The full description below throws in some more twists and special rules to spice things up.
-----
I discussed Magic with some of my non-Magic friends and mentioned that since many cards are cheap and the art on them is top-notch, you can use them for some other popular games such as Dixit or Concentration.
Here are some extensions of the Concentration game I propose (note that some of the links lead off site as I didn't figure out how to find some cards via the CARD tag):
Level 0: normal Concentration - just collect pairs of cards with the same picture and play.
Level 1: carefully pick pairs of cards that resemble each other but otherwise use normal pairs.
Examples:
Play with triplets rather than pairs where every picture is different but they are tied together. During your turn, you flip two cards as normal and only if you get 2 out of 3, you can flip the third card and score.
If you have mixed up pairs with the same name and both the same and different pictures (reprints, tokens), allow players to take another turn if they score a pair with both the same name and picture.
Land Mine - place a counter on a card in play. If a player reveals it but does not score a pair that turn, he or she must return a won pair of cards into play if possible.
Experience - reveal one card in the next player's turn for them.
Dreamstealer token - Target player gives you one of their scored pair.
Open questions:
How to make returning cards to play or switching them foolproof? Answered
How to make playing without an arbiter foolproof?
After some testing, this plays quite well.
If you have comments or additional ideas, please add them below.
I like it. It's a fun way to use filler cards, and it's almost infinitely customizable to suit different skill levels, personal preferences, or even the mood you happen to be in at the moment. It could also be a good way to introduce kids to Magic when they are too young to play.
Here's an idea for combining concentration with actual Magic:
Play with a set of 64 cards (8x8 grid). 32 cards are lands and 32 are spells. The lands are:
On your turn, if you match a spell with a land that produces the right combination of mana, you get to cast that spell (e.g. match an island with Merfolk of the Pearl Trident or match Mantis Rider with Mystic Monastery). Land cards are exiled while spells go to the battlefield or your graveyard, as appropriate. The two artifacts and the two Shimmering Grottoes are wild cards: a colorless artifact can be paired with any land and a Shimmering Grotto can be paired with any spell. Each turn, after you flip your two cards, you get a combat phase and then your turn ends. If at the end of a turn there are four cards left in the field, each player plays two more turns and then the game ends; the player with the highest life total wins.
You would have to be very careful about the cards you put into a set like this. Many cards, such as tutors or land destruction, would have no purpose. Mana abilities would be impossible to activate. Cards with X in the casting cost would be useless. Bounce would not function properly, and Counterspells would have no targets. I could go on, but this would become a very long post. I would recommend keeping it simple: most of the spells should be non-aura permanents, or spells which target players directly. Spells should generally have CMC of 3 or less. Those are not hard and fast rules, but exceptions should be used sparingly. I do think that Time Warp would be a fun card to it include.
To make it even simpler, replace the Shimmering Grottoes with Wastes or Urza's lands and drop the wildcard rule (so that the two colorless cards require uncolored Mana to cast). To make it even simpler, replace the two- and three-color cards with more mono-colored cards and basic lands (so that there are six of each).
Thank you for sharing yet another take on merging Magic and Concentration. My idea is targeted more on players not familiar with Magic but this is cool too.
One concern that occurred to me is how blind luck would affect this variant. Say you luck out very early in the game to score a 2/2 or a bigger critter. Wouldn't it give you too much headstart in general if you just count life totals for win?
That's definitely a risk, but I don't think it's significantly greater than the risk of mana flood, mana screw, or a series of bad hands you can't mull your way out of. There are a few things that could be done to minimize the impact of luck. As I said before, you have to pick the cards for a set like this very carefully, and I would keep most cards at CMC 3 or less. This should be a creature-heavy game and most creatures should be power 1 or 2, with none greater than 3. Maybe bumping up the starting life total to 30 would give players more time to find answers to an opponent's early creature advantage. At any rate, I see this as a very casual game to play while waiting for the rest of a gaming group to arrive, or after being eliminated from a tournament.
In general, I see myself just scraping together some cards for a quick game of concentration much more often than I would play a concentration-Magic hybrid. I just wanted to throw it out there as something that might be fun to try. It might also be a good way to teach game concepts incrementally, starting with creatures and combat without having to worry about mana pools, the stack, or deck building. There is definitely much less room for strategy in a game where you don't have a hand full of cards to choose from.
Another way to play would be this: whenever you find a pair, the land goes onto the battlefield and the card goes into your hand. There is no size limit on your hand. You cast spells normally, but neither player can cast any spells until at least eight pairs have been pulled from the field. The game ends the same way: when there are only four cards left in the field, each player gets two more turns and then the game is over. Of course, you can also win by reducing your opponent's life to zero, so this is just a mechanism to prevent stalemates.
Other than that, I do think that your variant might be a good pastime for Magic players but it needs testing at this point. Luckily, it seems to be possible to do even in a small group or just by yourself.
In the meantime, I was able to answer
How to make returning cards to play or switching them foolproof?
Switching must be done when all cards are face down. The player switching the cards may use their other hand to obscure the view somewhat but other players can still look to make sure the player does not peek at cards or do other shenanigans. This should be enough to introduce additional randomness without really disrupting the game.
When someone scores a Poison card pair and activates it, each player chooses a pair to return secretly and passes it to the "poisoner" - they shuffle all these cards face down and distribute them as they please into free spots between other cards in play. They may use reasonable distractions to obscure view while returning the cards but other player don't have to look away or anything.
Unless the game is played by supermen, these simple manipulations of the playing area should be enough to strategically confuse other players, as I can confirm by some testing I've done.
Just added two additional special cards to the opening post:
Land Mine - place a counter on a card in play. If a player reveals it but does not score a pair that turn, he or she must return a won pair of cards into play if possible.
Experience - reveal one card in the next player's turn for them.
Also, you can use the Etherium Cell token and the Energy Reserve counter interchangeably (that is until we find two cool and different uses for them )
To bring even more variety and use for otherwise low value cards, you can introduce planeswalker emblems to the game.
Normally, you put scored pairs on a face-down pile. When you score a pair with a special effect, keep it face up in front of you until used. Used cards go to the face-down pile. Unless specified otherwise, you may play emblem effects only during your turn.
Here are my initial ideas how individual emblems could work:
Dovin Baan - Target player skips their next turn.
Nissa - Turn up to 3 cards in every attempt to score a pair this turn.
Tamiyo - Turn up to 4 cards in every attempt to score a pair this turn.
Jace - Counter the effect of target action card (play on any turn).
Kiora - Play target action card owned by a different player (play on any turn if required).
Gideon - Players cannot target you with action cards until the end of your next turn.
Nixilis - Put a counter on up to two cards in play. Only you may flip those cards until the counters are removed.
Narset - Remove all counters from cards in play and flip all revealed cards in play face down.
Sarkhan - Discard an action card another player owns without effect.
Liliana - Take an extra turn. If you don't score in it, skip your next turn.
Chandra - Each other player chooses an unused action cards and discards it without effect.
Garruk - Target player reveals two cards in play. They cannot score them this turn. (The cards stay revealed until scored or affected by another effect.)
Arlinn - Until your next turn, any won action card is discarded without effect.
Koth - Shuffle a row or a column of cards in the playing area.
Ajani -
Venser -
Tezzeret - Choose up to ten cards in play. Shuffle them and return them to play.
Dack - For each player, play an unused action card owned by that player (even Jace if it's available).
Sorin - Put a counter on up to two cards in play. If a player scores a pair with either of those cards, you score the pair
Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(game) with Magic cards (for which there might otherwise be little use, such as basic lands or tokens).
The full description below throws in some more twists and special rules to spice things up.
-----
I discussed Magic with some of my non-Magic friends and mentioned that since many cards are cheap and the art on them is top-notch, you can use them for some other popular games such as Dixit or Concentration.
Here are some extensions of the Concentration game I propose (note that some of the links lead off site as I didn't figure out how to find some cards via the CARD tag):
Level 0: normal Concentration - just collect pairs of cards with the same picture and play.
Level 1: carefully pick pairs of cards that resemble each other but otherwise use normal pairs.
Examples:
Level 2: for pairs, pick cards that have similar pictures but not exactly the same
Examples:
Level 3: for pairs, pick cards with different pictures tied together by something quite obvious
Examples:
Level 4: for pairs, pick cards with different pictures tied thematically
Examples:
Level 5: Go hog-wild or mix card pairs from the above levels together
Examples:
Extra options:
Play with triplets rather than pairs where every picture is different but they are tied together. During your turn, you flip two cards as normal and only if you get 2 out of 3, you can flip the third card and score.
Examples:
If you have mixed up pairs with the same name and both the same and different pictures (reprints, tokens), allow players to take another turn if they score a pair with both the same name and picture.
Example:
Special cards:
Test how many of each special card below to include in your deck to accommodate your play group the best.
When you score a pair of
Open questions:
After some testing, this plays quite well.
If you have comments or additional ideas, please add them below.
Cheers
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
Here's an idea for combining concentration with actual Magic:
Play with a set of 64 cards (8x8 grid). 32 cards are lands and 32 are spells. The lands are:
You would have to be very careful about the cards you put into a set like this. Many cards, such as tutors or land destruction, would have no purpose. Mana abilities would be impossible to activate. Cards with X in the casting cost would be useless. Bounce would not function properly, and Counterspells would have no targets. I could go on, but this would become a very long post. I would recommend keeping it simple: most of the spells should be non-aura permanents, or spells which target players directly. Spells should generally have CMC of 3 or less. Those are not hard and fast rules, but exceptions should be used sparingly. I do think that Time Warp would be a fun card to it include.
To make it even simpler, replace the Shimmering Grottoes with Wastes or Urza's lands and drop the wildcard rule (so that the two colorless cards require uncolored Mana to cast). To make it even simpler, replace the two- and three-color cards with more mono-colored cards and basic lands (so that there are six of each).
One concern that occurred to me is how blind luck would affect this variant. Say you luck out very early in the game to score a 2/2 or a bigger critter. Wouldn't it give you too much headstart in general if you just count life totals for win?
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
In general, I see myself just scraping together some cards for a quick game of concentration much more often than I would play a concentration-Magic hybrid. I just wanted to throw it out there as something that might be fun to try. It might also be a good way to teach game concepts incrementally, starting with creatures and combat without having to worry about mana pools, the stack, or deck building. There is definitely much less room for strategy in a game where you don't have a hand full of cards to choose from.
Another way to play would be this: whenever you find a pair, the land goes onto the battlefield and the card goes into your hand. There is no size limit on your hand. You cast spells normally, but neither player can cast any spells until at least eight pairs have been pulled from the field. The game ends the same way: when there are only four cards left in the field, each player gets two more turns and then the game is over. Of course, you can also win by reducing your opponent's life to zero, so this is just a mechanism to prevent stalemates.
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?p=9309281
Other than that, I do think that your variant might be a good pastime for Magic players but it needs testing at this point. Luckily, it seems to be possible to do even in a small group or just by yourself.
In the meantime, I was able to answer
Switching must be done when all cards are face down. The player switching the cards may use their other hand to obscure the view somewhat but other players can still look to make sure the player does not peek at cards or do other shenanigans. This should be enough to introduce additional randomness without really disrupting the game.
When someone scores a Poison card pair and activates it, each player chooses a pair to return secretly and passes it to the "poisoner" - they shuffle all these cards face down and distribute them as they please into free spots between other cards in play. They may use reasonable distractions to obscure view while returning the cards but other player don't have to look away or anything.
Unless the game is played by supermen, these simple manipulations of the playing area should be enough to strategically confuse other players, as I can confirm by some testing I've done.
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
Also, you can use the Etherium Cell token and the Energy Reserve counter interchangeably (that is until we find two cool and different uses for them )
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
Normally, you put scored pairs on a face-down pile. When you score a pair with a special effect, keep it face up in front of you until used. Used cards go to the face-down pile. Unless specified otherwise, you may play emblem effects only during your turn.
Here are my initial ideas how individual emblems could work:
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?