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):
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.