When you sit down to play some Magic at your casual gaming night, how do you play? Do you mix things up with alternate formats? Do you run with a few other variants such as Emperor, Two-Headed Giant, or Planechase?

There have been a plethora of support cards printed by Wizards of the Coast that embrace the casual side of Magic. From Vanguard to the Hero's Path, we have many alternate cards to choose from. Let's talk some more about each.

Path of Heroes

These cards, which are not normal Magic cards and that lack traditional backs, have a variety of interesting things to proffer. They usually include a character type from the world, such as The Philosopher or The Slayer. One set has Equipment, such as Lash of the Tyrant and Spear of the General.

If you wanted, you could certainly include the hero cards into your next casual Magic night. Our own Andrew Rogers suggests a few ways to use both the Hero's Path cards as well as cards from the Challenge Decks.

The one major issue is that some of the ways to use hero cards that have been suggested fall a little flat. For example, you could make them 0/1 colorless creatures with no mana cost or some other idea. That's a lot of hoops to jump through.

So, how about just using them in a simpler, more Vanguard-style way?

This puts cards like The Protector and The Vanquisher on the same level as emblems and such. They cannot be destroyed, stolen, Cloned, or sacrificed.

Now, that leaves one major question: How do people obtain Hero's Path cards?

However, some of the later hero cards are a bit overpowered. The Champion is nasty. Knowing that you are building a deck around it, you can run something like Umezawa's Jitte in your deck. The Champion would basically give you an extra card to start the game: the Jitte, right in your hand, and playable for just 2 mana. It's easy to have Godsend, Mirari, or Akroma's Memorial available and ready to jump into play for just 2 mana.

Meanwhile, your Aura deck is broken with The Destined, which cuts the cost by 2 mana to target your stuff, while The Explorer gives you a free Exploration to begin the game. That makes a simple little 3-mana activation to give deathtouch (The Avenger) look downright homely.

This is the same issue that we encountered with Vanguard. If you let people build a deck around a certain Vanguard card, they will break it. Take Mirri. With it, all of your basic lands can tap for any color of mana. Knowing that ahead of time, just build a five-color, good-stuff deck that runs anything and everything without worrying about mana. Want to add in that Counterspell? Sure thing! And you start the game with an additional 5 life, too. So you can break Mirri easily enough.

Unfortunately, that results in someone receiving a card that makes no sense in his or her deck (The Champion in a deck without noncreature legendary artifacts comes to mind) while another player will end up with a nasty card like The General or The Warmonger in a deck with a ton of tokens.

Therefore, perhaps you could what we did with Vanguard. Shuffle the hero cards and deal two or three to folks, and then let each player choose the one he or she wants. Did you get a humdrum The Avenger? Then just run The Vanquisher. Bored by that Cloak of the Philosopher? Then grab The Warrior to give stuff haste for no mana. That way, you have a controlled random element to keep things from getting too out of hand.

This worked really well for Vanguard cards as well. We used Vanguard cards in our playgroup for years. It was a fun way to keep things fun and fresh with the same players (and similar decks). A lot of casual players may just have one or three decks and that's it and aren't actively investing money into the game and acquiring new cards. That's okay. Vanguard worked well for them.

We'd shuffle three Vanguard cards face down to folks, and then they’d choose one to play. You'd make the adjustments to your life total and hand. You weren’t stuck with a bad choice for your deck.

We even created some rules to adopt a strategic element to Vanguard play. At any time, without using the stack, you could switch your card for another hidden card. Change your life total and hand to reflect your new card. (For example, Mirri gives you +5 life and makes no change to hand size. However, Squee is plus three cards in the hand but -4 life. So if you moved from Mirri to Squee, you would lose 8 life and draw three cards. If you went in the reverse direction, you would discard three cards and gain 8 life instead.)

It's a lot of fun!

Today, Vanguard cards can be a bit pricey. I have a full set because I played way back when, and I traded for them for cheap from folks who weren't that interested. The Vanguard Sliver Queen can set you back a lot of money, and Titania is ridiculously expensive. (Take a look at them here at CoolStuffInc).

So, if you want to avoid purchasing some of these older cards, I get it. They have a huge cool factor though.

As you might have heard, avatars online had Vanguard abilities, too, for Magic: The Electronic. Some of these avatars were so famous and interesting that entire formats were built around them (Momir Vig and Momir Basic being the iconic example).

Unfortunately, we have never had this injection of Vanguard goodness printed in real life.

Now, that's probably not going to happen. Until it does, you can just print out the online Vanguard avatars on index cards or something. Then, shuffle the index cards with the real-life Vanguard ones, and use them in the same way.

Want to know which ones were made? Take a look at all of the awesome Vanguard cards that we have, all ready to rock!

For example, how about a draft? You could have a snake-order draft and then just draft the Hero/Vanguard card(s) that you want, as long as they are available. Sounds fair, right?

Or what about an auction? You could have people start the bidding for a particular hero card with a bid of seven cards and 20 life. Folks could outbid them by having fewer cards/less cards for that hero card. If you really wanted The Champion or The Explorer, would you be willing to outbid someone for it? (A bid of six cards and 20 life beats a bit of seven cards and 1 life—cards trump life for the auction). Would you go to four cards and 10 life? At whatever point the table thinks it’s fair, you can have the nasty hero. (In Commander, you'd obviously begin with seven and 40.)

I'm sure you can come up with some other fun ways to distribute the heroes and vanguards.

Speaking of which, I hope that you have a full planar deck deck. The Planechase products are a blast, especially if you have one of each plane. Make sure to snag a copy of the promo planes as well—the result is a thick stack of fun. Planes are sort of a modern, flavorful spin on the old chaos-ridden variants.

The planes are a streamlined way of bringing that fun to a table, but with the ability to walk away to another plane if you want. So run a deck with one copy of every plane (and yes, even include The Eon Fog) and the phenomena as well. I know some folks who include two of each phenomenon card to make it more likely to flip one.

And nothing says you can't have a hero card and a Vanguard card while walking the planes. Maybe you are The Philosopher Tawnos or The Avenger Mirri. Perhaps you are Serra with the Axe of the Warmonger by her side. And your character is walking the planes and checking out the Cliffside Market or Gavony as you battle across the Multiverse.

Combining everything is fun! It breaks the monotony. It imbues a sense of true wackiness to the table, but you are able to control it somewhat, which helps. So have some fun with Herovanchase!

See you next week,

Abe Sargent

P.S. And don't forget that you can run Archvanchase's Path and run all four things, including the schemes from Archenemy! Or you could face Garruk the Slayer with them all! Get ready!