The Magic: the Gathering Multiplayer and Casual Format Gateway

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8 Responses

  1. Alex says:

    Huh, people are still playing Rainbow Stairwell? I thought my friend Peter and I had solved it when both of our immediate approaches was to build a deck full of Morphs so you can never be really colour-screwed.

    I’ve never heard of Continuous Draft. It sounds fun.

    I’ve read a lot about Backdraft, and would love to do one, but deckbuilding each round is too much deckbuilding for my group, so I’d have to find a different group to do it.

    We’ve done a couple of Reject Rare Drafts though. It was quite a lot of fun.

    Archenemy is our go-to format for 3 players. You need to be careful, though: the schemes are balanced for 3 heroes, so with only two, the Archenemy’s deck needs to be SIGNIFICANTLY weaker than the heroes’ decks. Otherwise you have an unpleasant, unfair stomping. But if you do remember that, you can have some pretty great games (though definitely at the whim of the shuffle of the scheme deck).

    • jmgariepy says:

      You know, I’ve got tons of things to say about these individual formats, but the article’s nature only allowed me to pick and move. I guess I got me a few articles to write. 😉

      On Rainbow Stairwell: I don’t know how popular it is now, but I’d love to see people bring it back. I think a lot of people ‘solved’ the format in 2003… but that was 2003. Morph isn’t as solid a plan now, since the morph creatures are rather unimpressive compared to the new lot from Extended. Since this is one of the few formats I’ve never tried, I convinced my friends to make some RS decks. We agreed to add the further restriction of keeping all the decks under $25, commons and all. Don’t tell them, but since they agreed to use EDH color identity, I’m tossing together a mostly artifact deck full of creatures with colored mana activations, featuring Skeletal Shard as my 3-cost black drop. It wouldn’t work against most Rainbow Stairwell decks, but maybe I can pull it off in Rainbow-Stairwell-on-the-cheap.

      Continuous Draft is fun. The last time we cube drafted, I convinced the guys to give it a try. The end result? Everyone agreed that we should continuous Draft every time we cube, at least for a little while. It’s neat to see the cards switch back and forth between hands, and pop up in different games. I know in our game, we had an enigma pop up when I played U/G, and my round 2 opponent played U/G. The both of us ended up in a very different kind of draft, based on valuing raw power, as opposed to evaluating each color’s value. On round 3, the universe switched back to normal, as my round 3 opponent was playing W/B.

      I really love Archenemy, and was really surprised to see so many negative reviews. Some players just like to pilot one deck, I guess, and Archenemy doesn’t work with some decks. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand that compulsion. I also don’t understand the compulsion to look for a strange casual format if you only ever want to play one deck. If you’re looking for some spice for your games, Emperor and Planechase are nice diversions, but they don’t get at the real problem if you’re tired of looking at the same sixty cards.

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