[sfRattan]

My brother and I made up a version of Magic as kids where all the mana is laid out sideways in staggered rows between the players, creating a sort of hex grid landscape. You drew and played from your deck, but placed cards on the "map" created by the mana on the board, only where the adjacent mana matched their cost, and moved around attacking each other. Six adjacencies meant cards could cost up to seven and work in the format.

It was great fun, and also completely unbalanced. Once you knew your opponent's powerful card, it focused battles around the intersections where they could spawn. I've heard of other people doing similar things, but never an official format that used mana as a landscape game board.

We mostly did it that way because we didn't know the actual rules, which I recall being widely true of both Magic and Pokémon among kids who collected the cards in the 2000s.

[andrewflnr]

Interesting. I've been kicking around the idea of designing a similar game (probably in computer format tbh), specifically with the idea of mana being geographically located in a hex grid.

Any ideas for a more balanced version, or other thoughts about it? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be curious to hear more details.

[sfRattan]

It was mostly unbalanced because Magic: The Gathering wasn't designed with movement, range, or position in mind. So there were all kinds of effects interactions that didn't make sense and we always had to rule things on the fly. And there were definitely arguments about which cards should be faster or slower.

Other games to look at include the Undaunted [1] series by Osprey Games:

- They use deckbuilding-esque mechanics to simulate squad level combat in WWII.

- They also have staggered tiles creating a hex-like board. When I first saw undaunted I thought, "oh, I did that years ago with Mana cards!"

- There are little punch out tokens representing the cards in your deck. Who you have in your hand each turn represents who you can give orders to on the board.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/63557/series-undau...

[andrewflnr]

Gotcha. Hopefully I'll fare better designing it from scratch with that format in mind!

Thanks for the reference too. There doesn't seem to be a lot of data on that page but I'll look into it as far as I can.

[sfRattan]

It's BoardGameGeek's aggregation of all the games in the Undaunted series. You have to click on the specific games (e.g. Undaunted: Normandy or Undaunted: Battle of Britain) to get the detailed info on each.

Edit: in the "Linked Games" tab.

[NeutralCrane]

You might be interested in the relatively new TCG Sorcery: Contested Realm. It’s a a game that plays lands to a grid and creatures on the lands, somewhat like the game you invented. Also has an artistic direction reminiscent of 90s era magic.

[fidrelity]

90s kids won at MTG by having the more convincing argument.

[Our_Benefactors]

Too true. The idea that you could play instants during your opponents turn caused many a disagreement, especially over combat timings or unintuitive but real mechanics like “stack combat damage, sac mogg fanatic”