Magic Lunch

We have a small magic following at the office and we often play cards over lunch (pictured: Wayne [Left] & Derek [Right].) Due to the casual nature of our players we prefer the Zen format that puts us on a fairly even playing field. Note that Zen is NOT to be confused with Zendikar!

For those unfamiliar, here's a definition of Zen: Every player starts out with a tournament pack and 2 boosters, or 5 boosters + 6 of each basic land. These cards are the player's deck and they can't at all be added to or removed from. To play, shuffle up your deck and the player with the shortest stack chooses a # of cards to ante that is agreed upon by the other players. Each player sets aside their ante and draws their 7.

There are many variations of house rules for mulligans - everything from pitching your hand into the ante to draw 7 new cards as many times as you want, to more traditional styles like re-shuffling all land or no land hands. Our preference is a little more complex and seems to fit this sort of play well: 2 lands or more and you keep it, period. Less than 2 and you reveal your hand, put it on the bottom of your library and draw 7 new. Once you have your 7 you can pitch up to 3 cards from your hand into the ante and draw that many cards - you can do this only one time and you make your pitch all at once.

That's it - you're ready to play. We usually play traditional 1v1, two-headed giant, or free-for-all killing the opponent on one side first; but all formats are open including Emperor (usually not enough time or space for that over our lunch at the office though.)

After play the winning player takes all of the anted cards and adds them to their deck (again, nothing additional is added and nothing is removed.) For team play the winning team randomly splits up the won cards. Zen is a great format for players of all skill levels and I fully support it!

We played a two on two today with Felipe from Customer Service and Derek from Corporate IT against me and Wayne from Software Support. Wayne and I were victorious, largely from Wayne's Merrow Grimeblotter enchanted with my Reins of the Vinesteed. Gotta love Zen - you're forced to play with such random & obscure cards.

After our match I busted four booster prize-packs I'd been sitting on from an event last month. I'd been trading packs to Derek for random stuff and he'd pulled foil copies of both Misty Rainforest & Marsh Flats so far! He didn't want to trade for these so the spoils went to me. See right: I pulled a Lotus Cobra & Marsh Flats. An Oran-Rief & Kazuul Warlord were less impressive from the other packs, but they'll be saved for future Zen playing. The Flats & Cobra made for a pretty amazing 4 if you ask me!

I know many (myself partly included) are not fans of busting packs. But if the rares are crap I just keep their packs together to be re-used for future Zen deck setups for myself or friends (I should mention that when decks get low due to anteing, it's not uncommon to "play for deck equivalencies" and chance doubling up against having to make a new deck all together - note Wayne's giant stack in the first picture, he started with 5 boosters & 30 lands just like the rest of us. He's "Eaten" a few decks in his time!)