,we normally have 7 to 9 players...

Killer Joe

New member
Something weird happened last night at the shop. Last week, the store Guru (so he thinks) won the thursday night casual tourney. This means that he's entitled to announce what is the format for the following week, usually it's 1.5 or extended, sometimes draft or standard, but last week he picked 1.5 with a twist: Everyone started out with five land in play, one of each color. You could only have a forty card deck but with no Slivers, artifacts or land. If a land was destroyed you put it back into play at the end of the turn. It was an okay idea, it was better than his original one which was to make decks that contained cards with 5 or less letters in it's title (whatever).
Here's the weird thing, we normally have 7 to 9 players and almost always the same ones, but on this night we had 15 players, I know that's not real significant but it was to me/us. There were players who I've never met before and that had known about our thurs. night tourny's but never cared to show up. I'm not one for unusual tourny formats but if that's what it took to 15 players what will it take to get more?!
I'm not a cut-throat player but I am the oldest in the group (30+), maybe It looks weird for me playing with youngins of 16 - 26 yrs. old. I don't know, but the feeling is starting to come back like when I first started when there were 20 plus at each tourney. I like it that way.

I'm rambling..............

This is Yellowjacket
 
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Chaos Turtle

Guest
That sounds like fun, which is probably why so many showed up.
Around here, all anybody wants is sanctioning. One of the guys recently got his level-1 judge certification, and now it seems that 'casual' tournaments are a thing of the past.
We usually have a pretty good crowd for Arena, 12-16 people (in a very small town) and it had been growing, slowly but steadily. When this season started, though, most everyone wanted to do Extended, since that's what the PTQ's are (as if even one member of our group will actually attend a PTQ anytime soon -- I'm the only one who actually has, as far as I know) and the attendance has dropped off to about 12 again. None of the new guys showed up last week. I almost didn't, either, but I would have missed my friends.
Anyhow, I and some others have suggested Vanguard - Standard for the new season, hoping to actually see some interesting decks. The only problem is that most of the new guys don't have any Vanguard cards, but I'm willing to share, and hopefully some of the other players will also.

Forgive my ruminating; my point is that for most players, especially the new guys, Magic is still about fun and creativity.
Want to increase participation? Increase the fun.
 
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Mordecai

Guest
Casual tournaments are fun and people realized that. When I ran a creatures-only/one-creature-type casual tournament over Christmas break, we had more people show up than we'd had in over a month, and a lot of them were people who had never been to our tournaments before.

Of course, I had just about the best deck possible for that format long before I announced it....
 
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Zadok001

Guest
I like that kind of tournament. I've only played in two, one of which was simply 20 card decks with Vision Charm banned.

The other was more interesting. It was for exactly 5 of us, but can be done with as many as 8 (though it gets kinda touch-and-go). Each player gets a peice of paper. One player is chosen to go first. Each OTHER player then names a 'rule' that player must follow. The rules can be as simple as banning a single card, to banning all creatures with power 4 or greater. Obviously, the rules can't be too restrictive, you kinda have to use your own group's judgement to decide what's going too far. Repeat for each player.

This format is interesting 'cause it forces everyone to think differently. For me, they banned big creatures (power 4 or greater), stopping me from playing Greater Good. :( It works best when the group knows each other's playing styles fairly well, since the rules become much more unique.

(The other big advantage is it literally cracks the groups metagame wide open. No deck can be built to take advantage of the evironment, since the environment is totally changed.)

"I ban your damn Necros. Die, Trix, die!"
 
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dawn

Guest
Hello, I have just joined this group. I wanted to comment on this. I don't play at a shop and have never played a necro deck or academy deck or any mainstream deck, I have been playing since Unlimited and like the poster of this I am 30+ myself. I play to have fun and relax, the only time I even use a DCI# is at pre-releases. I wanted to say we tried a game something like that, but you can only play with 5 people we did the same thing with the lands and you could have a sixty card deck the twist was, we took the five Elder Dragon Legends and put them out face down and everybody drew one and had to build a deck around there dragon. It turned out to be quite fun. Thanks for listening. Cry-for-DAWN
 
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