General Format: Rolling Sealed

[Jason Waddell]

(all numbers are preliminary and I hate you already)

1v1
Each player is given a sealed pool of 70 cards. You each build 30-card sealed decks and play against each other. At the end of the game, any (non-basic land) cards on the battlefield, graveyard or exile are retired from your pool and replaced by an equal number of cards from your cube. Now you'll have a slightly different 70-card pool.

You build a new deck after every game.

Build again. Play best of X, the format can last forever, so play until you get tired. Your pool slowly churns and changes. If you're going to lose maybe you play out some shit cards to get them out of your pool. Maybe you try to win the game without overcommiting your bombs so they can be reused. Maybe you cut your losses and scoop early. Do whatever you think is best.

Scooping has flash and split-second.

 

[Jason Waddell]

To note, I want a pool that is smaller than 90 cards for two reasons: I want the deckbuilding to be quicker than full sealed, since you'll be doing it often, and I want the pool to feel different after you swap out 10 cards from it or whatever. The number of cards you use in a game is independent of this number, but the smaller N is, the higher percentage of your pool it is that changes.

Of course, if we make it super small we start to lose the flexibility and skill-testing nature of deckbuilding, so there's a trade-off.

Deck size should scale to the pool size. 70 cards is ~25% smaller than 90 cards (ballpark), so we would need a 30 card deck there. Nice even numbers are good too.

 

[Tyrole]

I gave this a shot with a friend last night for a few games. Always looking for new 1v1 cube formats, and I think this one has potential. A few notes:

Games were more conservative. The idea of retaining cards between games definitely adjusted play decisions. Likewise, certain mechanics (e.g., buyback, bounce spells) gained value and/or greater importance when we were trying to conserve certain cards for future games. It could have been we were just playing well below optimally, but the best strategy seemed to be to win by the smallest margin possible while reserving key cards unless they were absolutely needed. Would it make sense to offer some sort of incentive to the winner? Maybe winning a game means you get X number of "bonus" cards to add to your pool. Something to motivate playing for the game and not the series might speed things up a bit.

The original pool size and deck size seem reasonable. That said, the pool did not really feel much different between games. During the games we played, our pool changed at most 10 cards between plays, which is only around 14% of the total pool shifting. When you only have ~17 cards from your pool in each deck, there isn't much opportunity to rotate out more cards. It could be we just didn't play enough games, but when I went back to my pool, my plans for it rarely shifted much. That said, it's possible if we had played more games, the pool would shift more and the feel would change over time.

Overall it was still pretty fun, and could be a great format for 1v1 cubing.

 

[Changling Bob]

Without testing, it feels like the optimal thing to do is tap out as soon as you get far enough behind that you'll have to luck out to win, to preserve those cards for the next time where they'll be more likely to be impactful? Like, if I've got 3 outs, its better for me to scoop than to try and semi-stabilise a bit and find one as otherwise I'll lose n good cards from my pool from stabilising and potentially losing my out as well if I still lose.

 

[James Stevenson]

I'd really like to play this with someone, yet I can't be bothered to go draft or to update my cube, read magic articles or anything these days. A 2-person metagame is so great.