Art by Micha HuigenA Brief Cube History:
The Drunk Wizard Tower (DWT) is a unique play experience akin to PleasantKenobi's Party Box. Originally built to be played in Wizard Tower, we found that neither me nor my play-group particularly enjoyed that format. We began looking for ways to improve our experience and shortly thereafter the cube began to evolve into something more fun and innovative. Some additions, such as The Ownership Rule were adapted from my experience playing Brandon Sanderson's cube at an Unstable prerelease event. With the release of PleasantKenobi's party box video, further innovations were made to the cube. Some of these innovations included adding Jokers, allowing Booster Tutor to fetch non-Magic cards, and an expectation that cards tutored from packs will remain in the cube provided that they do not ruin the overall play experience.
Rules of Play:
1. Each player owns every card in the Drunk Wizard Tower. See The Ownership Rule section below for details.
2. Each player shares the same library, graveyard, and exile zones. To start a game, all 300+ cards of the Drunk Wizard Tower are shuffled together and each player is dealt seven cards.
3. You can play any card from your hand face-down as a land named "Prismatic Nexus." Each Prismatic Nexus is nonbasic, every basic land type, and can also be tapped for colorless. Face-down lands with a morph, megamorph, or disguise cost be flipped face up by paying that cost. Flickerwisp can also be used to exile these face-down cards. If a card exiled this way would be returned to the battlefield, return it face-up if it's a permanent card, otherwise leave it in exile.
4. The shared library cannot be searched or shuffled. If a player would search the library for one or more cards to put into their hand, they instead draw that many cards. If they would search for one or more nonland cards to put onto battlefield, they instead cast that many cards from the top of the library. If they would search for one or more land cards to put onto battlefield, they instead manifest the top card of their library as a land that many times. If a card would be shuffled into the library or placed on the top/bottom of it, exile that card instead.
5. If a card does not have a listed mana cost, then it can be played for free. This means that cards such as Wheel of Fate are free to cast.
The Ownership Rule:
Each player owns every card in the Drunk Wizard Tower. While this rule may seem simple at a glance, it can cause some interesting interactions that we will cover in this section.
Flicker. Most flicker effects function the same way they would under normal circumstances. If an effect such as Flickerwisp would cause a player to return a permanent to the battlefield under its owner's control, then that player returns it to the battlefield under the control of its most recent controller instead. The same is true in the case of effects that would return a card to its owner's hand, such as Rescuer Chwinga. In the case of Venser, the Sojourner and Meneldor, Swift Savior, the exiled creature is returned to the battlefield "under your control," allowing players to use them to steal creatures from one another.
Mutate. Mutate specifically reads "target non-Human creature you own." This means that in the DWT you can mutate creatures that your opponents control. This turns cards like Sea-Dasher Octopus and Porcuparrot into powerful removal spells. With this in mind, if a creature mutating would cause one or more abilities of that creature to trigger, the controller of that creature owns and resolves each of those triggers.
Disproportionately advantaged. Staff of Compleation, Coveted Raven, and The Beast, Deathless Prince are three cards which greatly benefit from The Ownership Rule. Staff of Compleation becomes a cannon that eliminates any permanent for the low price of 1 life and which can be repeated for only 5-mana. Coveted Raven steals any permanent when it attacks and can come out of nowhere due to its disguise mechanic. Finally, The Beast, Deathless Prince draws you a cards anytime a player takes combat damage and quickly becomes a threat in its own right.
As a reminder, cards in the cube which care about ownership have been equipped with a small purple star in their bottom right corner.
Joker Cards:
Joker cards read: "Choose a Magic card name that hasn't been cast this gaming session. Create a copy of the card with the chosen name. You may cast the copy. Exile this card. (You still pay its costs and copies of permanent spells become tokens.)"
Jokers cannot be used to directly kill a player or end the game. An example of an illegal Joker would be casting it as Coalition Victory with the proper criteria met. A legal use would be casting Damnation with a Zulaport Cutthroat on board, even if one or more players would lose the game as a result.
As with all of Drunk Wizard Tower, while players should strive to win, the overall goal is fun and interesting gameplay. Jokers are intended to be played accordingly.
Battle Cards:
Battle cards function slightly differently in DWT than in other formats.
Battles on the battlefield can be attacked by any player and defended by any player who does not control an attacking creature. Whichever player defeats a battle may cast the back of that card as if they were its controller. Example: Player D casts Invasion of Tolvada. When it enters, Player D returns an Elvish Visionary to the battlefield, draws a card, and passes the turn. On their turn, Player A attacks Invasion of Tolvada with three 5/5 creatures. Player B chooses to block one of those creatures. Player C blocks another. The third unblocked creature deals 5 damage to Invasion of Tolvada, removing all of its defense counters and defeating the battle. Player A, not Player D, may now cast the back of the battle, The Broken Sky, without paying its mana cost.
Planechase Cards:
Certain cards included in the cube, such a Start the TARDIS, give players the option to Planeswalk. If a player should Planeswalk while you are not playing Planechase, shuffle the included 20 card Planechase deck, then reveal the top card. The game proceeds as a game of Planechase with one exception, if a player would leave a Plane or Phenomenon, exile that card instead of putting it on the bottom of the Planechase deck. Once all 20 Planechase cards have been exiled, the game reverts to a normal game of Magic.
Some cards in the cube, such as Path of the Schemer, give players the option vote for Planeswalk or Chaos. If you are not playing Planechase and Chaos is chosen, shuffle the 20 included Planechase cards and reveal the top card. If it is a Phenomenon card, resolve the Phenomenon and then reveal another card. Repeat this action until a Plane is revealed, then Chaos ensues. Once the Chaos action has been resolved, exile the Plane and the game resumes as normal.
Stickered Cards:
By this point you may have noticed that some of the cards in Drunk Wizard Tower have been vandalized with powerful sticker effects. All 10 of its bounce lands seem to have been Charmed to enter the battlefield untapped, Unsanctioned Angels are always slipping through the cracks, and even The Beast is Playable in this topsy turvy world!?
Basic Rules. Lucky for you, I'm here to explain all these oddities! Firstly, if a sticker has been placed over the text of a card such that it omits or changes a bit of its text, it was done on purpose and for your benefit. Just roll with your best interpretation of what the card is trying to say and everything will turn out A-OK.
Getting a bit more specific.
Much of the stickering in DWT has been done to clarify interactions between rules. An example of this would be clarifying the interaction between The Ownership Rule and The Beast, Deathless Prince; because each player owns every card in the cube, even before he was stickered, The Beast, Deathless Prince would trigger, untap, and draw you a card anytime a player was dealt combat damage. For clarity and understanding, it was easier to sticker The Beast than to explain niche interactions involving ownership. The same is true for many other cards in the cube that care about owners. Checkout The Ownership Rule section for more examples of cards stickered to make the game a bit more simple.
Pin Collection is another tricky sticker fiend. A player can choose to cast it for one mana and reap the benefits of any stickers added in previous games, or they can bite the bullet and add a sticker themself. All stickers must be placed on the art of the card and cannot cover another sticker.
Outside the Game Effects:
If a card such as Living Wish would allow you to choose a card from outside the game, you may choose any card that meets the criteria from your personal collection or from among the exiled DWT cards that have not been played this session.
When Legion Angel enters the battlefield under your control, you may choose to add one of the 8 unique stickered Legion Angel cards from outside the game to your hand.
Better than One allows a player to choose someone outside the game to become their teammate and form a two-headed dragon. This could include a player who has already lost the game. The other person must agree to the team up and remain present, though they don't necessarily need to understand how to play Magic.
Non-Magic Cards:
Any non-Magic card in Drunk Wizard Tower still functions as a spell, must be cast, and can be countered. Any thing that remains on the battlefield after it resolves becomes a permanent and any creature-like card (Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh! monster, etc.) becomes a creature.
Booster Tutor can be used to get a card from any Booster Pack rather than only a Magic pack. This leads to some interesting cards entering the Drunk Wizard Tower and often some situations where you'll have to make up the rules for a card on the fly. Cards put into the DWT this way will stay between games and are only removed if they are found to ruin the overall experience.
Digimon. All Digimon are artifact creatures with power and toughness equal to their DP. They have a mana cost equal to their play cost and any Digimon with a digivolve cost also has the following ability.
Digivolve X (Place this card on top of a creature you control with mana cost or level equal to or greater than the level listed on its digivolve cost. That creature becomes this digimon. Then draw a card.)
Flesh and Blood. This is a difficult game to work into a Magic system. Despite that, Flesh and Blood cards can be exiled from your hand to add mana equal to the number of red pips in the top left corner of the card (max. 3). They can also be cast by paying mana equal to the cost in the top right corner. I don't have a lot to say on these as we only have one example in the DWT, Read the Ripples. For this card in particular, we play it as an aura that gives +0/+2 and that is sacrificed at the end of your turn to cast a copy of Opt and then draw a card.
Pokemon. These cards have no mana cost, no power, and cannot attack. They can be used to block.
Damage dealt to Pokemon is not removed during the cleanup step.
Each Pokemon has a set of one or more moves that function as activated abilities. These abilities cannot be activated until a Pokemon has been continuously controlled by a player since the beginning of that player's most recent turn (they experience summoning sickness).
Once on each of their turns, the controller of a Pokemon can choose one of their abilities to activate. Activated abilities of Pokemon can be activated by paying mana equal to the number of energy symbols for that ability.
If the activated ability of a Pokemon would deal damage, that ability reads: "Choose target creature an opponent controls or an opponent who controls no creatures. Deal X damage to that creature or player."
If the spell or ability of a player other than a PokemonEX's controller would cause that PokemonEX to die, the controller of that spell or ability draws two cards.*
Yu-Gi-Oh!. While tributes may be necessary to summon more powerful creatures in Yu-Gi-Oh!, any Yu-Gi-Oh! monster can be played for free in Drunk Wizard Tower and functions as a creature card normally would in Magic. Because of the massive power and toughness of these creatures, cards such as Soul's Majesty have been removed from the DWT.
I have decided that these cards add more confusion and difficulty than fun so they are being removed.