Magic: The Gathering formats

Magic: The Gathering's standard method of play is one-on-one using a deck of at least 60 cards with a maximum of four of each card except for basic lands. Some of the Limited and Draft formats use a minimum deck size of only 40 cards.

The Officially Sanctioned Formats are Legacy, Vintage, Extended, Standard, Block, Draft, and Limited.

Official Formats

Vintage

Vintage is considered to be an eternal format because the card pool never rotates. This means that all the sets that are currently legal will continue to be legal and any new sets will automatically be included in the legal card pool. Only a small number of cards are banned from Vintage. One set of cards banned are cards with any mention of the ante rule such Contract from Below and Demonic Attorney. Chaos Orb and Falling Star are also banned due to the difficulty in judging their agility mechanic. And Sharazad was recently banned in order to prevent it from being abused as a stall tactic.Because of the expense in acquiring the old cards to play competitive Vintage, most Vintage tournaments held are unsanctioned ones where players are permitted to proxy a certain number of cards. Proxies are treated as stand-ins of existing cards. They are not normally permitted in tournaments sanctioned by the DCI.

Legacy

Legacy is the other eternal constructed format. It evolved from Type 1.5, a format defined by a banned list that merely consisted of all banned and restricted cards in the old Type 1. In 2004 the format was revitalized by separating the banned list from the rechristened Vintage and banning many old, powerful, and expensive cards such as Mishra's Workshop, Mana Drain, and Bazaar of Baghdad. The result is that Legacy has a lower power level than Vintage and is on average considerably more affordable. The DCI has attempted to promote the format with the addition of a Legacy Grand Prix circuit. In 2007 the company announced that this format had selected for the final individual portion of the World Championships prior to the fixing of a problem that they had made after moving the championships from summer/fall to fall/winter.

Extended

Extended as a format consists of the last seven years of block rotations and core sets. With each fall set release, one year's worth of blocks will rotate out of the format. Any additional sets released between rotations are automatically added to this format's card pool. This system was implemented in March 2008 to balance the format's card pool, synchronize the rotation with Standard, and make the policy easier for players to remember. The current Extended rotation consists of the Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught, Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, and Shadowmoor blocks; the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth edition core sets; and Coldsnap.

Standard

Standard is a format that consists of the most recent core set and the two most recent block rotations. The current Standard rotation consists of the Tenth Edition core set, Coldsnap, the Time Spiral block (Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight), the Lorwyn miniblock (Lorwyn, Morningtide), and the Shadowmoor miniblock (Shadowmoor, and the upcoming Eventide.) There are currently no cards banned in Standard.

Block

This allows basic lands and only the cards in the most recent block rotation. Block formats are defined by the cycle of three sets of cards in a given block. For example, the Ravnica block format consists of Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, and Dissension. The Lorwyn-Shadowmoor mega-block, consisting of Lorwyn, Morningtide and Shadowmoor, and once it is released, Eventide, all count as the Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, and will rotate out as such. Only cards that were printed in one of the sets in the appropriate block can be used in these formats.

Limited

Limited tournaments are based on a pool of cards which the player receives at the time of the event. The decks in limited tournaments need only be 40 cards; all the unused cards function as the sideboard.In sealed deck tournaments, each player receives a 75-card Tournament Pack (containing 45 cards and 30 basic lands) and two booster packs (each with 15 cards) from which to build their deck, though exceptions exist.In a booster draft, several players (usually eight) are seated around a table and each player is given three booster packs. Each player opens a pack, selects a card from it and passes the remaining cards to his or her left. Each player then selects one of the 14 remaining cards from the pack that was just passed to him or her, and passes the remaining cards to the left again. This continues until all of the cards are depleted. The process is repeated with the second and third packs, except that the cards are passed to the right in the second pack. Players then build decks out of any of the cards that they selected during the drafting and add as many basic lands as they want. Booster draft tournaments are somewhat prone to collusion, as players can hold the cards their neighbors need at the expense of their own deck building. Talking, signaling, and showing cards is forbidden during the drafting process and may be penalized by disqualification from the tournament.

Alternate Formats

Casual play groups and even Wizards of the Coast have developed many alternative formats for playing the game. These formats are designed to accommodate larger numbers of players, to allow two or more players to work together as a team, or create specific requirements for deck construction. They are distinct from the officially sanctioned formats such as Legacy, Vintage, Extended, Standard, or Block Constructed which are organized by the DCI and merely define the available card pool, not change the rules of the game.

Many of these variants are popular in tournament play, though not all have support from Wizards of the Coast, several of the variants have also been implemented in the official online version of Magic: The Gathering.

• Multiplayer — The simplest format is the free-for-all, where players sit in a circle and vie with those around them to be the final surviving player. One variant is "Rainbow" (or "Five-Player Star") and involves exactly five players, each playing one of the colors of Magic and trying to defeat the two diametrically opposed players. Theoretically, the five decks should be equally balanced, so that the game is based more on skill than on deck strength. Another variant involves limited attacks, where the player can only attack the player on his left. This means that the players must take out all other players before reaching the final two. In some cases, a player may exhaust his available resources and be unable to establish a win condition. Team-based play is also popular. "Two-Headed Giant" is a team game where pairs of players share turns and life totals. In "Emperor", two teams, each generally composed of three or five players, play to ensure their central player (the "emperor") outlasts the other. In June 2005, rules for handling multiplayer games were added to the official rulebook, and "Two-Headed Giant" team play is the first multiplayer variant to be sanctioned by the DCI.

• Vanguard — In this variant, each player has a special card that affects the game. These cards change the players' starting life total and cards in hand, and have additional effects as well. Vanguard initially began with special oversized Vanguard cards, released as part of various promotions. Although three cycles of cards were made, interest never caught on due to relatively low production and lack of sanctioned tournaments. The cards featured depicted major characters from the storyline of Magic, including Gerrard Capashen, Karn and Squee. A new version of Vanguard was eventually added to Magic Online, with a player's avatar filling the role of the oversized physical cards[1]. Players are given a standard set of avatars and can receive more as entry and high-finishing prizes in release events. New avatars are regularly added as new sets of Magic cards are released, each depicting a card from the set. The wider availability online, combined with occasional tournaments, has made online Vanguard more of a success than its physical predecessor. One recent addition to the standard Vanguard format is Momir Basic, which involves the Momir Avatar which allows a player to discard a land card to get a random creature into play. All Momir Basic Decks are constructed entirely of basic land.

Alternative deck construction

Various alternative rules can be used to govern the construction of decks. Some of these variants have become so popular that unsanctioned tournaments have taken place at various Magic tournaments and gaming-oriented conventions such as Gencon.

• In one system, players are allowed to use only one of each card instead of the usual limit of four. This variation is called "Singleton", "Highlander" (named after the catchphrase "There can be only one" of the movies), "Legendary" (in Magic, there may only be one of any legend card in the game), or "Restricted" (tournament formats with a restricted list insist that decks have no more than one of those cards) Magic. Some players of this format require that the decks have a minimum of 100 cards, ban sideboards, and institute a special rule for mulligans with hands having either too many or too few lands. [2][3][4][5]
• In Rainbow Stairwell, players make a 56 card deck utilizing 4 of each basic land, or 2 of 10 different multiple color producing lands, along with six cards from each color and the artifacts. These six cards must have a converted mana cost ranging from one to six, with each card taking up one of six slots.
• In the "Pauper's Deck" or "Peasant Magic" variants, all rare cards are disallowed, and players must construct decks using only the more commonly available cards. Peasant Magic was created by Rob Baranowski who felt that players with limited access to cards should still have an opportunity for competitive play. Tournaments for this format have taken place at Gencon since 2001.
• In "5-Color" or "Prismatic Magic", players must build very large decks (at least 250 cards) and accommodate a minimum number of cards of each color. This format was first developed by Kurt Hahn and several other players in the Milwaukee area. [6] 5-Color is managed by the 5CRC which while not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast or the DCI, does organize tournaments, has its own list of banned and restricted cards and has a world championship held at Gencon. It also supports ante cards, an initial component of the rules for Magic that has since been deprecated. When Magic Online was under development, this format was requested by many users, and it was added as "Prismatic" with slight differences, including the minimum number of cards of each color and no support for ante. An additional "big deck" mulligan is also standard online, allowing players to compensate for hands with too many or too few lands.
• In order to alleviate problems with the mana resource system, some play variants include rules for building decks without lands. These variants often include other compensating controls, such as restricting players to one spell per turn (as in "Type 4" or "DC-10"), or in using spell cards themselves to be played as lands and produce matching colored mana.
• "Mental Magic" is one of the more extreme variants, in that cards may be played as any card in the game with the same mana cost.
• One draft Variant is Reject Rare Draft which has each player donate 45 rare cards (the same number as in 3 regular boosters) and then draft as normal. This variant was developed at Neutral Ground, a gaming store owned by Brian David-Marshall, a columnist for Wizards and noted commentator in the Magic world.
• Permanent Magic is a variation where instant and sorcery spells are banned. (Which can also be combined with Restricted Magic.)
• Backdraft is a draft variant where each player tries to build the worst deck possible because each player will be giving another player that deck to play in the tournament. To avoid mana problems, players choose what lands to add in the deck they are "backdrafted". Additionally, house rules may restrict backdrafters to 3 colors maximum.
• Mini Magic is a constructed variant where decks are built with a maximum card limit of 15 and a maximum hand size of 3. Because of the small deck size, the state-based effect where the game ends if a player is unable to draw a card from his or her deck is ignored. Select cards are banned in this format due to their heightened power level given the limited deck size. Alternatively, Mini Magic may be drafted using a single booster pack per person.
• Legends Deck: all players play using the same deck that is generally made of 300 or more cards. Legends decks have been known to get so large that they must be divided into two or more stacks to prevent it from toppling.
• Cube Draft -- Cube Draft gained popularity due to the Magic Invitational, and consists of at least 540 cards. "The Invitational Cube" has some of the most powerful cards in the game, like the Moxes, among other banned and/or restricted cards. The cards then are picked at random to make 3, 15 card packs for the players to draft from. The Invitational Cube Drafting is done under normal Booster Draft rules.
• "Riviera Live Draft" -- Using a large Common Library, players "draft-as-they-draw". Flexible, controlled land drawing allows opportunistic change of strategy in mid-game.
• "Live draft" -- Another "Live draft" form - With no personal libraries (could cause problems with for instance Clash).