aMANAzing!: Each player begins the game with one of each Land card in Vintage on the battlefield.

What a nightmare. Everyone can immediately get Marit Lage off of Dark Depths, then they can give it haste with Flamekin Village, but everyone also has a Blighted Fen and a Maze of Ith. There's also every Strip Mine variant ever, so I don't even know what would happen but it wouldn't be pretty.

Silver Lining: With exception to basic lands, only silver-bordered cards can be used in decks.

My rough cut at my three roundrule submissions on the table.

Masters Are We
All cards in your deck must have been printed in at least one of Eternal Masters, Modern Masters, or Modern Masters 2015, or be a Basic Land.

(The cardpool here is plenty deep and powerful, even though the mana's a little rough - no lotus or storage lands means the best you can do to get more than one mana out of a land are Rav karoos)

That'll Cost You Double
All mana costs are exactly twice as much as printed. (A spell or ability that normally costs 2WR now costs 4WWRR).

(We've played so many discount rounds in various flavors, I was curious to see what would happen if we went the other way.)

You Clean Up Well
During the Cleanup step of each turn, each player's life total becomes 20. (Basically, you must either win by some alternate win condition, or be able to cause your opponent to lose 20 life in a single turn).

(No nickel and diming, if you want to win by damage you really need to have a strategy that grows over time - token generation, creatures whose power increases, etc. Even Emrakul alone can't win this.)

I like the You Clean Up Well idea. Would likely encourage decks that don't typically see play (but would also be more likely for Mayor decks to dominate).

Yeah, Clean Up Well does sound interesting. Instead of creature-based matchups being about racing and trading, they'd turn into an arms race where both sides do nothing but gather power until they have enough to threaten a one-turn kill.

Penny Sleeves: With exception to lands, only cards with converted mana cost 1 may be used.

ALFFA: Attack Left Free For All, instead of pairs everybody's decks are pitted against everybody else at once. Attacks always go to the left and each player starts the game first for one game.

I bet this would be a grading nightmare. The easiest thing to do would probably be to attribute each column to the deck that went first for that game. I also think it would create a very interesting meta, since you have to defend the right while attacking the left. Luminarch Ascension would undoubtedly be the most feared card.

So I finally get to contribute to the Alternate Format lists...What's everybody's feelings on ALFFA?

No idea whether or not people will vote for it, but I don't have any problems with it from a logistical perspective.

I assume we'd assign "seats" at random.

I'll come back for one round to submit an Ensnaring Bridge deck and laugh maniacally.

No um.... it's an absolute grading nightmare. Warning: Rant below.



It would be an absolute nightmare to set up fairly.

Edit: Ninja'd but I still say it would be a nightmare for other reasons.

It's also worth noting that there are a lot of "I win if left uncountered but if you counter me your deck is very weak to everything else" decks like Ensnaring Bridge that I am not necessarily convinced would make for a fun format. If everyone wants to run Artifact Blast then they can but those decks are nowhere near as good with multiple opponents.

Edit: What I would really do is play something like Jinxed Choker or Bitterblossom to make the decision trees go haywire.

Edit: JK. I know what I would play, because I would want to participate and of course I want to win if I want to participate, but the decision trees would still go haywire as a side effect.

You'll be ?happy? to hear that Ensnaring Bridge is even on the banlist for alt rounds now.

Hangarback Walker is the new king of the incomprehensible decision tree.

Realistically, if the round became a thing I would try to find the most efficient way to play Tempt With Vengeance. Always wanted to try that in a situation with like 10 people.

I think the only way to make it a zero-sum game is to give the winner 3 points, all losers 0 points, and all PLAYERS 1 point if there's any sort of draw. That way your deck just goes for as many points as it can get, and it doesn't matter which Lotus player you wreck with turn-1 discard.

But I realize now that even with that, the decision trees would be a nightmare, which is still a decent argument for not putting it in the poll.

It does matter which Lotus Player you wreck with turn 1 discard. Let's say, theoretically, that one of those players is going to get 3 points and it's the person you don't force to discard. Let's even take it further and say that every one of the rounds will end that way, so each round you have to decide who to make discard and the other player gets 3 points. And there is no way for you to get any points out of it.

^ Basically the "fairest" way would be to flip a coin, but we would first A) have to explore all the decision trees and their decision trees to make sure there is no way you can force a tie and B) we would also have to consider the consequences of like 5 of these kinds of decisions showing up and directly affecting each other. What if Decision A) would make the answer to decision B) obvious and vice versa. which one do we do first? What if C, D, and E all want to have a say? Do we really want to potentially do this for 10+ games?

And yes it is likely at least some of this sort of thing will show up because there will be people who will always lose and realize it but then be able to affect the overall outcome in various ways. If you know there is no way you can score points than any targeted discard is really nasty.

Oh, oops. Yeah, I was focused on fixing the "who lives in a tie" situation, and totally forgot about the kingmaker scenario.

Yeah, there's no probably good way to make that work. It just deviates too much from the core of 3CM.

I am a horrible, horrible person. Very entertaining to read through those posts.

I've already submitted an alternate format (in PM). It was not ALFFA. Or any of the other stuff I've posted to this thread (though I did think about submitting Commander; I decided I didn't want to submit another 4CM variant while Bid for 4CM was in the running).

Really the only two formats I've posted here that I would seriously consider using are Penny Sleeves and Commander. Maybe Delirium after tweaking it a bit (maybe limit it to two cards in the graveyard and one must be a Tribal Instant or Sorcery and the other an Artifact or Enchantment Creature).

Need feedback on an idea for an alternate round submission.

Community Effort: All spells and abilities have Convoke. Noncreature spells can only be paid for using mana produced by creatures or creatures tapped for Convoke. (reminder text: a cost of is unaffected by this restriction.)

By "abilities have Convoke" I mean you can tap a creature to pay for or a single mana of any of that creature's colors in the activation cost of an activated ability. So Imperious Perfect could have its ability activated if you control one other green creature. But not if you only control Imperious Perfect, because it has a in its cost (so in the process of trying to pay the costs for its ability, if you tap it for Convoke to pay you can't pay for the ; in contrast, you'd be able to pay for Leech Bonder's activated ability just fine if you only control it because you can tap it with Convoke to pay for and then pay the cost, provided it doesn't still have summoning sickness).

Probably too dependant on in-depth knowledge of the rules, hence why I want feedback before I officially submit it.

It sounds like it is effectively a more limited version of vanilla. Something like double mayor off of depletion land is relatively unaffected while other decks get hit really hard. I would expect people to just try and play the vanilla decks that slip through the cracks.

I'm assuming things like Black Lotus and Gut Shot would be free still? This would make double lotus very powerful for 6 drop creatures.