Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Wizards Tower Wednesday: An Introduction

If building jank decks out of whatever you have lying around isn't casual enough for you, let me hit you with some magic realness. Today we introduce Wizard's Tower Wednesday!

Wizards tower is my favorite casual format and great for 4+ players. You can play with two or three, but four or more is the most fun.

Wizards Tower is a single deck consisting of 250 cards with no lands in it, and only one copy of each card. All players share the single deck and share a single graveyard. Once per turn you can play any card from hand face down as a land card. This land can tap for any color (and with the addition of the new colorless symbol it could be tapped for colorless specific mana, although we haven't implemented any Oath cards into our tower.)

Wizards Tower can give play to a lot of un-playable rares and mythics that you have just sitting around, but it also makes some mediocre cards broke as fuck.

In general anything with deck manipulation such as scrying is great, because rather than setting up cards for you, you set them up for the people next to you.

Today we're going to talk about two cards. One that's great for wizards tower, and one that is too good for wizards tower.




Great: Zur's Weirding

Now, seeing how I am an expert at magic, I can see no format other than maybe casual EDH where this card would see play. In Wizards Tower this card is better than that time the hot girl at Taco Bell accidentally touched your hand when she handed you your burrito. This card brings you together as a council of really mediocre judges in determining who gets power and who gets picked on and never wants to play Wizards Tower again (Hah, jk, they always come back for more - Dan). All you have to do is watch your opponents' faces for that glimpse of panic when a card is revealed to know if they are going to veto it. It throws an element of chaos into the game which some people hate, but is great for that good old fashioned kitchen table bullshit.

Broke as fuck: Spellheart Chimera

A couple pump spells, some counter spells, card draw, and some mill later and this card is all of the sudden the strongest thing in the deck. Hopefully you're not a dum dum and have included some hard removal into your tower, but with 250 cards in deck the odds of someone getting removal exactly when you need it are about the same as you getting Taco Bell girl's number. If this card is pulled and left alone it can make for a short and one sided game, and with this being a casual format, it's all about fun. This card does not provide that.

-Gaige

Dan's Thoughts:

Gaige wrote this, but I can't just let him have all the fun, so I wanted to talk about a card I love in the tower.

Also one of the best words.

Pretty shitty counterspell, right? Nah man, fuckin' way wrong. Rearrange the top four is gravy in Wizard's Tower. So it's you and three friends playing. You counter their Zur's Weirding, look at the top four and see three crap cards, and one huge bomb. You get to choose which crap card each of them gets in hand, and then leave the bomb fourth from the top. Your next turn, you get exactly what you wanted. Dope.


Want help picking out cards for a tower? What to see what our monstrosity looks like? Send us a message and let us know!


2 comments:

  1. In your experience, what's a good number of each type of card (Planeswalkers, Creature, Enchantment, Sorcery, Instant) for a Wizards Tower? As a follow up question, what percentage of cards should be in each CMC curve? You talk about having a sufficient number of little creatures so that you can get something out in the early turns, so how many? 20 one or two cost creatures?

    Thanks.

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    Replies
    1. I don't really have numbers for you on how much of everything but you'll want the majority card type to be creatures. Then put in a fair amount of removal, burn, and counter spells. Then splash in some silly artifacts and enchantments. Planeswalkers are overall kind of iffy because most are too busted and just win the game once they hit the field.

      I can go through my Tower and give you some numbers on distribution but the biggest thing is just playing it a lot making tweaks as you see fit. If you play it and find that there aren't enough little guys in, swap some out bombs out for early game creatures. Having a hard time dealing with bomb creatures? Put in more removal and board wipes. I think my Wizard's Tower is in it's 12th or 13th version, and we still make minor tweaks here and there to make things more fun.

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