New format idea: "Cursebound"
General forum
Posted on July 20, 2024, 5:11 p.m. by StopShot
Cursebound is a "Rule Zero" extension of the EDH format. All legal EDH decks are legal in Cursebound. Cursebound slightly loosens up deck-building limitations of EDH to allow for nonlegendary creatures to be your commander while maintaining traditional commander gameplay as well also lightly capping the power level of nonlegendary commander decks for the sake of fun and fairness.
In the cursebound format, if your commander is a nonlegendary creature you must also have a "curse" card as your "commander's fate" in the command zone. The chosen curse card in the command zone can only enchant yourself, and it has the added text, "[this curse has] protection from yourself." If your commander is a nonlegendary card, you can only cast it from the command zone if your "commander's fate" is already on the battlefield first. The "commander's fate" is not subject to the command tax. Removing a player's commander's fate from the battlefield will not counter or return their commander to the command zone if their commander is on the stack or on the battlefield. (Removing the commander's fate only impacts their ability to cast their nonlegendary commander from the command zone.) The command tax still applies to nonlegendary commanders and nonlegendary commanders are treated as if they have the legendary supertype regardless of what zone they're in. (As in they'll proc cards like Hero's Blade," and cards like Mirrorweave would not see that commander as a valid target.) All other EDH rules apply.
In Cursebound you are allowed to choose a commander's fate that is outside your commander's color identity. The color identity of the commander's fate will also be added to your commander's color identity, (and thus you'll be allowed to add cards of that color identity to your deck). There are only two deck building limitations regarding the commander's fate. (1) Your commander's fate must be of a higher or equal card rarity than your commander. (Ex. Vampire Nighthawk + Curse of Predation is allowed. Vampire Nighthawk + Curse of the Nightly Hunt is allowed. Vampire Nighthawk + Curse of the Pierced Heart is not allowed because the curse is of a lower rarity.) If a card has multiple rarities then their rarity is always the least rarest from among their physical card printings. (2) Curse cards that have the words "you" or "your" or omit the words "you" or "your" in its text box can not be used as your commander's fate. (For example, Maddening Hex and Curse of Vengeance can not be your commander's fate as they mention the word "your" and "you" in their text boxes. Curse of Disturbance and Curse of Opulence can not be your commander's fate because both omit the word "you" in their text boxes - "Whenever enchanted player is attacked, [you] create a 2/2 black Zombie creature token." & "Whenever enchanted player is attacked, [you] create a Gold token.") All front-faced curse cards that meet these criteria may be used as your commander's fate. Decks can only have one commander's fate.
The intent and spirit of this format and the commander's fate is for two reasons. To provide nonlegendary creatures with more color flexibility as they're much-much more likely to be mono-colored compared to most legendary creatures, and to keep in spirit with "Rule Zero" fairness by providing a reasonable drawback that can make their existence more tolerable to more playgroups. These principles should be kept in mind when enforcing a banlist for this format, for example, Curse of Obsession and/or Bane of Progress would both be banned from being command zone candidates simply for going against the spirit of the format by either being able to abuse their curse's drawback or having a way to negate their curse's drawback from the command zone with very little difficulty. Command Beacon would be an example of a banworthy card in the 98 for also skating around the spirit of this format as well. (Do note, cards banned in the 98 don't apply to legal EDH decks that aren't running a commander's fate in the command zone.) While competitiveness is acceptable trying to find ways to break the intended mechanics of this format should be discouraged for the sake of healthy game balance and group enjoyment.
I’ve been wanting to play a hostility deck for a while. My only question is that the curse rarities seem arbitrary
July 20, 2024 8:52 p.m.
@Bookrook, the restriction on curse rarities is in place to keep curses themselves from being arbitrary. If most decks wanted to splash a color, an overwhelming amount of them would likely by default utilize whatever curse disrupts them the least, such as Curse of the Pierced Heart with seldom any deck ever picking any of the other red curses to splash into that color. An Ink-Treader Nephilim that uses Curse of Oblivion as their commander's fate would likely get much more value from color splashing into black than whatever drawback that curse would exert on them.
The mindset should be that the strength of the nonlegendary commander should also determine the strength of the curse. I do acknowledge rarity is and can be a very inaccurate way to determine power level, but it's a simple solution that benefits game balance to some extent better than to have no rule that mandates equal strength between commander and curse.
July 20, 2024 9:48 p.m.
@FormOverFunction, I like the novelty of the thought, but the limited variety of available curses could be very constraining, especially if you've added a color outside your commander's color identity via your commander's fate.
July 20, 2024 9:58 p.m.
If I have it right, the curse rule only applies to players who choose a nonlegendary creature? So it's technically possible to play a cursebound game with normal EDH decks and nothing is different? That seems anti climactic to me. If you're posing this as a new format, then the new rules should apply to everyone. (So for example, everyone must have a curse regardless of whether their general is legendary or not. Alternately, you could force everyone to choose a nonlegendary as their commander and drop the curse rule altogether.) Otherwise you might as well have it be a rule 0 deck for normal EDH. Lastly, who would WANT to have a curse? You're incentivizing players to just use a normal commander, essentially opting out of the rules you added.
July 21, 2024 11:55 a.m.
What if you just make everybody have a nonlegendary commander and have a curse?
July 21, 2024 12:43 p.m.
@predation, @Bookrook, the reason to allow EDH decks is for accessibility reasons. The fastest way for a new format to die out is if you can't find someone who has built the same format-legal deck as you. Extensions of pre-existing formats is usually the best way to develop new formats, because the lack of players predicament is no longer a factor.
Before there was a Commander format there was a format known as 100-card singleton, where players built 100-card decks that had every card except basic lands restricted to just one card, there was no self-enforced restriction on color identity, there was no commander, and games were typically 1v1. If you had a commander deck back in the day and none of your friends had commander decks it was typical to instead make a multiplayer game where it was your commander deck versus your friends' 100-card singleton decks, because the formats were very similar enough to one another and the 100-card singleton players understood you were self-restricting yourself out of 2-colors just to have a clunky creature exist in your command zone. (Old EDH only allowed you to pick between five 3-color dragons to be your commander before branching out the commander choices, hence the name "Elder Dragon Highlander".) If EDH hadn't designed itself so closely to 100-card singleton it would have had a huge lack of players to play games against and it would have died out before ever becoming the success it is today. Modern is another example, back in the day if you couldn't find Modern players you'd bring your Modern deck to your local Legacy playgroup, because there really is no rule stopping you from playing a game of Legacy with a Modern deck and from there the format was able to take off organically from player interest.
Accessibility has to be the biggest factor to be kept in mind when designing a new format. If Cursebound were to take off and become a widely played format, then I could easily see players scrapping the EDH carve out which would be fine if it ever got to that point.
@predation, I don't think it de-incentivizes players (at least nowhere near the same extent as it would not having another Cursebound player to play with). A lot of players have a nonlegendary creature they absolutely wish they could use as their commander and while there's nothing stopping these players from making a Rule-0 commander deck, playgroups can always decline such a deck from being played which can mean that nonlegendary creature deck has no one it can be played with. Playgroups can have a multitude of reasons for declining a Rule-0 deck, but the most common reasons tend to be the playgroup views the Rule-0 deck as having an unfair advantage or the Rule-0 deck is on a much higher power level than everyone else's decks. Cursebound sets to ease the apprehensions EDH players might have the same way EDH set to ease the concerns of 100-card singleton players. That is to say 100-card singleton players tolerated EDH players because they saw the color-restriction EDH-players put themselves under was a heavier handicap than what advantages having a commander in the command zone provided them. In Cursebound your deck has a higher likelihood of being tolerated because the curse can be seen as a heavier handicap than whatever advantage you'd get splashing in an extra color through your curse's added color identity. That is to say the Cursebound deck is more likely to not be turned away from the average playgroup compared to a Rule-0 nonlegendary Commander deck and all the while the extra color identity incentivizes a lot more creativity in deck-building for mono-colored and dual-colored nonlegendary creature commanders that wouldn't exist if they had to build strictly in their color identity. (The added color is important because WoTC hardly ever prints nonlegendary creatures that have three or more colors in their color identity.) And of course, just because it has an EDH carve-out today doesn't mean the format can't evolve over time to remove that EDH caveat if it ever becomes a mainstream format in of itself.
July 21, 2024 1:50 p.m.
This might be a crazy idea, but what if the curse was something that you could cast after your commander leaves the field, rather than being able to recast your commander. Flavor wise I kind of just like the idea of, your commander stays dead but they leave the field with a curse. And, I guess in part I am also pitching this because it may help with some random commander/curse combo that could end up being too strong. Oathbreaker had problems with that where there just were commander/spell combos that ended up making the format not much fun because people weren't playing their decks, they were playing their command zone.
Seems like it could be fun : )
FormOverFunction says... #2
I thought this when I started reading, so I’ll post it, but I’m already having second thoughts... but anyways: what if you had to have something like three curses and your opponents got to pick which one you got? It’d be tough, because you’d have to find multiple workable ones (that met the requirements) but that could wildly swing how the deck (and THEIR decks) work. Could be fun. I like it, though! Excited to hear about any fourth coming playtests or examples!
July 20, 2024 8:34 p.m.