Beer Drinking Chaos Kitchen Table Style...Rules?

[jazzykat]

I bet some of you remember when you first started playing and cracked open packs and played around the kitchen table, or was lucky to be able to go to the card shop and stay up late eating junk food, and playing casual chaos games until the morning hours. This was before the internet was very widespread and I never heard of a netdeck, and wasn't interested in tournaments but I sure did like to sneak wins and goof off playing crazy decks. We didn't have money to get 4 of every good card, and our definition of good was more subjective.

Now I play almost completely tournaments. The last time I tried to build a casual deck I kept optimizing it till it looked like a bad legacy deck, and lost all the flavor of playing with cards I thought were cool.

Besides EDH is there a casual format that forces you to make a "bad" deck by banning really powerful cards.

For example one of my favorite casual decks of all time, had Quirion Dryad, Control Magic, Psionic Blast, Brainstorm (w/o fetches), Ghost Ship, Force of Will, etc. in it. While some of the cards were very good (especially at the time) some of the cards were sort of bad, and nothing was very "Unfair"

What I want to do, is play wacky games where I lose to Goblin Bombardment while drinking beer and smoking cigars (Sort of like an alternative poker night).

Any ideas?

[Nessaja]

Just play multiplayer, it's rather hard to win those games with Legacy decks (prison decks could work..).

Planechase and Archenemy are supposed to be fun formats too, never did it though.

[cupajoe]

It's interesting how perspective changes with time.

I think your problem isn't really a problem. If you're playing with your buddies at the kitchen table, if one deck starts to rule, just put it away and bring out one that's not as good. Eventually a rough equilibrium will emerge.

I don't think you need a formal ban list here. For instance, I have a Booby Trap deck with four Tinkers in it. Tinker is banned in Legacy (obviously), but there's really no way my deck can win before turn 6 or so. But it's a blast to play and it evokes lots of laughs when I match it up against other casual decks.

[mujadaddy]

If you're playing with your buddies at the kitchen table, if one deck starts to rule, just put it awayThere are at least two ways to overcome "one deck's dominance" at the kitchen table. Multiplayer has already been mentioned; much tougher to win when you have 2-3 players all ignoring each other to kill you first.

The other is to make sure everyone has 2-3 decks they enjoy playing. The guy with the best deck doesn't necessarily have to swap out his, as long as another player has a generally fragile deck that rolls over that one "best deck" archetype. (Example -- janky pro-black :w: knights comes out when the Eva Green deck has been winning a few rounds)

[Shugyosha]

There are two formats that could work for you:

Jankmagic: Every player builds a 60 card deck with 5 of each basic land and 6 cards of each color and 5 artifacts/colorless spells. The deck need to have a mana curve of some sort like 6x CMC 1, 6x CMC 2, etc. (devided among the color you choose). Before the chaos game decks will be given to players randomly. So you basically build a very janky deck because it is more likely to get another deck randomly than yours. The trick is to build with style and maybe limit the pool for each player. One has to build a Zendikar block deck, another one a mirrodin block. Good way to get rid of old/bad cards. Another way is to build around ideas. Every player gets a whacky 3 card combo and hast to build a deck around it. The others have figure out how the deck works.

Type 4 (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/198): Hands down the best casual format in my opinion. The trick is to build a good pool. I have a large all foil pool (cards cost less than 1€ each) with interesting cards which create whacky situations and demand good decisionmaking.You can also build pools entirely with creatures or with crap cards. If you want to draft (we usually just play) you have to build a pool with many synergies. If anybody is interested I can post my pool here.

[DownSyndromeKarl]

how many friends do you plan on playing with? You could do that five-player variant, Star, or whatever it's called. Everyone builds a monocolored deck of a different color, and you sit in a color pie. (Ex. You play blue, Joe plays White, Orlando plays Green, Dana plays Red, and Jorge plays Black, seated in that order) Then you just play Spheres.

I absolutely love casual magic, do you really want me to list 20+ variants that we've tried over the years? Lol.

One that my friend came up with was True Tribal. Every card in each players deck(minus basics) has to be a certain creature type, have art/flavor related to that creature type, etc. He built a Kavu deck based on that. It was slow 1on1, but in multiplayer, if he wasnt kept in check, he'd do well.

[DownSyndromeKarl]

Type 4 (http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/198): Hands down the best casual format in my opinion. The trick is to build a good pool. I have a large all foil pool (cards cost less than 1€ each) with interesting cards which create whacky situations and demand good decisionmaking.You can also build pools entirely with creatures or with crap cards. If you want to draft (we usually just play) you have to build a pool with many synergies. If anybody is interested I can post my pool here.

I didn't read the entire article, but if thats the same Type 4 my friends and I play, we have Conflux in their. Easily the best card in the format. lol

[Shugyosha]

I didn't read the entire article, but if thats the same Type 4 my friends and I play, we have Conflux in their. Easily the best card in the format. lol

We have the common special rule, that you can play more than one spell per turn if you play it without its mana cost. Brilliant Ultimatum and Djnn of Wishes are pretty broken cards. As we usually only take uncounted stacks of the pool as libraries therefore the pool doesn't contain tutor effects. It also slows down the game. Playing fast is so much more fun.

[android]

I actually put a lot of work into my rando-magic box. Right now it stands at about 5,000+ cards equally divided into colors with an emphasis on artifacts (as they are less restrictive to play) and as many non-basics as I can add. I have ensured that the mana curves are as unrestrictive as possible with most of the cards falling in the ≤ cc3 range and very few cards with stupid mana costs like 3UUUUUUUUUU. It took a long long long time to randomize everything (3 of us shuffling for about an hour).

I made it a point to put no more than 1 each of any given card with a few exceptions. These are (and you can alter as you see fit); Cloudpost, Chaos Confetti, Goblin Tutor, Blacker Lotus and maybe some others I'm forgetting now. I try to add as many of the aforementioned cards as I can get a hold of as we actually tear them up if the wording says so. We tried sub-themes like saturating the pool with slivers which was kind of fun but then decided if it was going to be tribal, we'd have to weed out tons of tribes and just focus on the core; elves, goblins, merfolk, etc. It go less fun so we just went back to totally random.

The rules are basically that we have a shared library of randomized basic lands which has it's own graveyard. We've gone back and forth with whether we should have a shared library of random cards with a shared graveyard (leads to some serious rules conflicts like Exhume, Dredge and whatnot) or individual libraries with individual graveyards. Personally I prefer the chaotic shared library/graveyard as we get to make up rules for how order of events take place. Some priority rulings turn our very cool and fun. Tutoring is fun. Milling is ridiculous.

Overall though, it takes a long time to get everything set up and the cards are basically committed to the rando box but it's well worth it. So fun, so random, stupid wins with terrible cards. All the worst cards have an opportunity at MVP in the games and no two games are ever the same or predictable.

Try it out, you won't be sorry.

[ScatmanX]

I used to have champ with my friends, that the only cards legal should cost R$1,00 or less in a certain online cardstore. (R$ my currency)
That lead to the creation of a really large number of diferent decks, that we almost did not spent money investing.

[Leftconsin]

One of the things I have found with trying to have fun in multiplayer is just try to get everyone's decks to the same power level. I have a highlander deck that runs power and I use it when some group really really wants another player to play EDH (I hate formal EDH by the way). But I play Black Lotus into Keeper of Progenitus and suddenly I'm the target, even though I'm helping pretty much everyone. While someone else assembles a table killer combo a few turns later and no one complains.

On to my suggestion:
Ban nothing other than ante cards from the format. You can enforce fairness by modifying decks.
Emphasis on playing fair decks as a whole, even when using unfair cards. Black Lotus is OK when you play fun jank off it.
You can throw deck construction rules out the window. Want to play 8 Blastoderms? That's fine as long as it isn't overwhelming.
Kick out people that play only to win. There are plenty of formats for that. You can play Legacy, or Block, or EDH if you want to be cutthroat.

Keeping a game fun is a personal responsibility that all the players have, and you should never hide behind, "But it's a legal card."

[dahcmai]

There's an old format I used to have our local store run here and there. The Worst Deck tournament. It was simple. You built the worst pile of shit you could muster. Then you handed your deck to the opponent and you played whatever pile of crap he came up with and tried to beat your pile of crap. Quite amusing.

The rules were a little complex, but it was like that to prevent people from making decks that flat couldn't win.

You had to have so many creatures, so many direct damage spells, and so many lands.

I'll see if I can find the rules. It was printed in an old Inquest magazine and we adjusted the rules a bit to keep it fair since cards were printed since that article was made that broke the format.

If you want try to google it up. It was literally called the "worst deck contest" or some such.

About all you needed to do to those original rules was up the land count some and up the count of dependent cards. Dependent cards are ones like Goblin Grenade that need another specific card to even be used. We made it so you had to have two of any card that was called for by another. So if you wanted Goblin Grenade, you had to have at least 2 goblins in your deck.

Someone eventually breaks the format and you have to make some new rules, but man it's hilarious until then.



Another format we had was Rainbow Stairwell. Amazingly challenging. You needed a card from each color, mana costs 1 through 6 and 6 cards worth of artifacts. So you ended up with a Red 1cc card, a 2cc red card, and so on until you had 6 red cards, 6 blue, and so on. Kind of like this. This is one deck I played. Notice the mana cost of each spell and you see the pattern of how to build your decks.

Black
1 Innocent Blood
2 Fevered Convulsions
3 Dark Banishing
4 The Abyss
5 Thrashing Wumpass
6 caustic tar

Blue
1 Mystical tutor
2 counterspell
3 Forbid
4 Rewind
5 Force of Will
6 opportunity


White
1 enlightened tutor
2 Seal of cleasing
3 Words of Wisdom
4 Humility
5 rout
6 final judgment

Green
1 Drop of Honey
2 Sylvan Library
3 kodamas reach
4 explosive growth
5 rude awakening
6 desert twister

Red
1 bolt
2 pyroclasm
3 hammer of bogarden
4 desolation giant
5 Shower of Caols
6 Wildfire

Artifacts
1 furnace
2 kite
3 skull of orm
4 jaymead tome
5 door
6 planar portal


This deck is quite brutal and I won the tournament we had for this. I would't try this against friends right off, it's amazingly mean. I had everyone hate boarding for me and I still did stupid good.

Anyway, then you could take 2 cycles of non-basic lands from some set. Fetches or Lair Lands for example. The rest had to be basics. No additions other than those and fill out your deck. No real limit on number of lands.

Green ends up being your mana fixing color most of the time, white ends up being the wrath color, and blue is search, but the trick is picking what you want for each slot.

It's a hell of a lot of fun, give it a shot. Really tough to build decks with this.