An Idea for a Format
General forum
Posted on April 5, 2019, 4:29 p.m. by MontaukMonster
I'm calling this one "All Stars"
Here's the short version: (almost) any deck that was Standard or Type 2 legal at some point in time.
Here's the long version: The format consists of card pools, and players can choose any of the available card pools from which to build a deck. Events would include decks that come from many different pools.
For example: you could easily see matchups like Fires vs Necro, Tinker vs Naya Lightsaber, Tog vs Gazi-Glare, Reanimator vs Turbo-Stasis, and so on.
The advantages are many: first off, there will never be one dominant deck where half the meta plays it. I've played something similar to this; I used to have all the gold-border Worlds decks from every year and we used to play them against one another all the time. I can honestly say that as abusive as some of these were, they would all be evenly matched against one another. One in particular I remember: Ravager could beat Nether-Go consistently but it lost to Stars and Stripes or Prosbloom every time, both of which struggled against Nether-Go. It truly is the ultimate rock-paper-scissors format.
Second, it would mean you could keep you Standard deck when it rotates out and still have a format to play it in.
All the card pools are explicitly defined, though as a general guide think of a deck that was legal in Standard at the time it would have rotated out for the incoming block set. This is to keep things even. To say a 'Worlds' Standard used to work until they changed Worlds to happen at the end of the year. So that way decks in those card pools would have access to two full blocks.
The next question is the 96 pool (Chronicles, Fallen Empires, Ice Age, homelands, Alliances, 4th Edition). First, to have a 95 pool would be redundant because it's the same pool minus the newer sets. So then 96 is the first pool. A lot of cards were restricted in that format: Balance , Black Vise , Ivory Tower , Land Tax , among others. We could take a serious look at those restrictions because some of those cards are really not that abusive for one and for two aside from a few stars the rest of the pool is pretty weak; realize that Elvish Archers was a tier-1 competitive chase rare worth a lot of money.
Anyway so yes, each pool would have its own banned/restricted list.
This may seem complicated. So many pools, so many cards to pick from. But if you just remember your old Standard deck, the one you locked away in the closet years ago because you didn't have the heart to dismantle it when it rotated out, it now has a format.
Let's get this going hmm?
I remember participating in a similarly-themed contest that was build-your-own-standard:
Gattison says... #2
This sounds almost identical to "shelf" which gained a bit of traction a while back on TO, except I think they kept it limited to Modern-legal sets only.
I don't know if the people are still active, but here's the link: New Format Idea: Shelf. bananamaniaman was the creator. Might be worth joining forces.
April 7, 2019 4:50 p.m.