What is the Box of Chocolates?
When I learned how to play magic, it was at a kitchen table. My playgroup didn't know what was good, and we didn't really care. At the end of it all, we were just trying to have a good time during high school. I wanted to put together a set of seven decks that were based around the decks used in my casual "meta" when we started to learn the game, mostly for nostalgia. Most of these decks weren't balanced, weren't ideal, and had too many colors. I tried to capture the spirit of those decks when putting together this set while adding minor improvements and changes.
How do you play?
Each deck is double-sleeved with Dragon Shield Clears in a certain color of Ultra Pro Eclipse sleeve. The deck is stored in an Ultra Pro 80 card solid color deckbox with the same color as the sleeve, and the deckbox has a number on it. All seven Box of Chocolates decks are stored in a Quiver Leather Carrying Case with one extra black deckbox containing dice and tokens in black sleeves. At the start of the game, each person rolls a d8. The number you roll is the deck you get to play with in an ensuing multiplayer game of Magic. Rolls of 1 through 7 correspond to one of the seven decks, and a roll of an 8 means you need to reroll. If two players roll the same number, they reroll.
What's this deck about?
In our casual meta, there really wasn't a boogeyman at first. All our decks were pretty similar(-ly bad) when we started. Then one player discovered infect, and that was what really started to change our meta. Irreversible damage and irreversible lifeloss were difficult to deal with, and we all responded in different ways. One player made a burn deck to deal with creatures, one player made a deck that would create ridiculous numbers of saprolings to chump block infect dudes, and I responded by making an auras deck that created creatures so arbitrarily large that -1/-1 counters really didn't matter. In the end, we all learned a little more about the game and we all found something we enjoyed playing. Originally the infect deck was Golgari and ran Contagion Engine as its proliferate source. I don't have any engines on hand, so I decided to go with Throne of Geth and add a reasonable number of artifact cards. Most of the other cards in the deck were from the old deck, and this deck was also notorious for not running full playsets of cards in its first incarnation. Now every card in this deck has a full playset! This deck also had no removal in its first incarnation, so I only added a basic fight spell (Setessan Tactics) to reflect that: it isn't an incredible removal spell, but it can work very well with infect creatures.
