#magic formats

-the full set of Foundations (FDN) cards all appear in the play boosters, right? and they'll all be Standard legal for at least 5 years, right?

-but cards from the other simultaneously released set called Foundations Jumpstart (J25) won't be Standard legal?

-the Foundations Beginner Box has 10 jumpstart packs but they don't have the same contents as the J25 set... okay..? (it seems like a good product tho!)

-the Foundations Starter Collection is a fixed set of FDN cards you buy, but it also contains some Commander-aimed cards with FDC, so not legal in Standard .. Are the FDC also in the play boosters then? Oh and there's also 3 Jumpstart J25 boosters in the starter collection.

-and I almost forgot there's Special Guests (SPG) in the set, also not Standard legal

@bace-jeleren, thanks again for that, by the way

Today’s new format variant is inspired from Alice in Wonderland. I call it Mad Hatter Magic.

-The game must be played with 4 players. -There are no teammates! True Chaos Magic! -Each deck being used must be built by a separate person (as in Player A cant have made their own deck and player B’s.) It is important for one of the key game components later on. -Players have a life total of 20. This life total belongs to the player, not the deck (also important) -After four turns have been played, (Player A, B, C, and D have all had a turn. Extra turns to not count for this) two coins are flipped. The first flip determines direction (heads is clockwise, tails is counterclockwise) and the second determines number of spots (heads for one, tails for two). Once the coins are flipped, every player at the table leaves their decks where they are and changes to the new position. -example: Ben, Sally, Jerome, and Mandy sit down for a game of Mad Hatter. Each of them play their first turns. Before Ben’s untap, two coins are flipped. The first is heads, so the direction of movement is clockwise. He knows that the only player whose seats he can’t end up in are his current seat and Mandy’s. The second is Tails, so Ben is now playing at Jerome’s old seat with Jerome’s old deck (and logically vice versa) while Mandy and Sally have also switched places/decks. From this point, Ben with his old life total of 19 (damn that turn one Raging Goblin from Sally) plays his new first turn. -Players could decide that instead of keeping the turn order consistent with players they would rather keep consistent with decks, so even if Ben isn’t playing it, Ben’s deck can be.

I'd like to see a format of Magic where, instead of lands, you had "fossil" cards which are just regular cards converted from whatever they were originally to land-like cards. This mechanic is drawn from Duel Masters.

Fossils are placed on the field upside down, they lose all types and abilities, and their only type is "fossil"; fossils are NOT lands

The fossil cards produce one mana of any colour in their mana cost

They can be tapped for mana the same turn that they were played

A card can only be converted into a fossil any time that you could play a land card (this is a replacement effect, so cards like rampant growth can be used to play an additional fossil)

basic and non-basic lands are still be allowed (for cards like Gatecreeper Vine etc.), but they're restricted to a maximum of 4 copies

Day 3: Your Favorite Format

I promised myself I would not skip over ANY of these, but my last post summed up how I feel about Day 2's topic (least favorite color) well. 

My favorite format is a bit of a tie between Legacy and Vintage. Back when Time Spiral rotated out of Standard, I was torn on what format to go to. Looking over Extended showed nothing promising (and no one likes Extended anyway), Modern wasn't invented yet, and knowing nothing about the format, I didn't want to get into Vintage. Legacy seemed to hold a bright Magic future for me, and so I jumped in.

(As a little side note, I am 16, and got into Legacy in 2008, back when I was 12 years old - and Force of Wills were 25 bucks a pop [and didn't pick up any. Fuck!]. Due to my relatively young age compared to the rest of the Legacy crowd, it's frustrating how many people think I jumped on the bandwagon when StarCity started promoting it and card prices got jacked up, when in reality I've been playing the format for longer than pretty much anyone I actually know. #SPECIALSNOWFLAKESYNDROME)

As for Vintage, back on December 26, 2010, I decided to jump into Vintage with Parfait. That lasted about 5 minutes (literally - like, one game) and so I scrapped that list (IT HAD 4 TRINISPHERES TOO LMFAO) and created a Drainless Oath build that I was very happy with. Ever since that day, I've always turned to Vintage if I want a predictable but absolute joy of a format to play. Whenever I go on haitus and come back only to find Legacy lists too intimidating, I virtually sleeve up a few Oaths, Stony Silences, Null Rods, Time Vaults, or whatever I want to, really. While the pillars of the format may make the format seem very archetypical from the outside, I'm familiar with all of them and there's always room for creative juices to flow!

Pauper's Magic is possibly my favorite format, albeit one I don't get to play often as it requires a deck to be built specifically for it.  The rules for building a pauper's deck are simple:  60 common cards.  Cards that are commons in one set but uncommon or even rare in another are considered common for the purposes of building a pauper's deck.

As a college student who seems to be broke half the time, I really appreciate the pauper rules.  I don't have to spend money keeping up with Standard, and I don't have to buy expensive rares to complete decks.  The mindset for building a pauper's deck often feels much more small scale than that of a Standard deck.  You aren't working to get one card onto the field, and individual cards in a combo tend to be a lot less powerful.  That said, a pauper deck can easily set off a combo that can end the game within 4 or 5 turns.  Grapeshot-Storm and Gobbo-Storm come to mind.

My current deck uses fog and milling abilities for a slow, often times painful, game of battlefield control.  Here's the list:

TurboFog-Mill:  Total Cards 60

Mana: Total Cards 22

7 Forest

13 Island

2 Halimar Depths

Creatures: Total Cards: 2

2 Reckless Scholar

Artifacts/Enchantments:  Total Cards: 8

1 Nihil Spellbomb

1 Sunbeam Spellbomb

2 Prophetic Prism

4 Jace's Erasure

Instants/Sorceries: Total Cards: 28

1 Counsel of Soratami

4 Tome Scour

2 Forsee

4 Counterspell

2 Ponder

2 Treasure Hunt

3 Fog

4 Moment's Peace

2 Constant Mists

2 Explore

1 Blunt the Assault

1 Spore Cloud

Sideboard:  Total Cards: 15

2 Manaleak

2 Island

2 Thoughtbind

1 Stoic Rebuttal

2 Power Sink

1 Negate

1 ThinkTwice

1 Divination

2 Llanowar Elves

1 Naturalize

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