I have an idea to change how all formats are played to improve the quality of every game.
Here's the TLDR: Two decks.
Now, 95% of the rules stay the same (ie card interactions, phases, etc.)
but there is one small but important change.
You now have two decks. One that is all of your lands. And one that is everything else.
-Both decks still have to add up to the min. amount of cards, 40,60,100
-At the beginning of each draw step the player chooses which one to draw from, 1 from lands or 1 from the other deck with everything else in it.
-Starting hand is a combination of both decks (player chooses how many and from which ones. ie play can draw 3 cards from the land deck and 4 from the other.)
-Tutoring/cracking, you still can look at both decks if you want and shuffle each afterwards.
-Wheeling, players will put the lands back into the lands deck and shuffle, and the other cards in the other deck and shuffle that took.
-Milling, when you have to mill cards, the player that is discarding can choose where that one spell is milling to. Either the lands deck or the other deck (this adds a new layer of strategy defensively).
-Losing the game due to lack of cards. Players will loose the game when both decks are depleted. (again making mill not feel so terrible to play against.)
Pros
-NO FLOODING/STARVING EVER!@
-Makes wheeling a lot less terrible and players can strategically choose how many lands or cards they want to draw.
-More reliable and fun games.
-Adds a new layer of choosing what you want your cards to be each turn.
Let me know what you guys think. Or if you have any questions about this idea.
Welcome to the forums, glad you're so enthusiastic!
I have tried playing games like this before, and...it unfortunately doesn't quite lead to as fun gameplay as you might expect. It's one thing when the game is built around it, a la Inscryption, but Magic was built to be a singular deck, and there are elements to it that change as a result. That randomness of "Am I going to draw a land or not" is important.
The dual deck setup also breaks way faster than you would imagine. After all, if you're guaranteed to draw a land when you need to, you can really cut back on the number of lands you play. Or, in the reverse, a player can make a deck of 55 lands, and the 5 cards they need to win the game turn 1. Doomsday stacks are already a thing, and having them from the get-go means that the formats are just about breaking that.
It unfortunately would never be viable for tournament play of any kind. It's too consistent, which is a problem when the metagame is already really fraught and on a thin line. It would also require way too much shuffling, something they're already trying to cut back on with a single deck.
(I also don't think it works well when you're trying to teach someone the game, because it adds decision paralysis to one of the few steps in the turn that doesn't require any thinking.)
All that said, Kitchen Table Magic is the most commonly played version in the world, and if this is how your group wants to play, go for it! I'm not personally a fan, but if your playgroup works well with it, then I say go for it, and enjoy!
I've seen this done in other Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games like Force of Will TCG where you have a secondary deck for providing resources without getting "mana screwed". Not surprisingly, Force of Will TCG was eventually discontinued on account of the original creator of the game throwing everyone involved under the bus by leaving his own company to buy an expensive yacht. Flesh and Blood TCG on the other hand took the Pitch mechanic from Magic: The Gathering's Ice Age block where you exile a card from your hand as an alternative cost to cast it and turned it into the game's own resource system for playing cards based on the number of resource points a card has. If a card costs 3 resource points to play then you pitch (a.k.a. exile) 3 cards from your hand to play the desired card. The caveat here is that the "exiled" cards go to the bottom of your deck after being used to play other cards in hand known as the "Pitch Zone" without being removed from the game permanently.
You only get one action a turn to play cards unless a card has the following game text, "Go again" therefore creating a snowball effect that can be responded to more easily than in Magic: The Gathering when you're tapped out on mana. If you've ever played Universal Fighting System by Jasco Games in terms of it's gameplay then you'll probably be more familiar with what I'm talking about here. The recent My Hero Academia Collectible Card Game is basically another adaptation of Universal Fighting System that has other Intellectual Properties (IPs) under it's belt which is built around the same business model as Bushiroad's Weiss Schwarz TCG. One of my friends who I've known since we started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! 20 years ago hates the fact that Magic: The Gathering is used as a template or prerequisite for other Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games more than others solely on the fact that he hates MTG with a burning passion unlike me and his stepbrother where we actually enjoy playing it.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
After you reach a certain point there is zero incentive to ever draw from your land deck. Decks would be like 10 lands/50 spells or in Commander maybe 15 lands/85 spells.
As for milling, once a person has 8 or 9 lands in play, why would they ever choose to mill from anything but the land deck for as long as that’s possible?
I've always thought this idea fit nicely with the shared deck variant. In such a variant, the incentive is not to build a powerful deck, but a balanced one to share from.
But yes, if this type of play were used more widely, an entirely different rules and design apparatus would need to go around it. It's great for a variant, or for a little casual fun anyway.
Wow~! I'm super surprised how many people commented! Thanks for the feedback guys. I had been thinking about it for a while and you all brought up really good points. Especially the doomsday idea!
I've always thought this idea fit nicely with the shared deck variant. In such a variant, the incentive is not to build a powerful deck, but a balanced one to share from.
But yes, if this type of play were used more widely, an entirely different rules and design apparatus would need to go around it. It's great for a variant, or for a little casual fun anyway.
I do a shared deck variant we call Stack. The deck is pushing over 1200 cards currently. The way we play is that any time you would draw a card you can either draw from the deck or take a basic land of your choice.
It great fun for really random games.
There are people that play like that , especially in EDH / Commander games that are casual anyway.
In such games you want just to have fun, its not competitive.
It certainly works, if nobody abuses it for some combos.
That said, the game drastically changes around it, if you can reliable get to 4+ mana , or put just Urza Tron lands in your land pile, its much more of a problem.
Some might even choose to only play Wasteland, Strip Mine and the like in their land deck, all of that is a problem as the game is not designed to work that way.
If tuned, you really just want to have the absolute minimum required lands in your land deck, so even if its randomized, you basically are guaranteed to get the lands and color your need at will.
Doing so makes land destruction even more painful, to combat that you have to add more lands, which then automatically makes your land deck worse in any scenario that does not involve land destruction.
Managing two decks gets somewhat annoying, especially if the lands are mixed in with your hand, graveyard etc.
The rules have to accommodate the fact that 2 decks exist and should never mix, thats reasonable fine in a casual game, but to have clean rules for competitive this becomes quite messy.
That said, the vast majority of games are fine with mana screw and flood, its part of the game, and the "average" will never have a perfect land draw, and the fact that you cant control what you draw is part of the game, so you want to use cards to combat that (draw + discard effects, lands with cycling, simply having less lands in your deck to begin with, fetching them out of the deck, or man-lands that become creatures, which makes them not dead draws later on).
A lot can be done so mana screw is less of an issue, and simply part of the game.
----
Variations of the extra land deck could be:
Instead of a "deck" of lands, simply allow players to play lands from their sideboard, and make it a cost, like exile 2 cards from your hand, which is painful enough that you dont want to do it all the time, but you could still abuse this in some fringe decks. (this variant still becomes a problem if players can more easily play decks with no lands at all, for some kind of combo).
As each land costs 2 cards in hand, you can basically assume they mulligan to 5 cards just to get a guaranteed land. Some decks can operate with that, and opt to play much less lands.
Playing any card in hand as a land tapped and with pay 1 life to activate.
This is kinda what WotC designed much much later as the cards with double side and a land on the back. So you can play something as a land in that way.
As a normal card does not take this ability into account, it has to be painful and slow, so players only do it if they "have" to.
If you dont play a land for a turn, at the end of turn, you get a mana token (not an artifact, more like an emblem that nothing interacts with in the game).
Also a variant that fixes the problem of mana screw or color screw, at least temporarily, so the player gets to cast something to buy more time till they actually draw lands (and if they never do, well, too bad, they will be horrible slow, but at least able to cast stuff).
In this variation some players opt to play no lands at all, free-spells, like a mono-blue deck with Force of Will and spells that win with little mana, like a storm deck that uses its "free" Lotus Petals to explode with the mana from the first 3 turns.
----
Over time a lot of these variations saw some play , and all of them work for casual games.
But the moment someone builds and changes their deck with these mechanics in mind, it simply changes the entire game fundamentally, which is the main issue of having it in the first place.
I played a few games with one group where we took 1 basic land out of our deck, shuffled the rest, drew 6 cards, added the land to it and proceeded as normal. It does nothing for flood, but it made screw not so bad. We never played it long enough to figure out how to break it, but it was fun while it lasted, helped with pace/enjoyment levels of the game without being too much of an easy button.
I have an idea to change how all formats are played to improve the quality of every game.
Here's the TLDR: Two decks.
Now, 95% of the rules stay the same (ie card interactions, phases, etc.)
but there is one small but important change.
You now have two decks. One that is all of your lands. And one that is everything else.
-Both decks still have to add up to the min. amount of cards, 40,60,100
-At the beginning of each draw step the player chooses which one to draw from, 1 from lands or 1 from the other deck with everything else in it.
-Starting hand is a combination of both decks (player chooses how many and from which ones. ie play can draw 3 cards from the land deck and 4 from the other.)
-Tutoring/cracking, you still can look at both decks if you want and shuffle each afterwards.
-Wheeling, players will put the lands back into the lands deck and shuffle, and the other cards in the other deck and shuffle that took.
-Milling, when you have to mill cards, the player that is discarding can choose where that one spell is milling to. Either the lands deck or the other deck (this adds a new layer of strategy defensively).
-Losing the game due to lack of cards. Players will loose the game when both decks are depleted. (again making mill not feel so terrible to play against.)
Pros
-NO FLOODING/STARVING EVER!@
-Makes wheeling a lot less terrible and players can strategically choose how many lands or cards they want to draw.
-More reliable and fun games.
-Adds a new layer of choosing what you want your cards to be each turn.
Let me know what you guys think. Or if you have any questions about this idea.
if you're flooding/starving you didn't shuffle enough or your mana base is wonky.
I have tried playing games like this before, and...it unfortunately doesn't quite lead to as fun gameplay as you might expect. It's one thing when the game is built around it, a la Inscryption, but Magic was built to be a singular deck, and there are elements to it that change as a result. That randomness of "Am I going to draw a land or not" is important.
The dual deck setup also breaks way faster than you would imagine. After all, if you're guaranteed to draw a land when you need to, you can really cut back on the number of lands you play. Or, in the reverse, a player can make a deck of 55 lands, and the 5 cards they need to win the game turn 1. Doomsday stacks are already a thing, and having them from the get-go means that the formats are just about breaking that.
It unfortunately would never be viable for tournament play of any kind. It's too consistent, which is a problem when the metagame is already really fraught and on a thin line. It would also require way too much shuffling, something they're already trying to cut back on with a single deck.
(I also don't think it works well when you're trying to teach someone the game, because it adds decision paralysis to one of the few steps in the turn that doesn't require any thinking.)
All that said, Kitchen Table Magic is the most commonly played version in the world, and if this is how your group wants to play, go for it! I'm not personally a fan, but if your playgroup works well with it, then I say go for it, and enjoy!
This^^^
I wish I had a dollar for every time time someone proposed this as the solution to mana flood/screw.
You only get one action a turn to play cards unless a card has the following game text, "Go again" therefore creating a snowball effect that can be responded to more easily than in Magic: The Gathering when you're tapped out on mana. If you've ever played Universal Fighting System by Jasco Games in terms of it's gameplay then you'll probably be more familiar with what I'm talking about here. The recent My Hero Academia Collectible Card Game is basically another adaptation of Universal Fighting System that has other Intellectual Properties (IPs) under it's belt which is built around the same business model as Bushiroad's Weiss Schwarz TCG. One of my friends who I've known since we started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! 20 years ago hates the fact that Magic: The Gathering is used as a template or prerequisite for other Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games more than others solely on the fact that he hates MTG with a burning passion unlike me and his stepbrother where we actually enjoy playing it.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
As for milling, once a person has 8 or 9 lands in play, why would they ever choose to mill from anything but the land deck for as long as that’s possible?
Dumb.
But yes, if this type of play were used more widely, an entirely different rules and design apparatus would need to go around it. It's great for a variant, or for a little casual fun anyway.
Low-power cube enthusiast!
My 1570 card cube (no longer updated)
My 415 Peasant+ Artifact and Enchantment Cube
Ever-Expanding "Just throw it in" cube.
I do a shared deck variant we call Stack. The deck is pushing over 1200 cards currently. The way we play is that any time you would draw a card you can either draw from the deck or take a basic land of your choice.
It great fun for really random games.
In such games you want just to have fun, its not competitive.
It certainly works, if nobody abuses it for some combos.
That said, the game drastically changes around it, if you can reliable get to 4+ mana , or put just Urza Tron lands in your land pile, its much more of a problem.
Some might even choose to only play Wasteland, Strip Mine and the like in their land deck, all of that is a problem as the game is not designed to work that way.
If tuned, you really just want to have the absolute minimum required lands in your land deck, so even if its randomized, you basically are guaranteed to get the lands and color your need at will.
Doing so makes land destruction even more painful, to combat that you have to add more lands, which then automatically makes your land deck worse in any scenario that does not involve land destruction.
Managing two decks gets somewhat annoying, especially if the lands are mixed in with your hand, graveyard etc.
The rules have to accommodate the fact that 2 decks exist and should never mix, thats reasonable fine in a casual game, but to have clean rules for competitive this becomes quite messy.
That said, the vast majority of games are fine with mana screw and flood, its part of the game, and the "average" will never have a perfect land draw, and the fact that you cant control what you draw is part of the game, so you want to use cards to combat that (draw + discard effects, lands with cycling, simply having less lands in your deck to begin with, fetching them out of the deck, or man-lands that become creatures, which makes them not dead draws later on).
A lot can be done so mana screw is less of an issue, and simply part of the game.
----
Variations of the extra land deck could be:
Instead of a "deck" of lands, simply allow players to play lands from their sideboard, and make it a cost, like exile 2 cards from your hand, which is painful enough that you dont want to do it all the time, but you could still abuse this in some fringe decks. (this variant still becomes a problem if players can more easily play decks with no lands at all, for some kind of combo).
As each land costs 2 cards in hand, you can basically assume they mulligan to 5 cards just to get a guaranteed land. Some decks can operate with that, and opt to play much less lands.
Playing any card in hand as a land tapped and with pay 1 life to activate.
This is kinda what WotC designed much much later as the cards with double side and a land on the back. So you can play something as a land in that way.
As a normal card does not take this ability into account, it has to be painful and slow, so players only do it if they "have" to.
If you dont play a land for a turn, at the end of turn, you get a mana token (not an artifact, more like an emblem that nothing interacts with in the game).
Also a variant that fixes the problem of mana screw or color screw, at least temporarily, so the player gets to cast something to buy more time till they actually draw lands (and if they never do, well, too bad, they will be horrible slow, but at least able to cast stuff).
In this variation some players opt to play no lands at all, free-spells, like a mono-blue deck with Force of Will and spells that win with little mana, like a storm deck that uses its "free" Lotus Petals to explode with the mana from the first 3 turns.
----
Over time a lot of these variations saw some play , and all of them work for casual games.
But the moment someone builds and changes their deck with these mechanics in mind, it simply changes the entire game fundamentally, which is the main issue of having it in the first place.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
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