Abandoned Formats

Source Draft V2

Draft format for 2 players. You will draft your deck during the game (you do not bring your own deck, the format/mode has it’s own predefined card pool). You begin the game with 15 life instead of 20 in this mode, and a deck of 5 ‘Explore’ cards.

Begin the game with 5 decks (one for each source) on the table. It is known which deck is which source, but the decks themselves are face down. Randomly determine the first player. Players (beginning with the first player) choose a starting location. Once a starting location is chosen, other players cannot choose the same one.

Each player then takes a number of cards from the source decks, they have the choice of:

1. 10 cards from one deck.
2. 6 cards each from two decks.
3. 5 cards each from three decks.

From these cards players take 6 cards for their hand, and the rest of the cards can be shuffled into their deck (these will be the only cards in their deck for now), or burnt, in any combination of the two. Burnt cards are removed from the game and thrown in a pile.

The game begins and is played as normal, with the following modifications:

• At the end of each round before the draw phase, there is a draft phase. During this phase players take a number of cards from the source decks. They have the choice of:
  1. 8 cards from one deck
  2. 5 cards each from two decks
  3. 4 cards each from three decks.
  • After taking their cards, players shuffle at least three cards from their draft pool into their deck, and burn the rest.
• The draw phase functions as normal, although players have the additional option to burn their channeled cards along with putting them on the top and/or bottom.

Note: For newer players, it is recommended to just pick a single source deck to draft from for your first game(s) as this reduces the quantity of cards you must look at and simplifies meeting your source requirements to actually play your cards.

Mirror Format

Limited format for 2 players where you draft your cards for each round. Both players begin the game with an identical preconstructed deck of cards (one being the red deck and the other the blue deck). Each deck is a kind of mini cube, with support for a variety of strategies.

Instead of drawing cards normally at the end of each round and start of the game, players draft cards. Also, in mirror format, cards are channeled face down rather than face up.

Source Draft / 5 deck thing

Limited/draft format for 2 players. Rather than each player having their own deck, 5 decks are shared by both players. The top card of each of these decks is always face up / revealed. When drawing a card, players may choose which deck to draw from, and can either draw starting with the face up card or skip the face up card and draw from the face down cards (sending the face up one to the bottom of the deck or removing it from the game).

Source requirements

• Option A: Players begin with a reminder card (does not exist in any zone) starting location that counts as 2 for all sources. Written another way: all source requirements are reduced by 2.
• Option B (unused currently): Players do not have to meet source requirements when paying costs in this format.
  • If using this: Cards with Exploration would serve a different function

When starting the game, players draw their starting hands by drawing 6 cards. The top cards of the source decks are not revealed during mulligan.

Notes:

• If cards would be put on the bottom of a deck, remove them from the game instead (this includes channeled cards & mulligans!).
  • If a source deck has 1 or fewer cards, shuffle in all cards of that source that were removed from the game.
• Whoever started the round as the first player draws first during the draw phase (they draw all their cards at once before the next player).
• If you would draw more than one card from a single deck at once, the cards you draw beyond the first are not revealed.
• If a card says ‘top x cards of your deck’, or ‘draw a spell’, or similar, you may only use a single deck.

Optional / test rules:

• When drawing the starting hand you may only draw up to 3 from a single deck, & during mulligan you must reveal the cards and redraw from the deck of the same source.
• When getting cards with exploration abilities you get access to 10 two source locations instead of 5 single source ones.

Ski Draft (questionable)

Both players take 10 cards from the top of their deck. Each player picks 1 card to keep, then passes the rest to their opponent. From pick 2 on, each pick players keep an additional card than the previous pick. Continue until all cards are drafted. Note: in this draft format, chosen/drafted cards are revealed as they are drafted.

• At the end of the round the following steps are carried out:
  • Each player may put any number of cards from their hand into their channel zone. The number of cards in a players hand and channel zone + 3, (up to 10) becomes that players’ maximum hand size for the round round.
  • Each player puts all cards from their channel zone on the top and/or bottom of their deck in any order/combination
  • The draft is carried out, and all drafted cards are added to players hands. (Mirror format can be played with many draft formats, Ski Draft is recommended for players newer to the format, while Hausman draft is worth trying at some point. Feel free to invent your own if you like.)
  • Players discard down (to the bottom of their deck) to their maximum hand size.

To begin the game, rather than drawing starting hands normally, start with a draft, with maximum hand size 5.