Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1244: Formats I Made

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Someone on my blog asked me if I ever designed any Magic formats. It turns out that I have, so I spent a podcast episode talking about them.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work Okay, so today's topic came from my blog Somebody asked me if I ever made a format and the answer is I've made many formats So that is the topic. These are formats I've made Some of these I co-made some of these I popularized But these are all formats I had a hand in. So I'm going to go chronologically for my making them. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things. These are the ones that are the more major ones that I've done. So I will start with Minimaster,

which a lot of people know as Pac wars. So let me explain the origin of Minimaster. So long ago before I became a Wizards employee I used to live in Los Angeles and every Saturday I would drive down to the Costa Mesa Women's Center where it was the magic event of Southern California and I think I did a whole podcast with Scott Larribee about this. Back in the 90s, it was like the place to be for the Magic scene in Los Angeles. And one of the formats that they would run was called a Grand Master. It's my favorite format.

So the way a Grand Master would work is when Magic first started, you could buy boosters, which were 15 cards, or you could buy a starter deck. And the starter deck had 60 cards in it, it had some lands in it. And the idea was you sort of could play it out of the booster, out of the starter deck, but it wasn't balanced or anything, it wasn't the best of experience.

But you could, I mean, it had lands and it had spells in it. It usually had all five colors in it. So the way a Grandmaster worked was that you were allowed to, you took your 60 card deck. I think you went down to 40 cards and you could add in up to five lands or something. And then you would play round one. Usually this was a three round thing. Eight people played it. If we get sixteen sometimes we do four rounds. So what happens is you're playing, let's say it's eight person. So you're playing your first round, the quarter final round, and whoever wins gets the deck of the losing player. Then for the next round, the semi final round,

you have to make a sixty card deck, but using the two decks you had combined, you can make whatever you want out of those two decks. And then if you won your semi-final round, you got your opponent's decks, which is two decks. And then for the finals, you had four decks to build out of. So the idea is each round you would keep building and making something cooler. I love this format. In fact, there was a payphone at the Coastal Mesa Women's Center and every week I would call ahead of time and I would say okay sign me up for the Grand Masters I say to Scott because I because once it filled up if we got eight but couldn't get to 16 It was only eight. So I always wanted to play in that so remember Henry Stern and I

Were talking one day about how one of the issues about playing Grand Masters is that you had to buy a starter deck, but unless you won the event, it went away. You know, you don't get to keep the cards. So the buy-in was a little expensive for a lot of people. One of the reasons we usually can't get more than eight was the buy-in was expensive. So Henry and I said, well, what if we did it, but instead of starting with the whole starter deck, you started with a booster pack. So we call it, instead of Grand Master, we called it Mini Master.

So the idea is the buy-in was a lot cheaper, and the way it would work is you would take two of every basic land, you would shuffle it into your booster, and then you would play round one. Normally the rules we had is you didn't look at the booster. Then if you won the first round, you get your opponent's cards,

same thing as a Grand Master. And because the buy-in was lower we get a lot more people to play. That's why Henry and I did it. I think to get more people to play. But eventually what we realized was the most fun part of the Mini Master wasn't the building the decks later on. That was fun. But the real fun was just playing out of a sealed booster was crazy fun. And the reason was, it really just forced you to adapt to things, oftentimes cards you had never played before, and combinations that would never have come up. And there was some, especially when it was blind, you didn't even know what was in it was really thrilling and very fun. And so we started playing Mini-Mafter without the later parts of it. And in fact, I so enjoyed the format that I wrote an article in the duelist introducing the Mini-Mafter

to the world. And that is why, and then once again, it went on to become a popular format. I think now they call it Pac Wars, but it began as Minimaster, and if you ever wondered who's ever referred to it as Minimaster, why it was called Minimaster, that is why. Okay, the next format, speaking of the Duelists, I'm not sure this is a format, but I will take credit for this one, what I'll call Duel decks. So I loved building decks. Before I came to Wizards, I was a really big deck builder. And one of the things that I enjoyed was building two decks to play against each other. And

so I wrote an article and I said, okay, here's what you need to do. When you make your decks, you want each deck to be aware of what the other deck is doing. And there's a delicate balance because there's a lot of rock, paper, scissors to magic to magic right the goal isn't to make two decks where one deck just dominates the other deck you want to make two decks for each deck has an identity each deck has answers to the other deck but not things that shut them down and so the idea is I would build two decks that had their own weird quirky qualities to them and then I would figure out like okay well what are the issues when this deck plays that deck?

And I would play them against each other. And I would realize, oh, this deck's winning more, why? Oh, and I would start balancing between each other. And years later, when we came up with the idea of doing a dual decks, which were two decks that wizards, pre-constructed decks wizards made, meant to be played against each other, it borrowed a lot.

I mean, I like to believe that I had influence in the creation of the dual decks. And anyway, if you like deck building, it is actually a really fun challenge to build decks to play against one another. And like I said, the key to it is make two decks, play them against each other, and then figure out where, what problems the decks have against each other. And then you want, once again, you want to give solutions that are solutions, but don't wreck the other deck. A lot of times when you're playing against decks in a tournament and you have sideboard,

the whole idea of a sideboard card is something that's just gonna dominate the other deck. Not what you wanna do here. You wanna have answers, but things that are not gonna just dismantle what the other deck is doing. Okay, next up, a third thing. My first three are all dual articles. So one of the things that was very fascinated, once again, before I got to Wizard, back in

my active deck building days, where I was doing a lot of deck building, I liked, I was intrigued by the idea of a solitaire magic format. Now obviously there are a lot of what we call PVE, we made like a bunch during Theros where you play your normal deck and then there's some external deck or something that's playing against you and you're sort of playing against it. And those are fun, PVE are lots of fun, that's not really what I, that wasn't my goal at the time. My goal was I wanted to create something that's more akin to traditional card solitaire. Something in which you have magic cards, you shuffle, you have a deck, you shuffle it, you lay things out, and then you're somehow using magic cards as magic cards to play a solitaire light game. So I ended up coming with something I was actually very proud of. I called mana maze solitaire. So here are the rules to mana maze solitaire.

Basically, you lay out cards like you do in like Klondike, which is a traditional solitaire where you lay cards out in, you know, eight wide, eight deep or something like that. Or actually, normally you play solitaire with a 52 card deck, so it's whatever 52 cards is. But anyway, the idea here is you're laying out cards in rows and columns. And the rules of manumay solitaire is if you are a permanent, uh, the only way to get rid of the permanent, and the one exception is Auras, which I'll get to in a second. If you are a permanent other than Auras, uh, the only way to get rid of you is to do one of two things, or one of three things, sorry. You can tap it, that will get rid of it. You can sacrifice it, that'll get rid of it. Or you can destroy slash exile it, that will get rid of it. So for example, you can put lands in the deck.

When you tap the lands, they'll produce mana, but then they'll go away. Then for spells and auras, in order to get rid of them, you have to cast them. Auras actually didn't enchant something else. Although the way the aura works is the underlying card is the thing that is the card in the game. But sometimes by enchanting it like, you know, you can put a weakness on to kill things and stuff like that. And then if you cast, if you cast an instant or sorcery, once you spend the mana, it goes away. You can't cast, other than auras, you can't cast permanents. Permanence you have to tap, destroy, or

sacrifice. And then the idea is you have different means why to get rid of cards and so you'll have some kill spells you'll have and there's usually a mix of things. The idea is if you play an enchantment, the effect happens. If you have an artifact, the effect happens. Often you have things that have abilities, so you can use the abilities. And anyway, the idea is if you have a right mix, and in the original article I talked about that, you want to have a bunch of things that get rid of things and things that can tap and you can make a good mix so there's an interesting puzzle of what you have to do. In fact, speaking of puzzles,

I so liked manamaze that I started making some puzzles. So there are both in the magazine and in my book, there are some manamaze puzzles, which essentially I teach you the rules. And like, okay, um, win this solitaire game. Anyway, like I said, this one's a little harder to understand, explaining it. I should find a place to, I know if you go online, you can find duals articles online these days,

but anyway, that Man in May Solitaire is the name of that format. Okay, the next batch of formats I made were for the Magic Invitational. So for those that are unaware, quick story of the Magic Invitational. I did a whole bunch of podcasts on them, so if you want more details, you can listen to the podcasts on them. The idea was I was the editor-in-chief of the Duelist, and there was an event we used to run at Origins where it was a team constructed event.

Where one person played standard, one person played extended, and one person played vintage I believe. And the idea was you had a team, each of your team members played a different format, you would play against another team playing against the correct format, and then if you won two out of three matches, your team would win the round. And so the duelist sponsored it a couple of years and we called it the duelist team challenge.

So Wendy was the producer of the duelist and she really liked how that played out. And she said, you know, I've squirreled away some money. If we wanna do something, I think we could do some sort of event that's a duelist branded event. And she came to me and said, here's my budget, you know, what could you do? And she goes, we'd like to do something that we then could write about,

something we can make an event that we then can make content out of. So I said, I have a great idea. What if we do the All-Star game? It's originally called the Duelist Invitational, it actually got changed to the Magic Invitational. And the way it worked is we brought 16 of the top players in the world. And then we had what was called a round robin tournament. So a round robin tournament is a tournament

in which every person plays every other player once. So we had 16 players, it would be 15 rounds. So each player literally played each player once. And then just to add some extra spice, because this was the best of the best, I would make formats. Now some of the time they were existing formats, but I always wanted to surprise the players

and I wanted to challenge the players. Part of the goal of this was to really test what they could do. So I liked the idea of making formats because I know they've never played them before. So a bunch of what I'm gonna talk about, the next five or slash six formats are all formats I made for the Magic Invitational.

We'll start with Duplicate Sealed. So I ran this event in every non-online Invitational. So the Invitational's early on, we traveled around the world, then we had a year we were at Wizards, and then we had three years we were online. Oh actually the year at Wizards might have been online too. Anyway, once we got online I was a little more restricted in my ability to make brand new formats because that required programming. But when we were when we just used our cards, I would make all sorts of formats. So the one format I played in every single non online

magic rotational was called duplicate sealed. So the idea of duplicate sealed is sealed is a fun format. It's neat to go. Here's a bunch of cards. And what do you make out of it? The problem is there's a high variance to Sealed because everybody opens up booster packs and some players will just open better cards than other players.

We actually had a pro tour once in Atlanta where we did a, it was kind of a pre-release for Mirage, but it was a Sealed event. And one of the problems were, yeah, the players that did well tended to be good players, but they were also good players that just opened the better cards, that there was a lot of variance there. And so I came up with a way, how do we do sealed in a way that is not high variance? And the answer was what I called duplicate sealed. And the idea was it's a sealed pool in which all 16 players played the exact same sealed pool. So the reason it's really interesting is it's not just about building a sealed

deck, which it is, but on top of that, you know the format, you know the environment. Everybody has access to the same cards. So which cards are the best to play when you know what the environment is. And it was really interesting and I spent a lot of time. I really I wanted to make sure that the it was a skill testing as possible. So the first year I just made my own sealed pool and I balanced it. The way we would do it is we would actually have play tests and R&D and I would run it and then I would see what people played and I would take notes. And then if certain colors got overplayed I'd swap cards in

and out and try to adjust it to get the colors as balanced as I could. But then as time went on as I started doing the event year after year I started getting more inventive. One of the things I got permission to do is I start adding new cards, cards that did not, oh sorry, before I started adding new cards, first thing I did is I took existing cards and I changed their cost. So one year, for example, I took really good Magic cards and I made them more expensive.

And then another year, I took really bad cards and I made them cheaper. And then eventually I got permission to start making my own cards. So if you've ever been to Magicon and played in Gavin's unknown event where there's brand new cards, this was the first event ever where we made brand new cards for the Magic Invitational.

And then I started, as it went on one year for example, everything was a one drop. I started getting inventive and trying quirky things and it was very fun. If you ever wanted to, if you want to run Duplica Seal for your friends, the hardest part of Duplica Seal is not actually making it. The hardest part is getting all the copies of the cards. But if you're making it for your friends, then you make it mostly out of commons and uncommons. Not a horrible task to do, especially if you're playing

four, six, eight people. But the idea is, what I would recommend is, what you're trying to do is make an environment where the colors are roughly equal. It's not if the colors aren't equal it's okay. I was also playing with like pros so like their ability to judge environments was really really good so it's really important that I was even as possible. If you're playing for the first time with people that aren't pros you could be a little off balance you know not everybody's as good at reading the thing, oh, red's the best carpool here. But anyway, it's a lot of fun. And it's really the one

of the neatest things about it is to see what different people do. I loved at the end of it to look at the 16 decks made and see, oh, what did people do? And then we would look and see, oh, what were the three and O decks? And the interesting thing about duplicate sealed is you would think, oh, the three and O decks were the ones that were built the same. And no, that wasn't the case. That oftentimes that the three like one 3-0 deck was black and red, but another 3-0 was white blue. They'd be different colors.

So it had a lot and part of it also had to do with players had a sense of what they were most comfortable with. So sometimes they lean into the style of play that they liked. So anyway, I find duplicate sealed to be very interesting. OK, next up is Solomon draft. Now, I'm not 100% sure if I created Solomon draft. It is possible that someone else at Wizards made Solomon draft. At bare minimum, I popularized Solomon draft because

other than duplicate sealed, Solomon draft was the one other event we played at every non-inventate, non online invitation. So the way that Solomon draft works is that you take all your cards, you take six boosters worth of cards, you shuffle them all together. And then you, the first person, there's player A and player B.

Player A will take the top eight cards, draw them, reveal them, they will then divide them into two piles. Those piles could be any number. I mean, probably not zero and eight, but seven and one, six and two, five and three, four and four, three and five, two and six, one and seven, whatever you want. And then you would, player A divides the cards into two piles.

Player B then chooses a pile. Then player B takes the next eight cards off the library, puts them face up and divides them. And then player A takes the pile they choose. Now the interesting thing about this is all the information is open. And as you see people drafting, what gets really interesting about the format is

cards start changing value. For example, let's say player A early on starts taking a lot of really good red cards. Okay, it looks like player A might want to play red. They're going to value red cards higher than they would value other cards. So when you're dividing the cards if you're player B, you can take into account that player A prioritizes red at a higher rate than you do, assuming you're not playing red. So the idea is the value of the cards changes as the draft goes along. So it is very, it's a very intriguing format. And like I said, you can go play that now. Go get six boosters, open six boosters.

I recommend, or you should not look at the boosters. You should shuffle them so that you're not seeing the cards until you draw them But Solomon is super fun. My favorite Solomon story. So at Kuala Lumpur Well, so Chris Chris Pukula a very famous pro player. I had three top eights Almost done the whole thing. I think he showed but he didn't but anyway, he was horrible at Solomon draft. So Chris was a popular player. One of the ways you got to the Invitational, you could win Pro Tours, but also the fans got to send a couple people.

And Chris got sent by the fans a lot because he was very popular. So Chris played at a whole bunch of Invitationals. He was horrible, horrible at Solomon draft. In fact, I think he was, he had never won a round of Solomon draft. Then he was good friends with John Finkel, many considered to be the best magic player of all time. John was amazing, amazing at Solomon draft. John, I think, never lost a round of Salomon Draft. John, I think, actually plays Salomon Draft for fun. And it's one of those formats that, like,

it has so much information that most players can't even absorb all the information. But John is so good at absorbing information. Anyway, so when you, the finals of the Invitational, there's five formats, usually three constructed, two limited. And in the finals, you play all five formats. So when Chris and John made it to the finals, they made the finals at Kuala Lumpur, Chris

knew that he had to play John in Solomon draft, which Chris had never won a round, John had never lost a round. And the idea is you have to win, you know, three out of five formats. And Chris was like, I can't win Solomon draft. So I have to win three out of four formats. And Chris went on, he lost in Solomon to John. But he went on to do that and beat John in Kuala Lumpur.

And I think Chris considers it his greatest magic accomplishment of all time. Okay. Next up is the auction. I often called it auction of the people. Sometimes I called it auction of champions. So the way it works is you get 17 decks. Auction of champions usually is I would take, like I took pro tour winning decks for the auction of champions.

Auction of the people, which it was most of the time, is I would come up with some interesting deck building challenge and then I would say to the players, hey build me decks and we'll pick the top 17. One year was based on creature types, like the only creatures in the deck could be of a certain creature type. One time was based on artists, all the cards had to be illustrated by the same artist. So we had different themes and the way an auction works is you want to have one more deck than people auctioning. We had 16 people because of the invitation, so we'd have 17 decks.

Then you randomly put people in an order from one through 16. Then player one picks any one of the 17 decks. And then they get to start to bid. Here's how the bidding works. You start with eight cards in hand, 25 life. Normally, obviously, a game of magic starts with eight cards in hand, 25 life. Normally, obviously a game of magic starts with seven cards in hand and 20 life, but you start a little bit higher.

And then the first person must bid on the opening deck. Now they can just bid eight cards, 25 life if they like. The next player must either bid lower. And what that means is if you bid the same number of cards, you have to bid less life. If you bid less same number of cards, you have to bid less life. If you bid less number of cards, you're allowed to bid more life. So let's say the first player said,

okay, I'm gonna do seven cards, 18 life. Player two could say, okay, I'm gonna do seven cards, 17 life or 16 life. Or they could go, I'm gonna do six cards, 25 life. If they go down in cards, they can go up in life up to 25. Then each player has to then bid lower or sit down. Everybody would stand up. Once you sit down, you're out of the auction for that round.

You would keep going until somebody, everybody sat down, meaning the last person to bid, nobody outbid them. And then they would get the decket, that starting hand size and that starting life total and then you keep and then uh player two if they didn't win the first round you didn't take the deck from the first round picks the next deck and you so you keep moving down who starts um to pick the the cards um it is a really interesting format you can play with any constructed decks you want the decks don't even need to be equal in power because you're bidding on them. In fact, the auction works a little bit better if there's some range in the decks so that people can sort of evaluate what they think is better and

what's not. I did the auction in many formats and the auction was something we could do online. So we did do the auction when the invitation was online. We did pre-constructed decks one time. Anyway, we did all sorts of things. There's a lot of fun and it's a format you could play at home. It really is a pretty cool format. And like I said, take decks you normally play. And, or if you want you to take pre-constructed decks or whatever you want to do. You just need existing decks. Okay. Next up is the rotisserie draft Oh real quickly. I have a fun story about

auction the people or auction of the champions so in a year later, so after Kuala Lumpur was Sydney in Sydney John Fickle made the finals again. He actually won that year. He was playing Ben Rubin and Once again, they had to play all the different formats. So in the auction of the champions John had actually gotten Zach Dolan's 1994 World Championship deck and a lot of people think his deck is kind of a little janky so a lot of people didn't have a lot of respect for it but John did and John realized two things. One, it's a lot better than people realize. And two, it's just it's a deck back in time where like it's vintage, like it has a Lotus in it and some boxes and time walk. I mean, it's got ancestral. I mean, it's got good stuff. And so in the finals, John Finkel had Zach Dolan's deck

and Ben Rubin had Dave Price's Tempest, all Tempest deck. So there was a, it was Tempest block construction, although I think at the time only Tempest had been out. So it was just Tempest and Ben had bid lower than John, meaning John started, I don't remember exactly, but a higher bid than Ben did. And then in John's first turn against Ben, it was turn one Sarah Angel,

because he used a black lotus to get a Sarah Angel out. And Ben was like, I don't think I can get rid of that. If I'm lucky, I can get rid of that in the third turn if I draw perfectly. And it really sort of hammered home that John had gotten a steal, that people didn't really give Zach's deck the credit it deserved.

Okay, next up is Rotisserie Draft. So this goes, the next year we were in Cape Town. Kai Buda won that one. And we, I was trying to come up with an interesting draft format. And I wanted to make use of Odyssey, because Odyssey was the latest set at the time. So I came up with a neat idea.

So inspired by a rotisserie draft in baseball, that's why it's called a rotisserie draft, I laid out the entire, all of Odyssey. And the idea was there were two eight-person drafts, because it was a 16-person event. Each set was for one draft group. And the idea was that you randomly got an order and then you drafted from the whole set, meaning you saw everything you got to draft, like everything was available. Like Rochester,

you open up a pack and then everybody sees that pack. Rotisserie, you see everything in the draft. Now I did the whole set. Large sets are nicer about the right size. It doesn't need to be that. You can build whatever you want in a rotisserie draft. The key to a rotisserie draft is people are picking it and it's all open information. Anyway, the draft ended up being such sort of a cool draft that it is a very popular draft that people do. You can see people drafting online. It's a very popular draft that people do. You can see people drafting online. It's a very interesting draft to watch

because of the open information. And there's a lot of neat dynamics. And depending on what the card pool is, you can, anyway, the drafts can be really interesting. So Reticority Draft is one of the things I invented for the Invitational that has had the longest life outside. Occasionally people play duplicate sealed. I'm sure some people saw them in draft from time to time. But Vertisserie Draft is

the one that I see actually done the most. It's a very fun, it's just a fun format that a lot of people have done, especially when you're streaming drafts and stuff, it's fun to do. Okay, the final format, it's actually to do. Okay the final the final format actually two formats but they were related block party and BYOB bring your own block. So one of the things I was intrigued in is I like the idea of could we have a format where you had access to any card but not every card. What I meant by that was what if we gave you means to choose what magic cards you wanted but as you start choosing cards it limits

what other cards you could choose. So block party was it was a block constructed event so block constructed back when we made blocks normally with magic for long gear had blocks had a large fall set and then usually a small winter set and a small summer set. Sometimes they were a large spring set. And the idea was, it was a block-constructed event where you had to play a block-constructed deck, but you could play any block-constructed deck. So the idea was, go search and find the best block-constructed deck you can, or do you think it's best for the metagame or whatever, and bring that. Then the next year I got more inventive and I said okay this year what we're going to do is build your own block is you can have any first set in a block,

any second set in a block, and any third set in a block. And if the block had less than three sets, like just say it only had two sets, well you could take the first and take the second for the first and second. So you still could choose those. And the idea was you had to build your own block. So you had to have one first set, one second set, one third set, and then build a deck. But you could choose what set you wanted. And the really neat thing about this is, let's say for example, I'm a control player and I really want to play a fun control deck.

I go, oh, well, you know, I want to play Force of will okay force of will is cold snap we counted We'd as I is a it's I say so we did I stage alliances cold snap So that was considered to be the third set. So alliances is the second set So if you want force the will we'll make alliances your second set and then you oh what what's the best? Ooh, maybe I want you know And you can figure out what you want, ooh, maybe I want, you know, and you can figure out what you wanna play. Like if you want, you know,

Mercadian Mask has a couple of good things. So you wanna figure out what makes the most sense for what you want, and then you pick accordingly. You had to pick stuff from a block, so you couldn't pick core sets. But like Urza Saiga was a very popular first set because Urza Saiga is very powerful. But anyway, you had to pick three things,

and it was interesting. What players tended to do was they didn't pick the most powerful block in a vacuum. Like everyone didn't play Urza Saga. What they did is they said, what archetype do I want to play? What are the cards I need for that archetype? Okay, from all the, what lets me build the best thing? And they look at different archetypes and figure it out. And anyway, once again, it's a fun format. If you want to to try something where if you just enjoy weird deck building once again any first set in a block any second set in a block any third set for anything that is past blocks just everything is a first set anyway so those are all the various formats these are the major ones so mini masters dual dual decks

Manny Mae solitaire duplicate seal Solomon draft auction of the champions of people Rotisserie draft block party and bring your own block. So those are formats I made and how I made them Some of them you many of them you can play at home Few of the duplicate seal requires some work, but these are all formats you can play Solomon draft you can play today You know a lot of these you can go play right now. They're super fun. Anyway try them out see what you think. But anyway I'm at work so we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic it's time for me to make magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.