Small Update: New Formats, New Hub.
Site Updates forum
Posted on May 14, 2024, 2:03 a.m. by Femme_Fatale
A small update today. The two new formats are Dandan and Judge's Tower. The new hub is "Shared Deck".
Both Dandan and Judge's Tower are casual centric formats with no deckbuilding requirements, rules or restrictions. They center their gameplay around all players drawing and playing their cards from a central deck. No other deck is included.
Dandan
Dandan is a 1v1 format spurred on from the card of the same name Dandan. Traditionally the deck's only wincon was Dandan and both players fought to find it first and be the one to control it. In a sense, the spirit of the format is creating new and interesting interactions when there is only one deck and both players are striving for the same win condition(s).
Judge's Tower
Judge's Tower many of you will probably be more familiar with. It is a multiplayer format focused around testing each player's knowledge of the game rules. A player will lose the game if they fail to make a correct play or miss a triggered ability, PROVIDED that another player called them out on their missplay or missed trigger. If they player that did the calling out was themselves wrong, then they lose instead. The cards in a Judge's Tower deck are chosen because they interact with the rules in a unique way or cause the player to be constantly focusing on when they can use an ability. There are various versions of how this works but players typically have infinite life and infinite mana. All cards must be played if able as soon as possible and if you can activate an ability of a card you must do so.
Shared Deck
As for the hub, "Shared Deck" is exactly what both Dandan and Judge's Tower are. However if you want to make one of these decks in a constructed format, the Shared Deck hub will let you label that constructed deck as Dandan or Judge's Tower. This hub will also encompass any future formats that utilize a singular shared deck across all players.
Ender666666 says... #3
Could we differentiate Standard Brawl and Historic Brawl?
May 14, 2024 9:24 a.m.
Samuel_Antao_Amazonas says... #6
Attractions, Battles, Undercity, Stickers...
May 14, 2024 2:10 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #8
legendofa: I would actually like to remove Horde Magic entirely. No one uses it for its intended purpose and if it were a format it'd be hidden after a year.
Ender666666: I'll consider it but we've got exactly one deck for Brawl in the past 4 months so it isn't looking too popular.
As for all the hubs they should be there. If they are not then there are bugs.
May 14, 2024 10:38 p.m. Edited.
Ender666666 says... #9
Heya, it's just that it's a difference between 60 card and 100 card decks, so I'm not surprised no one uses it currently.
May 14, 2024 11:06 p.m.
I'm going to work on hub inventory in the very near future, so I'll see what's going on with those hubs.
Kind of disappointing that Horde Magic doesn't get any love... There's a handful of genuine Horde Magic format decks, but yeah, it's overwhelmingly misused. I'd like to think it would survive better as one of the niche format options.
I promise I'm not trying to be too petty re:Horde Magic, but formats like Heirloom and Noble don't seem to have even any legal cards, let alone legal decks. I just quickly skimmed some formats I didn't recognize, and those two stood out as having apparently no interaction on this site in over a decade, filled entirely with bright red decklists.
Trying to be proactive instead of just complaining, is there a way to remove or disable some of the little-used formats, and would anyone be upset if the format options were cleaned up?
May 15, 2024 1:12 a.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #11
As for the hub things I suspect there's a bug where the backend isn't properly auto-creating the hubs for all the subtypes and keywords. Gates for example should pop up amongst the tickboxes.
We have disabled some of the little-used formats yes. You can't make any decks of heirloom, hero, noble, quest magic rpg (that's reserved for the decks running the rpg now) nor penny dreadful. But it doesn't make sense to break existing decks with those formats so they'll stay as they are.
As for the bright red stuff apparently there was a bug with "Is casual" flag for our formats. It's supposed to just make everything legal. But apparently it was doing diddly squat. If that becomes fixed a lot of these casual formats should stop being all red.
May 15, 2024 1:37 a.m.
Elocutiona says... #12
My Dandan decks with 4+ copies of the same card are marked as "Not Dandan legal" which is obviously incorrect, given that the format has no deck restrictions at all, let alone a card limit of 4, since the original deck has 10 copies of Dandan. Examples of decks marked illegal: Tempo/Good Dandân by BradenMTG, Wrath Wrath by Harrison Fang, and Owling Mirror by me.
May 15, 2024 5:58 a.m.
BrettonTheKid says... #13
I just saw TCC play Dandan earlier, I meant to look it up but you helped me out there.
May 15, 2024 7:15 p.m.
Starting the hub inventory, I don't see any of the keywords or mechanics from MKM or OTJ: disguise, case, suspect, plot, spree, outlaw, mount, and commit a crime are all missing. Gate, battle, stickers, and attractions are also missing, as mentioned above, along with historic, performer, clown, employee and guest. (Stickers and attractions might fall off after the last round of bans.) I'm happy to add them manually, but if it's supposed to be auto-creating, it's being pretty slow about it.
Would Undercity fall into Venture into the Dungeon, or is it distinct enough to be its own mechanic?
May 17, 2024 12:54 a.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #15
I have no idea what Undercity even is. Historic not being there makes sense because it's not a keyword. Same with Outlaws and Crime Committing. Stickers also wouldn't get auto-added as it isn't a subtype nor a keyword. None of these would work as subtype/keyword hubs since those check the occurrence of them in the deck.
Regardless, that's the bug with hubs I'm talking about. Things like gates, battles, attractions, etc should be auto-added but they aren't.
Elocutiona: Is casual flag no longer checks quantity of a card for legality so your Dandan decks and all other casual formats should be fine now.
May 17, 2024 2:37 p.m.
griffstick says... #16
@ Femme_Fatale I'm not a website designer but what if the was an option to type in your own hub. And over time your website gets a weekly or monthly tally of new hubs being used and when it reaches a certain number it gets automatically added. Is that something that can be done?
May 17, 2024 6:56 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #17
I was thinking about that myself actually but I think there's some issues with cleaning that data and how useful it'd be over time, and the maintenance involved in replacing things in decks when you get new hubs in or when users are entering hubs that already exist because they can't be bothered to find them ... there's a lot of pieces involved.
I think you either go one way or the other. We have a pretty popular hub request forum that legendofa here maintains that I trust the efficacy of that satisfies trying to go both ways already.
There is an issue of format specific archetypes that I think this feature might fit best for, more specifically so that we don't ever maintain it as these things can evolve quite rapidly or be incredibly niche. But if anything if I were to go this route I'd have every hub be user defined but include an auto-complete to site supported or recommended or popular hubs. Synonyms to some of these would have to be included.
Though I definitely fear the usefulness of this data, seems like it'd be just another form of title or description or hook. The deck space feature we have seems like it solves any sort of discoverability issues that user-defined hubs would try and solve.
May 18, 2024 1:52 a.m. Edited.
Femme_Fatale says... #18
legendofa do you think having archetype hubs (like twin/12-post/tron) being locked to specific formats would be useful to keep the hub list count low in the drop down? Would obviously need to be ignored for casual formats but wondering if this interests you.
May 20, 2024 1:29 p.m.
Femme_Fatale I'm interested in that. It would definitely help streamline the selections and solve most of my problems with format-specific hubs. Do you have a specific list of archetypes worth locking to formats at this point?
May 20, 2024 9:07 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #20
legendofa definitely not, I haven't been engaged with constructed magic in years. It'll basically be a feature you'd engage with at your leisure if we decide to add it in.
legendofa says... #2
Would it be possible to change Horde Magic from a hub to a format? I know that the focus on tokens makes it weird, and maybe not viable, but it's much more of a unique deckbuilding and playing system than a strategy or archetype.
Thanks for these updates and new inclusions!
May 14, 2024 2:48 a.m.