House Rules: New MTG formats

[Tower_Mazer]

With the new addition of Momir viewtopic.php?f=25&t=1044 I thought this would be a great time to share our ideas on house rules you all play with. I have a bunch but haven't played magic with my cards in a while so I'll just jot a few ideas for now but I will and some more when I did out rules wrote for them. Also I have almost a complete inquest collection from 1995-1999 and they had a lot of house rules formats. I have to find them though, I've moved 3 times and went through a divorce but, I'm pretty sure I still have them.

Here are 2 that were not mine but very fun. They in their own way with the debug mode can mostly be played on our favorite game MTG manalink.

Vanguard: There are 32 cards as far as I know. Arena used these in there seasons a long time ago when I played. They would give you an ability like a worldly enchantment. They would make adjustments to your starting and max hand size and starting life. I can list all 32 cards and there effects in a separate post if anyone wants. What I liked to do is I have them in 4 plastic sheets of 8 cards each. The players would roll 1D4 and that was the page they would get to roll for next with 1D8 and that would be the card they would use as their Vanguard. Does any current programmer think Vanguard rules could be implemented ie can max hand size be set?

Chaos Magic: I learned this format from friends back in 1995. We made a list of 100 cards and numbered each one. At the beginning of each players turn we'd roll 1D100 (we used 2 10 sided die) and that card would take effect before you untapped or phased in and out. It made for some interesting games.

Draft Machine 500: Choose 500 cards and shuffle them all up and make 1 universal Library. Each player is dealt the standard 7 cards. During each players draw phase they must announce if they are drawing or taking a land. If they take a land they take the top card off the library and place it face down with 3 counters on it. Each land counts as a Gemstone Mine. Of course if they draw they just drew a card. The rest of the game is played as your standard rules would apply. This is really fun for multi player.

Highlander: I imagine most of us know this one. Besides basic lands you can have no more than 1 of each card in your deck. This one is easy to use with manalink.

Here is one I can't remember all the details
Dueless: You and other players make decks. You play with any deck but your own. Every Loss your deck you made gets you get a point. Deck construction is were I don't remember all the details. The decks have to be 60 cards. For every 2 cards of color a basic land of the color must be in the deck. Gold cards count as each color in the casting cost. All cards shall be castable. Must contain 20 creatures? It was fun OMG did my deck suck lol.

[0rion79]

Does highlander includes restricted / banned cards too, as Black Lotus or Mind Twist?

[Tower_Mazer]

Does highlander includes restricted / banned cards too, as Black Lotus or Mind Twist?

I only played in 1 tournament that was Highlander and it was type 1 but no restricted cards were allowed. I think most top notch type 1 decks are mostly highlanders anyway cause of the restricted list.

[aww1979]

I never really played with any house rules. We mostly just had a few common courtesy ones, like not being anally retentive when someone forgot to pay an upkeep or something, and letting them go back to do it. I've heard of people in tournaments being real dicks about stuff like that. I remember one guy getting screwed because he was being attacked by multiple creatures, had multiple pumpknights on his side in defense, blocking the first attacker, giving that pumpknight first strike, and then being denied the right to block the rest of the attackers because by giving first strike, he had technically moved past his declare blockers stage. While technically within the rules and the attacking player's rights, that's just being an ass, since the giving first strike was just to prevent forgetting the mana cost later.

In team play, we sometimes had a few more rules, like being able to block your teammate with your creature or look at each other's hands or that sort of thing.

Other than that, we always did Type 1 because most of us didn't invest enough money to buy into the ever-shifting Type 2 environment once they started pumping out new sets every 4 months. We did do type 2 back around the fallen empires/ice age days, but sets came out slower then.

A few house rules I've seen other people use: (which I think are stupid, but it's up to you to use them or not. some of these i used as noobs, others I've just seen and never used myself, but none of which I use today)
-draw to refill your hand to 8 cards every turn (mostly used by munchkins/noobs I'll admit we did this one until we read the rulebook more closely as noobs, hehe)
-on the first turn, play all lands for free, refill your hand, and repeat until no lands left in hand (also used by munchkins/noobs who can't follow a mana curve to save their life)
-deck ante. Play a game, only the winner gets the entire deck of the loser, not just one card chosen at the beginning.
-replace useless/unusable colour hoser cards. If you draw a card like COP:Red and your opponent isn't playing red, remove it from game and draw a replacement. This was back when our sideboards were pretty much all colour hosing cards like Anarchy, Gloom, Tsunami, etc, during multiplayer games once you'd killed the player(s) you'd put those cards in for, or if you'd maindecked stuff like that.

A few tournament variants I've seen. Some of these might be mainstream, I have no idea anymore.
-The 1-2-4 rule. No more than 1 of any rare, 2 of any uncommon, and 4 of any common in your deck
-The powerless rule. Basically, Type 1 without the power 9.
-All-common card decks

I played with the vanguard cards once, that was fun, though they were with our normal decks so we hadn't built around them. We just took a different vanguard card every time, but chose it ourselves.

I'm really liking that Chaos Magic idea. You could do all kinds of variants based on rolling dice, including fancards (fan effects?).

I've also always thought it would be fun to set up all players with an Illusionary Mask on turn 1, and play it as originally worded, and not the stupid current errata that lets you abuse Phyrexian Dreadnought by not paying its cost. I haven't ever tried that one, though.

[Tower_Mazer]

aww1979 you made me think of 1 kinda 2 in 1 style we used a lot.

Hunt Magic: Each player grabs 2 identical cards and puts 1 face up in front of them. This is what represents them. The other copies all get shuffled together and dealt out face down. These are your marks or target players. Now in game you can only attack your mark and sometimes we played we any spell targets an opponent it has to target your mark. When you kill your mark you get their mark (sometimes we'd gain life by doing this). If anyone else kills your mark you still get their mark not the player that killed them. If you get yourself as a mark you are rouge. This means you can attack anyone and no one can attack you first unless they to are a rouge. Now when someone attacks you (this includes spells that target opponents if playing with that rule also) it gives you a 1 turn chance to retaliate against them even if don't have them as your mark. So if the person that has you as a mark attacks you every turn you can attack them back every turn also, just not 2 turns later ect. This is very fun in games with more than 4 players. It keeps it fair and no one feels ganged up on (most the time). The other variant we used this with was rolling a die before the game if we had 4 or 3 players. Even number the player to the right of you was your mark, odds the player to the left of you was your mark. One roll set the marks for all players this way and stop making people timid to play 3 player games.

[stassy]

For testing purpose, a MTG forge-like random deck generator would be nice (Momir only pick up creature into play)

[0rion79]

Hello, I would also propose a kind of format that I love a lot: the mono-expansion decks and the single-block decks.
In the first one, you are entitled to use cards - except from basic lands - ONLY from one single set. I know that it was used to see what was the strongest expansion ever, but I don't remember who was the winner. It is really nice because it allows to use cards that, else, you would never use.

The other one is almost the same, but it allows to use cards from "blocks".
Actually we have:

Basic set + Arabian Nights + Antiquities

Legends + Fallen Empires + the Dark

Ice Age + Alliances + Homelands

Then I bet that other cards are too limited in number for being used for this purpose

[Tower_Mazer]

Hello, I would also propose a kind of format that I love a lot: the mono-expansion decks and the single-block decks.
In the first one, you are entitled to use cards - except from basic lands - ONLY from one single set. I know that it was used to see what was the strongest expansion ever, but I don't remember who was the winner. It is really nice because it allows to use cards that, else, you would never use.

The other one is almost the same, but it allows to use cards from "blocks".
Actually we have:

Basic set + Arabian Nights + Antiquities

Legends + Fallen Empires + the Dark

Ice Age + Alliances + Homelands

Then I bet that other cards are too limited in number for being used for this purpose

Yes Inquest did a battle of the sets years ago. The one major problem they did was allowed the decks to contain any cards from the base sets of the main sets era ie Ice Age was also mixed with 4ed. I think Torrment won, but I have the issue somewhere around here. Whenever I find it I will update this post.

[Enchanteur]

One format I played :

Players have some points and buy some specials powers before beginning the duel.
Like theses :

Pay 4 : draw a card
Pay 2 : recycle a card
Pay 3 : give flashback to a card in graveyard (flashback cost is the cost of that card)
Pay 0 (but only one time par game) : tutor a Legend creature from outside the game.

Etc, Etc...
There is a list of powers to create before, and according everyone with the balancing of the costs.