In Vampire:tES, if a player’s hand is below the maximum, they draw up. If it’s above, they discard down. Now, I don’t think this will work as a Magic: the Gathering format because of how delicately balanced Magic is. Many cards only work because hand size is this or you can only draw when that.
It’s interesting to contemplate something like Mindculling doing a strange riff on Wheel of Fortune. It’s cool, I like looting, even reverse looting. One of the things I want to do do in the Zombie CCG I occasionally work on is drawing cards related to a location’s size, then playing some of them and restocking the difference from your hand. Meanwhile, your opponent does the same, except they’re looking for Zombie cards to play against you.
It lets you go through your deck organically. Your deck isn’t a mini-shelf full of cards that you either draw, tutor for, or never see. Tutoring is an arduous, uninteresting process and the downsides of never seeing a card you carefully selected to go into your deck are obvious. You are searching for the cards you need and getting to see all of those you put into the deck, whether it’s four Decimator Webs, or that one Lorthos, the Tidemaker you forgot you owned.
It lets you go through your deck organically. Your deck isn’t a mini-shelf full of cards that you either draw, tutor for, or never see. Tutoring is an arduous, uninteresting process and the downsides of never seeing a card you carefully selected to go into your deck are obvious. You are searching for the cards you need and getting to see all of those you put into the deck, whether it’s four Decimator Webs, or that one Lorthos, the Tidemaker you forgot you owned.
To my defense, if you only had one, he could easily get lost in the...shuffle.
If I were foolish enough to suggest an Equlibrium format, I think I’d go all the way; equal hand sizes, equal permanents, spells/abilities per turn. Even then, since players don’t land permanents simultaneously, equal permanents couldn’t happen. A cap that rises as the game moves forward would be interesting or a track that’s tied to player “progress” might be worth looking into.
An exchange system might be interesting; you can cut your hand size down at the cost of your max life total, mill yourself to put additional creatures into play, or even sacrifice creatures to play more spells or activate more abilities in a single turn.
Even then, I don’t like forbidding actions; I prefer to penalize. What if playing those things to pull ahead cost you something? What if the changes weren’t something cards did, but a way to progress the game? You have to cut a max life total of 30 down to 19 to play a land. You have to reduce your maximum hand size from seven to six to play that Instant this turn.
What if you could only have one more permanent in play than your opponent? What if you drew or discarded a card every time you weren’t at your maximum hand size? There must be cards that would break this format. I don’t even know if you’re playing Magic any more at that point, but I’m excited to think about it.
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