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It wasn’t until I played a three-hour-long, five-player Commander game that I finally pinpointed the main thing that had always bothered me about free-for-all games.
They took too damn long.
Now, I understand that perhaps some of the appeal of free-for-all is that games tend to go longer, so players can consistently cast their 9-mana spells. Indeed, that is the reason you start with 40 life in Commander—to make sure all decks can get to their late game without being thwarted by aggro.
It doesn’t take three hours for everyone to get to 9 mana, though.
Granted, three hours is an outlier, but it isn’t just the length that bothered me; there were other aspects of free-for-all games that annoyed me, too, but it was hard to pinpoint exactly what. Then, I read an old Duelist article by Richard Garfield that perfectly summed up the rest of my feelings. In the article, Garfield criticizes three aspects of political (FFA) games. It very much resonated with me, and mere paraphrasing wouldn't do it justice. Here is an extended excerpt of the article:
One of the most unpleasant features of a political game is what I refer to as kingmaking. Kingmaking happens when a player who has no chance of winning can choose who does win. This holds some charm for beginners, because being a kingmaker allows revenge against irritating players, and justifies diplomacy—the winner is chosen by someone else. The advanced player tends to dislike kingmaking, though, because it trivializes the time spent playing. The longer the game goes on, the more irksome is such an ending.
Another depressing thing about many political games is the way they encourage passive play. If attacking another player costs me and my opponent resources, then there is a strong incentive to sit back and let other people fight. Games that have this characteristic can be a lot of fun if some of the players ignore this and attack anyway, but are a real drag if everyone sees waiting as an advantage. How many times have you seen one player get sick of doing nothing and say, ‘Well, I have to be going, so I am going to attack’? Boredom should not be the incentive for conflict in a game.
(For anyone unlucky enough to not have read any of Richard's articles, you can find many of them here.)
After reading Garfield’s article, I thought about trying to design a set of special rules for FFA in Magic that overcomes these problems. I was hit by inspiration when reading about a mechanic in another CCG Garfield designed (called Vampire: The Eternal Struggle) where you received a bonus for killing the player to your left. It solved every problem Richard had had—passive play is no longer encouraged, having a weak position no longer has the same political advantage it used to, and kingmaking is less likely, since each player is incentivized to focus on his target. It should also make multiplayer games go faster, which solves my original problem with the format.
Below are some possibilities I thought of for possible effects. Either pick your five favorite effects from the list—and a player has a choice of one of the five effects when he kills the player to his left—or pick your ten favorite effects from the list, and roll a ten-sided die each time a player is killed to determine which effect the killer will receive.
- Life-gain
- Targeted removal
- Burn
- Mana-ramp
- Tutoring
- Card-draw
- Board wipe
- Reanimation
- Mind Control
- Clone
- Extra turn(s)
- Fact or Fiction or Brilliant Ultimatum
- Living Wish
- Show and Tell or Eureka
- Tooth and Nail
- Praetor's Counsel
I’ll give each choice a rating (out of 10) based on my opinion. Again, these are all just suggestions, so by all means, do whatever you fancy. But in general, I’m looking for effects that are fun and won’t slow down the game and be repetitive.
I’ll also give two suggestions for what, specifically, the effect should be—one that’s on a lower power level, and one that’s on a higher power level. I do this because I find that some playgroups are more Timmy-heavy and prefer, big, swingy effects, whereas more Spike-heavy groups just need a moderate incentive to be aggressive.
1. Life-gain
Life-gain will inevitably prolong the game. Given that multiplayer is already significantly longer than two-player Magic, that’s a serious flaw.
Rating: 1
Low power level: Gain 13 life.
High power level: Gain 30 life.
2. Removal
First of all, the two most obvious possibilities that exist for removal are Terminate and Vindicate. Since Terminate is only useful again decks that run creatures, and therefore would slightly encourage creatureless decks in this format, I would prefer Vindicate. The uses of Vindicate would probably encourage conflict and speed up gameplay, which is a plus.
Rating: 6
Lower power level: Vindicate
High power level: Violent Ultimatum
3. Burn
Again, this could be done in multiple ways. To make it more versatile, it seems that being able to target creatures or players is better than only being able to target one or the other. To make sure targeting creatures isn't redundant with Vindicate, you should be able be able to divide the damage as you choose. Burn, like permanent removal, will probably tend to speed up gameplay. Then again, dying to a burn spell in the face isn’t a terribly fun way to go down, and if your life is within a low enough range for the burn spell to be lethal, you would be motivated to defend the player to your right, which is very awkward, since that player’s simultaneously trying to kill you.
Rating: 5
Lower power level: 4 damage divided as you choose among any number of target creatures and/or players.
High power level: 9 damage divided as you choose among any number of target creatures and/or players.
4. Ramp
If you're killing players, you're probably in the late game. If you're in the late game, you probably don't need mana-ramp. So, it seems this ability is bad simply because it's so seldom that it would be relevant. In order to potentially be relevant, it’d have a fairly large ramp spell.
Rating: 2
Lower power level: Search you library for up to three basic lands and put them onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
High power level: Search you library for up to eight basic lands and put them onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library.
5. Tutoring
I'm torn about this effect. On one hand, tutoring for a card is a great way to speed up the game and a solid bonus. On the other hand, it encourages degenerate combo decks (which benefit disproportionately from tutoring effects). I’d also imagine that over multiple games, gameplay could become repetitive if the players play with the same decks and typically tutor for the same things.
Rating: 3
Lower power level: Demonic Tutor
High power level: Triple Demonic Tutor
6. Card-draw
This speeds up the game and doesn’t lead to any repetition. It’s perhaps a little bland, though; I find Fact or Fiction–type effects to be a more entertaining version of card-draw.
Rating: 6
Lower power level: Draw three cards.
High power level: Draw seven cards.
7. Board wipe
The one big difference between having Wrath of God as a card somewhere in your deck and getting a wrath effect when you kill a player is that it’s much easier for your opponents to predict the latter than the former. In this case, being able to predict something so easily is a problem—people are probably going to play around it; and you play around board wipe by waiting to play creatures. An effect that discourages everyone from casting creatures not only prolongs the game, but is simply not fun. However, if you are playing with the dice-rolling variant, board wipe is fine since players won’t play around it nearly as much. So, it’s rated much higher if you use dice rolling.
Rating: 1
Lower power level: Destroy all creatures.
High power level: Destroy all creatures you don’t control.
8. Reanimation
It scales in power level with the number of players and how long the game has gone on. And big creatures are always fun and advance the board state.
Rating: 8
Lower power level: Rise from the Grave
High power level: Triple Rise from the Grave
9. Mind Control
Like board wipe, players will play around this, which would be dull and prolong the game. I’m not going to want to cast one of my sweet Eldrazi cards if I think it’s just going to get Mind Controlled. But, again, like board wipe, if you play with the dice variant, this is rated higher.
Rating: 2
Lower power level: Abduction
High power level: Blatant Thievery
10. Cloning
Though players might play around this a little bit (by not playing creatures so there are no good Clone targets), it seems unlikely they would, since cloning their creatures doesn’t hurt them directly. In my experience, Rite of Replication–type effects are also incredibly fun and exciting to play with.
Rating: 8
Lower power level: Rite of Replication, unkicked
High power level: Triple Rite of Replication, unkicked
11. Extra turn(s)
The thing I don’t like about this is that it can be a little dull for the other players to watch you take multiple turns. This issue becomes particularly problematic if one player can kill multiple players in a row and doesn’t give his opponents a turn to respond. I guess such a situation would lead to faster gameplay, but that hardly seems relevant in light of the depressing situation for all but one of the players involved.
Rating: 3
Lower power level: Time Walk
High power level: Time Stretch
12. Fact or Fiction or Brilliant Ultimatum
I’ve always loved Fact or Fiction. I think at a low power level, Fact or Fiction is more entertaining and interactive than straight-up card-draw, and at a high power level, Brilliant Ultimatum is just a really big Fact or Fiction with the same cool mini-game involved.
Rating: 9
Lower power level: Fact or Fiction
High power level: Brilliant Ultimatum
13. Living Wish
I’ve also always thought that grabbing cards you own from outside the game is really fun. Booster Tutor is among my absolute favorite cards to play in Cube (erratad to find fifteen undrafted cards from the Cube), but unfortunately, that’s impractical to do anywhere other than Cube. Living Wish seems to be the best card in the Wish cycle for casual. If players don’t have any spare cards on them in their deck’s colors, though, it’s completely useless.
Rating: 6
Lower power level: Living Wish
High power level: Triple Living Wish
14. Show and Tell or Eureka
This one should certainly progress the board state along if everyone isn’t in topdeck mode yet. If they are, though, this is probably useless. It also might be too swingy for some players’ tastes, but other people love that sort of thing.
Rating: 5
Lower power level: Show and Tell
High power level: Eureka
15. Tooth and Nail
It’s fun and speeds up gameplay, though it could potentially become repetitive across games—people will probably tutor for the same finishers if they’re using the same deck, but having repetition in finishers really isn’t that bad. It also isn’t as likely to enable combo decks as normal tutors would be. Tooth and Nail entwined is a little high in power level, though.
Rating: 6
Lower power level: Search you library for two creature cards, reveal them, and put them into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
High power level: Tooth and Nail, entwined
16. Praetor's Counsel
Praetor's Counsel is basically card-draw that becomes increasing busted as the game goes on, and it does it in a really cool way. There is nothing that’s quite like Praetor's Counsel at lower power level, so I just picked a more orthodox graveyard-recursion card.
Rating: 7
Lower power level: Make a Wish
High power level: Praetor's Counsel
So, that’s all of the effects. Here’s a list of the effect and its rating:
Fact or Fiction or Brilliant Ultimatum: 9
Cloning: 8
Reanimation: 8
Targeted removal: 6
Living Wish: 6
Card-draw: 6
Show and Tell or Eureka: 5
Burn: 5
Tutoring: 3
Mind Control: 2
Extra turn(s): 2
Mana-ramp: 2
Life-gain: 1
Board wipe: 1
So, if I were making an effect, it would look something like this:
As you can see, I prefer the lower-power-level, non-random version of the bonus. But, as I said before, that’s just my personal preference. Customizing the effect to your taste is more than encouraged.
I’ll end with another variant that occurred to me, but which was above and beyond the power level of anything previously mentioned. Whenever you kill the player to your left, you annex him. Annexing means you gain control of all his permanents, you add his hand to your hand, you add his graveyard to your graveyard, and whenever you draw a card, you may also draw a card from his deck. It’s certainly big, and it certainly speeds up gameplay. It might reintroduce a certain level of politics into the game, though, as annexing a player gives you a huge advantage, and other players will probably try to gang up on you. If you never disliked political games as much as Richard Garfield or I did anyway, this variant will probably be great for you. A potential issue I can think of is that if the player you annex needs to leave (with his deck) before the game is completely over, the bonus escapes you. Despite that, I think this might be a fun format to try out, especially in formats that aim to be swingy anyway, like Type 4 (in Type 4, you could also get to cast an extra spell per turn for each player you annex).
Variant formats have always tickled me, and I hope that even if you didn’t have problems with normal multiplayer, you’ll still find these ideas fun in their own right.
May none of your Magic games last three hours.
