A ridiculous format to make use of bulk junk cards
The Kitchen Table forum
Posted on May 18, 2025, 9:40 a.m. by KermitWizard
“Wizard’s Castle Commander”
!Gargoyle Castle (https://www.mtgnexus.com/img/gallery/1689741876/3895-gargoyle-castle.jpg "Gargoyle Castle"), by Paul Bonner.
THEME
An ancient necromancer, lets call him Ruz, has after many millennia accidentally been eaten by his gargoyle. Indisposed, the once hidden entrances to his castle are revealed, leading to his vast subterranean labyrinth library of forgotten magic spells. Ruz has taken his best spells with him, however, leaving behind his vast library of mostly mediocre and junk spells.
Although no longer magically hidden, old Ruz’s protection spells persist over the castle, preventing other wizard’s from bringing more than one spell with them inside.
Wizards battling to claim the castle for themselves can only bring their commander with them and must use the junk spells they find in its vast library.
RATIONALE
The number of cards that players of Magic the Gathering collect but don’t use is a problem. We end up with heaps of “excess” or “bulk” cards, kept in boxes, organized, or unsorted. What to do with them? These collections of bulk cards are useful for casual deck builds, and cube builds, but for the most part, even after building casual decks and cubes, there are still more “excess” cards left behind. This format design is meant to address that problem, by giving these cards utility, for play.
This is an open, multiplayer, casual format (see Quinn Murphy’s nice set of terms and suggestions for making your own Magic Format(https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/making-your-own-magic-format-2016-02-17).
HOW TO WIN
• Each player starts with 20 life. The last player with more than 0 life, wins and claims the castle.
• Optionally, if all players agree, providing a prize for the winner adds to the fun. Thematically, the winning player could choose and keep cards from the bulk lot, for instance, or even the lot. Or, if players agree to only use pauper commanders, then the winning player would keep all the commander cards.
• It is virtually impossible to exhaust the library in this format, but technically if there are no cards left to draw, then all players lose.
MULTIPLAYER RULES
• There must be at minimum two players. There is no maximum number of players.
• Players can only use creatures to attack players to their left or right.
SETUP
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Each player brings with them one card that they own, as their commander. All other cards are the bulk excess cards of one player.
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Get out your bulk excess cards. These can be curated, semi-curated, or non-curated, but generally, it is a pauper format, although bulk rares can be included if you don’t mind using them sleeveless. Sleeving this many cards is not practical. Take out cards that you want to sleeve. There is no limit to the total number of cards that can be included. And there is no rule for the number of a single card that can be included. Multiples, of any number, is permitted.
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Organize your bulk cards by colour into seven piles: White, Blue, Black, Red, Green, Colourless, and Multicolour. Create an eighth pile of all lands. Place these stacks in the centre of the table, within reach of all players.
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Then, each player draws 7 cards, drawing each card from any pile they choose.
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When all players have drawn their initial hand, then turn the top card of each pile faceup.
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The player with the highest mana cost commander takes first turn. Roll a die in the case of a tie.
DRAWING AND DISCARDING
• When a player draws, they choose which pile to draw from. When a player draws, turn the top card of the pile they drew from faceup.
• On a player’s turn, in their draw step, they first may discard any number of cards they wish and draw that many cards. Then, they draw 1 card as usual.
• All players share a common discard pile, "Ruz's graveyard". When a player discards a card, they place it in the common discard pile.
!Gargoyle Castle(https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=389532&type=card "Gargoyle Castle").
KermitWizard says... #3
Right, arcane signets each, to start, would speed it up, I suppose. I'd like a mechanism that distributed treasure tokens somehow.
May 18, 2025 3:13 p.m.
How about just having a separate pile for face up basic lands? It still uses your draw for the turn to use that pile, but you can choose your basic land. This can have either a soft limit (Pay 2 life to draw a basic land, discard a card to draw a basic land, something like that) or a hard limit (You can only do this three times per game).
May 18, 2025 3:50 p.m.
A fantastic idea for a format, even though it pains me to imagine undoing all the organization I've done for those worthless cards.
Although, there should be some mechanic to make blue mill cards not worthless. I suppose they might currently have some value if you limit color splashing in some way, so you could empty out all cards of a certain color. You'd also need to limit the quantity of cards in each pile to a reasonable amount, though, and ehhh that seems bothersome.
Here's another idea: how about the top card of each color pile is always face-up, and so cards that mill can be used to deny a player from getting a juicy-looking card sitting on top of a pile? This would also lend itself well to being a chaotic multiplayer format, since you could easily perform political favors with this.
May 18, 2025 9:09 p.m.
You've inspired me to write my own format idea to solve the same problem. I hope you'll find some of these ideas interesting.
RiotRunner789 says... #2
Seems fun. Only issue I see is mana fixing or drawing the right mana producing lands.
May 18, 2025 1:35 p.m.