By Dwarven Pony
Have you been playing Magic lately and just not gotten the kind of fun feeling you used to get when you first started playing? Well, there is a way to fix this... (It doesn't involve you sending me all your cards and getting a new hobby.)
Anyway, what you do is grab all your cards, and going through each colour (including gold) and artifacts pick out cards that are FUN to play with (everyone has their own definition of fun). Pick about 10 creatures for each colour, and ten sorceries, instants, enchantments. Make sure you include no removal of any sort. No creature removal (except maybe one at most) and no land removal. Absolutely no enchantment removal or artifact removal (you'll see why in a minute).
Pick a lot of global-effect cards (such as Enchant World cards, or artifacts, sorceries, etc.). Go with a theme for each colour. You'll have about 20 cards of each colour, 20 artifacts, and 20 gold cards. Now stick in 11 islands, plains, forests, etc., 11 non-basic lands that produce coloured mana. Then pick 11 colourless mana only land. Do not put any more than one copy of a card in the deck! Now shuffle all the non-land cards together, put them in a pile, and then shuffle all the lands together, put them in a 2nd pile.
Get one or two opponents, and split both piles of cards between yourselves. You will each have 2 libraries, one with only lands, and one with all but lands. Whenever you draw a cards, including your first seven, pick only ONE pile from which to draw.
Get what's happening? You and your friends are playing a gigantic deck (you never know what will come up) with all five colours. No one person has a "superior deck" - meaning it's luck if you get the only Serra or Moat, or Crash of Rhinos in the deck. There are no stupid artifacts that are affecting one person (so don't put in racks or black vises or what have you). And since you can choose whether you want to draw land or not mana screw does not exist! With no removal whatsoever, those long-dragged out games you may have been playing have been made much quicker. And hey, with only a single counterspell in a 200+ card deck, you don't have to worry about casting a good card.
Trust me. This is fun. Try building it.
A roleplaying-like variant by Alex Shvartsman.
Developing Your Character
Much like in a roleplaying game, you must prepare your character before the game begins. This will have some serious effects on how you build and play your deck, so choose wisely. There are four characteristics you need to consider:
Grow In Power
Your character is represented by a Planeswalker token - a 1/20 creature. You begin at level 1, but your character can progress in power by gaining experience points. There are a few ways to gain them.
Any time you destroy a permanent your opponent controls, you gain a number of experience points equal to that permanent's casting cost. You gain 2 experience points for each opposing land you destroy.
You can also gain 1 experience point for every 5 mana you have "stored." At any time, you are allowed to place any amount of mana from your pool into "storage" and trade it in for experience points. One of the finer strategies in the game is deciding whether you want to cast your spells faster or save more mana for experience points, gaining a long-term advantage.
For every 5 experience points, you gain a new level, at which time several things happen. First, your character gains +1/+1 for every new level he has achieved. Your character may also learn a new spell in any of the colours he can currently use. This may not be a copy of a spell he currently remembers.
For casting spells in your hand, you can only cast spells with a casting cost less than or equal to your current level. Only Planeswalkers of level 5 or above may cast X spells.
Finally, reaching certain levels provides additional benefits - refer to the chart below for details.
Let's Do Battle
Once all the bookkeeping has been taken care of, it is finally time to begin playing. Get as many players as you can - while this variant can be fun for two players, it becomes a lot more interesting in a free-for-all format.
There are two paths to victory - remain the last Plainswalker standing or advance to level 10. In a multiplayer game, the second path to victory becomes a very viable option.
The combat in this variant is handled different from a regular Magic game. First, the Planeswalker and his creatures may attack another Planeswalker or any of his creatures directly. The defending player can still choose to block with another creature instead. The Planeswalker himself may choose to block an attack directed at one of his creatures.
The combat is not resolved until all attackers or blockers have been removed from combat. In other words, creatures continually attack and block each other until one, some or all are dead.
Level Abilities
XP LVL Abilities ------------------ 0 1 5 2 10 3 May cast spells of one colour adjacent to your main colour. 15 4 May cast artifacts. 20 5 May cast spells of both colours adjacent to your main colour. 25 6 30 7 35 8 May cast spells of all colours. 40 9 50 10 You win!
For this variant, you need about a five hundred card deck. You probably will need to use all the cards you have, or if you have a rather large collection (like me), one colour will do. Your hand size is restricted to seven cards at the end of your turn. This means that Library of Leng and other hand increasing cards are banned. Feldon's Cane is also banned, and Royal Assassin is restricted.
All forms of upkeep are non-cumulative, making the upkeep of a card with cumulative upkeep just one payment of the printed cost. If you deal damage to another player, you gain life equal to the amount of damage dealt. This doesn't apply to creatures. If you deal damage to yourself, this effect does not apply.
This game takes hours, so be prepared to sit for a while. It reminds me of my newbie days, when I used all of my cards to make a deck.
By Eddie Hamud, Copyright (C) 1998
This is a "battlefield" type variant for Magic. There have been several variants of this type, but the best one is probably Tactical Magic, by Eric Huynh. I've "borrowed" several of his ideas, and made up the rest - so I'm going to have to give him most of the credit for this variant.
Setting Up
You'll need some kind of huge grid - posterboard and pencil lines work pretty good for this. You'll need to divide it into squares big enough to hold Magic cards, tapped or untapped. The size of the grid depends on your taste - play a few times, then decide how big you want it. We liked using about 5x5 per player (so with 2 players 10x10, with 3 players 15x15, etc.).
Each player will also need a token to represent himself. Anything will work here - coins, Monopoly pieces (I like the dog), Magic cards with cool art... just as long as you can tell them apart.
Last, each player will need their own deck. It'll help a lot if you have ways to tell your cards apart - if you don't have card-sleeves, I recommend you get some.
Starting
Overall, the rules will be the same as Magic rules, with the changes given here.
Each player puts his token in a square on the border of the grid. A player can't choose the same square as another player - once a player is in a square, that square is occupied. Other than this, the game starts the same way as any other.
Life
Creatures don't have defense now - they have life, just like the players. This means they are not healed at the end of the turn as they are in a normal game, and it means they can gain more life than they started with, using healing spells or artifacts. You'll probably want to use pennies or something as life points, otherwise it gets hard to keep track of.
Creatures
When a creature is summoned, it is placed adjacent to the player that summoned it (diagonal spaces do count as adjacent). If all the spaces adjacent to the player token are occupied, the new creature is placed as close as possible, but comes into play tapped, and doesn't untap during the first turn after it is summoned.
The exception to this is the walls - they can be placed anywhere within 5 squares of the player token, and do not come into play tapped (unless that card comes into play tapped normally).
Players
A player token is 1/20, but is not a creature! It is still a player!
Movement
A creature/player moves during the main phase. All movement must be made before combat. Walls cannot move - all other creatures can move a number of squares up to their current life. Flying creatures can move up to their current life + their toughness.
A creature cannot move through a space that is occupied. A space is occupied when there is a player token or an untapped creature in it. Flying creatures can move through occupied spaces, but cannot stop in them.
Attacking
Any creature can attack an adjacent creature, as long as it is a legal attack - a non-flying creature can't attack a flying creature, a blue creature can't attack a creature with protection from blue, etc. All attacks happen during a player's attack phase. Any spells or effects which last "during combat" last for the whole attack phase.
When a creature attacks, the attacker and the creature it attacks blocker are both tapped. A tapped creature cannot move or attack, and does not "occupy" the square it's in, but can still be a blocker if it is attacked.
Walls and player tokens cannot attack, and do not tap when attacked.
Enchantments
Local enchantments work as normal, and are carried along with their target.
Enchant Worlds work as normal, but are placed to the side, not on the grid anywhere.
Circles of Protection and Enchant Player cards are carried along with the player they affect. They affect the player token's square, and any squares adjacent to him - Circles of Protection can now prevent damage to creatures.
Other enchantments are placed on the square the player was in when he cast the spell, and the card stays there until it leaves play.
Countering and Disenchanting
Enchant Worlds can be disenchanted from anywhere in the grid, but they are so powerful that it takes extra power to disenchant them. When a spell causes an Enchant World to leave play, the player who cast that spell has to remove all copies of his disenchanting spell from the game. (Casting another Enchant World doesn't count, even though it causes the first to be discarded.)
Other enchantments/artifacts can only be disenchanted by a player if that player has a creature or token adjacent to the target enchantment/artifact.
Counterspells are similar - a player can only counter another player's spell if he has a creature within 2 squares of his enemy's player token, or if his player token is within 4 squares of his enemy's player token. If a creature is used in this way, tap that creature - this represents the player channeling a great amount of magical energy through that creature. Only untapped creatures may be used in this way.
Optional rule: A tapped creature may be used in this way, but it will bury that creature.
Artifacts
Treat artifact creatures like all the other creatures; these rules only apply to non-creature artifacts.
When a player creates an artifact, he can either carry it himself, or give it to a creature he is "connected" to. A player is connected to any friendly creatures he is adjacent to, and any friendly creatures they are adjacent to, and so on.
A creature can carry a number of artifacts up to its toughness. If a creature is at any time carrying more artifacts than it should be able to (because its toughness is decreased by a spell), the creature must drop artifacts until it is carring no more than its limit. Dropped artifacts have no controller, and the first creature or player token to enter the square containing the dropped artifacts can pick them up and carry them.
If a creature carrying artifacts is sent to the graveyard, any artifacts it was carrying are destroyed. If a creature carrying artifacts leaves play for any other reason, the artifacts it was carrying are dropped.
A player controls all artifacts he and his creatures are carrying.
Losing
When a player token is killed, the game isn't over! A player doesn't lose the game until he is killed and all his creatures leave play.
When a player token is killed, that player discards his hand, all his artifacts (including artifact creatures), all lands he has in play, walls, and enchantments. Then, his library and graveyard are removed from the game, and from that point on, he skips his draw phase.
Optional Rules
Shadow
Shadow creatures aren't considered to "occupy" a square except to other shadow creatures, and vice-versa. This means that a shadow creature and a non-shadow creature can occupy the same sqaure.
Terrain
There are two ways to do this:
There are several things you could do with either one of these. The obvious thing would be landwalk - a creature with landwalk can attack, but can't be attacked, as long as he is occupying his type of terrain.
A player token can go anywhere, but creatures can only enter terrain of their colour (really only works when everyone is using a 5-color deck).
A creature gets +1/+0 when it's in terrain of its color....
Aquatic creatures can only occupy islands, and only blue/flying creatures can move through islands...
Whatever you decide to do, any tapped lands should not count as being that type of land until it is untapped (although that kind of ruins that last rule... as soon as an island it tapped, any aquatic creatures on it would be buried).
This variant provides for a bit of uncertainty, as the roll of a ten sided die will determine the effects at the beginning of the game. Each effect is treated like an enchant world, so another enchant world cast will eliminate the effect. Nothing other than an enchant world can remove the effect. If an enchant world is cast and later removed, the effect is still gone. If a ten is rolled, roll again twice, disregarding any roll of nine or ten.
For any number of players.
Setup
Construct 6 separate decks. The first five decks each contain a separate color of magic, while the sixth deck contains land and artifacts (and, possibly, even a legend or ten).
Place the six decks on your playing surface. It helps to put a color marker beside each deck so players don't have to guess what color they are. If you want to copy our setup exactly, we put the land deck in the middle of the table and placed each of the five colored decks in a star pattern around it. If you look at the back of any magic card, you can see the order or position each color should be in.
Here's a quick look at our table:
5 1=black, 2=blue
3 2 3=green, 4=red
6 5=white, 6=land/artifact
4 1
Start
After making sure everybody has 20 Life, pick a victim to go first. The victim draws one card from any pile. Play proceeds in a clockwise manner, with each player drawing one card until all players have seven.
Play
Play now commences as per normal multiplayer magic rules with the following exceptions:
If a rule, spell or effect requires a player to draw a card, he may draw from any pile. He may also look at drawn cards before drawing any additional cards. Players may target any other player with a spell, effect or attack.
If, at any time, a player's life is reduced to 0 or less, he is eliminated from the game. The winner is, of course, the last player with life.
When constructing decks, balance between colors is nice to think about, but really isn't necessary as every player has equal opportunity to draw any one color.
By Matt Hill
This is real simple, only creatures, local enchantments, and artifacts are allowed when constructing decks. This makes for a good, long game, especially with three or four players.
Sometimes, it's the sneakier creatures that win the game for you, not the big behemoths.
If you prefer a longer game, or have decks that develop more slowly, try starting players with life totals of twenty-five, thirty or more.
If you find that having a minimum of forty cards gives your opponent an unfairly streamlined deck, try increasing the minimum deck size. Magic Tournaments usually enforce a minimum deck size of sixty cards. They also regulate deck composition by holding players to a maximum of four of any spell card except basic land (or for certain cards, no more than one in a deck).
By Paul Nomikos
There is only one deck (the Main Library) consisting of 300 or more cards. (Recommended: at least 100 cards for every player.) Shuffle this deck thoroughly. Cut the deck and you deal 21 cards (one at a time) to each player. Each player must discard 14 cards in his graveyard, and then the game proceeds normally with only two additional rules.
Cards which refer to your graveyard (or any graveyard) would naturally refer to your graveyard (which just happens to be an opponent's library). Obviously, cards like Tormod's Crypt may become rather powerful (you might want to ban that one.).
By Eljay Love-Jensen
Use the same rules as Highlander Magic, with the following modifications:
Each deck must be constructed with two of every dual land and four of any other land/lands (Maze of Ith and Library of Alexandria are restricted and Karakas is banned) for a total of twenty-four land.
The remainder of the deck must be constructed with gold cards (multicolor). You do not have to play cards of all five colors. Remember that only one Summon Legend or Legendary Land of the same name is permitted in play at the same time.
By Don Blaheta
At the beginning of the game, each player's twenty life points is divided into four each of Black, Blue, Green, Red, and White. As the game progresses, whenever a player takes damage (or loss of life) from a specific colour, he loses a life point of that colour. If he takes colourless damage/loss of life, he takes life points from the colour currently with the most points. If he gains life which can be attributed to a colour, he gets life points of that colour, and if he gains colourless life, each point is added to the colour with the least points. The trick is: he can only cast spells in a colour for which he has life points.
In standard M:tG, colours of opposition have a clear advantage over each other. This variant makes it better for decks of the same colour to go against each other (colourless life gain becomes real useful).
By Thomas Staudt
This variant is called Common Set Magic because that's what you use as decks - one of each common card of a Magic set. This variant has the following (but is not limited to) advantages:
There's not much to the rules: the deck consists of all commons of a Magic set, preferably a stand-alone set because the other expansions' commons are a bit specialized, but feel free to try them, too. You can have all players draw from the same deck or battle different sets against each other.
We restricted X spells targeting a player to have a maximum X of six, and pumpable abilities to be pumped up six times.
You will have a lot of creatures and very little creature removal, so be very selective. Landwalkers rule this variant. Feel free to stone rain your only Mountain to stop that devastating Mountain Goat. This is also great fun in a multi-player setting. There we play with 4th, Ice Age and Mirage and let the loser of a game choose which set he wants to play next.
By Phil Bailey
Each player must have at least 2 decks, preferably 3. Start play as normal with your first deck. Once you die, place your hand, library and all of your cards in play into your graveyard. You may now start playing with your next deck at 20 life. You can only lose the game if you run out of decks.
The idea is that each player is controlling not a single wizard but a small cabal, coven, or school of sorcerors and may customize his wizard group prior to play. It's sort of a wizard design complement to deck design.
Each player can have any number of wizards and twenty points to spend on them. One point will buy any of the following:
Note that in the regular game a player has the characteristics:
Life points 20 = 4 points
Hand capacity 7 = 7 points
Draw 1 card/turn = 4 points
Use of all 5 colours = 5 points
---
20 points
So a player can build a group exactly like a regular game wizard or can vary
the mix to coincide with a particular deck.All of a player's wizards are considered to be banded together so that the player may distribute damage done by attacking creatures as he sees fit. Life point totals are kept separate for each wizard and spells affect only one wizard per spell. The draw capacity of all four wizards are added together to produce a single draw per turn for the player. 1/4 of a draw per turn rounds down while 2/4 and 3/4 rounds up.
When a wizard dies, the player loses the capabilities that the wizard contributed to the group. A player reduced to zero draws per turn may either continue playing with the cards left in his hand and on the table, or a zero draw capacity may be considered a loss as is zero cards left in the player's library. If the only wizard with a particular colour proficiency is killed, all cards in play remain, but the player cannot cast any new cards of that colour.
If players find that the reduction in playing ability as individual wizards die unbalances the game too much, they may use the same system to design a single customized wizard using twenty points. They should purchase draw capacities in full lots of four points per card drawn/turn.
By Natnoj
Each player chooses a Creature with an effect and of the same colour (can be just one of the colours if the deck is multi coloured) that creature is his/her deck master. The player then gets life equal to the creature's converted mana cost taken from his/her starting life total. Creatures involving mana, life gain, alternative win, cards with effects like platinium angel and abilities which require you to sacrifice the deck master or any of your creatures are not allowed. If the deck master posseses a non-passive ability requiring you to pay mana or life, pay double. If you are required to discard cards, discard the cards and pay life equal to the cards discarded. The deck master can be summoned by paying half of the player's life rounded up and sacrificing lands equal to its converted mana cost. Deck masters cannoted be countered and are indestructable for the first turn it is played and can be played anytime you can play an instant. It also cannot be targeted by spells or abilities. When the deck master is in play, you can play its abilities with regualar cost. When the deck master is destroyed, you lose the game. During your upkeep if the deck master is in play, place a death counter on it. Once the deck master has death counters equal to its toughness, you lose the game. You may pay 3 life to remove a death counter from your deck master. The counters cannot be added, removed or affected by any other effect other than the above effect. There must not be any copy of cards similar to the deck master in your deck or sideboard. If the deck master is legendary, all creatures played with the same name as it are destroyed.