EDH alternative formats

[Abramelin]

Tell me what you think! I yearn for feedback!


So when it comes to team based games in EDH, the entirety of a team takes their turn at the same time. So they must decide as a team when they are ready to go into a combat phase. Like in two headed giant. Has anyone tried 3v3?

Fun alt game: Protect the king, 3v3 but players may only attack players who sit next to them so the 'king' in the middle just sits and builds up their board. Players in this format would have individual life totals they must protect. The hole team loses when the king dies

Fun alt game #2: 5 star, 5 player format where players may only attack the players across from them, not sitting next to them. You win when both players across from you are dead. So everyone has different enemies. Long game though since everyone takes individual turns.

Fun alt game #3: Zombies vs Humans, 4+ players more the merrier. Players have individual life totals they must protect (20 life each). Teams take turns at the same time but must choose who to attack. When a player dies, they join the enemy team and start at turn 1. Eventually, the game becomes 3v1 or 4v1, once the last player is dead and joins the larger team, everyone body wins!

Fun alt game #4: This one is a crazy one I used to play in an infantry battalion in the Marines. We called it battle royale lol.. Its a big game, like 5v5, and teams take turns together. But you are only playing against the person across from you at the table, when you defeat your opponent, you choose to jump into a game to the left or right, so next turn I would join my teammate and it would become a 2v1 and you just keep going until the whole other team is defeated. Of course, the enemy team is doing the same so its a chaotic game. I mean cards that drain all opponents are going to hit a lil different in some of these formats i'm listing. But it usually is being exploited on both teams so it almost just turns it into a wild chaos format

I am working on a format that will be group vs boss but not operated by a player.. I'll post that if this post goes well lol

Tell me what you think or if there is a cool variant you play in your group!

[WWolfe]

I’ve played all those at one point or another. They’re fun ways to switch it up. My favorite was Star.

[Morganator 2.0]

Fun alt game: Protect the king, 3v3 but players may only attack players who sit next to them so the 'king' in the middle just sits and builds up their board. Players in this format would have individual life totals they must protect. The hole team loses when the king dies

So this one is called Emperor. It has a huge problem with range of influence. None of the players on your team can interact with the opposing emperor. This allows them build up a boardstate with no risk of getting interrupted, like you said. Unfortunately this setup favours combo decks... and combo decks don't need to be favoured.

I am working on a format that will be group vs boss but not operated by a player.. I'll post that if this post goes well lol

This one is called Horde and it is a lot of fun. I have a few horde decks myself. For this format it's everyone on a team against the horde deck. The "survivors" get three turns to build up before the horde goes. The horde flips the top of their library until they reveal a non-token, plays all revealed cards, then attacks. Instead of a life total the horde mills cards when damaged. The survivors win when the horde has no cards in their library and no creatures on the battlefield.

When making a horde deck, don't be scared to make them powerful. 3 or more players can do a lot of things.

[AlltheTokens]

What you called protect the king is normally called Emperor.  It is a long established casual format, but it usually wasn’t played with EDH decks.  We used to play it back in the early days on the rare occasion we had 6 people.

My favorite alternate format is Horde Magic.  The players are on one team and face an automated horde deck.  Players have a shared life total and take their turns as one.  The original poster of the format said 20 life per player, but he also put A LOT of “each opponent” effects in his Horde.  My playgroup usually just starts at 60 life no matter how many players we have.  Alternate win conditions do not trigger against the horde.  The Horde can not draw cards.  The Horde typically has around 60 tokens and is designed so that it has to make as few decisions as possible.  If the horde must make a choice it does so randomly unless you have a custom rule in place.  The Horde automatically pays all mana costs.  The Hordes turn cycle is as follows.  Upkeep triggers,  reveal cards from the top of the library until a non-token is revealed,  put all tokens on the field, cast the revealed spell, cast any spells the players have bounced to hand, cast any spells with flashback from the graveyard. activate all abilities that can be activated, go to combat, any creatures that fit the Horde’s “theme” have haste, all creatures able attack the players.  Activate any abilities that can be activated.  Post combat recast anything the players bounced during combat, activate any abilities, resolve any triggers.  The Horde wins if the Players’ life total hits zero.  If a player “lose the game” due to a trigger or drawing on an empty library only that player is removed (custom rule my playgroup uses).  any loss of life the Horde suffers causes them to mill cards.  The players win anytime the horde has no cards in library and no creatures on the field.

[Abramelin]

I am familiar with horde, this is not horde.. I will post about it later its like a everyone vs boss. But horde sounds fun, just maybe too easy..

[Aetherium Slinky]

Humble Beginnings Commander - HBC

See the full article by WitchPHD:
https://witchphd.substack.com/p/humble-beginnings-commander

and the full rules & philosophy document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CKqzg0AuMRTj8LwoW_yXjXOmQWs5sF1OqxWQmVfGFOE/edit

TL;DR No fast mana or fast tutors. The idea is to ban cards that create severe imbalance in the pod in the early turns. Mana is more valuable on early turns than it is late game. A T1 Sol Ring or Mana Crypt can mess up the playing field pretty badly letting one player pull ahead and snowball to a win prematurely.

The idea is not to make T3 the new T1 - the idea is to ban things that can cause lopsided and unfun games. You can still definitely have T1 and T2 plays! The rules obviously cut all the important staples for cEDH so you can't play cEDH like this but other than that it doesn't really affect the range of power levels you can play. I adapted my Kinnan cEDH deck to be HBC compliant and it won every time against more relaxed decks.

We played this for a couple of months just to test it out and went through countless iterations of banlists. It's subtly fun because it results in fewer non-games for most of the time. It's not obvious the first time you play but over time you'll notice the playfield leveling aspect of the banlist.

I wrote a short stats article on T1 Sol Ring. TL;DR: at least one fourth of your games are lopsided if all players are running Sol Ring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDH/comments/120jvvk/to_sol_ring_or_not_to_sol_ring_variance_and/

[anjinsan]

I like the look of Humble Beginnings (I actually started a thread here to discuss whether a version of the format with weaker ramp would be better, but a bunch of people got weirdly confused about it and kind of mad, go figure  ). I think my main complaint is that land-to-hand tutors get caught up in the bans which includes things like Dig Up or Bushwhack (I think landcycling may dodge this as the actual text is in the reminder text?) - the document does point out that some things that are fine get caught up in the bans and that's OK, but I think these Lay of the Land -with-upside cards specifically are healthy for the game and should be encouraged.

It's interesting to note that they didn't find it slowed down games at all. This seems to be one of the common arguments against removing fast ramp, and one that I've always been sceptical of (this probably opens up space for early plays - probably makes Ravagan pretty excellent, mind you - but at worst you go "land, pass" three times and then start playing, which whilst not ideal hardly feels like  big detriment to the format).

In other news, I don't think anyone has talked about Archenemy? I'm not sure if that counts as an EDH variant or just a different format entirely but it's worth mentioning.