The Blind Eternities: A Planechase Variant

Gaige here. With the yesterdays announcement of Planechase Anthology by Wizards, this November it will be possible to get your hands on the much sought after Planar cards used in order to play Planechase. If you can't wait until November for the cards, use this site in the meantime to help control your hype. Once you've taken care of your planar bone cone let's talk about a lesser known Planechase variant: The Blind Eternities.

Not sure what Planechase is? Check out Dan's cute article on it. Edit by Dan: It's super cute. And explains how to play it and stuff.

If you're one of those lucky few who has a set of planar cards, great. If you are not, grab some construction paper and some crayons and draw up some planes. Once you've got your planes together, clear off a table and let's start.

Unlike normal Planechase where you just flip cards over on a planar deck, in Blind Eternities you traverse a grid getting to somewhat choose what plane you are on.

Start off with a grid of 5 planes all face down like the picture above. See that little white icon that is either a little person or maybe a lowercase "i"? That's you. You start in the center of the above grid. Use some sort of token to denote what plane you are currently on. The next step is for each player to grab your decks. Yes I said decks, don't get too excited. So everyone grab your deck shuffle it up, spill cards on to the table so everyone knows what you're playing, shuffle again, and get your starting hand. Once you've got all that set, flip over the five plane cards.

There you go, you are now on a plane. Hooray. Now you play Magic and add whatever effect the plane would add. "This doesn't seem very different" Well it is I promise. Start playing Magic. When you get sick of this plane roll the planar die. If you get the planar chaos symbol (which will now be referred to as "dickbutt" hereafter) do whatever it says on the card. If you get the Planechase symbol then you have some choices to make. "But I hate choices" Well what are you doing playing a game that is nothing but choices?

You now get to choose which plane you move to. Read all four, see which is your favorite and move to the best plane. "But even with a choice of four, they're all bad." Yes, that is Planechase for you. Buckle up and slide into a new plane for better or for worse!

Once you've nestled in to your new plane and you're all nice and cozy, reveal planes to fill any empty slots in the North, South, East, and West directions. As you can see you either need a big table or to go back to 3rd grade and just play on the floor. If you went with the crayon and construction paper idea, you can probably just hang them on a cork board on the wall or something. Your two biggest limitations are going to be table space and the amount of planes you have.

Now I would think I wouldn't have to say this, but I don't know about you Magic players sometimes. So you decide to move again and this time you moved down. You are on a new plane. This one is better. Congratulations. When you reveal new planes, you only fill in the blank spaces with the new planes. You don't put a new plane on top of an existing one. It seems pretty straight forward, but some people...some people just don't understand things.

So here you are on the best plane ever and you are trying to roll a dick butt when, Oh no! Instead you rolled a Planechase symbol and have to move. But somehow moving to any of the four available planes instantly kills you! Well we can't have that. Earlier when I said you only have four choices in moving, I lied right to your face. You have one other option.

HELLRIDE

As the diagram above demonstrates, if there is ever nothingness to any diagonal direction you can "hellride" into the nothingness. You're trading the safety net of knowing whats coming for moving two spaces. If you have revealed planes in the diagonal direction, you cannot "hellride" there. You have to go the long way and work your way through the planes.

Once you've hell ridden your way down south, you will  just reveal more planes like normal and just keep playing until everybody but one person loses. "Why didn't you just say play until somebody wins?" Because no body wins in Planechase really, there is just one person who maybe doesn't lose.

This art depicts my face when I heard about the Planechase announcement.

For those of you wondering about Phenomenon cards, here's how those work. When you move somewhere and have to reveal new plane, if you reveal a Phenomenon card, it just happens. Whatever that card does, happens. The above card says "each player draws four cards" so that's what you do. You then lay a plane card down where ever was flipped to take its place. There should be no Phenomenon cards layed down on the field.

Since you enter a plane before ever revealing new planes, any "enter this plane" effects would resolve before phenomenon. For example: If you enter a plane that says "When you enter this plane destroy all creatures" you would destroy all creature before revealing new planes. That way if you have a phenomenon that said "when you encounter whateverthehellplane each player may put a creature card from his hand onto the battlefield" those creatures hit the battlefield after the boardwipe and are not destroyed.

For those of you limited in table space or planar cards you can always have planes disappear off the board if you go to far in one direction so that the board doesn't just end when you run out of planes, or so that you can shift the board when you run out of table.

And as a final parting gift because I love you:

Here's a blank planar card so you can fulfill all of your planar dreams. "Why didn't you use this for your salami plane?" Well it wouldn't really have that true "Heavy Salami" flavor unless it was just a little bit janky. Rather than use this to make copies of planes, this is more for when you have obviously better planes ideas than Wizard's. Because you know you should be part of the Wizard's creative team. You're just looking for your "in".





Did you like this variant? Did you already know about this variant? Did you make a sweet custom plane that you want to share? Let us know in the comments!