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BattleBox Format

Casual*

PeeBee

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Creature (106)

Instant (39)

Sorcery (20)

Enchantment (10)

Artifact (9)

Format Overview

The idea of this format is that it creates fun and fair games of magic, with interesting interactions and a prebuilt deck of cards that change everytime you play. The battlebox is created for grindy games of magic that swing back and forward and allow both players to use their skill and knowledge of the game to piece together a win.

Why Play Battlebox?

  • Never get mana screwed
  • Never get mana flooded
  • Games always play differently
  • Answers to all cards being played
  • No library shuffling
  • Cheap/Free to build
  • Singleton card format
  • Play unique and different cards
  • 240 card format
  • Fully customisable cardlist to fit yours and your friends play styles
  • 2-4 players

How To Play

Battlebox can be played with 1 library for all players or 1 library each, if you are going to have 1 library each, then randomly separate all the cards into as many piles as you have players. Then each player will receive 1 of each basic land and 1 of each ally/enemy guildgate, which will mean each player has access to 3 mana symbols of each colour and access to a total of 11 mana, put these lands aside for now and don't shuffle these into your decks. (You can remove the waste if you aren't using colourless mana symbols in your cards).

Each player can play 1 land of any type on his or her turns and this land comes from your personal land deck, which can be open or hidden to all players.

Now each player draws 4 cards from the library and this will be their starting hand (Mulligans cannot be taken) and each player draws a card at the start of their turn (including turn 1). You will decide on who goes first with normal magic rules taking effect when you start.

Single Library Games

If a card or ability refers to you looking at yours or an opponents deck, this will always be the shared deck in the middle.

Multiple Library Games

The best way to seperate the decks into multiple libraries is to use all cards in the battlebox, shuffle evenly into even piles of cards for each player and play from those.

Card Considerations

Land Destruction: When choosing cards for your battlebox make sure there are no permanent destruction or land destruction spells, this will make the game unfun and take out a lot of the skill involved in playing.

No Shuffling: To keep games going fast and to enable large deck sizes I have made all the cards require no shuffling of the deck in any situations, however to stop a stale game of top decking, I have added lots of card that can view multiple cards at a time and put them into the graveyard if needed.

Bombs: Make sure there aren't single powerful cards in the game, if your opponent cannot beat you because you have played a certain card, then its probably best to replace that card, the idea is that you can always answer an opponents threat, even if that means triple blocking, searching for a board wipe or finding a similar power card.

CMC: Put in a good distribution of converted mana costs, so cards can be used throughout the game with early and late game plays.

Tutors: No tutors should be allowed in the decks, as this will benefit the player that found their tutor first to take over the game.

Choices: this one is very important as the whole idea of battlebox is so that you can make choices and influence the game with every action, so make sure you put a good amount of instant speed interaction, library searching and card that can be used in multiple ways. (choose one, fabricate, cycling).

Removal: Make sure that you have a good variety of removal inside the library that hits a variety of permenant types. Artifact/Enchantment/Creature removal is very important and having multiple types on one card is a good idea (Putrefy, Abrupt Decay)

Tips and Tricks

If you are playing against opponents and you are all using a single library, you can keep an instant speed library manipulation spell such as scry/draw/pick one and ruin their setup.

With a shared library, comes a shared graveyard, and milling cards can both be beneficial and detrimental, so make sure that if you are going to mill some cards, they dont have flashback or a way to recur them from the graveyard.

If you are playing with a shared library, then you can setup your next few turns if you find a card that can rearrange the top 5 cards. e.g. In a 2 player game on your turn, after the draw you can put a card you want 2nd from top and 4th from top, which means you should draw them on your next 2 turns.

Creating a battlebox should include 240 cards, this number will allow 4 people to play with 60 card decks and having less players means that the games will be vastly different each game as you wont get through all the cards of the libraries. However more or less can be used to suit you and your play group.

Good cards to look for are ones with these keywords:1). "Look At", "Morph", "nonland permenant", "draw a card", "cycle", "each player"

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