In the past, I've written two articles for StarCityGames.com about casual tournament formats my Magic group has used. Each article covered four of our tournament formats. In this article, I'll bring it up to an even dozen by providing four more fun formats - plus an unlucky 13th format, which didn't work at all. As a bonus, I'll provide a decklist from that tourney for the brokenest Magic deck ever created.

Reject Booster Draft
This one is our take on a Reject Rare Draft I saw some articles about on magicthegathering.com a couple years back. We didn't want to use all rares and didn't like a few of their rules, so we made up our own version. Here is the text from the rules announcement email.

General Rules
1. Each person must bring 3 "reject boosters" made of 1 rare (or U1 for sets with no rares), 3 uncommons, and 11 commons. These are meant to be extra cards and/or garbage cards you never play with. Feel completely free to dump whatever junk cards you want into these boosters. The whole idea is to see what you can build after drafting a pile of bad cards you'd never normally play with. At the end of these general rules are the booster construction rules for what can and can't go in your boosters.

2. There is no "type" for this tournament. Any card from any white- or black-bordered release is legal, along with black bordered promo cards. Silver- or gold-bordered cards are not legal. There is no banned list, although you must follow the booster construction rules listed below.

3. Games will be played for ante. We normally never do this - but since we're playing with drafted reject cards, nobody should object. After every game, the loser must add a card from their sideboard to get back up to forty if they've fallen under the minimum. The winner may add the won ante card into their deck if they wish, but they don't have to. Other than these changes caused by ante, each match you must begin with the same decklist you started with.

4. When cutting your opponent's deck for ante, the first card that isn't a basic land is the ante. Whoever has the higher mana cost card at risk gets to choose whether they draw or go first. If it is a tie, roll dice to determine who gets the choice.

Booster Construction Rules
1. Do not include cards that are useless except in very narrow circumstances. Examples include cards that require snow-covered land to be in play for their main effect to work, cards that deal only with cycling, kicker, or flashback costs paid on other cards, and cards like Apocalypse Chime that mention a specific set by name. The reason for this restriction is that these may be simply unplayable in all (or almost all) games since you never know if the specific conditions they can work under will ever happen.

2. Each booster must contain at least two cards of every color. The other five cards can be artifacts, non-basic land, gold cards, or more colored cards. The boosters must not contain basic land; you may add as many basic land as you wish to complete your deck after the draft is over.

3. Your overall 45-card pool must contain at least five cards of each of the major types. The major types are:

• Creature/Summon
• Sorcery
• Enchantment (including Enchant Land, Enchant Creature, or Enchant World)
• Artifact
• Instant (includes Mana Sources and Interrupts)

The remaining 20 cards may be of whichever types you want.

4. You may include only one "ante" card in your overall pool. Ante cards are any cards that say "ante" in their text, or say that you must remove them from your deck if you are not playing for ante.

5. If you include Shahrazad in your card pool, you are declared a total loser and will be fined $40, which will be used to buy that evening's pizza. Playing extra subgames is not good, given our limited timeframe. Note that this does not violate the "there is no banned list" stipulation above. You can put one in if you want to; just be aware of the consequences.

6. If you have any question about if a card would be okay under the above guidelines or not feel free to ask another player their opinion. If you both think it should be okay, go ahead and play it.

What worked:
It was fun trying to figure out what to build out of these piles of junk. Also, it was surprising what some people considered reject cards. People included stuff like Phantasmal Forces, Clay Statue, and Unyaro Bee Sting. Those aren't exactly Constructed-worthy, but I thought they were awfully good compared to the chaff I expected to see.

What didn't:
It was a lot of work putting together the boosters to meet our complicated rules. Also, there wasn't much balance; some packs were far better than others, so if you were lucky enough to open one of those good packs you had a big advantage by having much better first-pick options.

Set Wars
This is a Sealed format. Everybody chooses a set, and we required a sign-up before the tourney so no duplicates were allowed. You bring three boosters of your chosen set, and one of the starter or tourney pack from that block. For example, I chose Visions so I got three Visions boosters and a Mirage starter. Another guy chose Legions, so he got three Legions boosters and an Onslaught tournament pack. Other than that restriction, you play with normal Sealed tournament rules.

What worked:
This was one of the most popular of our homemade formats. After the tourney, every single player said they wanted to do it again soon. It was particularly fun seeing the matchups between different sets. We expected that some sets, like Urza's, Tempest, Mirrodin, and Legions with all the creatures would have a major advantage against some of the less-powerful sets - but the other sets did just fine, with an almost exactly .500 record for everybody.

What didn't:
Umm, not much. The one expected problem of imbalance didn't happen. Maybe the only negative was that signing up was a hassle - getting everybody to email their choices in required a bit of nagging.

Weenie Madness
Here are the rules we used for Weenie Madness Constructed:

1. Weenie madness uses a sixty-card Constructed deck, using Type I rules as modified below.
2. All cards must have converted mana cost of 0 or 1.
3. Spells with X in the casting cost are banned.

In the tournament announcement email I included a FAQ to clear up a few things.

Q: Can I play a card with buyback (kicker, morph, etc.)?
A: As long as the converted cost is 0 or 1, that's fine. So for example, Mind Games (which costs B, with a 2B buyback cost) is just fine. Llanowar Elite costs G for a 1/1 with trample, but has a kicker for 8 that gives him some counters. Those kinds of cards are perfectly acceptable. The only thing that matters is the converted casting cost, which is the mana cost printed in the upper right of the card.

Q: What about a card with activated abilities that cost more than 1?
A: No problemo, man. As long as the casting cost of the card is 0 or 1, we don't care what you have to pay to use its abilities. Go ahead and use 'em.

Q: Since the name is Weenie Madness it has to be all creatures, right?
A: Wrong! That's just the catchy name we gave it. Any kind of card (creature, instant, sorcery, enchantment, artifact, land) is fine to use, as long as the casting cost is 0 or 1.

What worked:
It was fun building Constructed decks with such a small list of available cards. But even with the tight restriction on what was usable, people had a very wide variety of decks.

Also, the usual ways of thinking about mana base, number of lands to run, etc. were all pretty useless - which required some creative thinking when building your deck. In fact, the tourney winner (me) had only six Mountains and a Mox Ruby, along with seven of the Onslaught fetchlands to grab the Mountains with. One guy tried running even fewer lands, but he found it was too few and was hurt by it.

As a final bonus, games were nice and fast - which was helpful, since we play on a weeknight and time is often an issue with our tournaments.

What didn't:
The flip side to the lack of normal deckbuilding rules letting you be creative is that the decks were not very balanced. The guys who guessed correctly on their mana base had far better decks than those who didn't. In the entire tournament, only one match wasn't a 2-0 sweep.

I discovered I have three of the decklists from this tourney saved in my old email tourney report. If you're interested here they are.

My decklist:
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Shock
4 Pyrite Spellbomb
4 Seal of Fire
3 Shower of Sparks
1 Goblin Grenade
1 Death Spark

Creatures
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Cadets
4 Raging Goblin
3 Kris Mage
3 Grim Lavamancer

Artifacts 3
2 Bonesplitter
1 The Rack

Mana 14
6 Mountain
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Bloodstained Mire
1 Mox Ruby

Todd's decklist and comments:

Lands
4 Adarkar Wastes
4 Tundra

Creatures
3 Glittering Lynx
3 Suntail Hawk
2 Wall of Hope
2 Flying Men
3 Icatian Javelineers
3 Mother of Runes
3 Shrieking Drake
3 Soltari Foot Soldier

Enchantments
4 Coalition Flag
2 Unstable Mutation
4 Seal of Removal

Spells
1 Ancestral Recall
3 Divert
4 Rain of Blades
4 Smite
2 Serum Visions

Artifacts
4 Bonesplitter
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire

Sideboard
SB: 2 Aegis of Honor
SB: 2 Annul
SB: 4 Blue Elemental Blast
SB: 3 Erase
SB: 4 Hydroblast

This obviously needed a few more lands, and I probably should have taken out the Unstable Mutation for some fetch lands. Coalition Flag totally rocked. Divert was fun, too. The Shrieking Drake coupled with the Icatian Javelineers worked rather well, but often proved troublesome.

When I had land - even one land - the deck rocked... But no land is bad news, and I saw that all too often. Oh well. Not bad for a deck built the night before.

John's decklist:

Lands
12 Forest
12 Mountain

Creatures
4 Ornithopter
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Spore Frog
4 Kird Ape
4 Pouncing Jaguar
4 Rogue Elephant

Enchantments
4 Rancor

Spells
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Shock

Fattie Madness
This one is the same as Weenie Madness except that all cards must have a converted casting cost of 5 or more, instead of 0 or 1. There are two other modifications of the rules for Fattie Madness.

1. You get to put four basic lands into play at the start of the game. This isn't part of the game itself - you just have four basic lands in your play zone as you shuffle up and deal. These are not taken from your deck - they are four separate lands. Your deck must still have 60 cards in it, not 56.

2. Epic spells are banned.

What worked:
There are tons of normally-unplayable spells that are great for this format. I ran a blue control deck with Fervent Denial and Overwhelming Intellect as counters. And Spiketail Drake is a great creature since you can drop him turn 1 and counter the other guy's stuff until he gets to eight mana. Everybody else played red, and for them, suddenly Searing Flesh, Searing Wind, Pyrotechnics, and Avatar of Fury went from "useless" to "strong" cards. We found it very interesting trying to find the unplayable spells that would now be stellar as a turn 1 play.

What didn't:
Some types of cards are so much better than in real Magic that it becomes unbalanced; turn 1 Desertion and Treachery are awfully overpowered. In a normal game, you get beat on for several turns before you can play creature-stealing spells, but in this format they can hit a creature as soon as it is played. That gave me a huge advantage. Then again, the red guys could throw nine points of burn at your head on turn 2 just as easily, so maybe it all works out in the end.

Those are the four fun formats I promised for this article. Here is the one totally un-fun format we tried, and the brokenest decklist ever.

Anything Goes
Just what the name says. You build a sixty-card deck, but that's it for rules. No banned list, no restricted list, no four-of limit on cards, silver and gold border allowed, etc.

When I thought up that format, I expected it would be fun, with lots of creative combo decks all trying for the turn 1 kill. But I never expected a deck where it is just about impossible not to win on turn one . . . Here's the decklist that breaks the format:

60 Rocket-Powered Turbo Slug

That's it. He dropped seven Rocket-Powered Slugs on turn 1 and swung for 21. If you went first and got out a blocker (or had a Force of Will to counter one of them no matter who went first) you'd be hit for eighteen and get attacked by sixteen more 3/3 creatures on his turn two. The only possible way he could lose is if the other guy had a turn 1 kill in his deck and got it off first. Or in one deck there were some Platinum Angels and about eighteen Moxes/Sol Rings/Mana Vaults, so that guy might have been able to get an Angel out turn 1 with a lucky enough starting seven.

I'd call that a broken deck. And obviously this was a too-broken format to be any fun at all.