Pool 1.0
Our Magic the Gathering play group came up with a format to help prevent burnt out of Magic. We have been playing on and off over the last 35 years and it seems like each time we stop playing do to power creep, over competitiveness and net decking. There is always need to get more and better cards. Games just don’t seem as fun and we stop playing. It doesn’t matter the format it always happens.
Pool Format
We came up with the Pool format to help prevent this from happening again. The format consists of one Commander Pre-Con, relatively new and drafting every other week. That’s the Pool, no other cards can be added. We use the drafts to help improve or even change our Pre-Cons. Alternating each week between Commander and drafting.
Commander
To keep things interesting we roll, “the” (sidenote: A 30 sided die, where if you roll a 1 some bad must happen and if you roll a 30 something awesome happens. Examples would be 1, you go last every game for night. 30 you go first every game for the night.) of doom to decide what variant we play.
Game Variants
- Two-Headed Giant
- Archenemy Original and Duskmourn
- Planechase
- Emperor
Drafting
The weeks weren’t Commandering, we draft. Due to the limited card pool, we highly suggest chaos drafting. Depending on the size of the play group that week we may pick 2 draft or commander draft (sidenote: and then use the same variants as above. We will add an additional pack (4 in total) to help build our 60 card decks ) The following week and every other week we drafted, as we called it Rare Drafting. Rare Drafting has been a thing with our friend group for a number of years, my be 15 or 20. It’s a normal 3 pack draft, passing right, left, right, but after all the games are over, all the rares and mythics from the draft are placed out on the table and we draft those base on wins and loses.
commander draft I personally love this method of drafting, you are not tempted to draft a rare or mythic because of it’s value or if you need it for another deck.
Again all of the cards drafted are now included in the Pool. Every other week we drafted, the drafts allowed us to introduce new mechanics and archetypes into the Pool. Each person drafting brought packs from which ever sets they wanted. So each draft was unique, some where great, some where not so great.
The main Commander decks could only be modified with the cards with in the Pool.
But you could also trade from within the Pool.
What We Learned
The color identity of our Commander decks determined what we drafted. My Commander deck was JUND colors (Black, Red, Green) I pretty much only drafted those colors, I wanted to improve my pre-con.
We figured that out pretty early on, it wasn’t a big deal.
What we learned about starting the Pool off with pre-cons, is that they are pretty well tuned. They where hard to improve on. If we had access to the cards out side of the Pool that would be a different story. The Pool limited our options and we had to work with what we had and it was difficult to make big changes.