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][BaDR] for example) now that I’ve realized that it solves all Magic’s problems.
BaDR: https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/the-danger-room/ “The Danger Room - Star City Games”
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.)
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 losing scratch tickets. With same-deck formats you can use old existing cards you already have and you can use them again and again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. If you do have lots of those cards just feel free to split the decks up into two literal and physical decks.