Another ridiculous format for junk cards: "All-Rounder"
The Kitchen Table forum
Posted on May 18, 2025, 10:59 p.m. by demorome
Inspired by KermitWizard's post of a similar name, here's a half-baked format idea intended to make use of otherwise useless cards. This one is also inspired by the video game "ROUNDS", where a game is decided by winning a certain amount of fast-paced rounds, and for each lost round, the losing player gets to select a power-up to even the odds.
Thus, let's call the format "All-Rounder", both a reference to its inspiration, and to how the winner must have a well-rounded deck that thrives even against an opponent's adaptations.
Another guiding principle will be to make the game quick and snappy, and to emphasize skill by eliminating the possibility of drawing poorly. This will be sorely needed, since the cards are pretty much all going to suck and will barely synergize together.
Rules
- 2 players minimum, but no maximum.
- Players can attack any other player, but a player cannot be attacked by more than 1 player before their last attacking player's turn comes up again. This is to prevent players from easily ganging up on someone.
- Each player starts with a measly 10 life. This can be later increased, more details later.
- There is no deck to draw from; each player has all their cards pre-drawn, in their hand.
- Cards that would draw a card instead produce "Jokers" that can be played as any card that has been revealed to you this game (including an opponent's card!), but which cost +1 generic to cast. If you play a Joker and copy a card that's in your hand, you must obviously reveal the copied card to prevent cheating. This is powerful, but since we start at 10 life, control decks should still be easy to keep in check.
- Cards that would mill an opponent instead let you destroy/counter that number of Jokers (these still go in the graveyard, so have some note-taking mechanism ready). If you would mill yourself, you can place new Jokers of your choosing in the graveyard. Once a graveyard is "Overflowing", meaning that there are 10 or more cards in it, the owner of that graveyard takes 2 damage at the start of their turn from the risen dead / poor sanitation.
- Cards that would fetch a card produce a Joker of the required type.
- Cards that would reveal cards from the top of your library must instead let another player randomly pick that many cards from your hand to reveal them.
- If you have no cards in hand left, you must either hope to win with your current boardstate, concede, or, at the start of your turn, reset your hand as it originally was (including bringing cards out of the battlefield/graveyard/exile) at the cost of 2 life and sacrificing 2 lands. You cannot play a land during this turn.
- Besides non-basic lands, players generally have no lands in their hand. Instead, anyone can access any basic land and play it as normal. This resource can be safely used up to 4 times, with uses beyond that costing 2 life. This is to prevent stuff like Landfall from being too degenerate, while overall minimizing randomness as much as possible.
- To build their deck-hands, players must first draft through the chaff. To do so, each player picks X random cards from a pile of garbage cards, where X is the amount of players. Then, a regular draft format ensues with these "packs" of picked cards. This process repeats until each player has 7 cards.
- After the chaff-draft, it's time to d-d-d-duel. The aim of the game is to be fast-paced and to not linger on agonizing moments where your current hand is just garbage. Thus, use of timers is encouraged; each player has 30 seconds when they have priority to start making their play with no take-backs.
- Each round could also be capped at 10 minutes. If there's no clear winner at the end of those 10 minutes, "sudden-death" is enforced: all players make full attacks against each other at the same time, with each attacker also being able to block as though they had vigilance. Any creature damage taken during sudden death has uber-deathtouch, meaning it instakills players as well. Survivors are winners, and those killed are losers. It is possible to have a round end with all-winners or all-losers. To prevent temptations to stall, the timer is hidden from view and may even be set with +/- a couple minutes to randomize it a bit.
- Alternative timing suggestions are welcome.
- The ultimate winner is decided by whoever reaches X round-wins first. A good default is probably 3. There might be multiple winners if using timer rules; that's okay!
- Upgrades: this is where the fun begins. After each round, losers can choose to pick X random cards from the pile-o-garbage, where X is the amount of losers who choose to do this. Then, those players do a mini-draft with those "packs" of chosen cards.
- Alternatively, players can opt to increase their starting health by 2, or to Promote a card. "Promoted" cards basically work like Commanders in that you can re-play them for a Commander Tax, except they're not restricted by card type, and you can have multiple Promoted card.
- Some other upgrade ideas might come later, like starting with a Treasure token, or "Junk-Sacrificing" a card in your deck-hand to obtain a random junk rare.
This is all just a theory-crafted format though, I'll have to see if it's any fun. Any feedback welcome.
Yes, I expect I'll have to simplify it a great deal once it comes to actually trying to explain this in-person. This was mostly a first-draft attempt to chuck as many cool-sounding ideas as possible. I'll take the criticism to heart.
May 18, 2025 11:34 p.m.
For the basic lands drawn, I figure it should be mostly easy to track visually, just based off the amount of basic lands one currently has. Unless you drafted fetchlands, then I suppose you just have to place the "freely-drawn" lands in their own zone to visually separate them from basic lands that are created from a cracked fetchland.
For Promoted cards, I imagine they start play in basically a Command Zone and return there whenever they're used. The tax for re-using Promoted cards would be shared amongst all of them, so it's no more complex than dealing with Partner Commanders most of the time, unless someone wants to over-invest in Promoting cards every upgrade they get, which seems like a sub-optimal choice anyways due to the aforementioned shared tax.
For tracking who has attacked who, that seemed like a simple enough burden for the person who got recently attacked to remember, and they're incentivized to remember it. I'll have to see if this rule is even worth keeping though, as in most cases it can probably be left optional if your fellow players don't usually gang up. Personally, I just wanted there to be a rule to prevent the game from temporarily turning into Archenemy, but perhaps I'm just being salty, and it has little in common with the rest of the overall design, besides that I can half-justify it as ensuring "fairness" / emphasize skill. Though table politics is a skill of its own, so idk.
The "Jokers" definitely seem like the biggest tracking difficulty I'll need to tackle. Perhaps it will be smoother to just have everyone draw from a pile instead. The core idea behind them was that normally, when you draw a card, you expect it to synergize with the rest of your deck, so letting you just clone an existing card seemed like an easy way to make a combo start popping off, rather than drawing some random card from a pile of garbage you haven't even looked at. I'll have to inquire amongst my players how they feel about it.
legendofa says... #2
This format has a couple too many things to keep track of for my liking. I haven't played Rounds, but if the game does most of the tracking, that makes it easier for that. Right now, you have the game timer, the number of basic lands drawn, who has attacked who recently, revealed cards, and promoted cards. It might be more doable in practice than in theory, but looking at this from the outside, it looks like there's a lot going on.
Still, it looks like a good, fun use of bulk cards once it gets going. I'll be interested to hear how it works if you get some live testing in.
May 18, 2025 11:30 p.m.