League Rules
This content was originally included in an issue of The Duelist magazine. The original article can be accessed via Internet Archive here.
Main Magazine Page: The Duelist #0
By Chris Page
One of the difficulties with Magic is that its unstructured nature allows those with more money or bigger trading circles to acquire better cards. While it’s possible to build a very strong deck with just a couple of starter decks, some judicious trades, and a fewkey victories, even incompetent players can buy themselves pretty decent decks. Playing in a league gives everyone equal deck-building resources, so league duels determine who is the best player, rather than who is the best player and buyer.
In a league, the rules control both the initial pool of cards from which players build their decks and the way in which the cards change hands. To keep players from bringing outside cards into the league environment, you can actually mark the league cards, perhaps with a stamp, or you can keep a master list of all the cards and report ownership changes to that list, which is held by a league coordinator. We prefer the second method just because it doesn’t harm the cards, thought it’s more of a headache and you have to trust everyone in the league for it to work well. If you’re using the second method, you should probably forbid trading after the season starts to make the coordinator’s job easier and prevent teamwork.
To make sure the initial distribution of cards is absolutely fair, get one starter deck for each person in the league, mix all the cards together, and have people choose cards. You’ll need a whole evening for this—a very long one if no one is familiar with the cards. Lay them out on a table or on the floor, with duplicates next to each other, and have people take turns choosing one card at a time. To prevent the person who chooses first from gaining a significant advantage, you can assign each player a number and have them choose in order 1-2-3-4-5-6 for the first round, 2-3-4-5-6-1 for the second round, 3-4-5-6-1-2 for the third round, and so on. To speed things up, you can choose lands and other cards in two separate drafts—lands second, obviously. Another alternative is to remove the lands, lay down the cards in random piles of two, three, or four, and have people draft entire piles. Afterwards you can pick lands, which should go a lot quicker. Finally, allow a few days for trading before you settle on a final distribution.
Once everyone has a deck, you can start organizing matches. You’ll want to work out most of the details to suit your group of players, but every league match group must answer a few basic questions. Each player should play each other player at least once, but how many times beyond that? Should there be a final game between the two people with the best records? What about playoffs? Even defining individual matches takes work. While the Magic rules define a set as the best three out of five duels and a match as the best two out of three sets, you don’t have to work it that way, especially if your players are short on time. Since each individual duel involves a fair amount of luck, a match should involve more than one duel. But how many? Best three out of five, six of eleven? And what about ante? Should here be ante for each game, or some sort of overall ante?
While the optimum number of games in a season and how to handle playoffs are a matter of taste, we’ve found a few recommendations for the other questions. There should be at least five duels in a match, to even out the luck factor. You can set the upper limit as high as you like, considering how much time your players have and how many duels you will still enjoy playing after your first few matches. As for ante, having players ante for each duel—and compelling them to play with won ante—favors broad-based decks. You might well consider this a good thing,but if you’d rather encourage specialized decks, you should either use ante for the overall match or do without ante altogether. If you do ante, set up a league schedule to make sure that everyone plays each other in a fair order. That way, if the interaction between a particular pair of decks favors one over the other, the weaker won’t get crushed to oblivion before it has a chance to take on a few other decks against which it might fare better.
There are also lots of other things you can do with a league besides the basics. If you want something really interesting, you can mix in the multiplayer rules and have a league of teams. When a league season is complete, you may want to retire some cards and crack open a few fresh decks for a new draft, evolving the league without changing the basic characteristics of the decks too much.
When you need inspiration, a good model for your league rules is existing rules for sports teams; just consider every deck a team and every player a team coach. We’ll also be coming out with more detailed league rules later.