Tower - a new, casual multiplayer format

One month of weekly games: So now, after one month of playing the tower, we had some awesome interactions take place, that would not have been possible in our normal EDH-playgroup. I thought in this blog-post I'd share some lines that have been played and some ideas/adjustments that should be made in the future The best NOPE I have ever seen: So we were like 2,5 hours in that one game, two players dropped to zero, and a huge GY-pile in the middle of the table. V casts one of the wishes and cracked open a Ravnica Remastered finding a gorgeous Cyclonic Rift . This spell should be game-ending at this point in the game, because the only other player left at the table is K with a big army, able to take V out. It might have been one of few cards that could change how this game ends. So when V decided to overload Cyclonic Rift , K tapped his Alchemist's Refuge  to make him cast his spells as though they had flash. What's coming next? K decided to flash in a Bloodthirsty Adversary ...

TL;DR: the short version: What is Chaos-Tower? Chaos-Tower is a casual out-of-the-box format best for 4 players. It's a single 400 cards, five-color deck shared by all the players. And there are some legacy elements. How to build the Chaos-Tower/What do you need? Build a singleton 400 cards deck. There should be around 140 lands in there. Feel free to use any cards you want to, but I recommend reading through the blog, there are some ideas for construction. Optional:  Have some unopened packs with you.  You should need like 2-4 packs per game played, some inner-sleeves and a marker. If you don't want to spend that money or have no packs with you, there should be a sideboard (maybe made out of random bulk). How to play Chaos-Tower?/The rules. Rule 1:   There is only one deck and one graveyard.  Cards referring to "your" deck or "your" graveyard now refer to "the" deck or "the" graveyard. Rule 2: There is one free mulligan. If your second h...

Additional rules and the first games: Additional rules: So there are some other things to mention, that we managed to find out while playtesting: The starting life total is 30. There is one free mulligan. If your second hand contains less than 3 lands, you can reveal your hand and mulligan again. Repeat this process if necessary. After mulligans resolve the deck is separated into 4 barely equally sized decks. There is always one "active" deck. Each player is only allowed to draw and to search the active deck. After a player searched the library, the active deck rotates.  (Tip: Indicate the "passive" decks with coins on top of them) The bottom of the library is the bottom of any passive deck. The thing with the rotating decks was mentioned by a friend of mine during our first game. The idea fixes long searches and the shuffling of the deck. It also could screw you up if you look for a specific basic and the active pile doesn't have it. The first games: It was jus...

The Legacy Aspect: But playing with the same 400 cards over and over again can indeed be a bit boring. Yes, the game interactions will never be as the game before, but there will always be some cards that are too impactful and end the game very quickly. So when I recently played the legacy tabletop game Gloomhaven ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloomhaven ) with my friends,  I was fascinated with the concept of sending your character on retirement and starting a new hero. This concept could help balance the deck if there are some cards ruining the experience, and also adding some new. So what I did was implementing (trying to) this mechanic in the deck. The special ingredients #2: And again we find ourselves in the Judgement-era. There we find another cycle of cards, that suit our format very well: the wishes. All 5 wishes let us look through the cards "from outside the game", pick one and put it in our hands.  Each of those og wishes comes with its own restric...

Building the Chaos-Tower: The first steps: I never stopped remembering the fun we had with that deck back then and decided to build a newer, more focused version of that deck. I set myself some rules for the new build: just use the cards I own, no proxies the deck should have exactly 400 cards, 140 of those should be lands every color should be equally represented every card only once, except basic lands gameplay is alway casual and no tutors??? (more on that later) Those rules made me build the deck in a way, that the gaming experience should be similar to a four-player game of Commander, but including cards, that had no place in a normal CMDR-deck. While building I figured out, that the whole ramp-package just contained signets, talismans and the other usual suspects when it comes to mana-rocks. I was not very happy with that... because yes: they fix you in like one or two colors, but remember: this is a 5-color-deck. These rocks accelerate your playing, but when it com...

The Background: Now for about two months I've been "working" on a "new" way to play our favorite TCG Magic - the Gathering. The basic idea started back around the Timespiral-block when there was nothing like Commander, that we knew about. No Blogs, that we could read, no articles and no youtube-content. Just basic one on one MTG (at that time T2, standard).  So my friends and I just threw together our bulk-cards and formed one single deck with approximately 500+ cards, that we had just laying around. There were no rules for constructing the deck. And there were just a few for Playing: there is just one library there is just one graveyard it's a multiplayer-format normal MTG-rules apply There were no planned synergies, tribal mechanics, combos in that pile. We called it "the Highlander" because we heard about that format but didn't know what that was. I remember it containing cards like Elvish Piper ,  Shivan Dragon and even one copy of Rhystic...