The last playgroup I had wasn’t conventional; we didn’t play commander, but we also weren’t heavily 1v1, we all played modern decks but our games were both group ffa games and 1v1 games, and we had to balance our decks for both.
One thing that helped our games stay balanced was that we very often played planechase on top of that — not with the standard rules, though, rather than each player bringing a deck of planes, we just used a full set of planes (we played proxy back then), and had one big plane deck which was “neutral” to any player, and existed to help weaken combos and strengthen general purpose strategies.
Also now that i’m trying to get into commander, commander feels like a fun place for the mechanic, whether under standard rules or the “neutral all planes shared deck” variation i played.
Is this an unpopular opinion?
My playgroup has done the “neutral all planes shared deck” thing; in fact, we’ve never played Planeschase the way it was intended, but I think a better method is to have everyone choose a set of planes (say, 5-10) and shuffle those together to create the shared plane deck, rather than using all of them.
If you use the full set, certain deck types are just left in the cold; for example, there are far more planes that support aggro strategies than pillow fort (which makes sense, because there are more aggro decks), but it just creates a situation where certain players are favored before the game even starts.
rather than each player bringing a deck of planes, we just used a full set of planes (we played proxy back then), and had one big plane deck which was “neutral” to any player
Last time I played Commander in a full group with my friends, we did this. I downloaded the “Planechase - MTG Companion” app so we had all the planes available. It was fun, I’d do it again.
My group plays with the planechase. It’s fun, adds another element of randomness that can lead to interesting situations and strategies
I have yet to get any planechase cards to try out with my friends but it does look fun
The march of the machine commander decks each come with a unique deck of 10 planes (well, 9 planes and 1 phenomenon each) so if you buy those that’s 50 planes.
The doctor who set will also have 10 planes in each of 4 commander decks, and that’s another 40 if your playgroup is cool with universes beyond cards.
@rubythulhu @krow I’m excited for all these new planes! I got the Planechase Anthology back when that was released, so I have them all. It puts a big new spin on commander nights!
