When I first started blogging about EDH many years ago, I spent a fair amount of time just exploring interesting ideas. Interesting to me might not be interesting to you or anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun to bounce around a weird idea every now and then.

To ring in the new year I'm going to share one today.

This isn't EDH, though it will share the basic gameplay and deckbuilding constraints, and it most certainly isn't cEDH. Today I'm going to talk about bsEDH.

If you need to understand what "BS" is short for, I'll give you a moment to google it.

When you "call BS" on someone, you're calling them a liar, so bsEDH is all about trying to get away with lies and catch other players in their own lies. In this format, the lies are made-up cards that don't actually exist in Magic: the Gathering. That means this will be best played online on a platform that lets you add in custom cards, or in a game where everyone is playing heavily or fully proxied decks. My choice would be Tabletop Simulator, but I'm sure there are other options that would work well too.

bsEDH Deckbuilding

The first thing to make clear is that your group will have to agree with both how many made-up cards each deck has to run, and what level of difference from an existing card lets it count as BS.

I'd suggest starting at 10 BS (made up) Magic cards per deck. If you have too few, they won't be relevant and you'll end up just playing EDH. Too many, and it might be too easy to figure out which ones are fake. You might want to also require that at least five card types be represented in your ten cards.

The amount of difference your fake cards have to have is a key part of this format. You should again agree as a group on where the line is. I would recommend that the card has to have a unique, made up name and should not have a text box that matches an existing Magic card. Beyond that, I think part of the fun is trying to toe that line between what is an obvious fake card and what is close enough to seem real.

I'd advise against allowing someone to just take "Arctic Foxes" and change it and the text box so the card is "Arctic Fox." Changing all the plural Foxes to Fox might seen too cheesy, but changing it into "Arctic Vixen" might be enough to be a good fake card for bsEDH.

Your deck will be a normal Commander deck, just with 10 fake cards mixed in. The format uses the normal EDH banlist, with the caveat that you include those fake cards you made up. Your goal will be to play EDH and win the game. Your group should try to balance out your power levels. You'll be playing EDH and you want a fun game, not a pubstomp.

Calling BS

You may be wondering where the BS in bsEDH comes up, and what happens when you call BS on someone's card.

You can call BS on any card as it gets cast, is revealed, or comes into play. Lands don't get cast. Morph and Manifest are keywords that transform a card that is already in play, and transforming double-faced cards can also flip to reveal a back side without ever leaving the battlefield. Most spells are cast, so it makes sense to be able to call BS on a card when it's on the stack, but before it has resolved.

You can "call BS" on a card at instant speed in response to a card being revealed or put into play.

If you "call BS" and the card is a fake, the card gets exiled and the player who played the card loses half their life (rounded up).

If you "call BS" and the card was real, you lose half your life (rounded up).

This bsEDH format is still just a concept so I'm sure there will be details that have to be sorted out. As an example, how often can you call BS on someone's card? Losing a challenge costs you half your life, but it's a 40-life format, so maybe that's not a big enough penalty?

If you got a challenge counter on your upkeep and you could build them up and use as many as you have, would that be too many challenges? Could they be affected by proliferate? Magic is a game of details, so if you try out bsEDH you'll need to work those details out.

In this most casual of formats, this is an incredibly casual idea for a variant of EDH. Whatever rules you end up playing by, keep the focus on having it be fun and fair for everyone involved.

Finding the Fun

This bsEDH idea may seem a little weird, and you might be wondering why you'd even bother to try it out, but I think there are some good reasons to give it a shot.

Playing bsEDH tests a bunch of things that you don't normally experience in EDH.

You'll be incentivized to play weird and obscure cards from the older days of Magic. Cards that might never get played in 2025 will be useful as "bait" to try to get your tablemates to call BS on cards that are real and are legal in EDH.

You'll be rewarded for having an extensive knowledge of Magic cards. You're bound to see them over the course of a game, and if you know your stuff you'll be able to catch your tablemates in a lie or two.

Your ability to lie and to catch a tablemate in a lie is the sort of thing that definitely comes up in EDH. It's hard to imagine that skill not being even more valuable in bsEDH, where your very life (or at least your life total) may depend on catching and getting away with lies.

You'll get to make new cards! Given how many custom cards get created and shared online every year, this might be a big selling point for some playgroups. You might try to be clever and make subtle variants on existing cards that seem real, but just happen to be made up. You could take a risk or two and make a new Nephilim or an archetype that should have been created, but never found its way into a Magic set.

If you are good at bsEDH, your fakes will pass the smell test, your obscure cards will bait out other players' challenges, and you might even get to win a game on the back of a ridiculous card that never should have been printed, and in fact is completely made up.

Angle Shooting

Anytime a new idea like this is brewed up, I fully expect that someone will try to angle shoot the format. You might have a deck designed to want you to be at a low life total, so you call BS on everything that gets played and you make your fakes incredibly obvious.

If everyone is trying out this new format with the same approach, I think you'll be fine, but if you have someone who is prone to trying to find ways to always take advantage of every situation, you might want to decide whether or not this kind of "angle shooting" is OK. Spikes are gonna spike, after all, so save yourself a little trouble and have a conversation ahead of time.

Final Thoughts

I have an online playgroup that plays semi-regularly using Tabletop Simulator, but I think you'll need a playgroup where everyone is into the idea of trying out bsEDH. The process of thinking up fake cards, and then making virtual (or paper) versions of them to shuffle in with your real cards, is going to take time and effort.

Unless your whole group is into the idea, it might end up being hard to actually try bsEDH out. I love the concept enough to devote this column to it, but I have no illusions about it really becoming the next big thing in Commander.

I expect I'll have some decks to share in the coming weeks. I've been working on some builds around cards from LoTR and Bloomburrow that I haven't shared with you yet. Hopefully I'll have the chance to do that before we dive into the next big set.

That's all I've got for you today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!