General Vanguards with Cube

[InfinityBlack14]

For the pure craziness of it, I dealt each player 3 vanguards and choosing 1 before drafting. I was lucky with Stark in an aggro shell I drafted. Has anyone else attempted this, or wanted to include this in their cube some way?

Edit: Second question: would you have vanguards and planes draftable(?) If they were regular sized cards like conspiracies?

 

[Velrun]

Yeah. We did it some years back.

Was a terrible idea. I kept trying to balance the cube around these Hearthstone hero-powers that are as uninteractive as conspiracies but they were either too broken or useless. I really wanted them to work but could not.

Same with Archenemy Schemes. However they were a lot more random.

The best attempts were the Planechase Planes. They are just awesome no matter which format you add them into except aggro seems to always get a few %s better chances of winning now.

 

[InfinityBlack14]

Yeah. We did it some years back.

Was a terrible idea. I kept trying to balance the cube around these Hearthstone hero-powers that are as uninteractive as conspiracies but they were either too broken or useless. I really wanted them to work but could not.

Same with Archenemy Schemes. However they were a lot more random.

The best attempts were the Planechase Planes. They are just awesome no matter which format you add them into except aggro seems to always get a few %s better chances of winning now.

Firstly, thanks for the reply. I appreciate all input. I have another question now:

If you remember, how were the vanguards distributed?

Was archenemy played the same way it normally is?

How did you implement planechase?

 

[safra]

I have half of the Planechase planes and I used to bust them out if people really wanted to play multiplayer. We did a thing I read about online once but haven't ever seen again, but which I think is pretty fun:

Shuffle your stack of planes like normal, and then lay out 5 planes in a + pattern. You start on the central plane, and any time someone would planeswalk (rules reminder: you can pay as a Sorcery to roll the die once, then to roll again, then , etc. There's a 1/6 chance to planeswalk, and another 1/6 to trigger an effect of the current plane.) they can instead move the 'active plane' in one of the four compass directions. If it's face-down, it's flipped up and gets its ETB thing. Blank planes get added when someone would planeswalk to the equivalent 'map tile', and then flipped up. Eventually you end up recycling planes - we always did it so that when you run out, everything except the 5 current/adjacent planes gets shuffled back into the face-down deck.

It's better than the "Planar Deck" idea imo.

(PS if anyone who drafts more multiplayer than I do wants to buy em off me, shoot me a PM)

 

[Velrun]

Firstly, thanks for the reply. I appreciate all input. I have another question now:

If you remember, how were the vanguards distributed?

Was archenemy played the same way it normally is?

How did you implement planechase?

I do remember. In phase 1 each player was given 3 random vanguards at the start of the draft and during their deck construction phase they could choose to lock on to one of them and discard the others from their card pool. Later on we went with a different approach: In phase 2 we actually made a fourth booster pack that was 100 % vanguards. It was drafted as the first pack and everyone would draft in normal drafting order and until the pack was empty. We made some custom vanguards as an addition to the original old ones and the Magic Online vanguards that we also printed. Each pack was 5 vanguards. This time we also let the player wait with his Vanguard choice until deck construction. So first you got vanguards, then you got cards and then you put it all together in deck construction. In this phase we also included some custom designs to hate on vanguards because they were simply too dominating. Sometimes games could be decided by turn 1.

Archenemy Schemes we did like we did phase 2 except with larger packs. The first pack was a Scheme pack with 15 Schemes that was drafted like normal. During deck construction each player built a Scheme deck pile of 10 of their 15 to make a real Archenemy Scheme deck. They were also very dominating but super random. The best player coooould win but more often the better Scheme deck would win. Schemes are, by the way, set in motion during each precombat main phase.

Planes work like a charm but takes up a lot of space no matter how you go on about them. We always play The Blind Eternities Map:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/eternities-map-2010-07-19

It sounds quite complicated but it plays out really smooth. In the Blind Eternities Map no player gets to draft any Planes but instead they can affect which plane to planechase to by choosing which direction they want to go on the map (like a board game board). Four directions: up, down, left, right. All four directions have a plane face up so the destination is predetermined. In this way players can try to ‘run away’ from dangerous planes which can tiggle any strategic player the right way. There are a bunch of other rules such as Planes that are too far to the right (3 steps) gets shuffled back in and players can choose go hellride I think it was called. That is diagonal planeswalking into the unknown (hence the name of this version of Planeschase) I would 100 % recommend using this for any cube or Commander game if you have a large table to play at.

 

[InfinityBlack14]

I do remember. In phase 1 each player was given 3 random vanguards at the start of the draft and during their deck construction phase they could choose to lock on to one of them and discard the others from their card pool. Later on we went with a different approach: In phase 2 we actually made a fourth booster pack that was 100 % vanguards. It was drafted as the first pack and everyone would draft in normal drafting order and until the pack was empty. We made some custom vanguards as an addition to the original old ones and the Magic Online vanguards that we also printed. Each pack was 5 vanguards. This time we also let the player wait with his Vanguard choice until deck construction. So first you got vanguards, then you got cards and then you put it all together in deck construction. In this phase we also included some custom designs to hate on vanguards because they were simply too dominating. Sometimes games could be decided by turn 1.

Archenemy Schemes we did like we did phase 2 except with larger packs. The first pack was a Scheme pack with 15 Schemes that was drafted like normal. During deck construction each player built a Scheme deck pile of 10 of their 15 to make a real Archenemy Scheme deck. They were also very dominating but super random. The best player coooould win but more often the better Scheme deck would win. Schemes are, by the way, set in motion during each precombat main phase.

Planes work like a charm but takes up a lot of space no matter how you go on about them. We always play The Blind Eternities Map:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/eternities-map-2010-07-19

It sounds quite complicated but it plays out really smooth. In the Blind Eternities Map no player gets to draft any Planes but instead they can affect which plane to planechase to by choosing which direction they want to go on the map (like a board game board). Four directions: up, down, left, right. All four directions have a plane face up so the destination is predetermined. In this way players can try to ‘run away’ from dangerous planes which can tiggle any strategic player the right way. There are a bunch of other rules such as Planes that are too far to the right (3 steps) gets shuffled back in and players can choose go hellride I think it was called. That is diagonal planeswalking into the unknown (hence the name of this version of Planeschase) I would 100 % recommend using this for any cube or Commander game if you have a large table to play at.

That sounds great! Thanks, I'll try it out when I can.