I’m still somewhat new to MtG, and have mainly played commander, along with a bit of modern which was a little too intense for me. What are some good formats to look into for kitchen table, 2 player mtg with my wife? Commander is great but tends to want a 4 player format.
Bear in mind we’d rather not buy new cards, but used cards and proxies are fine, got no major price constraints since I’m happy to print up a card if it’s going to be too hard to find.
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Cube is lots of fun! A tailored 2-person cube is customizable and you can play over and over and have new experiences.
I used to have a “Sudden Death” cube where you start at 1 life that was a lot of fun
Mini cube is the way to go. Scrounge up 180 moderately coherent cards (including about 15% cheap mana fixing lands), Housman draft that shit and you’re off to the races.
I didn’t realize cubes could be mini. I’ll have to check that out
Forgetful Fish aka Dandan
You could try duel commander, also called french commander. Basically it is commander but with a diferent banlist. For example there is NO Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, things like that. And some commanders are also banned.
You can also play 1v1 commander with unmodified commander decks, but you need to go into it knowing that some things will be pretty broken while some others just won’t work at all. I do this pretty regularly with my fiancee when we just want to jam a few games or if I want to test a deck.
Sounds like some of the changes are similar to what we already have as house rules, interesting. Thanks!
@socialjusticewizard i don’t think i can post on that website, but i really have been enjoying Jumpstart as a great way to play with new players. It’s reusable too, as long as you don’t pick the same two colors to shuffle together.
I also recommend JumpStart (and by extension JumpStart ‘cube’ once you are a good bit more familiar with the game). Once you have it built is is a great way to just pick up and play.
Why not just play standard? It’s faster than commander and decks are smaller.
I don’t know much about standard tbh, what’s the best way to learn about it? Or is it not much different from commander?
I’ve played a great deal of commander in the last year and a bit, but because I don’t have a lot of friends who play, my experience is otherwise quite insulated and I don’t know what I don’t know.
pretty much completely different from commander, you dont have a commander, each player starts at 20 health, its not singleton so you can have up to 4 of each non-basic land, and it’s a minimum of 60 cards in the deck (can have more)
If you want to get a taste of standard, it’s sort of the default format on Arena. If you download the client you get a couple of starter decks with it to begin and you can run a few games.
Winston Draft! Me and my brother did Winston drafts for years. We also built a Winston cube where we each “controlled” 50% of the card pool and changed stuff for drafting. Essentially like a cube for 2 people, it was a blast. Then we went to college and moved away, maybe we should get another Winston cube going it’s been a bit.
@socialjusticewizard brawl’s not bad if you want a 1v1 commander-style experience.
Oathbreaker is kinda like a mix between commander and standard. The games are quicker, so it can work better as a 1v1, but can also scale to multiplayer games.
One other option might be to pick a time period and run the standard decks of that time. So if you pick something like a decade ago you would be playing with the original Theros and the Return to Ravnica blocks. Some cards from that time might have held their value, but cards like Boros Reconer switched from $30 while in standard to like $0.6 after they rotated out.
