Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #464: Old Formats

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

In this podcast, I look back at some of the different formats from the early days of Magic including things likes Grand Melee and Emperor.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. So, I did a podcast a little while ago, my trivia one, where I talked about a format called Grandmaster and Minimaster. And I realized, it actually was interesting content about formats. And I thought today, I'd start by talking about some old formats. I'm sure there's some podcasts I could do on new formats, but as the historian in me, I thought I would start today by talking about some older ways to play Magic. Some of which are still played today, not all these formats have been abandoned, but I decided that I would go back to the beginning and root some early formats

I decided that I would go back to the beginning and root some early formats and sort of talk about the different ways to play. So the thing to remember, by the way, just real quickly, get some historical... When Magic first came out, there was no format, per se. There was the way to play Magic. And originally, it was super, super open. I think the only restrictions on Magic when it first appeared was you had a 40 card deck. Yes, a 40

card deck. There weren't restrictions on how many cards you could have. The 60 card deck would come later, obviously. Pretty much you could play whatever you wanted. And the idea at the time was, Richard was like, well, how many cards is the average person going to own? Not that many. So I'll make it a 40 card deck just to make it easier to have choices to build

and you know the idea of having degenerate decks was like well I mean if you only had so many cards how degenerate can your deck get then magic was a huge smash and people getting lots and lots of cards and people able to make decks full of the same thing. So we then had to institute the whole 60 cards, four card minimum, and there started being ban restricted less. But, and then eventually that would lead to more constructed formats, standard and such. But today, we're going to talk about sort of some of the fan-made fanfics. These are formats that were put together more by the fans than by wizards. And so I want to walk through and talk about some of these. And sort of, I want to sort of talk about

like where they came from and what was going on. So I want to start with Grandmaster and Mini-Master. I talked about a little bit in trivia, but I'm going to go a little more in depth. So back in the day, I lived down in Los Angeles. And interestingly, there was no major place to play in Los Angeles. This was before the era of stores really having gaming space. There were some stores, in fact, the one place I tended to play for pre-releases and things had some gaming space, so there was some of that. But there wasn't, Friday Night Magic hadn't happened yet, you know, it was definitely an earlier time, and there wasn't a lot of, like, you

know, frequent places to play magic in Los Angeles, even though obviously it's a major city. The one exception was in Costa Mesa. So for those that don't live in Los Angeles, Costa Mesa is like an hour south of Los Angeles. I mean, it's a little drive away. But in the Costa Mesa's Women's Center which was just this place I'm not even sure what the Women's Center was for

but it was just this place that was willing to rent out its space on Saturday nights and on Saturday afternoon and Saturday night they used to run we used to call it the Costa Mesa Women's Center is what we called it

but I don't know if it had an official name but Scott Larrabee and friends would put on this, it was the biggest Magic thing I had ever seen at the time and Magic really didn't have a lot of regular gameplay there was a sporadic

thing here and there but this was big this was a lot of Magic players. There was a sporadic thing here and there, but this was big. This was a lot of magic players would show up. And this is a place where I met a lot of people who would go on, become pretty big in the magic pro scene. Most of the Los Angeles folk would all go there. And anyway, one of the things that Scott used to do is he'd like to mix it up. Obviously there was constructed Magic. Now once again, at the time, I don't think Standard had happened yet. So it was just kind of like, you know, there were, I think at this point there were 60 card decks and four deck limitations and there was some ban restricted lists. Now you could come and play normal Magic,

but there was also trying to come up with other fun formats. So formats that I think Scott made, I'm not 100% sure he did. I always attribute it to this place. I never played anywhere else. It was called the Grandmaster. So when Magic first came out, there were two different ways to buy cards. There was the 15-card boosters, as you know, and there was a 60-card starter deck.

And the idea of a starter deck was it came with lands, it had 60 cards, and the lands were roughly, like, it wasn't a particularly well-made deck or anything, and it had all five colors in it but the idea was well you could play out of it it's playable it was a product that you could just start playing um i mean pretty quickly you wanted to learn in five colors was too much and you know you wanted to sort of tweak it but the idea was here's a product you literally could

just start playing with even if it was uh somewhat lackluster experience out of the box. So one of the things that Scott did now remember by the way the idea of limited magic, the idea of here's a certain number of booster packs along with land was not, I know now it's part of the pre-releases it's just kind of one of the ways you play Magic. It was interesting that Limited and sort of Sealed, in a traditional sense, wasn't really played a lot.

And the Grandmaster was sort of Scott's take on how to do a Limited format. So the way it worked was that you got a starter deck, and you could narrow down to 40 cards because 40 cards was how many cards you played in limited and 60 cards was how many cards you played in constructed. In fact, this

is super early. It's possible that at this point all decks are just 40 still. This is pretty early. But anyway, so you built a 40 card deck out of the 60 cards. So basically what it did is it said, okay, you can fine-tune some. Now, you only could cut 20 cards.

I mean, A, you usually had to end up, you played at least three colors. Sometimes you played four. Sometimes you just played what we call good stuff, which is you play all the colors and just play the best cards you could. There are a couple different strategies with Grand After. Like I said, there was the narrowed-down-to-three-color strategy where I'm not playing the best cards, but my mana worked out for me better. And then there was the good stuff strategy

where I just played the best cards, played all five colors, and kind of hoped that I got my colors and hoped the game would last long enough that I got there. So anyway, that was a very popular way to play. I used to play Grandmasters all the time. One of the things I enjoyed, I did build decks and stuff, but I really enjoyed the variety

because Grandmaster was my first experience interacting really with limited play, with sealed play of some kind. Draft was not a thing yet. And I think there was occasional limited play, with sealed play of some kind. Draft was not a thing yet. And I think there was occasional sealed play, but it was sporadic. And really, mini-master was... Sorry, not mini-master.

Grand-master was the way we played. That was just... If you wanted to play limited, that was kind of the format you played. Oh, sorry. I forgot the important part here. So you played, and then when you beat somebody,

you got all their cards. So the idea of when you bought into a Grandmaster was the only way you got the cards is if you won the whole thing, and then you got all the cards. So the prize for winning a Grandmaster, Grandmasters would either have 8 or 16 people in normally, power 2, obviously, because it's a single elimination. I mean, you don't play Swiss with Grandmaster.

So either you would have eight or 16. Every once in a blue moon, you'd do 32. But the idea, usually you would do eight normally. So the idea is, oh, I would win eight starter decks if I won. So you would pay for one starter deck, and then you would win eight if you won. And anyway, the idea was once you beat somebody, then you've got to combine the decks

together and fine-tune it even more. I don't know. At some point, the rule became, once we had 60-card decks, I think round two beyond, you had to have 60-card decks. Round one was 40-card, and then round two was 60-card. And the idea is, as you would play, each round would get r you know, rougher and rougher,

because people's decks would get better. And anyway, then Henry Stern and I came up with Mini Mafter, which was our variant on Grand Mafter, which is you started with a booster pack, and then you mixed in land. And I forget at the time how many land you put in. I think at the time you put 15 land in is what we did, is you just put three of every basic land in. And now the idea there was it just was like Mini Master,

but it had a lower overhead to buy in. Instead of buying a starter, which was like, I don't remember exactly, but, you know, three times as much as a booster pack. You just could buy a booster pack. And what we found was there was a lot of fun of when you were playing with just a booster pack, you just ended up playing with cards that you almost never, ever play. The way we used to play, the way we, when we designed mini mafters was the rule was you mixed in your land and played blind, meaning

you did not look at your cards for the first round. That was tradition for Minimafter. And then, later rounds, now, what ended up happening was, I introduced Minimafters in a Duelist article. I used to write a lot of articles for the Duelist.

Duelist was a magazine on magic. For those who don't know, I've talked about The Duelist in podcasts and stuff. I got my start by, the first thing I ever did was make puzzle columns for The Duelist, and then I started writing out columns for The Duelist, and I wrote a lot of content. So one of the content I wrote was about the Minimaster format,

because I really liked it, and it was something we'd introduced in Los Angeles. It's gone on by a bunch of other names, Pac Wars, a bunch of other names, Pack Wars, a bunch of other names. And the idea of getting the opponent's cards and keep playing, that aspect of it has drifted away. Now it's kind

of just you make a deck, you know, shuffle in 15 land into your 15 card deck and play, usually blind. And that is just a fun way to play Magic with, you know, you don't need a lot of cards you need a single booster pack but anyway, Mini Masters has lasted

a lot longer than Grandmasters, mostly because when the starter decks went away it made it hard to play Grandmasters you can, by the way play a version of Grandmasters with more cards if you want to

actually mimic Grandmaster, what I would recommend is playing with four booster packs. Or you could play with three booster packs. Actually, I guess you would do is play with three booster packs and add the appropriate amount of land. That will get you pretty close to the... Yeah, three booster packs and land

would get you close to the original Grandmaster. If you ever want to play the original Grandmaster, you could do that. Okay, so other formats. Okay, so another early format that was very popular was called Grand Melee. Okay, so what Grand Melee was, is there are people who wanted to play with lots of people. The idea of a bunch of these formats I'm going to explain now are multiplayer Magic because early on there was a way to play Magic in constructed. I mean,

later there would be other constructed formats, but a lot of the early fan favorites were trying to find ways to play with multiple players because normal Magic could work with multiple players, but there was a bunch of formats created. So Grand Melee was created to play with a lot of people. And just so you're aware of this, I have played in Grand Melees with hundreds of people, and I know that there have been Grand Melees with, I think, like a thousand people. So here's how Grand Melee works. You sit in a giant circle.

And then I think every three people, there's a marker. And what the marker means is it's your turn. So the way Grand Melee works is your effects only affect the person to your left and the person to your right. So, for example, if I cast a Wrath of God, or some creature kill spell, a mass creature spell, all the creatures on the person to my left would get killed, and all the creatures to my right would get killed.

We call that a sphere of influence. It'll come up in another game I'm going to explain in a sec. So the idea was, anything I do only affects the person to the left of me and the person to the right of me. And be aware that the way the game works is only every third person is even casting something. So because the sphere of influence is one away on each side, that means that... So let's say person one is playing and then person four is playing. Or let's say person two is playing and then Person 4 is playing. Or let's say Person 2 is playing and Person 5 is playing.

Person 2 can only affect 1 and 3. Person 5 can only affect 4 and 6. So they can play at the same time and it doesn't particularly affect anything. The idea being the only person... Any one moment in time, either the person to the right of you is playing, you're playing, or the person to the left of you is playing. And each one of them, those are the only people that affect you. So in Grand Melee, the way it works is you attack to the left.

You obviously, you're allowed to cast spells to the right or to the left, but only one away. But you, traditionally the way it works is you get a point whenever you defeat someone to your left. In fact, further than that, whenever someone to your left loses, they get kicked out of the game, the person to the right scores the point. So what happens sometimes is because the person to your right is attacking you, there are times that you will take out the person to your right. But you don't score the point for it. The person to their right scores the point to it.

So you are disincentivized from killing the person to your right. But be aware, they're trying to kill you. So you do interact with them. And the idea in Grand Melee is, I'm trying to defeat the person to my left, and the person to the right is trying to defeat me. Every person to my left and they're trying to defeat the person to the right trying to defeat me. Every time you beat somebody they get knocked out of the game and the person to the right scores the point.

And the way Grand Melee works is that you keep going until there's only one person left. Oh, actually, there's two means. You keep going until either there's one person left or one person has scored enough points that nobody else can beat them in points. So, for example, let's say I have a 100-person Grand Melee and one person gets to 50, I guess 51 kills. You could beat it less than that and still win. Let's say, for example,

you get down to three people in a 100 grand melee, and one person, for example, is at 36, and the other two people are 46, and the other two people are in the 20s. Then, oh, well, there's not enough people left to catch up. So once that is true, once someone's won enough that nobody else can enough people left to catch up. So once that is true, once someone's won enough that nobody else can't kill enough people to catch up to them,

then they win. The one rule we did usually add in Grand Melee is the final kill, the person who's the last kill, usually is worth more than one point. Sometimes it's worth two points. Sometimes it's worth more than that. Usually the idea is the final kill, just for suspense purposes, the final kill is worth a little bit extra, so if people are close,

it comes down to the big dramatic final thing. The reason Grand Melees are fun is it allows you to play with a huge number of people. Oh, the other thing that happens in a Grand Melee is, number of people. Oh, the other thing that happens in a Grand Melee is, as people die, there's a rule system by which you remove the active... Usually the way it works is

active player takes their turn. When all the active players are done, it moves. When there's a death, when there's enough deaths, at some point you have to remove active turns, because you don't want somebody... You don't want somebody having an active turn with the range of one. I can't have the person to my left and person to my right both play. Well, they can, but it gets very, very complex.

It's easier if there's only every third person. Grand Melee, I don't know the origin of Grand Melee. I believe it started as a tournament thing in conventions. It was a place where a lot of people would want to play all at once. And there was a point in time where Grand Melees, it was like, it was sort of a point of pride how big your Grand Melee would be. And people would advertise, you know, we're having a Grand Melee. And then after the fact, they go, you know, last time we played,

we had a Grand Melee of 85 people, or 102 people, or 300 people. Now, Grand Melees would take a long time, for those who have never played in a Grand Melee. Grand Melees, usually the way a Grand Melee would work is you would start, like, at 5 p.m., and, like, at midnight, you would end or something. It would take hours and hours and hours to play, depending on how big it was. A smaller Grand Melee, like a 21stperson grand melee, that just took a couple hours. But like a 300-person grand melee, that would take five to seven hours often.

But it was a fun way to play. And there's a lot of politics to it. Because what you would try to do is befriend the person to your right and say to them, I don't know, you would try to befriend them and discourage them from, I don't know. I mean, obviously they wanted to kill you, but you, the people that were the most, oh, usually the way to win a Grand Melee, by the way, for those that care how to win a Grand Melee was, you would set up some infinite combo that would then mow through the people to your left. There are rules about when, like,

when you killed somebody, you couldn't affect the next person until your next turn. So you could only beat one person a turn. But if you set up this infinite sort of machine, once it was your turn, you would be able to kill people in a single turn. Anyway, that is Grand Melee.

Next, Emperor Magic. So Emperor Magic is, either you play three on three or you play five on five. The idea of Emperor Magic is, the person in the center is the Emperor. And then the person next to them there were terms for these emperor magic is some kind of call also called general magic either the people in front could be generals either the emperors or the generals and then there's like lieutenants and there were names so either there it's three on three in which the center person is the emperor or the general or it is five on five in which the center is the general.

If it's three on three, you have a range of two. If it's six, sorry, if it's three on three, you have a range of two. If it's five on five, you have a range of three. Is that right? Range of? Yeah, the idea is, oh, no, no, no, I said that backwards. If you have three on three, it's a range of one, and if you have five on five, it's a range of two. The idea being

that the emperor or general can't be hit until someone falls. And so the idea is, the person in the center, who's the emperor, has a range, so let's do three on three to start with. So let's say you're playing three on three emperor. You have a range of one, which means

the emperor can buff the lieutenants on the side, but they can't affect the other side. Likewise, the people on the ends, the lieutenants, can affect each other. Well, the left lieutenant can affect the right lieutenant, and the right lieutenant can affect the left lieutenant, respectively. But the idea, essentially, is you win by defeating the emperor or general, like I said, that goes by different names. And the idea there is you sort of build your decks that the emperor wants to help the people

on the sides of him and that he wants to sort of do positive things. You might run things like Howling Mine, Red extra cards or Mana Flare. I'm using old terms because it's old format. Where you can make people produce extra mana. So the idea is usually the general was more supportive or the emperor was more supportive of his lieutenants. And they were the ones that had to have the means by which to sort of mow through. And it was sort of cooperative in the nature as you're working as a team together

and that the three of you are trying to defeat your enemy. Now, sometimes the format played five on five in which you had a range of two. You can, by the way, the format's actually adaptable. The only trick about playing it is you need an odd number of people on each side. The center is always the emperor. And then the range of the game is you can reach out to the end of your side.

So let's say you're playing with seven. Your emperor would have a range of three. The idea being when the game starts that the emperors can only affect their own side. And you can't hit the emperor until you burn through one person. That you can't hit the emperor until you burn through one person. That you can't reach the emperor yet. That's kind of the limitation of it. It's a neat format in that it's a cooperative format.

You can do deck building together and it's something in which because you're fighting on both sides that there's a lot of things going on. Normally the way that you play it is, so imagine that you're the emperor. Usually we call them lieutenants. Sometimes it's the flank. The right lieutenant sits to the right of the emperor. The left lieutenant sits to the left of

the emperor. The right lieutenants would take the turn at the same time. The emperors would take the turn at the same time. Then the left lieutenant would take the turn at the same time, the Empress would take the turn at the same time, then the left Lieutenant would take the turn at the same time. So the idea is, at any one moment in time, there's always two people happening. And the idea is, when the game starts, with a range of that nobody,

the two people taking the same turn can't affect each other. Now, eventually, that's going to collapse. Usually, you still keep two active players at once. So the idea is there's always somebody. The way it works is always somebody on each side has a turn. I've seen variants where there's only one active at a time. Takes longer, but it's a little less chaotic

because you're not watching two people at once. The thing is if two people take a turn at the same time, in the beginning it doesn't overlap, but eventually when someone falls, you start having the overlap happen. You sort of, you can play and figure out when you're playing how you like it, whether or not

you want to have concurrent turns or not. Like with Grand Melee, we tend to avoid concurrent turns because it can create a little bit of chaos, but there's some fun stuff that can happen. Yeah, the reason by the way, I'm sort of curious. I'm almost to work, but

one of the reasons I want to talk about old formats is that I want, like I said, as sort of a historian, I kind of want, I don't know how often people play, I know Grandmaster's gone now. People still play Mini-Masters to a certain extent.

I think Grandvalent Emperor are both still played, I think. But not at the level they were once played. These were formats in the early day. These were kind of the... I didn't get to Star Magic.

Should I say that for another day? I'll quickly do Star Magic I realize I have a little extra time here I'll do one last format before we end today I realize looking at my watch because I didn't have to drop anybody off I'm just going straight to work, there wasn't traffic so I'm actually getting here a smidgen early

although I do got to I can't spend too much time I got to get to a meeting I'll explain Star Magic real quick. So the way Star Magic works is it's a five-person format. Each person plays one color. And the idea of Star Magic is you win when your enemy colors have lost. So the idea is essentially it's a game in which it's a multiplayer free-for-all in which

as soon as two players are out, the game is over. Because as soon as two colors are out, that's somebody's enemy. Oh, actually, is that true? No, no, no. I guess they have to be two allies have to be out. That you can have two enemies out and then no one is won yet. I think once you have three out, the game

has to end. There's no way for the game to end with three people out. You can have two people out. So, like, if white and red are out, nobody has both their enemies out yet. Anyway, it's a free-for-all. Everybody plays at the same time. I'm sorry. There's one active player's turn. You go clockwise around.

It's white, then blue, then black, then red, then green. And the idea is, because each person has a different win condition, you get interesting allies. Like, the idea, essentially, and this is kind of a cool thing, is your allies are the colors you are allied with, and your enemies are the colors you're an enemy with. And so neat things happen because,

for example, white is allied with blue, but also allied with green. But blue and green are enemies. So white doesn't particularly want green to destroy blue or blue to destroy green. And so there's neat dynamics that happen as you try to help your allies from losing to your enemies. And your allies are themselves enemies,

which is always kind of cool. This is a fun format. Now, you need to play exactly five people. Emperor, like I said, is flexible in that you need an odd number of people. I'm sorry, you need an even number of people. But you need... You can play with six or ten.

So Emperor requires a certain number of people. Star Match requires exactly five people. Grand Melee you can really play. You kind of need six to start with. But usually Grand Melees are way, way bigger than that. But anyway, one of the things that's pretty cool about these formats, if you haven't played them, is these formats go way, way back. And, I mean, these are just different ways.

And these are all formats that pre-exist me working at Magic. So these are old, old formats. These are formats that go back to, we're talking 93 and 94. So if you guys like this, I can do other podcasts in other formats over the ages. I just decided to start today with old, old formats. But anyway, actually, I have a meeting I've got to get to. But anyway, that's Grandmaster, Minimaster, Grand Melee, Emperor, and Star

Magics. There's early formats for you that maybe you've never heard about. But anyway, let me know, by the way, if you like me talking about old formats. It's something I can do more of. But I'm now in my parking space, so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Bye-bye.