Magic: The Gathering format: Pack War (Icrontic style)
It's pretty simple.
- Open 2 packs.
- Remove the token + land. Do not look at the rest of the pack.
- Add 3 of each basic land.
- Shuffle & play. Normal rules (best of 3, 20 life, etc).
You get a free mulligan if you draw all lands or no lands (and reveal your hand). Otherwise, no mulligan.
This checks a lot of boxes:
- Nearly zero setup time.
- No collection necessary.
- Still a good skills challenge.
- Fun way to open packs via game.
The "official" Pack Wars (aka Mini-Master) format is to play with only 1 pack. @Soda and I played with 2 over the weekend and that seemed about perfect so I'm sticking with that at the moment. We had a couple blowouts, but most of the matches were surprisingly challenging and great games. In our second game, we managed to open 3 mythics in 4 packs between us and go thru all of them in 1 game.
Highly suggest this for a boardgame-length Magic duel. I have plenty of packs to support this.
0
Comments
I'm probably going to reveal my age here, but by pack do you mean booster pack or starter deck?
Booster pack.
Starter decks (later "tournament pack") ended a long while back (they were basically 3 booster packs with extra land). The last set to offer a tournament pack was Shards of Alara (a set which you may recall if you played in a @Colgere draft at Expo 2009).
These days you'd buy a Bundle, which is 10 boosters + land + a card encyclopedia of the set + a spindown life counter.
Way back booster packs were also different numbers of cards. Today, every set has 15 cards in its boosters.