A while back, I wrote an article for StarCityGames.com where I described four formats for "fun" tournaments my gaming group has used. Here's the link to the original.

Since then, we have experimented with several other formats, some of which worked really well. This article presents four new casual tournament formats you can use with your gaming group. If you have half the fun we did with them, you'll be happy you gave it a try.

Pack Wars
For this tournament you play single elimination matches. Thus you must have exactly 4, 8, or 16 players. Each player brings two booster packs from whatever set they wish and three of each basic land. You open the packs and shuffle the cards together with your basic lands. There is no deckbuilding of any kind; whatever you happened to open is what you'll be playing with. After each match, the winner gets all the loser's cards and shuffles the larger pile together as their "deck" for the next match. This continues until the winner of the tournament gets all the cards. There are a couple variations you could try. You could have everybody using the same boosters. Another possibility would be to set a limit of, say, 60 cards. Each player is responsible for bringing a mix of basic lands plus sealed packs totaling up to that number. That would allow people to use eight or twelve card boosters, or even an old style starter deck if they wanted.

What works: It's heaps of fun. Somebody gets a really decent prize (almost half a box worth of assorted boosters if you have eight players) while the rest aren't out that much.

What doesn't: Mirrodin block packs give a big advantage, since with all the artifacts you won't have as big a problem with colors as others will. After trying this once, we'll definitely outlaw Mirrodin block packs when we do it again to eliminate this advantage. Also depending on your group, it might be tough to guarantee that you have the right number of players available. With ours it is tough to know who will be there from week to week, so it was an issue.

Alphabet Constructed
Pick a Constructed format of your choice - Type 1, 1.5, or Extended probably work best though. Each player chooses a letter of the alphabet. Every card in the deck other than basic lands must begin with that letter. You can either make people "sign up" for their letter a few weeks ahead so everybody gets a different one, or you can let people pick what they want and not worry about duplicates.

What works: Deckbuilding is very interesting when you have the starting letter restriction on your card pool. What letter you choose will often guide you to which colors or which style of deck you want to play. In our tournament, the winner chose "S" and went with a white weenie deck that had tons of Soltari guys with shadow, Savannah Lions, Silver Knights, and a few other good creatures. But all the typical pump spells White Weenie typically uses (like Glorious Anthem and Crusade) were not available. Finding ways to work around those limitations is interesting and fun. Other decks included a Mlue "M" deck with Moxes, Morphlings, Man-O'-War, and counterspells like Mana Drain, Mana Leak, and Miscalculation. There was also a Green "W" deck with tons of elves (Wirewood) and silly combos involving making infinite insect tokens and so on.

What doesn't: Ummmm, nothing. We didn't get a huge turnout, since not everybody wanted to build a deck for this format, but the ones who did all thought it was great. We're thinking when we try again, all the letters used the first time will be outlawed, making everybody try something completely different than what they used before.

Team Switcheroo Draft
You need an even number of players drafting. You are teamed up with the most opposite player in the order. For example, with six players, the teams would be 1&4, 2&5, and 3&6. You draft your cards as normal. But then you build a deck for your teammate out of the cards you drafted. You switch before playing, so your teammate gets the deck you built and the extra cards you drafted as their sideboard. There is no mixing of cards between partners allowed. We did allow a little consultation between teammates during deckbuilding, but you could also do it where there was no working together at all. When we did it, we paired up people according to their rankings on a spreadsheet of our tourney results. The top ranked player was paired with the lowest, second ranked with second lowest, etc. That way the teams were more even. Even without the spreadsheet, you could do something similar by pairing the more experienced players in your group with the newbies.

What works: This adds some very interesting twists to the draft, as you have to take the play style of your partner into account. For example, when we did it, we needed an eighth player, so I talked my wife into being my teammate. She doesn't play much and absolutely hates Blue. Thus I didn't take a Blue card all night knowing it would be totally useless for her. Another thing that worked great is with the way we paired people up, there was a great chance for the newer players to learn from their partner. They could see how a more experienced person would build the deck. And even for us old veterans, it is interesting to see what somebody else did with the card pool we were given. Finally, when we tried this everybody had a final record between 2-4 and 4-2. We think this was because of the way we chose teams. The more experienced players are likely to draft better too, so the weaker players had a good card pool to work with. Likewise the stronger players probably had worse cards than they were used to running. This evened things up to the point where everybody finished with close to a .500 record, which was nice. Nobody went home sad about a terrible result.

What doesn't: The one problem we had was people being worried about what they were drafting for their partner in terms of what cards they'd like for the future. People wanted to rare draft so their teammate wasn't mad at getting no rares for example. After the tourney, we figured out a solution for this one - you do it just as described except each person goes home with the cards they drafted instead of the ones they played. In other words, after the tourney is over, you switch cards with your partner again.

Modified Precons
For this format, each player has to have a preconstructed sixty-card deck. You are required to make exactly ten card swaps by taking out one card from the precon and replacing it with a different card of the same color. No lands may be switched. We didn't require the changed card to be from the same set or block, but you could do it that way too. You end up with a tweaked deck where the lands and number of each color of card are the same, and the majority of spells are the same, but there will be important differences due to your changes.

What worked: It was pretty fun building these decks too. Every time you open a precon, I'm sure you think "what a stupid card choice" for a few of the cards and wish they had put in something else. Well . . . this is your chance.

What didn't work: The winner depends critically on deck matchups between the precons. If you happened to pick a precon that is strong relative to what the others chose, you had a huge advantage. Plus, it seemed that almost everybody wanted to take precons with Red in them so they could pull out crappy burn for Lightning Bolts and Fireballs. I'm not sure what you can do about either of those flaws, but they are fairly minor.

There you have it - four more creative and fun formats to use with your regular gaming group. Give one or all of them a try and I'm sure you'll agree a change of pace from your regular gaming is sometimes kinda nice.