pie chart

Sovereign Wars

Custom

karakiwi

Upvote 0
0

Creature (64)

Planeswalker (33)

Sorcery (17)

Instant (25)

Artifact (22)

Enchantment (12)

Maybeboard

Planeswalker (7)

Artifact (1)

Instant (1)

Sovereign Wars: A Casual MtG Variant

This is a deck pool for a custom variant that a friend and I have come up with, based on the Sovereign's Realm conspiracy.

Rules

Shuffle the entire pool together, and deal each player 25 cards; these cards will become their entire deck for purposes of the game.

Each player draws 5 cards for their starting hand, and is allowed no mulligans.

Each player is considered to have access to the activated ability from Sovereign's Realm, that is:

Exile a card from your hand: This turn, you may play basic land cards from outside the game.

However, basic lands will still only tap for their normal color.

Otherwise, the game plays as a normal game of magic; players can win via reducing their opponent's life to zero, an opponent attempting to draw from an empty library, or card effects such as that of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries.

Abilities that interact with cards in exile can access cards exiled to the ability to allow playing basic lands.

Players are considered to have an unlimited number of Plains, Islands, Swamps, Mountains, and Forest available outside of the game (such as for the Sovereign Realm's ability).

Card Pool Creation Considerations

Following these rules, one could of course construct whatever card pool is desired; in constructing this pool, I (mostly) followed a few general principles:

  • Include cards with interesting effects that can meaningfully affect the board state on its own without relying on anything else. (Since each player's deck is effectively a mystery to them, combo pieces are never guaranteed).

  • No lands. Since any card can be exiled to effectively turn it into a land, it seemed easier to categorically ensure that the entire deck is spells, rather than having a few exceptions.

  • Likewise, avoid cards that tutor for lands--if there are no lands to grab out of the deck, that effect becomes useless.

  • In general, I've avoided tutors and things that allow a player to see their entire deck at once; my goal was generally to preserve as much of a sense of surprise as possible, to keep players generally always knowing that there's some hope of an answer, since they don't know what could be in the deck that could help.

  • Very few "play additional lands" effects on permanents--since exiling a card allows the player to broadly play any number of lands during a turn as they have land drops, these effects become very powerful. I've put a few single-use cards in that do this, to allow some ramp, but something like Azusa, Lost but Seeking would become extremely powerful without needing to actually draw the lands to be able to make use of the extra land drops. Alternately, if one wanted to include more of those effects, changing the rule to be exiling one card per land played in a turn would be a fair option.

  • Few cards with mana value greater than 5--since the starting hand is only size 5, and playing lands requires exiling cards, it can be difficult to get to higher quantities of mana without either getting some extra card draw or spending some turns not playing a spell. I haven't kept this as a hard rule, and based on how games have been going, I may revisit it.

  • Few cards with triple pips of the same color--I've found that in general since you don't know what you're going to draw, it tends to be safest to get access to mana of every color before doubling up on a land; that said, if you have a double-pip card in your hand that is powerful, it can sometimes be worth it. Double pips can become playable with that tradeoff, but also often end up being exiled to facilitate land drops, which makes them less interesting. Triple pips are therefore even more difficult to make work, but I've left Jace, Wielder of Mysteries in nonetheless for some reason...

  • [Personal Preference] No counterspells--this one could easily be modified to fit your playgroup, but I personally do not enjoy counterspells, and since there's less need for color balance since both players will pretty much have access to all colors, the fact that blue becomes lighter on removal is less of an issue. I realize I'm biased on this point and that others may enjoy them more, but for now I'm happy to keep them out. :)

I basically started this pool by digging through a bunch of uncommons, rares, and mythics I had lying around and pulling out anything I felt looked interesting to play with. At time of writing, it has a bit more red and green than the other colors, and I would like to try to solve that at some point, but for the meantime I'm more interested in playing with the pool and making modifications based on what cards are frequently exiled vs played. On the one hand, players can always make use of less-interesting cards by exiling them to play lands, but at the same time I believe there are more options and more interesting choices when a player has to decide which of several good cards to get rid of.

Suggestions

Updates Add

Comments

Attention! Complete Comment Tutorial! This annoying message will go away once you do!

Become a supporter of TappedOut and hide ads for only $3/month!

Important! Formatting tips — Comment Tutorial — markdown syntax

Please login to comment