The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
That’s interesting—I used to play with my brother’s cube but never thought of building a cube as part of the game.