When I heard that StarCityGames.com was delving heavily into the topic of Peasant Magic, I was ecstatic. Finally, I thought, Peasant Magic is getting some concentrated focus.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen superb coverage of the format when it's covered, through reports on changes to the format and deck lists. The more coverage this format gets, though, the more likely it is to attract new players. Right now, it's one that, quite honestly, hasn't received enough attention from the Magic community at large.

Perhaps it's because Wizards of the Coast doesn't recognize it as an official format. Or maybe it's that players see it as a sort of "uber-budget Vintage" variant (a completely inaccurate view, by the way - but I'll get into that a little later).

Details about my Magic experience would bore you, so let me just say that Peasant Magic has been my format of choice for the last three years. My claim to fame regarding Peasant Magic is a "Master of Peasant" title earned at GenCon Indy 2004. (That lasted exactly one day, when the deck I was playing fell to 7^th place the following morning.)

So what is Peasant Magic? Simply put, Peasant Magic is a game for people who don't have (or don't want to spend) a great deal of money on rare cards. It's a game for people who collect a lot of commons, and a few uncommons, and even fewer rares.

If a card was ever printed as a common, it's considered common for the purposes of Peasant Magic. Counterspell is common because it was first printed that way in Tempest. (Prior to that, it'd been printed as uncommon.)

Deck construction is simple: Build a sixty-card deck with no more than five uncommon cards total. The remaining fifty-five must be common.

Now, there are some exceptions, of course: A "Peasant Council" that operates in much the same way the DCI monitors Wizards-sanctioned tournaments for cards that might be hurting the format. They've done a decent job of keeping it in check, too. One of the most brilliant decisions they've made is to reclassify Strip Mine as uncommon, rather than ban it outright.

That's not always an option, though, since there are a few cards that are banned from the format. Some are banned because they break it, others because they're expensive to own, and a few for both reasons. Recently, ante cards were also banned from the format.

The list includes:
Jeweled Bird
Timmerian Fiends
Bronze Tablet
Brain Freeze
Ali from Cairo
Bazaar of Baghdad
Berserk
Candelabra of Tawnos
Diamond Valley
Juzam Djinn
Mana Drain
Mishra's Workshop

Building a Peasant deck (for those of you who've never tried it) is about as difficult and time-consuming as building a normal deck. Of course, you have to start with the basics: Pick a color, pick a theme.

The real challenge comes in figuring out which commons are the best for your deck. Elves are popular, especially with the uncommon Skullclamp still in the game. Affinity is popular with many common zero casting-cost artifacts to choose from, and no Null Rod to worry about.

Determining the uncommon cards for the deck you're playing is the hardest part. Clearly, in cases like the elf deck mentioned above (or almost any other thirty-two to thirty-five creature decks), Skullclamp is a great choice. What about a suicide black deck? Would three Demonic Tutors and a pair of Hypnotic Specters be a better fit?

One mistake I see new players make is that they try to tweak an existing deck that did well in a sanctioned format into a Peasant Magic deck. This is what I meant earlier when I said the format is treated as "uber-budget Vintage." Red burn decks with Isochron Scepter are just as popular as they've been in Vintage - and they perform about as well. (That means, "Not very.") It's mostly because the better, faster decks out there burn through the library and present too many threats on too many fronts. Affinity and Elf-Clamp can outrace the burn, and strong builds of either will include artifact hate to get rid of the Isochron Scepter.

If your deck normally relies on a lot of uncommons or any rare cards, odds are it won't do very well in Peasant. A great example is U/G Madness. Roar of the Wurm, Arrogant Wurm, Circular Logic, Standstill, Compulsion, Wonder, and Quiet Speculation are all uncommon cards. That's way too many to tweak the deck into a Peasant deck.

But on the other hand, some decks make the transition without a hitch: Affinity, for example.

So if you're new to the game, try your hand at a simple common deck first. Then figure out which five uncommon cards best fit the deck you're playing. Later on, you might try building a common deck around five uncommon cards.

The best tip I can give for building a deck in Peasant Magic is simply to know your commons. Of course, today, it's not that big an issue: Wizards of the Coast does it for us with the coloring of expansion symbols to reflect the cards rarity. But take the time to learn what cards were printed as commons and uncommons in sets before Exodus, too.

Most are obvious - but there are a few other examples like Counterspell, where a card was printed as common in at least one of its runs. Mishra's Factory, Strip Mine (though it's considered "uncommon by order of the Peasant Council), Sage of Lat-Nam (the MVP of my Affinity deck), Maze of Ith, and Sinkhole are all commons.

Finally, have fun with it. I've played many sanctioned Magic events over the last few years. Of all of them, none topped the fun had playing Peasant Magic. Most of the time, after the match, one player takes the match slip to the judge and goes back to talk to his friends about how the game went. After the Peasant Magic tournaments, I talked with my opponent about his deck, and almost every game, we showed each other our decks, and discussed strategies for improvement of each deck.

Peasant Magic creator Rob Baranowski suggested the friendliness stems from the fact that all the decks were cheaply built, and that everyone at the event could build anyone else's deck with relative ease.... and he's right. It doesn't feel quite as bad to lose to a Dauthi Horror as it does to lose to a first-turn Mishra's Workshop, Sol Ring, Mox Sapphire, Black Lotus, Trinisphere, Tinker, Darksteel Colossus. That happened to me - well, maybe it wasn't exactly like that, but all I remember in the dizzying blur was my opponent ending the turn with that monstrosity in play.

In my next article, I'll focus on one of the most unique aspects of Peasant Magic: Namely, that both Unglued and Unhinged are legal sets, and what that can mean for the game.