Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Magic Formats, Part VII Finale

The Weepies
These formats technically exist and are just shy of being too pathetic to share.

Pack Wars is about trying to make a playable deck out of a booster pack. It’s fifteen cards with no rhyme or reason and I’m supposed to shuffle in seven basic lands and act that like the short unsatisfying game divorced almost entirely from my skills as a player is a thing that people do and that I should buy another pack and do it again. It isn’t. I shouldn’t. Fuck you.

Type 5 is Pack Wars, except you use more boosters and don’t bother shuffling in lands, you just open packs and start using spells as lands that tap for their converted mana cost. Irrationally, I’m not as offended by this much quicker hand to mouth model of opening booster packs. Perhaps I’ve transcended into some higher plane of unfamiliar ur-disgust.

Type 4/DC 10 are two ridiculous formats that only work in a well manicured environment. Mana is infinite, but you can only cast one spell per turn. I believe they are also singleton formats. Activated abilities can be activated infinitely. The only difference, I think, is that DC10 has a stated limit of setting X equal to 10, while Type 4 relies on more counterspells. I much prefer DC10. I don’t mean to dismiss this format out of hand, it’s just that it seems like it could be fun, but I certainly don’t have the cards to pull it off.

Landless is, according to the account I have, the result of two people trying to play Magic without any lands. They got a good compromise going, and I’m pretty interested. Like Type 5, Type 4, and DC 10, it’s a landless format, and like Type 5, you can play spells as lands. However, a spell played as a land only gives one mana of one of its colors. After it’s played as a land, that card can’t be used for anything else and acts like a non-basic land until it changes zones.

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