Cloned from Elliot Raff's Stack - Magic Ascended Deckbuilder

Cloned from Magic Ascended Deckbuilder

Welcome to the Magic Ascended Deckbuilder! This is not a cube. This is a deckbuilding game similar to Ascension that uses many of the core rules of Magic: The Gathering and the MTG game pieces. Let me start with the core rules:

1. Your starting deck contains 2 of each basic land and no other cards. You will acquire cards as you play.
2. Whenever you run out of deck and need to draw, instead of losing you shuffle your graveyard and create a new deck then keep drawing.
3. There is a 7 card market from which you can buy cards. The market refills immediately whenever a card is removed.
4. Spells are free to cast! Abilities are not free and still cost mana.
5. You acquire spells by paying their mana cost as a sorcery speed action. You buy them from the market and they go to your discard pile.
6. To facilitate buying cards, you may play any number of lands every turn. However you also sacrifice all your lands at the end of each turn. This makes land function similar to basic resource cards in deck building games.
7. The draw phase is moved to the end of the turn and you draw 5 cards per turn. Also your starting hand is 5 cards.
8. There are standard market piles of Crumbling Vestige, Seer's Lantern, and Crystal Vein. Lands and other cards without a mana value cost 2 generic mana to buy from the market.
9. Instants and Sorceries you cast are exiled until the end of the turn when they resolve. This prevents easy infinite draw loops.

END OF TURN PROCEDURE

• “End of turn” triggers.
• Sac all lands.
• Move all instants and sorceries you put into temporary exile by casting them to graveyard.
• Draw 5 and reshuffle as required.
• Both players get priority.
• Cleanup step.

Other than that you are playing Magic. It's surprising how much the game still feels like Magic even with this many rule changes. The win conditions are mostly haste creatures, going wide with tokens, control, and burn spells. Because the deck cycles you can use the same few threats over and over.

The market deck is decidedly not color balanced but mostly doesn't need to be. Also because the hand size is still 7, cards costing 7 or less can be purchased fairly quickly and easily in the beginning of the game. These cards get much harder to cast as you add more non-lands to your deck unless you focus on permanent sources of mana like ramp creatures and Seer's Lanterns. I'm still working a lot on balancing the environment and I hope other people take this idea and build off it with their own lists. I have tried to find all the "cute" cards that interact in interesting ways with this ruleset. The big exception is exiling. I found that it was hard to find card effects which were costed appropriately for exiling in this style of game.