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005 - One month of weekly games/future of the 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. This creature allows him on ETB to pay 2R and then chose an Instant or Sorcery with mana value three or less in the GY, exile it and copy that spell.
The spell that was chosen and would now end the game is the good old Counter Spell, negating V's Cyclonic Rift and allowing K to win the game on the backswing.



Lantern Control:

There are a couple of cards in the Tower allowing you to look at the top of the library at any time, or to have them revealed. Cards that come to mind are good old Lantern of Insight or Courser of Kruphix.


Since there is only one library that we are drawing from, cards like Terramorphic Expanse and it's bro Evolving Wilds work really offensive. Also their new family member Escape Tunnel works in the same way (They all are pretty much the same card... insert "the Office"-meme here.).


So I managed to get two of these Lands and the Lantern into my starting hand, being able to control the first couple of turns and shuffling away a couple of early-game pieces while fixing my colours. 


Future Changes/Ideas:

Game-length:
So you already read before that there is a certain problem we came across with the game-length.
In three-player-pods a game of the chaos tower will take up to 2,5 hours, while a four player game can easily take more than 4 hours.
In the next weeks I will juggle around with the starting life-totals.
I think 20 will still be to low for this format.
Maybe 25 for four players? And keep the 30 lifes for three? We will see...
But there is another idea that I will mention in the next point.

"Active" and "passive" Graveyards:
At a certain point in the game turns tend to take longer, that's because the players keep looking through this 100+ cards GY for finding something to reanimate or to cast from there.
So I guess the feature became the bug in this case.
Now what about having active and passive GY's that are attached to the libraries.
So when a card moves to the GY, it has to go to the graveyard that belongs to the active library. And in conclusion, when a library is declared to be the new active one, not just the former active library becomes passiv, but also the former active GY.
This is in my opinion just an idea, that came to my mind... It will just be a mess on the table.
So the next point might be a better option.

Just. add. graveyard-hate:
Do I need to tell more?
When a huge number of cards in the GY is a problem, remove them from the game or shuffle them back in the library.
I'm gonna hard-include some classics like Reito Lantern into the Tower, to counter GY-strats.



The name:
I think the format schould not be called "Chaos Tower" anymore.
The "Chaos" came to my mind, because the version I built is very chaotic.
So "Chaos Tower" is just the name of my deck.
When V told me he wants to build a version of his own, I thought: "Yeah, but his doesn't have to be like mine, it doesn't have to be chaotic".

In conclusion this variant of Magic should be just called "Tower".

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