Super Fun Awesome Format - My First Real, Extensive Attempt At Designing A Game

I’ve been involved in playing Magic: the Gathering for over half my life at this point, and the game has greatly shaped the ways I think both as a player of games and as a designer of them. People have invented all sorts of ways to play Magic – there are a high variety of officially sanctioned formats, each with their own rules on how to build decks and which cards are legal to use. Outside that, players have homebrewed game types of their own. Cutthroat is a three-player variant designed to solve the common problem where two players gang up on the third. Emperor was designed as a multiplayer team format that allowed slow decks to flourish rather than be ganged up on. Two-Headed Giant was designed to be a multiplayer team format that encouraged building a pair of decks with interesting and powerful synergy with each other by having players on a team share their turn. Elder Dragon Highlander (now called Commander) was designed to promote variety in gameplay by increasing how large decks needed to be while decreasing how many of a given card you could play in a deck to just one.

Each of these formats is an exercise in game design – they all work off of a base set of rules (Magic’s) but put rules on top of it to encourage some sort of interaction or playstyle which doesn’t work otherwise. Part of why it works is because the game is so modular – deckbuilding involves putting all these disparate cards together to perform some task. You’re already creating something just to play in a given framework of rules – why not create a different framework of rules? I designed one of these myself, when I was bored and had more cards than what I knew what to do with. So was born Super Fun Awesome Format, a bizarre take on the game that opens up some unique rules interactions and strategies which couldn’t happen otherwise. So, what makes Super Fun Awesome Format interesting?

-Players start the game with 40 life and 10 cards in hand.

This is a step up from the regular 20 life and 7 cards. The additional cards allow you to have a few more options available at all times – this is crucial, because Super Fun Awesome Format has a wide variety of threats which all need to be dealt with in differing ways. The additional life makes games slightly longer – things in Super Fun Awesome Format tend to hit harder than in other formats, so having more life allows players to take more hits before dying.

- Once per turn, players may play a card from their hand face-down as a land with every basic land type.

In Magic, lands are a type of card you play which then produce mana. Mana lets you cast spells, so you need to play lands in order to do anything. Super Fun Awesome Format features few to no dedicated land cards, so there has to be some way of getting mana in order to do anything. I allow players to play regular spells as lands, which means that players never have to worry about having access to land cards. On the flip side, they do have to consider which of their precious cards they want to play as a land  - if it’s a land, it can’t do anything besides produce mana, so you need to be careful and use cards which aren’t very useful at the moment as lands.

- Once per turn, if a player has no cards in hand, they may play one of their lands as the spell it is face-down.

Here's where things start to get really interesting. I’ve noticed that being without cards is a huge detriment in Super Fun Awesome Format – the first player to run out of cards is at a huge disadvantage because they no longer have options and have a harder time affecting how the game turns out. Even though players draw one card per turn as per base rules, only having one card available to you at a time is difficult to fight through. So, if you have no cards in hand, you can cast your lands as the spells they actually are.

All those cards you’ve been playing as lands since the beginning of the game take on new purpose once you’re out of cards. Effectively, you can ‘store’ cards for later by playing them as lands, getting mana from them now and using them for their effect later once things get dire. What cards you decide to play as lands matter even more now – you keep yourself from accessing that card now, but can pretty safely have access to it later should you need it.

A few things to note – spells which force you to discard cards are relatively common, so cards being kept in your hand aren’t necessarily safe. Cards which destroy lands also exist, but are much less common – so spells are safer, though not impervious, as lands. Casting a spell this way means it’s no longer a land – it can no longer produce mana for you once cast. While land-casting helps to get out of tight situations in the short run, it hampers how much mana you have in the long run, which will hurt you later on. The decision to land-cast may be vital, but it is often painful and must be taken with a lot of consideration to how much you actually need the spell.

So far, the rules have been about making what to play as a land interesting – which exists in Magic, but is not nearly as large an issue in the regular game. Quite often, there is a clear choice of what land to play – not here. What land you should play is always a huge question, every single turn, and there are times where not playing a land when you can is a legitimate choice, far more often than would happen in a regular game of Magic.

- There is a common, shared library that all players draw from. The Super Fun Awesome Format deck is built beforehand, and does not adhere to the four-card maximum limit.

The shared library is the crux of Super Fun Awesome Format. It has also caused me more problems than any of the other rules, by far, because there are so, so many ways to go wrong with it. Deckbuilding is central to Magic – as a player, you’re trying to assemble a deck which does something, and does it well. Whether you’re trying to win as quickly as possible or through eventual, unstoppable force, deckbuilding is where most of a player’s decisions happen. How they want to play, how they want to achieve that goal, how they defend that goal from opposition is all a result of how they build their deck.

With Super Fun Awesome Format, I want as many different playstyles to be viable as possible. I want fast games to exist, I want slow games to exist, I want games where the main focus is whether a specific powerful creature survives, I want games that focus on fighting over who has more lands, and I want games that end suddenly through one player achieving a critical mass of resources. Most importantly, I want games which constantly shift focus – where what was important last turn was getting as many lands as possible, but this turn it’s about killing all those creatures that are about to kill me, and in a few turns could be about drawing a bunch of cards to try and piece together a more-or-less sudden win out of nowhere, and the most important skill a player can have is realizing when they should be shifting focus from one aspect of the game to another.

Making a deck which is capable of all that is, well, incredibly difficult. It’s been something like seven years, and I’m still tinkering with it. Super Fun Awesome Format has gone through a number of paradigm shifts over its existence, with what cards are and are not included, and how many of any type of card is available. The cards in the Super Fun Awesome Format deck are its lifeblood, and they ultimately determine how the game gets played.

Join me next time, when I talk about some of the problems that specific cards produced, what lessons these problems have taught me, and how those lessons might be applied to other, completely unrelated games.