Comment by Pikamander2
3 days ago
> What is fun?
> Here is a list of things that make a game of Magic The Gathering fun to us.
> No Discard. It sucks to have no spells to play.
> No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells.
I've always enjoyed these kinds of house rules that let you customize TCGs to your own liking.
A while back, I bought a bulk box of common Pokemon cards and put together some decks where I limited the cards to basic or stage 1 Pokemon, no high-impact coin flips, and a single EX card per deck. I found that setup to be more enjoyable than the official format.
I had a friend back in 4th Edition who ran a blue/black deck stuffed with counters and discard stuff like Counterspell and that damn Hypnotic Specter, a flying creature that made you discard a card every time it hit you.
And not just a card: A CARD AT RANDOM.
We used to joke about how obnoxious a Specter equipped with a Viridian Longbow would be.
Turn 1 Swamp, Dark Ritual into Hypnotic still a magnificent play and one that used cheaper cards in its time (vs. a Mox or something similar).
I've always enjoyed developing custom rules to existing games. I could easily start rambling here of my assorted inventions. One of my favorite means of playing MTG: the Hearthstone variant. This pretty much involves taking your constructed deck and removing all lands to a separate shuffled deck. Play proceeds as usual but with an additional step of drawing 1 land directly to the field. This means that by turn 7, you have 7 land available. I suspect I'm not the only one who's thought of this, right?
> No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells.
I have yet to find someone actually running land destruction in their deck, it's such a hated mechanic.
That's because WOTC's balance team makes it bad on purpose. Most land destruction is either hilariously overcosted or limited to nonbasics.
There should probably be more nonbasic land hate, though. Lands decks can be pretty hard to interact with.