Monday, October 1, 2018

On the Stack 12: Tiny Fighters, a homebrew Magic format

I like building decks with cards that I have left over from drafts and Sealed events, and I'm always on the lookout for new ways to use cards that might not be effective in Standard decks, where you're always using four of each of the best cards, or Commander decks, where there's often a better option from an older set. So I have a lot of fun building decks for formats like Brawl, which give me opportunities to use a more diverse set of cards from Standard, and Tiny Leaders, which forces me to be creative by limiting the converted mana cost of the spells I can use.

So why not combine the restrictions of Brawl and Tiny Leaders and see what happens?



Both Brawl and Tiny Leaders are variations on Commander with a couple of extra constraints. In Commander, you have a hundred-card deck where every card (except for basic lands) is unique, and one of those cards is a legendary creature which sits outside of your deck so it's always available to cast, and whose color identity determines the colors you can use in the rest of the deck. For example, the commander of my dinosaur deck is Gishath, Sun's Avatar, whose color identity includes all three colors that have a lot of Dinosaur creatures. So I have the maximum number of options for which dinosaurs to include.
Card images in this post are from gatherer.wizards.com

Tiny Leaders is an older format which isn't officially supported by Wizards of the Coast, so don't be surprised if you haven't heard it before. I thought it was a really good idea for a Commander variation. It cuts the deck in half, to 50 cards, and only allows players to use cards that can be cost for three or fewer mana. This makes games much faster than Commander and has some interesting effects on strategy; for example, there are very few creatures with more than 3 power in Tiny Leaders, so my Commander, Grenzo, Dungeon Warden, can be more useful for a lower casting cost. In Commander, if I wanted to cast him for only three mana, giving him 3 power I might have lots of cards in my deck I couldn't use, or be forced to pass up more powerful cards in order to use him quickly and effectively; in Tiny Leaders, on the other hand, it's much easier to fill your deck with creatures of 3 power or less, so basically any creature card can be played with his ability if you cast him as early as possible.

Brawl uses a 60-card deck, the same size as a Standard deck, and is limited to cards that are legal in Standard, with a slightly different list of banned cards. Commanders can be legendary creatures or planeswalkers. It plays approximately like a less competitive Standard environment. My current favorite Brawl Commander is Tishana, Voice of Thunder, in my Merfolk tribal deck.

When I combined the deckbuilding restrictions of Tiny Leaders and Brawl, I got the following relatively quick and compact format, which I'm calling Tiny Fighters.
  • Decks have 30 cards (half the size of a Brawl deck), including a Commander whose color identity determines what colors of spell you can use in deckbuilding.
As in Brawl, your Commander can be a legendary creature or a planeswalker. The color identity of a card includes any mana symbols in the card's text box, in addition to the card's casting cost. For example, a spell with a blue casting cost and an activated ability with a red cost can be played in a deck that has a red and blue Commander, but not in a deck that only has a red Commander or a blue Commander.

Try to include about 12 lands and 18 spells in your deck. The recommended number of lands is slightly lower than usual for 30-card formats like Mini-Masters because you'll never need more than three lands to cast a spell (though you may sometimes want more lands to cast spells with X in their costs). It's a good idea to make most of your spells creatures, since as always, the most effective way to win a game of Magic is to attack your opponent.
  • Life totals start at 20, and rounds are best of one like in Mini-Masters.
  • As in all Commander-based formats, all cards except for basic lands must have unique English names.
  • No spell in your deck can have a converted mana cost (CMC) greater than 3. This includes your Commander.
Spells with X in their cost are allowed, as long as the card follows this rule when X is equal to 0. For example, Hungering Hydra is allowed in any Tiny Fighters deck that uses green, because if the X in its casting cost is set to 0, it is cast for a single green mana. (Don't actually cast Hungering Hydra for just one mana; if you do, it will come in with no counters and die as soon as it enters the battlefield.)
  • All cards must be legal in Brawl, with a few important exceptions.
Since not all single colors and color pairs have Brawl-legal commanders with CMC of 3 or less, we include some of the commanders that have rotated out of Standard most recently in order to make sure that each color and color pair have a minimum of two choices.

We won't be supporting combinations of three or more colors in this way for a couple of reasons. First, the CMC restriction on Tiny Fighters is intended to make it easy for players to find the mana they need to actually play their decks. Having too many colors in a deck makes this more difficult, and would require the deck to include a lot of mana-fixing cards like Gift of Paradise and Manalith, leaving less room for the cards that are actually part of your strategy and making play less fun overall. (Doing this is okay, and even sometimes important, in decks with 60 or 100 cards, but when you have only 30 cards in your deck, it's better to get to the point quickly.)

Second, there are no cards that cost three mana or less and have three or more colors in their color identities in Standard, since the Elder Dragons each cost at least four mana. We may revisit this decision next time Magic returns to Alara or Tarkir, two planes which are known for having three-color factions.

Here are the legal Tiny Fighters commanders as of the release of Guilds of Ravnica on October 5, 2018. Commanders that are not Brawl legal are marked with an *asterisk.
The oldest non-Brawl-legal commanders will rotate out one at a time as new legal commanders are introduced. For example, Domri Rade, who's from all the way back in Gatecrash, will leave Tiny Leaders as soon as there's a new red/green planeswalker or legendary creature with CMC 3 or less, while Neheb the Worthy, who is from Amonkhet, won't be replaced in the format until after Olivia, Mobilized for War (who is from Shadows over Innistrad, an earlier set) is replaced.

Since Tiny Fighters has such a small deck size, it's a great format to play in between rounds of a draft when you might want to start playing again immediately but only have a little time. Unlike the other Commander-like formats, which can be played with more than two people, the small decks probably make Tiny Fighters a better two-person format than it is a multiplayer format.

I've included some sample decklists below. Feel free to make suggestions or share your own Tiny Fighters decklists in the comments. I look forward to seeing your brews.

Sample Decklists

Since these decks were made just before the Standard rotation, they only include cards from Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, Dominaria, and Core Set 2019.

The Llanowar Family

This Marwyn, the Nurturer deck can win in a few ways: by playing a lot of Elves to boost Marwyn's power, by using all the extra mana Elves generate to cast Hungering Hydra for large X values, or by casting Sylvan Awakening to turn lands into additional attackers.

Creatures

Noncreature spells

Lands

12x Forest

Aristosaps

This Slimefoot, the Stowaway deck, created by Ajani-on-the-Spot on wubrg.social, looks like an aggressive deck, but is actually a form of Aristocrats, a deck archetype that revolves around sacrificing creatures to activate other creatures' abilities. In this case, that means creating lots of Saproling tokens and sacrificing them to take advantage of Slimefoot's triggered ability and drain an opponent's life total.

Creatures

Slimefoot, the Stowaway
Deathbloom Thallid
5x Forest
3x Swamp

Acidic Wit

So far we've looked at a deck that wins by attacking with creatures and a deck that prefers to sacrifice them for profit instead. Both, however, win in the normal way for Magic, by reducing the opponent's life total to 0. This third sample deck is built around a totally different win condition, one that doesn't work well in most formats but is ideally suited to the small deck size of Tiny Fighters.

The goal of this Jace, Cunning Castaway deck is to mill its opponent out--to make them move cards from their library into their graveyard until they can no longer draw a card when they need to and therefore lose the game. The key to this strategy is Psychic Corrosion, which turns all the spells that let the player draw through their own deck into ways to make the opponent go through their deck even faster. And most of the card draw is based on creatures attacking and doing damage, which means that this deck still has a way to win even if Psychic Corrosion gets countered or destroyed.

Creatures

Academy Drake
Artificer's Assistant
Jace's Sentinel
Mist-Cloaked Herald
Siren Lookout
Siren Stormtamer
Skyscanner
Storm Fleet Aerialist
Tempest Djinn
Warkite Marauder

Noncreature spells

Jace, Cunning Castaway
Befuddle
Blink of an Eye
Millstone
Navigator's Ruin
Opt
Psychic Corrosion
Uncomfortable Chill

Lands

11x Island
Memorial to Genius
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