It's happened to us all. We're on game 3 of our match, the stakes are high, and we just sideboarded in the perfect thing to deal with our opponent's deck. Now we draw our hand and shudder. 6 land and a pithing needle. No way we're gonna keep that... so we draw again. This time we got 4 plainswalkers, a sweeper, and only 1 land. We mulligan again. 5 cards, no lands. Again. 4 cards, 1 is a land, 3 are expansive... we keep because we don't dare go any lower.
The game starts. We don't draw a land until turn 4. Our opponent looks almost as sad as us as he turns his creatures sideways for the finishing blow. Luck of the draw cheated us both out of a game, and now we'll never know which deck was better.
My format would remove this scenario forever. Never again would you have to worry about 'mana flood' or not having enough mana to keep your hand. Removing the 'dud' hand would:
Make the game more fun
Make match results more consistent and more meaningful
Make it easier for players to determine where their deck needs improvement.
For this format, you would need to own 60 card sleeves. If you were playing a mono-white deck, all these card sleeves would have white backs. If you were playing blue/white, then some of your sleeves would be white and some would be blue.
Cards that white mana cost would get put into white sleeves
Cards with blue costs would get put into blue sleeves
Cards that have both white and blue mana costs could be put into either blue or white sleeves
Artifacts could use any color of sleeve.
Lands could only be put in the sleeve of a color they produce. exception: colorless lands could use any color of sleeve.
During your turn, you can choose to play a land normally, if you have one. However, you could instead take any one of your cards from your hand and play it tapped, face down, as a land. Think of these as 'tap-plains' or 'tap-island'... they produce only a single type of mana, and they enter the battlefield tapped. Every card in your deck has the ability to become a tap-basic-land.
Advantages:
The first and most obvious implication of this is that people would reduce the number of lands in their deck, to allow more threats and answers. While a deck could try running 0 lands, I suspect the advantage of being able to have a land enter the battlefield untapped when you want would mean that most decks would still run 10-15 lands.
New players wouldn't have to worry as hard about whether they have the correct number of lands in their deck.
Disadvantages:
Your opponent can see what kind of cards you have in your hand. They're not going to fear counterspells if you're down to 2 white backed cards. This also leads to players scrying when a card of a certain color in on top of their deck because they think they need cards of the another color more.
This could make it more complicated to 'splash' a color. If you are running a green duck but want to splash Golgari Charm, you don't want to use your first Golgari charm to get the black mana to cast the second. Of course, you could just run the 12 GB dual lands, which would give you a pretty decent chance of getting the mana you need, but it becomes more complicated if you want to also splash a second color.
Deciding which card to play as a land could be a painful decision at times.
We would need to revisit effects that deal with destroying lands and graveyards. This format pretty much screws land destruction decks (which nobody really liked anyway, right?). Question is, when a tap-basic-land is destroyed, does it go into the graveyard as a land or face up as the original card?
Some of these disadvantages could be mitigated by, instead of having colored sleeves, having each player assemble a secondary deck of 20 basic lands, and when they want a tap-basic-land they exile a card from their hand and put the top card of their basic land pile into play tapped. I'm also toying with the idea of reducing deck minimum size to a smaller number, say 50, so that even with less lands in the deck, the number of non-land permanents is similar to before.
What do you guys think? Are you tired of loosing games to mana-screw? Are there big holes in my idea? What should the format be named?
I once had an idea for a format with a similar goal. (reducing mana screw) It goes as such: Before the game, each player choose two basic land cards from his/her deck and exiles them. Then each player shuffles their deck and draws seven cards as usual. before keeping their hand, they can exile one of the cards of their hand in exchange for one of the 2 lands. Each player can do this up to two times. (once for each land)
That said, I realized this idea would alter deckbuilding tremendously, and raises the power level. You can run much fewer land than before, and in fact it becomes all too possible to make a deck with only 2 land in it. There could be a rule implemented to counter this, which is that you can't win the game unless you have 7 or more lands out. A variant of this format could be: instead of 7 lands, you need at least 5 and they must be a different basic land. (thereby forcing each deck to run all five types) This format could be called Domain. (although it differs from the actual Domain mechanic, which counts nonbasic lands, whereas in this format, the lands must be named Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest.)
Your idea sounds neat, but one issue I might have with it is that it requires multiple colored sleeves. if I encountered a playgroup that played this, that would probably be the thing that would be preventing me first and foremost from joining them, the fact that I'd have to shell out on sleeves that are not only different colors but they must be specific colors. (and if I change deck, I'd have to get different sleeves) Aside from the monetary issue, I would just feel kind of silly doing it, not to mention it lets you guess what is on top of your deck. For these reasons a land deck might ultimately be a better solution.
It's happened to us all. We're on game 3 of our match, the stakes are high, and we just sideboarded in the perfect thing to deal with our opponent's deck. Now we draw our hand and shudder. 6 land and a pithing needle. No way we're gonna keep that... so we draw again. This time we got 4 plainswalkers, a sweeper, and only 1 land. We mulligan again. 5 cards, no lands. Again. 4 cards, 1 is a land, 3 are expansive... we keep because we don't dare go any lower.
The game starts. We don't draw a land until turn 4. Our opponent looks almost as sad as us as he turns his creatures sideways for the finishing blow. Luck of the draw cheated us both out of a game, and now we'll never know which deck was better.
My format would remove this scenario forever. Never again would you have to worry about 'mana flood' or not having enough mana to keep your hand. Removing the 'dud' hand would:
For this format, you would need to own 60 card sleeves. If you were playing a mono-white deck, all these card sleeves would have white backs. If you were playing blue/white, then some of your sleeves would be white and some would be blue.
Cards that white mana cost would get put into white sleeves
Cards with blue costs would get put into blue sleeves
Cards that have both white and blue mana costs could be put into either blue or white sleeves
Artifacts could use any color of sleeve.
Lands could only be put in the sleeve of a color they produce. exception: colorless lands could use any color of sleeve.
During your turn, you can choose to play a land normally, if you have one. However, you could instead take any one of your cards from your hand and play it tapped, face down, as a land. Think of these as 'tap-plains' or 'tap-island'... they produce only a single type of mana, and they enter the battlefield tapped. Every card in your deck has the ability to become a tap-basic-land.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Some of these disadvantages could be mitigated by, instead of having colored sleeves, having each player assemble a secondary deck of 20 basic lands, and when they want a tap-basic-land they exile a card from their hand and put the top card of their basic land pile into play tapped. I'm also toying with the idea of reducing deck minimum size to a smaller number, say 50, so that even with less lands in the deck, the number of non-land permanents is similar to before.
What do you guys think? Are you tired of loosing games to mana-screw? Are there big holes in my idea? What should the format be named?
That said, I realized this idea would alter deckbuilding tremendously, and raises the power level. You can run much fewer land than before, and in fact it becomes all too possible to make a deck with only 2 land in it. There could be a rule implemented to counter this, which is that you can't win the game unless you have 7 or more lands out. A variant of this format could be: instead of 7 lands, you need at least 5 and they must be a different basic land. (thereby forcing each deck to run all five types) This format could be called Domain. (although it differs from the actual Domain mechanic, which counts nonbasic lands, whereas in this format, the lands must be named Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest.)
Your idea sounds neat, but one issue I might have with it is that it requires multiple colored sleeves. if I encountered a playgroup that played this, that would probably be the thing that would be preventing me first and foremost from joining them, the fact that I'd have to shell out on sleeves that are not only different colors but they must be specific colors. (and if I change deck, I'd have to get different sleeves) Aside from the monetary issue, I would just feel kind of silly doing it, not to mention it lets you guess what is on top of your deck. For these reasons a land deck might ultimately be a better solution.