

Or two people can build decks and then shuffle them up.

But what about the bubble?

I’ve been burned before by the dream of “okay everyone just buy exactly this amount of random product and then we just use that to build decks from all summer”, a “bubble” of nostalgia and re-imposed kitchen table limits. The allure of getting to build and rebuild to fight each other in a hyperlocal mini-meta. It just… it requires a small group of people to be on the exact same page about the appeal of that idea. (And you still get into problems like bad matchups or unbalanced cards.)

A shared-deck is fun even if you’re just two players. It scales all the way down to “Hmm, it’s been a long time since you and I played some Magic. Wanna shuffle up and play?” It’s a less ambitious approach that keeps the game in the box. Magic’s goal was to be a game bigger than its box. Between games you’re trying to acquire cards, meet others, hone your decks. Shared-deck formats puts Magic back into the box, making it more like any other boardgame. That feels like a very welcome change to me.

But what about addiction?

Okay, okay. It’s not all roses. Any time someone comes up with a solution to Magic, like how a few years ago the Tolarian Community College professor suggested “everyone just buy one Deckbuilder’s Tool Kit and stick to that”, what ends up happening is that people play Magic, get into Magic, start lusting after more cards, more formats, new cards, more cards. This doesn’t solve that. Cube already solved many of the above issues and people can be like “Okay I only play cube” and some can stick to that and that’s great and other’s can’t and that’s not so great. I don’t have an answer for that. It makes me hesitate to even post this because maybe this “solution” is the equivalent of “enh, one glass is fine”. Paving the road with good intentions.

Draft-as-you-play

I’ll give you a li’l bonus: We’ve also experimented with replacing the draw from the shared deck with a Winston draft and we’ve also tried having a row of cards be a shared hand in addition to the private hands. Kind of like Star Realms a little bit. Magic the deckbuilding game except it’s not your deck you’re “building” out of these draftable cards, it’s your board.

In the end I usually prefer just drawing normally but this stuff is fun occasionally for variety.

Not literally a shared deck?

Also if you have plenty of tutors or milling or deck manipulation just feel free to split the deck up into two decks. Re-shuffle them and re-split them between each game. I really do enjoy the “drawing from the same deck”, literally drawing from one deck, where a Memory Lapse becomes a way to take the card for yourself or the occasional scrying effect can impact either or both players but that’s for decks that don’t go overboard with those kinds of effects, or decks deliberately built around such effects being shared. If you do have lots cards that don’t work well with a shared stack, just feel free to split the decks up into two literal and physical decks.

A lot of people wonder why the kindred cardtype in Magic can’t be a supertype or why it’s even necessary in the first place and I’ll explain that here!

Why it’s even necessary!

It was decided once upon a time that subtypes belong to specific card types. Like “aura” is an enchantment subtype, “elephant” is a creature subtype and so on. And the game rules is a super stickler about this point. It’s something it really insists on.

Now, could this decision change? Yes. With strange aeons even foundational rules can die.

That’s actually one of many reasons why Wizards better never hire me as a rules manager because I’d spend so much time trying to undo this “subtypes belong to specific card types” rule because I think that rule is so dumb. I’d just have a trait list and I’d make it more than just one line too. (Similar to how Netrunner does it.)

But dumb as it is, it does have a silver lining: because of this rule, if the game sees a card that’s “enchantment creature — aura licid” it can know that the “licid” part belongs to the “creature” part, and the “aura” part belongs to the “enchantment” part.

Now, if that li’l silver lining makes the restriction worth it (especially as they’re moving away from subtypes having rules baggage, like how it’s not the “aura” part that makes enchantments stick to stuff, it’s the “attach” part that does that)? I’m not sure. But it is what it is and that’s why it’s there.

By now that’s also something that digital relies on It knows that a “destroy all goblins” it only needs to look at creatures and kindreds.

But splice onto arcane!

However, while subtypes can’t be mixed and matched, two card types can share subset typesets as long as they share all of them. Instants and sorceries share all the same subtypes, which is why both instants and sorceries can be arcane.

And that’s why kindred: it’s a card type that share the subtype typeset with creature without sharing creatures other rules baggage like being permanents.

So why isn’t it a supertype?

If this could be done with any other marker, like a supertype, it wouldn’t need to be a supertype either. In that world it could be a keyword even or a li’l icon or whatever. And maybe that is possible with Magic rule 101. That’s the paradox of this: if this could be a supertype, it would not need to be a supertype. That’s a mindmelting sentence so let me try again:

If the card could just say “This sorcery can have creature subtypes even though it’s not a creature”, it could do that through card text or a keyword granting that ability.

If the card could not just say that, it couldn’t do that with a supertype either.

Now, one advantage for our très cray future rules manager unraveling all this stuff to prefer making it a supertype instead of other kinds of markers like keywords or icons would be that existing kindred cards would still look right. “Kindred Sorcery — Goblin” would look the same, visually and typographically I mean, as it it does now when it’s a card type. But that’s really the only advantage in the supertype camp.

Why did the kindred card type go away?

The reasons Wizards don’t like it is that it doesn’t make sense to only use it some of the time. Like if a goblin sorcery can be gobliny, why isn’t a fireball spell fiery or a counterspell wizardly or a heal spell clericy or an ice spell icy? They’d have to put that stuff on all the cards all the time (which I’d think would be pretty cool actually, hence why I’d want to move to a multi-line trait system) and they don’t like putting stuff on there that the current environment doesn’t even refer to. So either you always have kindred on everything or you never do it, was their thinking, and that’s why they stopped using it.

Why did it change its name?

“Tribal” was an awful name for it in the first place. Card types have changed names before (creatures used to be called summon spells in some zones) so that’s not new.

Magic introduced a new card subtype, “siege”, on a card type that itself was also new, “battle”. You can attack battles and try to defeat them. Sieges are special in that you play them on the opponent’s side of the table so you’re attacking your own sieges.

They got the power level just right and that they deserve major kudos for that, that can’t have been easy 👍🏻

Another compliment they deserve is that they were a very good way to represent all planes (together with a couple of other cards from each plane) truly making MOM feel like it spanned all the planes.

But overall I’m not too fond of them.

Flavor-wise the sieges are weird. So you play a card named Invasion of Segovia (for example). What would you think such a card would represent? It represents… the Segovians fighting back at the Phyrexians—both sides of the card are flavored as Segovians doing Segovian stuff vs them.

OK, so it’s called a “siege”. Like Helm’s Deep. And it’s a pro-Segovia, anti-Phyrexia card. So you’d think you’d want to defend it and defend it and defend it, like the Segovians in the story defended agains the Phyrexians. Siege. Simple. But no! You are trying to attack it down to release the sea tyrant Caetus who’ll help you fight the Phyrexians.

So when your opponent plays a Siege, that means you are suddenly forced to represent someone who is invading Segovia (Phyrexians, presumably, whether or not you’d ever put any Phyrexian cards in your deck) and trying to defend the—not defend Segovia, but defend the invading force so they can’t release the sea tyrant or whatever.

The play patterns are fun (and, importantly they’re fun on either side of the table), I just wish the flavor had made more sense. Sieges, for example, would make more sense as “quests”, like “we wanna go find the sea tyrant Caetus and free him” or something.

“But it had to make sense in MOM, a set about the planes successfully defending against the Phyrexians in battle, a bunch of quests wouldn’t make sense there”—exactly! They don’t make sense! They’re not about successfully defending anything. “But double-sided cards are all about ‘before and after’ stories, we needed the flipped-to-side to represent the Segovians victorious because that’s what happened in the story!” Not sure why we’re even playing a game if the outcome is set, but that’s a story for another day.

MOM has many cards that transform into corrupted, compleated versions of themselves. Those are also awesome but what would’ve made a lot more sense would’ve been if the backsides of the battles had been flavored as phyrexia victorius. Your opponent plays a siege set on Theros and if you can’t defend it, they’ll get a phyrexianized version of Polukranos or something. Really putting you in the shoes of desperately trying to defend against Phyrexia.

I was talking to a guy on mtgzone who doesn’t like EDH.

I used to have the same problem. It used to feel like it was full of invisible and unwritten rules that all contradicted each other. Getting bullied if cards are too strong or too weak.

Casual EDH, that is: as you point out, competitive EDH doesn’t have the same problem.

What I finally realized was that I shouldn’t approach it as a game. I should approach EDH deckbuilding like a crossword maker approaches making a crossword:

To try to create something that is a challenge but beatable.

It’s easy to create an unsolvable crossword. Just a bunch of white noise in a grid. But that’s just no fun to anyone. A good crossbow maker wants the crossword solver to have fun and to enjoy the puzzle, to tease them a bit but keep it realistic and grounded.

Now, a game of EDH isn’t a puzzle, but it’s an experience.

I started out making my first EDH deck super weak (it’s built around Tolarian Serpent) and have gradually been adding powerful cards or interactive cards or cards where I just like the art or the experience or the memory of when I first opened the card. I have a foil Rethink even though there are a lot better stack interaction cards, but it was just the first foil I ever opened so playing it makes me happy. The deck is still weaker than many of precons are out of the box so I still have a ways to go with it but that can be a gradual process of tweaking and modding.

When building a casual EDH deck, the point isn’t to win. It’s just not.

That’s what I was getting wrong, too. I was like “how can I build a deck that can win when you keep springing these arbitrary rules on me like no land destruction and no stax? You’ll just have an endless list of things that you’ll think is ‘too good’; if I find other things that aren’t on your ban list you’ll just add it to the banlist. And you bully me if my deck is too weak. And the games themselves are kingmakery bullshit where you hurt the leader just for leading.”

That’s where I was. So I get it.

Have you ever heard of a boardgame called Zendo? It’s pretty great. Or, better yet, 20 Questions.

In 20 Questions, one player comes up with a secret thing like “Brad Pitt” or “A pencil lead” or “My mom’s shoesize” or “The feeling of regret when missing out on bowling night” or “running with scissors”. And then the other people ask yes & no questions until they can figure it out. The goal of the people guessing is to find out the secret thing. For them, that’s “winning” in some sense of the word. But for the secret-keeper, they aren’t trying to come up with the universe’s hardest word. That just wouldn’t work. It’s easy for them to come up with something that the other people don’t even know exists! The secret-keeper’s job isn’t to win, it’s to come up with an enjoyable, challenging, but possible secret for them to guess.

Same goes for building an EDH deck. You’re trying to create an enjoyable challenge for your friends while also participating with your own fun in the challenges they’ve brought to the table.

Yeah, yeah, EDH as a format has its fair share of fundamental brokennesses that inevitably there are always going to be a high risk of bad experiences, but if you’re still in “the point of the game is to win” mode, you’ve yet to learn the 101 foundational thing which is that EDH is using the Magic cards for something else. You might think that thing is a waste of good Magic cards, that’s fine, but it’s another thing to do with them beyond trying to win.

You have a good basic point: The reason game designers put victory conditions into games in the first place is to guide play. Faffing around with cardboard with pictures and weird spell names on them is a pretty weird human activity in the first place. The thing that guides and structures that weird activity, normally, is that both players are striving for that W.

Casual EDH doesn’t have victory as a goal (in the deckbuilding stage). We’ll have to reach for other forms of guidance and structure there. Such as what would be entertaining and fun for ourselves and for the group.

So Magic had an announcement day where they laid out their plans for the next three years. I’ve sorted everything that they announced by how much I’m into it, and a short thought on each.

So this is not the order they’re gonna come out in. Instead, I’ve placed them from “aww yeah” gradually down to “Not into it”. For me personally. And not having seen the sets.

• Codename Volleyball. Space opera. Yes and yes. I love space opera. One concern is that I have a hard time seeing how they can scale back Magic’s story again, after it, so we care about one-town–level stuff again.
• Caverns of Ixalan. Looks amazing! After our Grendleroot / Veins of the Earth D&D campaign, I got a bit tired of the underground but this has me re-hyped. A fantastic blend between classic pulp tropes and Mesoamerican vibes.
• Bloomburrow. I like it. Seems to be most people’s fave. I hate the Hepcats / Beastars / Blacksad style (which soured me on Capenna and on the leonins and loxodons of other Magic worlds) but I love Mouse Guard and Watership Down, and this seems more like that.♥︎
• Codename Tennis. Three-plane death race. Into it!
• Murders at Karlov Manor. Great! These kinds of more zoomed-in sets really make the planes come alive.
• Wilds of Eldraine. Conflicted! I love fairy tales but I hate food.
• Codename Wrestling. Lorwyn / Shadowmoore. I loved the original Lorwyn but they didn’t stick the landing with Shadowmoore. That’s more on the art direction than the card designs.
• Duskmourn: House of Horror. A little too scary? I hated the Meathook Massacre and I’m hesitant about this. But maybe.
• Codename Ultimate. Tarkir set. I need to see more. Jeskai, Sultai, Mardu, Abzan and Temur are the best flavored factions they’ve ever made but then the morph and the time travel stuff was not so fun.
• Codename Yachting. Arcavios (world of Strixhaven). I like Quandrix but not Zimone, Dina but not Witherbloom, lesson-learn made the games feel samey, overall a positive experience and maybe, like with Ravnica, it’ll click on the return more than the original.
• Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Not sure they can pull of Western in an OK way. I like Vraska, so maybe.
• Codename Zipline. Event set. The previous two have been too bomby for me, gameplay-wise, while I’ve enjoyed the stories and lore. And by bomby I mean powerful cards that run away with the game, something most Magic players seem to like but I hate.
• Final Fantasy UB. My fave of the UB’s announced—I’ve only played some of the games so I’m familiar enough to be hyped but not enough that it feels stale. Spoilers are a concern, but otherwise I’m happy about this.
• Fallout UB. I don’t know a lot about Fallout, but that’s kind of a plus since it’ll make the cards feel fresh.
• Assassin’s Creed UB. Dammit! Having LotR on Arena has meant getting the books spoiled over and over again at every loading screen, but I’ve already seen the movies so it’s not so bad. But getting spoiled on Doctor Who has been less fun, and I don’t want that to happen with Assassin’s Creed, which I haven’t gotten to at all yet.
• Remastered sets. I don’t draft fresh boosters as much these days. It’s bad for the environment. Cube & digital FTW. Reprints are great, I’ve just soured on the entire booster experience.
• Modern Horizons III. MH2 was a disaster. Some people say the game “needed” the elementals and Ragavan. I don’t know about Ragavan, but the elementals have made the games more interactive and interesting. (I prefered Legacy to Modern because of how Force of Will policed the meta.) But why did they need to be mythic in an already overcosted set?
• Jurassic World UB. I hate this franchise so much.

Just a heads up: gonna be some spoilers for the Lord of the Rings novels down below.

Magic has started making cards from other games, books, or shows like The Walking Dead, Street Fighter, Arcane, Fortnite, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, and The Lord of the Rings. That’s called “Universes Beyond”.

I’ve been all for that, with one exception—I don’t ever want to see “brands”, like “I tap your 3/3 Pepsi with my Tide pod”. I get that an IP is a brand but I hope the line between what’s a cultural artifact, like a novel, versus a product with a logo, is clear enough even for Hasbro.

With that exception firmly in place, I’ve been happy with this. And the D&D set is my favorite set of all time.

But looking back at these past first few years of Universes Beyond, one thing strikes me. There’s not the same sense of exploration and discovery and wonder that we have with Magic usually, even one based on stories like Eldraine. It’s stiff, it’s walking down an already trodden path.

The Doctor Who stuff and the Lord of the Rings stuff is organized the same way as the source material unless you really go out of your way to mix and match.

I mean, Brewer’s Kitchen assembled the Ratadrabik / Smeagol / Boromir combo] and joked:

Now, I gotta applaud Wizard’s card design team here. This is just like in the movie. Remember when Boromir has sacrificed himself over and over again, and then Gollum looked at this and said “Oh my God, I’m so god-damned tempted by this ring, I could like steal all of Sauron’s land or something, I don’t know… and mill them?”

Yes, kinda, actually. Boromir did get tempted by the ring but then took arrow after arrow, sacrificing himself trying to save the hobbits, making the ring even more precious to them, and to Gollum as he guided them all the way through Sauron’s land.

Boromir gets tempted & sacrifices himself to save the team. Gollum gets tempted and guides you through enemy lands. The cards do what their story characters do, and that brings me a newfound appreciation for the freshness of Magic when it’s at its most original.

The exception to that has been the more open-ended games like 40K and D&D. Those have been perfect fits because those are story worlds where the outcome is not set. D&D especially worked great with all the modal cards giving us all kinds of new choices.

So in Magic there’s this creature ability called “prowess”!

I’ve been playing against Monestary Swiftspear decks a lot lately but there’s this trick you can do that I often see players not doing.

You have a Lightning Strike in hand and a Monestary Swiftspear on the board. They’re all tapped out but have a 2/1 or a 2/2 on the board.

I often see people blasting the blocker and swinging with the prowess monk for two damage.

End result: dead blocker, tapped monk, opponent has lost two life.

What you can do instead is swing with the monk, if they block you blast face, your pumped monk kills the blocker.

End result: dead blocker, tapped monk, opponent has lost three life. Better.

And if they don’t block, then you blast the blocker and you end up with the first result. So you’re giving them the option: do they feel lucky that you don’t have an instant? If they do, they’ll lose one extra life. If they don’t, well, that’s fine, you’re still back at the first result.

That’s why prowess was so scary when it first showed up. It adds so much uncertainty and tension to the board state fights. Prowes makes any instant a combat trick.

Don’t apply this mindlessly—if they have tricks on their own, you might be in trouble. But I see people doing it the other way even on a tapped out boardstate in a pitchless format, losing out on that one point of damage that might make or break the duel.

Yeah, yeah, I realize that not all games are life-and-death stakes and that you can save some clicks by just casting spells & tapping out first and then hitting attack and then sitting back while your opponent is doing stuff. The synchronous nature of Magic that’s fun in paper becomes fiddly on digital. I get that.

Here is my own Magic deck in spring 2023 standard.

7 Forest
4 Vilespawn Spider
2 Otawara, Soaring City
4 Dreamroot Cascade
4 Yavimaya Coast
1 Boseiju, Who Endures
4 Cankerbloom
4 Deathbonnet Sprout
4 Wrenn and Realmbreaker
4 Deeproot Wayfinder
4 Cobbled Lancer
4 Island
4 Network Disruptor
4 Dreamshackle Geist
4 Willow Geist 2 Haywire Mite

I made Mythic with a 💯 homebrew deck (although I guess the “selfmill-and-play-Lancers” plan is a draft archetype so it’s not that original).

Right now the most difficult card to face is Brutal Cathar since I don’t have any real creature removal outside of tapping down.

I have a hard time facing the Calix / Jukai Naturalist-based decks. I win sometimes but it’s not easy. Other white-based synergy/aggro decks like Humans, Parfait, Soldiers, and Angelfire Ignition are also difficult.

Second hardest is Sheoldred, the Apocalypse. I recently put a Mirrorhall Mimic in as tech (replacing another Skyturtle) but haven’t seen it in actual play yet. The idea is to clone Sheoldred. I dunno. (I can sometimes outrace the Sheoldred deck with Dreamshackle Geist.)

In the middle is the red deck. I’ve played other blue/green decks and they usually can go on top over the red deck, but it requires some luck and patience.

Then Esper control and Dimir proliferate decks are pretty easy, and then the ramp decks (there’s a mono-green one and an Atraxa domain one) I just run under them. The red/white Nahiri deck is also slow enough to outrace hopefully. And the black/red aristocrats deck is so fragile that the limited interaction I do have can sometimes be enough. And then comes the Haughty Djinn deck (if they’ve got too much xerox and not enough counterspells) and then the easiest of all is the W/G toxic deck.

Weird how W/G and R/W are both the hardest and the easiest depending on how they build it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also wow the Dreamroot Cascade is très clunky.

I’ve quit playing Magic a couple of times. Once was when they introduced “mythic rare” cards like Lotus Cobra, or the Superfriends deck with loads and loads of mythic rares. It was being presented as a new rarity above rare, more rare than rare.

It took me years to realize that mythic is just the same rarity as rare used to be, and “rare” now is, hmm, we would’ve called it “R2” back then.

A rare (these days) are twice as common as a mythic. So the change made many cards more easily available, not less. I quit for a bad reason.

“Whaddayamean, Sandra? Mythic rares are one-in-eight, everyone knows that.”

In the olden days, there was a common sheet, an uncommon sheet, and a rare sheet. That’s still how it’s done today, and rares and mythic rares are printed on the same sheet, each rare being printed twice.

(At times there have been a basic land sheet or a double-faced sheet and also foil sheets etc.)

Tenth edition, a pre-mythic set, had 121 rares, each printed once.
Shards of Alara, a mythic set, had 15 mythic rares, each printed once, and 53 rares, each printed twice. (53 + 53 + 15 = 121.)

So, Time Stop, a rare from tenth edition, is as rare (relative to the overall print run of the set) as Lotus Cobra, a mythic rare from Shards of Alara. Knight-Captain of Eos, a regular rare from Shards of Alara, is twice as common.

This should also explain the one-in-eight thing: 53 + 53 ≈ 15 × 7. So there are seven rare cards overall for every one mythic rare. But there aren’t seven Knight-Captain of Eos for every Lotus Cobra—there are two. It’s just that there are more rares (three and a half as many) as there are mythic rares.

Now, this might still lead to mythic rares being more expensive now than old rares like Necropotence or Masticore used to be. I don’t know why. I can think of three reasons: groupthink, overall print runs, and more of a chaff factor. Let’s say in the past, enough boosters were open (and resold as singles) to make a rare card cost $X. Now, fewer boosters are opened (relative to the much larger current player base) which makes a mythic cost more than $X. Great for Jennies who wanna explore underrated jank rares. Not so great if there are pay-to-win must-haves printed at mythic.

(None of this is to defend Magic as a whole, which has its fair share of problems as a game, hobby, and community. Just trying to set the record straight on this one thing which I mistakenly let kill Magic for me, for a while.)

In the late seventies a meme went through the investor community in America:

If after ten minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is—you are the patsy.

There are two ways investments can make money.

1. You’re investing in something that’ll geniunely increase in value. Like how an apple seed is cheaper than a well–cared-for apple tree. This is awesome.
2. You’re investing in something that you can send for more money down the line to some other sucker who’s left “holding the bag”. This is not great.

A lot of times on the stock market, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. In both cases, you buy something because you hope the price will increase. Sure, often the price will collapse horribly, but hopefully you’ll get out before then.

(The Bottle Imp is such a brilliant satire of this.)

During the tulipmania, crashy bubble as it was, some people did make a lot of money. Others were left bleeding and penniless. Same in many other bubbles: beanie babies, the subprime trench BS of 2008…

Yeah, yeah, Lotus and Moxen still haven’t crashed after 20 years, and the Mona Lisa is more than 500 years old and still expensive. They haven’t gotten more value, but their prices have increased. But most vintage postal stamps, for example, have fallen dramatically in price.

Other times the thing is flimsy AF. This can be hard to spot. The tulip bulb thing might seem dumb, and it was since it did crash within three years, but the bulbs weren’t just “one use and they’ll wither”. The idea was to take care of the plants and keep growing new bulbs from the old, and eventually resell. Although with the ever-increasing bubble, a lot of it was amplified by buying selling futures by people who never even saw the bulbs.

A lot of the time, some of the participants in a price bubble are mistakenly believing that their investments are long-lasting and sound.

Anytime you’re hoping to make money by selling it to some other sucker down the line, like in The Bottle Imp, ultimately you’re hoping to make money off of their misfortune, off of hurting them.

Follow ups

• StackSmith at the Ctrl-C club has a follow-up

That’s right. When you buy stock, let’s say in some eco-friendly mom&pop shop, you’re not really helping them grow or funding their efforts. You’re only betting on their success, not contributing to it (exception: when stocks are first being issued and when there is new issue).

It’s so similar to the horse racing track. It’s just money going around and numbers going up (or crashing), not really building the future. The horse doesn’t go any faster just because the stakes are higher.

But, when you’re using stocks to gamble on the success of corporations, that’s still distinct from gambling on there being s bigger sucker down the line. The idea is hopefully that the stock’s price will go up because fo the corporation becoming more valuable. The hideousness of growth is still better than just bottle-imping pure nothingness.

Gambling can pay off if the EV is good and if you catch the right waves. Abstaining from gambling can also be costly, relative to CPI in an inflation economy. But, gambling can also leave you utterly ruined since it’s so risky. The human world is so messed up.

• Nytpu chimes in with some own experiences

Sometimes you need to shuffle up two-hundred, three-hundred card piles, for example when shuffling up a “cube” or “danger room” type game.

Here’s one way.

Cut the cube up in piles of approx 40 cards. Say you’re shuffling up a 240 card pile, that’s six piles.

Grab two of them, and mash them together a few times.

Split it into two halves again, and put one back, and pick up a new pile and do the same thing.

Keep going around and around with every pile. It’s better to keep moving after a few mashes, two or so, since it’s more important to hit many piles.

(Do more mashes per pile if you do have tons of time.)

Repeat this until you’ve hit every pile six times. Six times “around the table”.

If you are two or more people, you can co-operate! Start at opposite sides of the table of piles and then everyone goes around the table; three times each if you are two people, two times each if you are three, four or five, or just one time each if you are six or more people.

Math nerdery

You don’t need to read this part unless you wanna peek under the hood of why this works.

The amount of times around the table came via this formula:

X×log(80X) / (X–1)log(4)

Each X for values three through forty-two gives six, if we round up for caution.

In other words, six times around the table is necessary if you have more than 120 cards in three piles, and sufficient for up to 1680 cards in 42 piles. It’s just the perfect number for this.

Thanks to Richard for helping me figure this stuff out.♥︎

Update:

A helpful commenter pointed out that there is an additional constraint on the number of circuits around the table; you can have at most twice the number of piles as the number of circuits. So for six trips around the table you can have at most twelve piles.

To mash shuffle a deck of cards is to divide the deck in two halves and mash the two halves together.

Topologically it’s the same as a traditional “riffle shuffle” but instead of riffling through the cards, you just mash them together.

Setting aside how bad card sleeves are for the environment, card sleeves make it harder to riffle shuffle but easier to mash shuffle.

Here is how to mash shuffle in an honest and random way.

• Have the cards at an angle or even horizontal so that you can keep the face sides of the cards angled away from you.
• Do not have the cards vertical so that they fan out so that you can see the faces.
• Ideally practice enough so that you can mash shuffle while looking in a completely different direction.

• Interleave the cards.
• Repeat the mash shuffle at least seven times (for a sixty-card deck; more for a bigger deck).
• Ideally, there should be 50% chance of one card and 50% of two cards in the interleaving. If you are always putting in exactly one card between each other card, you’re not doing it right. Erring in the opposite direction, putting too many cards in between the other cards, you can compensate for by mashing it even more times.
• The goal of shuffling a full deck is to make all permutations equally likely, and for all cards to have equal chance to be at the top of the deck. Clumps of a particular color or card type is very normal in true randomness. A perfect weave (such as Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, Clubs alternating perfectly) is not particularly random.
• After every mash, a card from the middle of the pack should be the new top card. If you keep mashing but the top card keeps staying the same card, you are messing up. After each mash there should be a new top card and a new bottom card.

For example, let’s say you have this permutation:

A A A A A b b b b b

You take the bottom half and mash it together with a tiny offset so that the new top card of the combined pile came from the middle:

b b A b A b b A A A

The offset should be minimal. If you make the offset too big, mash more than seven times to compensate.

The “more random part” is the middle part of the deck.

In this example, the B B at the top isn’t particularly mashed up, nor is the A A A at the bottom.

Then, you repeat:

B B A B A b b a a a →
b b B a B a A a B A

B B B A B a a a b a →
a a B a B b B a A B

etc.

All the entropy and randomness lives in that middle, mashed up, part. So everytime you re-mash, the top of the deck should come from the middle, mashed-up part. The sum of the two less random “offsets” at the top and bottom need to be much smaller than the random “elevator” in the middle. The “elevator” has the randomness that you want to spread into the rest of the deck as much as possible. Sort of like when stirring cinnamon into a dough.

If you have shuffled your opponent’s deck (which means you’re the last person who’ll get to shuffle it) also cut the deck.

So after teasing it forever with cards like Bag of Holding, Magic finally did a D&D set, the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (but there are some Greyhawk stuff in there, too, like Tasha and Vecna).

Magic puts out so many cards each year and I don’t get into every set. I’ve been holding out for this one, skipping over the previous sets because I really wanted to mix D&D and Magic.

But the execution on this is not really what I wanted.

Here’s some stuff I love:

• Iconic spells that feel they like their D&D counterparts like Magic Missile or Shocking Grasp.
• Flavor words to represent abilities on creatures and artifacts, like Guild Thief or Dawnbringer Cleric.
• Flavor words to represent choices on modal cards (almost like split cards), like You Come to a River. These are my fave.
• Familiar characters like Farideh and Lolth.
• All the flavorful locations you can visit, even basic lands like Plains.
• How you can go into dungeons like the Lost Mine of Phandelver.
• How creature types and flavor are free to be more D&D-like instead of shoehorned into Magic traditions, such as the blue elf Arcane Investigator.

I’m not as into the spells that do something completely opposite to what they do in D&D, like Tasha’s Hideous Laughter or Ray of Frost.

The biggest weird thing, though, is how so many of the cards refer to the rules of D&D rather than to the setting.

Rolling dice? +2 Mace? The twelve PHB classes?

Many of these cards seem fun to play with, but they kinda break the mood. D&D is an interface to the game world, as is Magic. Using Magic as an interface to the D&D rules is like trying to put surgical gloves on top of boxing gloves.

Having abilities be named the same is great (like the aforementioned Cure Wounds or Magic Missile) because it makes those abilities feel more diegetic. Having cards that give you the feel of joining a party or crawling a dungeon is also cool. But these “meta” cards feel like you’re pretending to pretend, like you’re playing that you’re playing.

I dunno.

I don’t mind adding dice rolling to black-bordered Magic, that’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s just that this set as whole doesn’t feel at all like “Magic visits the Forgotten Realms” and more like “Magic makes fun of D&D’s mechanics”.

Update

After finding out that this was intentional I came around to it and it’s now one of my favorite sets and I love the +2 mace.

Overview

Exactly two color decks.

• “king”, “rook”, “bishop”, “knight”, and four “pawns” in one color
• “queen”, “rook”, “bishop”, “knight”, and four “pawns” in another color
• 1 “magician”
• 1 “artifact”
• 18 enchantments/instants/sorceries
• at least 24 lands (at most four non-basic)

Color Restrictions

“Gold” multicolor

Only allowed among the 18 spells. Not among the creatures, magician, or artifact.

“Hybrid” multicolor

Among the creatures, magician, and artifact, you before the game write down what color it represents. For example, you can use Kitchen Finks as a 1WW creature or as a 1GG creature.

Among the 18 spells, off-color hybrid works as above (for example, you might use a WW Wheel of Sun and Moon in an Orzov deck) or if all the colors are within your two colors, it works like normal hybrid.

TDFC

Count the best side for the deckbuilding restrictions below. Both sides need to be the same color and either both needs to be a creature, or neither side (such as Search for Azcanta). For example, for Delver of Secrets count 3/2.

MDFC

Either both sides are enchantment+instant+sorcery, or both sides are land, or both sides are creatures of the same color. Both sides need to fit the deckbuilding restriction for its slot.

Artifact

• Colored artifact creatures, if they have a single color, can be used in the creature slots
• For the “artifact” non-creature slot, it can be either of the two colors, or be colorless

Other color identity issues (such as off-color activation)

Needs to stick to your two chosen colors but otherwise no restriction. For example, a black/green deck may use Elves of Deep Shadows as pawns.

Creatures

One king

• Needs to be single-colored
• Needs to have mana cost at least 5
• Every time the king goes to the graveyard or to exile, you lose half your life (the loss is rounded up)
• If the Queen has been in play since the start of the turn, the king gains “T, sacrifice your Queen: Counter a spell or ability that would’ve caused the king to be leave the battlefield.”

One queen

• Needs to be single-colored, and a different color than the king
• Needs to have mana cost at least 5

Two rooks

• The king’s rook needs to have the same single color as the king, and the queen’s rook needs to have the same single color as the queen
• Needs to have higher toughness than the same-colored bishop’s power
• Needs to have defender or reach. (If it has reach but not defender, it may attack normally.)

Castling

• You can return a rook to hand to play a king or queen tapped, or vice versa
• At most once per game
• The two cards need to be the same color
• The card you return can never have attacked or blocked
• The card you return need to have been there since the start of the round
• Auras and equipment fall off (like an normal unsummon)

Two bishops

.* The king’s bishop needs to have the same single color as the king, and the queen’s bishop needs to have the same single color as the queen

• Needs to have at least as high power as toughness
• Needs to have strictly higher power than the same-colored knight’s power

Two knights

• The king’s knight needs to have the same single color as the king, and the queen’s knight needs to have the same single color as the queen
• Each knight needs at least one evergreen keyword that is primary, secondary, or tertiary in its own color according to this list.
• Each knight can have other abilities in addition to that
• Each knight can not have defender
• Each knight needs to have sum of power and toughness six or lower
• Each knight needs to have power strictly higher than the pawns of its color

2×4 Pawns

• Two four-offs, that is to say four copies of the king’s pawn and four copies of the queen’s pawn
• The king’s four pawns need to have the same single color as the king, and the queen’s four pawns need to have the same single color as the queen
• If the pawn is vanilla, they need to be 2/2, 3/1, or 1/3 and may have any mana value.
• If the pawn is non-vanilla, it needs to be 1/1, 1/2, 2/1 or 0/3 and have mana value three or lower. They can’t have p/t-altering abilities (such as shades) and they can’t have non-mana tap abilities (so no Tims but Llano is OK).
• Pawns gain haste, but, any pawn blocking a hasting pawn gains +1/+1.
• Pawns gain “T, exile this card during your upkeep: Return a non-king creature of this card’s color from graveyard to the battlefield, tapped.”

One Magician

• Needs to have a single color but can be either of the deck’s two colors
• Either a creature with a tap ability that doesn’t make mana and has sum of p+t max four
• Or a planeswalker with max four starting loyalty
• The magician can never attack or block (sorry Gideon)

One Artifact

• Needs to either be colorless or have a single color, either of the deck’s two colors
• If it makes mana it needs to make exactly one of the deck’s two colors. So moxes are ok but not sigils, lotus, or sol rings.
• It has to be non-creature. Vehicles, equipment, jade statues etc are allowed.

18 enchantments, instants and/or sorceries

• These can be either of the two colors or both. See “gold” and “hybrid” rules above.
• You don’t have to go nine of each color
• At most two of each separate card. So not quite singleton, just almost

At least 24 lands

• At most four non-basic lands
• You can choose one dual of your decks two colors (does not have to be an ABUR dual, can be Adarkar Wastes or Hallowed Fountain).
• Except for your chosen duals, each of the four non-basic lands needs to be completely singleton.
• This means that you need at least 20 basic lands.

For example you can choose three Hallowed Fountain and one Mishra’s Factory.

Lands are the only way to have more than 60 cards in the deck since you have exactly 36 non-lands and at least 24 lands.

Snow-covered lands and wastes are allowed as basics.

Announcement Rule

Before the game, show your king and queen and announce what they are. “This is my king, and this is my queen.”

As you play creatures, announce what they are. “This is my rook.” etc.

Token Rule

If a token would be created it instead is not created.

Wishing

Creatures and artifacts can not enter from outside the game. Sorry contraptions and companions!

For enchantments, instants and sorceries, you may have a wishboard of up to 100 cards following the same restrictions on color etc as the 18 spells in your deck. So no colorless lessons.

Ban list

• Because of the Token Rule, all cards such as Generous Gift, Pongify, Skyclave Apparition, Hunted Phantasm etc that would give your opponent a token as compensation for an effect
• All sweepers, wraths, pyroclasms, including one-at-a-time sweepers like Porphyry Nodes and The Abyss or sweepers vs a particular color or type
• All discard (this includes wheels, looting and rummaging)
• All milling or top-of-deck–exiling (this includes “impulse draw” effects like Torch of Defiance and Bomat Courier, and all Ante cards)
• All Control Magic and similar effects
• All alt-wins and cant-lose cards
• All cards that makes cards leave the graveyard (such as Tormod’s Crypt, Cremate)
• All subgames
• All racist cards

These specific cards:

• Frankie Peanuts
• R&D’s Secret Lair
• Richard Garfield

Based on Wizard’s Chess by Tom Hazel.

I’ve quit four times! Kinda.

If there are three levels of quitting:

1. “Enh, I’ll just sit out for a while, maybe still keep up with Making Magic and some other blogs/videos, maybe not, but it’s just a temporary break.”
2. “OK, just no. Me and Magic are over.”
3. As 2, but also actually selling all my cards.

Then I’ve 1 2 2 1 but never sold my cards.

First sitting out probably shouldn’t count. I really, really wanted to continue. But everyone I knew quit. This break lasted from Urza’s Legacy through all of Mirrodin block. (Although I played in a Mirrodin draft on a trip. That was like an oasis in the Magic desert.) That’s why I’m so fond of Kamigawa block: because we actually started playing again.

Second time was because they introduced Mythic rare, or, more specifically spike Mythics like Lotus Cobra and the superfriends. I get salty about Maro’s “Twenty Things That Were Going To Kill Magic” because it actually was the end of Magic for me, for a long time. They had promise to not introduce chase cards and with foils, they did, but that was just bling. This time it was actually game-winning cards.

I started playing again after many years, sticking to limited only, but this was a harder break and almost right away. I had moved cities and was having a hard time finding a good community. This was the mid 00s, the era when every thing was “rape” this and “gay” that. Also most players in this new city were guys which was a pretty difficult thing to adjust to coming from my older community.

This was Scars era. I quit reading about Magic, quit thinking about Magic, I was just completely off it. I drafted with known and trusted friends twice.

Then when SOI came out I dove deep back into Magic. Mostly limited but some standard and legacy too. After a while, I realized something about the mythic problem: A mythic rare is the same as an old rare! A new rare is like an old “R2”, i.e. a given rare is twice as easy to get as a given mythic. So instead of adding a new chase ultra rare level… They had actually made it easier to get most cards! I kinda wish they had been clearer about that.

This was the era of playing a lot of Magic. I’m currently on a soft “I’ll just sit it out for a while” break that started because of Oko. I play blue/green in standard and I hate being on the deck that’s considered OP or most played. I love playing blue/green when no-one else is. This isn’t a good “Magic-quitting reason” but it’s just time for a little break. Having a hard time with my LGS also. This li’l soft pause has continued because of pandemic.

When making denominations for coins and markers (VP, mana, whatever) in board games, 1 5 20 100 500 is good. I don’t want too small factors between a stepped pair (such as 1:2 or 5:10 or 10:20), or if there is, then I’d want significantly fewer of the lower denom.

For example, in a game where 2-coins exist, that’s fine if there is only one 1-coin per player. Whenever they gain an odd amount of coin, they’d either lose or gain their 1-coin. You provide a bunch of 2-coins that can flow, and then everyone has their 1-coin within reach.

Neat Change

“Neat change” is defined as when you have as few coins as possible in as high denoms as possible. For example, 1 2 5 is a neat way to have 8 in a system that has 1-coins, 2-coins and 5-coins, while, say, 1 1 2 2 2 is an un-neat representation of the same amount.

It’s completely dorky and gauche to ask someone at the table to change to a neat representation just because you have your hangups about neatness. Don’t do that.

However, when there is consistently neat representation, it’s possible to grok the sums quicker and with less effort. It’s easy to underestimate this effect until you’ve experienced it for yourself. When representations are reliably always neat it’s a completely different level of immediacy compared to having to count it out and add it up in a new way every time.

We want to design systems that inherently afford neatness without having to be gauche dorks at the table.

The Binary Approach

As I mentioned in the intro, scarcity affords making change. At every level where the step factor is small, make sure there is a completely ridiculous lack of coins. If there are 5-coins, 10-coins and 20-coins available, you really only need one 5-coin per player and one 10-coin, and then a huge number of 20-coins. The scarcity itself will enforce people making proper change.

Obviously, having too many denominations (like a 1 2 4 8 16 approach) is cumbersome in its own special way since it’s the additions aren’t homomorphic. Uh, that’s a word I just made up but what I mean is that if you have a bunch of ones and fives, you are gonna get used to making change between ones and fives (like, you gain three? You learn quickly to take 5 and give back 1 and 1) and you are very quickly gonna get used to thinking in multiples of five plus some remaining ones.

With the more binary nature of smaller gap factors, making change is possible to learn but grokking the total at a glance is harder.

The Big Gap Approach

Whereas scarcity encourages constantly changing, big gaps afford relative (if not perfect) neatness by you simply not having to (or be able to) change often. If the nominations go 1 20 500, for example, you’re not gonna have to change to 20 until you’ve managed to scrape together twenty 1-coins.

Of course, that is completely ridiculous. Adding up twenty 1-coins is not easy. We don’t want the denom gaps to fall out of subitizing range (a.k.a. “at a glance”-range).

A Goldilocks denom set is 1 5 20 100 500, with numbers being both traditional and familiar, while also being multiples of four or five which is subitizable.

Sometimes you can also leverage the scarcity principle when designing your game’s component set, or when setting up your playspace. If people each have access to four 1-coins, three 5-coins, four 20-coins, and four 100-coins, you basically have ensured constant neatness.

When does this not apply?

This is a design consideration that pretty much only shows up in gaming, because that’s the only situation where people have one pool each and an always-available exchange bank. Games like Monopoly or Netrunner or the victory points in Caylus 1303 or the life, poison, or energy points in Magic.

Any situation where your money needs to be split into separate pots, like in Jump Drive where each turn of income is its own pile or even poker where your holdings are separate from your current contribution to the pot, gets awkward. You cannot apply the scarcity principle there. You can still benefit from the subitizing benefits of the Goldilocks denom set.

Situations like your real-life wallet, this doesn’t apply. That’s where otherwise completely cockamamie denom steps like 1 3 5 10 or 1 2 5 10 can make sense, since there is no easy way to make change anyway and thus no hope for neatness ever.

Situations where scoring is hidden (essentially “write-only”) are similarly inapplicable. You gain points, put them in your vault, and move on, and never make change. Issues with hidden, but trackable information are what they are, although this also applies to hidden and non-trackable sources of points, like the random point chips in Jaipur.

So “banding” hasn’t been seen since 1997 because it’s the most complicated mechanic of all time.

It wasn’t really played a lot even when it was legal. Not because the cards were weak. No, banding is both a very powerful and very flavorful mechanic.

But it caused confusion. Both rules confusion (as in: a lot of people — maybe not you, dear reader, but a lot of other people even at the highest levels of play, were unable to explain how the rules worked) and board state confusion (range strike and “Samite”-style healing have also been removed: they both had super simple rules but caused complicated board states and difficult combat math). And, the interaction of those two types of confusion was out of this world. So it had to go.

And I miss it so much.

But… we can solve two problems in one go by… splitting it up!

Part of the problem of the mechanic is that it just does too much.

Instead, now we have two separate abilities. (Hold your references to the xkcd standards joke…!)

Some cards would have one, some the other, and (especially in the beginning) only very few would have both. If, and only if, both abilities prove themselves, then we could start seeing them appear together on the same more often. And if that works, well, then we have the return of banding as we knew and loved it.

Here is how they would look with the reminder text for both.

Attack banding (When attacking, this creature may form a band with one other creature, or join an existing band. A blocker that blocks any part of the band blocks the entire band.)

Tactical assignment (You choose how damage from any creature blocking or blocked by this creature is assigned.)

Banding (This creature has both Attack banding and Tactical assignment)

As you can see, still kinda complicated even on their own… but managable.

One of the things people found weird was that when attacking, you could have at most one non-bander, but when blocking, you only need at least one bander for it to be useful.

But when split up, you could see how that kind of does make sense. Because you’re not actually forming any bands when blocking. You’re just blocking normally.

Another thing that’s always been kind of a let down is how evasion abilities (like flying) is kind of a nonbo with banding. Although banding is a very strong ability, this dysergy can be frustrating and confusing. “Whaddaya mean my Mesa Pegasus is blocked by your Craw Wurm just because I banded it with a Benalish Hero? I wanted the hero to ride on the pegasus… T_T”
This proposal doesn’t fix that but hopefully the “A blocker that blocks any part of the band blocks the entire band” is clear enough.

So that’s rules complexity addressed. What about board complexity? I think a lot of the board complexity did directly stem from the rules complexity. As far as how they play… these abilities are kind of like reverse menace. You can block me (or attack into me), but I’m gonna bring a buddy along. Sure, I can see how tactical assignment could result in board stalls or feel like it’s hard to math out what would happen if I attack into it. And board stalls is something that R&D has taken steps to try to avoid. Could be that tactical assignment, as flavorful and interesting as it is, is an ability you’d might want to use sparingly and keep out of low rarities. Only playtesting can tell.

Attack banding on the other hand can help break up board stalls. It’s something I can see being very healthy for limited. (Or, rather, I know it’s healthy for limited because we play with banding cards all the time since our Mirage cube includes the banding cards from Weatherlight.)

PS:
I get that the words “blocker” and “attacker” aren’t really rules language but reminder text isn’t rules text.

If you want rules text…
Here’s how this proposal would look, edited into the current comprehensive rules. (Note to people who stumble upon this page randomly: this is only my suggestion for how the rules could be written. If you’re looking for the real rules, they are here.)

• 702.21. Banding
  • 702.21a “Attack banding” and “tactical assignment” are a static abilities that modifies the rules for combat. The term banding refers to having both “attack banding” and “tactical assignment” abilities.
  • 702.21b “Bands with other” is a special form of “attack banding” and a special form of “tactical assignment”. If an effect causes a permanent to lose banding, the permanent loses all “bands with other” abilities as well.
  • 702.21c As a player declares attackers, they may declare that one or more attacking creatures with “attack banding” and up to one attacking creature without “attack banding” are all in a “band.” They may also declare that one or more attacking [quality] creatures with “bands with other [quality]” and any number of other attacking [quality] creatures are all in a band. A player may declare as many attacking bands as they want, but each creature may be a member of only one of them.
  • 702.21d All creatures in an attacking band must attack the same player or planeswalker.
  • 702.21e Once an attacking band has been announced, it lasts for the rest of combat, even if something later removes banding, “attack banding”, or “bands with other” from one or more of the creatures in the band.
  • 702.21f An attacking creature that’s removed from combat is also removed from the band it was in.
  • 702.21g Banding or “attack banding” doesn’t cause attacking creatures to share abilities, nor does it remove any abilities. The attacking creatures in a band are separate permanents.
  • 702.21h If an attacking creature becomes blocked by a creature, each other creature in the same band as the attacking creature becomes blocked by that same blocking creature.
    Example: A player attacks with a band consisting of a creature with flying and a creature with swampwalk. The defending player, who controls a Swamp, can block the flying creature if able. If they do, then the creature with swampwalk will also become blocked by the blocking creature(s).
  • 702.21i If one member of a band would become blocked due to an effect, the entire band becomes blocked.
  • 702.21j During the combat damage step, if an attacking creature is being blocked by a creature with “tactical assignment”, or by both a [quality] creature with “bands with other [quality]” and another [quality] creature, the defending player (rather than the active player) chooses how the attacking creature’s damage is assigned. That player can divide that creature’s combat damage as they choose among any creatures blocking it. This is an exception to the procedure described in rule 510.1c.
  • 702.21k During the combat damage step, if a blocking creature is blocking a creature with “tactical assignment”, or both a [quality] creature with “bands with other [quality]” and another [quality] creature, the active player (rather than the defending player) chooses how the blocking creature’s damage is assigned. That player can divide that creature’s combat damage as they choose among any creatures it’s blocking. This is an exception to the procedure described in rule 510.1d.
  • 702.21m Multiple instances of banding on the same creature are redundant. Multiple instances of “bands with other” of the same kind on the same creature are redundant.

The reason that the turnorder trick came so easily to mind recently is because I have had an idea for a long time that kind of goes in the other direction, for a simplified “beginner’s Magic”.

Four phases: Untap, Draw, Attack, Play cards

You don’t have to explain the summoning sickness thing, and you teach the good practice of playing your creatures after the attack (not always the best thing, but it’s a good default).

You do lose out on a lot, like playing removal and buffs before the attack for example, and it’s not asynchrous (so it obv works better for paper Magic).

But it’s sooo simple. I’m going to put decks together that can work well with this turn order and test it.

I’ve had this idea for longer that the asynchronous idea, which I guess is still better for a wider release and you don’t give up as much as you do with this variant.

Lately, we’ve seen a couple of games that are kinda a little bit similar to Magic, but have asynchronous turns – you do you, pass the turn, I do me, pass the turn. That means you lose out on the attack/block/board state part of Magic.

Other asynchronous games

Hearthstone and Star Realms work like this: you put out your units, and then you can attack any creature or you can attack the enemy directly. There’s no blocking, but there’s unit-to-unit fighting anyway since you can attack the other players units. There are also units that have to be attacked first, and these are core to these two games. They are the equivalent of blocking. They have a printed keyword (“Taunt” in Hearthstone, “Outpost” in Star Realms) – Hearthstone also features many ways to add this property to other units.

Codex has the same structure as Hearthstone and Star Realms in that you can attack any unit or the enemy directly. It also features the “Taunt/Outpost” mechanic of those games, but instead of certain units being designated as such by printed keywords, you can assign any unit to have this status. (Called “Patroller” in Codex.)

I’m not very fond of these solutions. I understand that they have their own tactics and strategies, but I’m so fond of Magic’s rhythm of trading creatures, building up board states, creating and breaking stalemates, and chumping.

Asynchronous Magic

Magic’s turn order is: Untap, Upkeep, Draw, First main, Attack (and the opponent steps in to block), Second main, EOT.

My idea was to instead make a game like this: Block, Untap, Upkeep, Main Phase, “EOT”, Attack.

You’d start your turn by blocking any of your opponents attackers from their previous turn (and any unblocked attackers would break through to you and your walkers). Then you’d get to untap, do your turn, and finally send in your attackers in the red zone by tapping them – and then you can’t do anything until it’s the next player’s turn. The “red zone” replaces the Patrol zone from Codex or the Taunt/Outpost status from Hearthstone and Star Realms.

The point of an asynchronous implementation is to make digital versions easier to implement and use. You do your turn, then wait – no timing stops or things like that.

Obviously you’d need “Portal cards” since there’s no Giant Growths, Firebreathing or other tricks (you can use a superset of Portal actually – many enchantments, artifacts and many triggered effects are already asynchronous, like Manic Scribe). Ideally the digital implementation would also make room for some exceptions to this, like the original Portal’s “Mystic Denial”, but the interface could be built aware of those exceptions rather than every single hand creating a priority stop.

Background

I was struggling to come to terms with Codex and I used this “inverted thinking” to finally get to grips with it. At first, you’re led to think of Codex’ Patrol zone as blocking. The analogy is presented that the Squad Leader is a solid blocker and the Technician is more of a chump blocker with an upside.

I was struggling to win, playing this game. I just couldn’t protect myself, I would try to build as many units I could, put up patrollers, but I would get consistently overwhelmed. The flimsy bonuses from the various patrol zones would not be nearly enough compensation. The attacker would make more and more favorable trades and I would fall more and more behind.

And then it hit me. The attacker in Codex would make favorable trades – like the blocker can do in Magic! To play defensive, just turn my thinking around. See the opponents board as sort of their “attack” and send in my units to make as favorable trades as I can with them. The patrol zone wasn’t a defense zone – it was the red zone! So, if I have great units, sure, feel free to put that Iron Man on Squad Leader and have the opponent waste a couple of units to take it down. But if I can make a favorable trade with something they have, do it. To be defensive in Codex – attack! So I started winning.

In the end, I also thought that I… kinda don’t like Codex’ structure that much. In Magic, the blocker has all the choices, but they’re also the ones that are risking their own life points and walkers.

In Hearthstone, Star Realms and Codex, the attacker has all the choices and they’re the ones delivering the beatings. It “feels” weird. Attacking in Codex is both the best defense (you get to favorably deal with your opponents threats), it’s also controllish (you can take out tech buildings, addons and heroes) but it’s flavored as aggressive. It gives the feeling of a runaway leader, of being beaten down. I don’t like that as much as I do the feel in Magic.

Above all, in those games, your units are (in a way) always in the red zone. Taunt, Outpost and Patrol helps you direct the mayhem a little bit, but there’s no way to just hang back with a valuable unit. If they break through your taunters/outposts/patrollers, that’s it, your precious unit is at risk. As Maro points out, it becomes much harder to build up a board state compared to in Magic.

In the analogy, it’s like if in Magic you always had to attack with all your units, and have some limited amount of Lure to protect.

Attacking in Magic = Not attacking in Hearthstone and Codex.

Attacking in Hearthstone and Codex = Blocking in Magic.

I dunno. Hence this post and this suggestion of putting attacks & blocks between turns, going back to the red zone concept (with the attacker just sending troops over in that direction, and the defender making the choices) instead of the patrol zone or “taunt” concept. It becomes more like Magic and I like that better.

Hopefully this post has had two purposes. First, presenting a design for a Magic: the Gathering variant, whether it’s an official thing from WotC (perhaps a simplified app) or whether it’s someone else making a game inspired by Magic (like Hearthstone, Star Realms, Epic, Ashes, and Codex all sort of are). I’m not saying this should replace our classic, complex game. It’s just something that could be an intro or a nice phone version that still has a lot of depth. Something to do while on the train.

Second of all, by helping Magic players become better at Hearthstone and Codex (and vice versa). Star Realms is a little different since ships can’t block – this thinking can be helpful for Ashes, though (even though it’s not asynchronous, it’s still a game where units can be attacked). So far, I prefer Magic but… this thinking helps me appreciate the other games a bit better, and be a little better at them because some of my Magic thinking can apply.

Dear Maro, EMN is going to be awesome and we’re on board. Liliana looks super cool.

But here is how me and my Magic-playing friend experienced this mystery.

First, coming off of OGW, knowing that Shadows over Innistrad is coming. Thinking “OK, Emrakul is probably in SOI”.

Then the first couple of cards and images come out and we’re like “Yup, looks like Emrakul for sure!”

Then the mystery angle is pushed, and we’re like… “hmm maybe there is a real mystery here after all”

We hear rumours about a puzzle hidden in the journal, we start bringing up other weird theories about what these tentacles and mutations can be caused by (our beloved Marit Lage comes up a lot in these talks). Because we’re like “It can’t be so obvious that it’s just Emrakul” – yes, this is where we’re at, the awesomeness of great Emrakul – favorite among Eldrazi – reduced to “just Emrakul”.

And then we hear that the journal puzzle has been cracked and the text is “Remember this they came as three”. And we’re disappointed, we’re like “Emrakul? But we already knew it was going to be her…” We never ever forgot that they came as three.

Some of us start clingin to straws that there’s gonna be Emrakul vs Marit Lage or something like that.

And then the revelation comes and we’re like.. “yeah.. ok I guess… we knew that”.

And the new story and art are great. But this was lessened because of the mystery. So we feel bad, disappointed. Disappointed even though Emrakul is awesome and a great character and the trailer is great and Liliana is great and Gisela and Bruna are great but we feel like… really, this was the mystery? Something we started thinking as soon Emrakul wasn’t in OGW?

I don’t think this is only about enfranchised players. The enfranchised players found the journal puzzle and brought other clues together. That puzzle was hard enough – but what the puzzle concealed wasn’t. Even Jace comes across looking bad because he considered this a mystery. Emrakul on Innistrad was so expected.

Maro, we love you guys. Please, please, don’t think of this mail as rude. Magic is a great game. I’ve come around on the “story cards” too. Everytime I play Declaration in Stone, I feel like I’m “Hollywood Nahiri” walking away from the ruined manor.

But this is something for your state of design, for sure. This mystery was well executed and as such should’ve hid a more unexpected revelation, I feel.

The movie “Rope” is one of my favorites. In it, the audience knows who the killer is but there’s tension anyway. In the mystery of Emrakul, the audience were treated as fools, it’s like the elephant hiding behind the tree on Elephant Ambush, it’s like… so much effort was put into concealing something that was obvious before the concealation efforts even started. It doesn’t make sense to us. I’m thinking:

Either have it be Emrakul but not try to conceal it so bad. We could’ve seen Jace and Tamiyo try to figure it out but without being hidden in such extreme ways to us – because that hiding failed since Emrakul is such a big missing third of the Eldrazi trio.

Or, play the mystery just as you did but have the true secret be something unexpected. Have the puzzle journal not be “Remember this they came as three” but rather something weirder. And then Emrakul can show up at some other time or place.

It makes sense and is awesome that Nahiri would bring Emrakul to Innistrad – she is the Harbinger in this story – but it doesn’t make sense to expect even many casual players wouldn’t pick this up.

We are enfranchised, yes. But most people I know know that Ulamog, Kozilek and Emrakul is a trio.

It’s like Huey is seen in one comic book, Dewey in the next issue. And then there’s a big mystery who is going to be in the third issue. And the clues are difficult and everything’s well hidden and the hoops you have to jump through to find out are appropriate and difficult.

And after a while the enfranchised Duck readers start thinking: this is so convoluted… they’ve got to have brought in Phooey or Fethry or some other deep cut.

And the revelation of the cover is delayed. And then the big day comes. And… it’s Louie!

And we as an audience… even the casual audience, are like… “Yes..? Duh?”

Maro, these are the first days of the big revelation for you and we know it’s important to you to celebrate and we are, we are going to celebrate and overall this is a good thing and looks like a good set. OK? SOI was a good set too.

It’s just… you did a good job with making us feel like it was a mystery. You are very skilled at creating emotions in us. So, we wanted a mystery where there wasn’t one.