Introducing Wizard’s Tower – A Magic: the Gathering Format

There are a lot of different ways to play Magic: the Gathering – Standard, Modern, Pauper, Commander, and Legacy. My personal favorite is Commander, but there’s one format that’s unofficially slunk under the table for a while: Cube. Thanks to a new article posted by Wizards of the Coast, this format gets a spin put on it and is re-introduced as Wizard’s Tower.

Cube is a draft format in which a player puts together a pool of cards and then makes boosters to allow for an 8-person draft. This format does take a lot of time, effort, and diligence to pull off, and not a lot of players could do so. In efforts to help this format take a shape that players can grab and run with, Wizards has added a twist to it and they’re calling their creation Wizard’s Tower.

In Wizard’s Tower, players draw from the same massive deck – the “Tower”. Each turn you draft a card from a pool in the middle of the table, and then draw a card from the tower. It uses sealed booster packs, which are a great way to both expand your collection and get into this new format. You’ll need 9 boosters total, and some land, which luckily comes nicely packed in a Fat Pack released for each set.

In the article posted by Wizards today, laid out for you are all the rules and materials you’ll need to get started playing Wizard’s Tower right away. Take a look below and get going!

Wizard’s Tower

What you need:

Two to five players
Nine booster packs
Eighty land (sixteen of each basic land)

Starting a game:

Open the booster packs (Try not to look at the cards in the boosters yet, though. It’s more fun to discover them during the game.)
Shuffle the cards and lands together into a single huge deck.
Determine randomly who will go first.
Deal three cards to each player.
Starting with the first player, each player may discard any number of cards and redraw that many. Once all players have done this, shuffle the discarded cards and put them on the bottom of the deck.
Put the top seven cards of the deck face up in the middle of the table. The deck becomes a library that’s shared by all players.

Playing the game:

When playing Wizards’ Tower, your draw step gets a bit more interesting:
1. First, choose one of the face-up cards and add it to your hand. If there aren’t any, put the top seven cards of the tower face up in the middle of the table, and then choose one.
2. Draw the top card of the tower.
All players share the same library and the same graveyard. If you cast a spell that targets a card in an opponent’s graveyard or manipulates the top card of your library, those cards affect the shared library or graveyard.
The face-up cards aren’t considered to be in any game zone.

Other than that, the game is played as a free-for-all Magic game. The last player left standing wins!