Tim MurtaughOn the off chance that you're a Magic player, you might be interested in this variant I came up with — it's meant to reduce mana variance and make life generally nicer (especially for new players):
David Zaslavsky@murtaugh Interesting! I seem to remember reading about variants with a separate land pile in the old Duelist magazine, but the extra rules you added aren't anything I've seen before.
RethinkJeff@murtaugh I'm a big fan of alternative mana rules!
Some notes:
This _aggressively_ favors aggro decks. Burn, for example, only ever wants 3 mountains.
Simultaneously, it reduces decisions in the early game for slower decks (turn 1 opt is about land or nonland, for example.) A lot of draw/go control decks spend their early turns making sure they can play lands, for example.
Small Deck is the gameplan for a bunch of stuff; for example you could play Thoracle Lotus Petal 4 Force and always win.
@murtaugh Overall, I think it's pretty cool, especially for battleboxes or preconstructed play! I think finding a way to give a downside to the lands pile is a good idea (Maybe they come in tapped?), and a lot of what I've described isn't inherently _bad_, just format warping, so we should be aware of it.
Maybe ban doomsday pile cards though.
@RethinkJeff Coming in tapped isn't the worst idea, I've been worried about plays happening too quickly — i'll add it to the list of questions to consider
@RethinkJeff All good thoughts! I agree with most of them, but I think of this variant as being for bracket 1 players (if I may use bracket 1 as a shorthand for all of the most casual/new players in any format).
If you know you're playing an efficient aggressive deck against a more causal deck, you could choose not to use the Land Pile in order to level the field a bit.
@murtaugh Yeah, that makes sense. And in a format where everyone is doing it, people drop opts and play more interactive one drops, so it evens out a little, and overall I'm not toooooo worried about it. The real problems only affect doomsday pile and big mulligan decks IMO.
GrimDeck.comThis actually looks really clever. Separating lands from spells removes so much of the feel-bad moments when you're stuck on three lands for six turns straight. How's it been playing out in practice?
@GrimDeck Pretty good so far! Although I've only played a few games with beginners and it works great there. I suspect that as the power level of decks goes up, the effectiveness of the variant goes down :)
@murtaugh That makes sense. Once you hit cEDH-level consistency the lands pile probably becomes less relevant since those decks already run tons of fast mana and card selection. But for kitchen table games where someone's stuck watching the table for four turns? Huge quality of life improvement.
@murtaugh Separate land pile is a solid fix for casual play. Cutting flood/screw makes teaching new players way easier. Have you tried it with fetchlands or basics-only?
@GrimDeck I've stipulated basics only, but it would be interesting to try it out other ways. It might actually become an interesting deck-building tool if you allow anything.
@murtaugh Yeah, allowing any land would open up deck design space. Could get interesting with duals and utility lands, though it might need a separate pile size rule to keep it balanced.