Magic the Gathering

Strategy

Planechase

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ August 13, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Wiz­ards is on a roll. I mean seri­ously. They knocked it out of the park with Magic 2010, even with the rule changes and other small com­plaints, it is sold out every­where and peo­ple love it. And now they’re about to fol­low it with what is des­tined to become a stead­fast casual mul­ti­player format.

In Plane­chase you play Magic just like nor­mal (well, nor­mal using the mul­ti­player rules.) Twenty life, seven cards, every player draws to start the game, etc. The catch is that the bat­tle moves between dif­fer­ent planes of Magic. From Tolaria to Llanowar to more obscure loca­tions like Turri Island. Each of these places has an effect on the game.

To those who know Van­guard, you’ll see hints of it in Plane­chase. Van­guard was a much ear­lier vari­ant of Magic that Wiz­ards pro­duced and was short lived though it lives on really through Magic Online.

I played with an excel­lent vari­ety of play­ers. Our host, the Wiz­ards employee who walked us through it was named Reid and he works in their Orga­nized play depart­ment. And two other peo­ple who’s names escaped my game play notes. One was a store owner and long time player. The other was a gamer who had stopped play­ing Magic before sixth edi­tion. And then of course there was me. So we had a good breadth of expe­ri­ence to see what effect that had on the enjoy­ment level of the game.

Here are some rules notes as explained to us before playing:

• There can only be one Plane card in play at a time, under any player’s control.
• The plane exists in a new zone called the ‘Com­mand Zone’
• The zone is con­trolled by the active player.
• Each plane has a sta­tic abil­ity and a trig­gered ability.
• You use a spe­cial six sided dice (more on that later)
• Chang­ing planes uses the stack as nor­mal, so it may be responded to as with any other game effect.

Each player brings their own Plane cards to the game, in the packs you can buy there will be 10 planes. Though it was not said explic­itly I think it is obvi­ously expected that each plane in a player’s stack be unique. Oth­er­wise it would be sort of boring.

The game starts with the first player flip­ping a plane from his stack (all planes are shuf­fled and placed face down in a stack next to the deck.) So the first plane is ran­dom from the first player.

Now the game begins like nor­mal, but dur­ing each player’s main phase they now have the abil­ity to roll that dice I men­tioned ear­lier. It is a cus­tom die with four blank sides, then one side which has the Planeswalk sym­bol (like a five pronged fork) and their ‘Chaos’ sym­bol. You roll at sor­cery speed and dur­ing either main phase of your turn.

The Planeswalk sym­bol, when rolled, causes the active plane to be put on the bot­tom of its owner’s stack, and then the active player reveals their top Plane and puts it into play. All planes are writ­ten in the sec­ond per­son, and so when it is your turn you become the con­troller of the plane (in terms of the game rules) so when the plane says “You” it refers to the active player.

The Chaos sym­bol, when rolled, causes the cur­rent plane to do it’s trig­gered abil­ity. It might be use­less, such as when a Plane causes the active player to set their life back to 20 (when they’re already at 20.) Or it can be some­thing as crazy as “You take another turn after this one.”

Each dice roll has a cost asso­ci­ated with it. The first one has a cost of zero, and then each suc­ces­sive role costs 1 col­or­less mana more than the pre­vi­ous roll. So the sec­ond roll costs 1, then the third costs 2, etc. If you have the mana to sup­port it, you can keep on rolling as much as you please.

I think that cov­ers the rules for Plane­chase, now to my experience.

Of the four decks dis­trib­uted with the Plane­chase packs I decided to play the Ele­men­tal deck. The other options being Zom­bies, Sol­diers or Arti­facts (think Myr from Mir­rodin.) This game is def­i­nitely geared towards the tribal theme of decks but none of the abil­i­ties I saw were tied to these spe­cific tribes. So if you decide to build a Faeries deck, Vam­pires or (my favorite) Elves — then you won’t be at any disadvantage.

The decks all had some awe­some­ness within them. The Ele­men­tals deck ramps mana extremely fast com­pared to the oth­ers, though the Myr deck did nearly as well in that area. The Zom­bie deck obvi­ously focused on the grave­yard and mak­ing use of it. The Sol­diers deck unfor­tu­nately was ham­pered in my game due to mana issues but it seemed to fea­ture it’s share of removal.

I was, until the very end, in a dom­i­nant posi­tion and would have done bet­ter were it not for some play mis­takes on my part.

My biggest con­cern going into this was that the ran­dom­ness would end up dom­i­nat­ing the game, and in some ways it did have a def­i­nite impact on the game, but it was by no means a shackle for my game. So that con­cern was dis­proved and indeed it was a major source of joy for us through­out our game. We were lit­er­ally cheer­ing and yelling in joy as our planes changed and we got to see where we ended up next.

Every plane is inspired by their name. Llanowar has mana effects for exam­ple. Some of these planes are a bit… obscure. There is one called ‘The Hip­po­drome’ which has some­thing to do with Segov­ian Leviathan. I’ll post the full story at the end. Go look at the card and think about what is odd about it. Look closely at its art.

So, in our game I saw some places which were too obscure for me, and some which were well known loca­tions that I enjoyed fig­ur­ing out the ties between their loca­tion and their ability.

As we were in the midst of the game I looked up to see Ken­neth Nagle (a designer of Plane­chase) come in and start watch­ing to see how the games were going, and then later Mark Got­tlieb (a devel­oper of Plane­chase) also came in to observe. It’s quite inter­est­ing to watch them and try to imag­ine what design­ers of the game are think­ing and how they react to observ­ing the laugh­ter and joy that they had had a hand in creating.

Any­ways, rolling the dice really becomes a strate­gic point through­out the game, but I also never saw a player shy away from rolling the die even if there was an oppor­tu­nity of some­thing neg­a­tive hap­pen­ing. There was one Plane which, if you rolled the Chaos sym­bol, caused you to dis­card your hand. How­ever, if you end the turn with an empty hand you would end up draw­ing 7 cards. I did not see a plane that was neg­a­tive all around, as obvi­ously play­ers would choose not to play with it.

I think though that my only real sug­ges­tion after play­ing the game was that there be some brute force way to force a planeswalk. Maybe pay six or eight mana to force a planeswalk. Make it pro­hib­i­tive enough that it isn’t some­thing you want to do, but if you just HAVE to get off the plane, let you force your way off it. When I dis­cussed this idea with Mark Purvis, a con­tribut­ing devel­oper for Plane­chase, he said it was never some­thing that they had con­sid­ered as far as he knew. They had wanted the effect to be purely ran­dom from the start. Fair enough.

As I’ll be play­ing this casu­ally, I may insti­tute a house rule for it. Ha! Take that Wizards!

I’m not sure how to truly con­vey just how much excite­ment and joy this new layer of ran­dom­ness cre­ated for us who played it. As a Spike/Timmy I truly enjoyed this and can’t wait to pick up my copy so I can begin play­ing it at home or at the store. I do worry that once play­ers know the Planes, and the sense of dis­cov­ery wears off, how much fun the game will be then.

After the game ended I asked Mark a few more ques­tions about Plane­chase, try­ing to see where it was head­ing. It is most def­i­nitely a casual for­mat as it cre­ates crazy and wacky events that are just ridicu­lous and make you shake your head in amuse­ment. I got taken out by com­plete sur­prise by a girl gamer who joined our table late and was being coached by the entire Wiz­ards staff present. I think Wiz­ards may have it out for me… (Actu­ally they were all awe­some and if I had to go out, I loved doing it in a big way.)

I also learned that they will be releas­ing more Planes. First with the Zendikar pre-release. Every player will be receiv­ing their stan­dard Pre-release Foil, as well as a Zendikar Plane card. This card will not be avail­able in the Plane­chase sets, or in any other packet (though I think it would be an ideal item for them to include in future fat packs.)

Though the for­mat is casual, Wiz­ards is work­ing on ways to encour­age stores to sup­port it with in store play. One way is that they will be pro­vid­ing stores that want to orga­nize in store Plane­chase nights with spe­cial planes to pass out to participants.

So we can con­tinue to expect them to roll out more Planes as time goes on, and if this is a suc­cess I would expect a fol­low up set to allow even more game play.

Now, to wrap this up, let’s go back to the Leviathan I men­tioned earlier.

Segovia. Yeah, I’ve never heard of it either. But Wiz­ards is aware of it, and it has appar­ently become a joke around the Wiz­ards’ office. A Leviathan is, by def­i­n­i­tion, some­thing that is huge. Other Leviathans in Magic are 7/11, 5/5 and 10/10.

Why then is the Segov­ian Leviathan only a 3/3? And why is a 3/3 so mas­sive com­pared to a blue whale? As pic­tured in the card’s art.

As it turns out, Segovia is a land of minia­tur­iza­tion! Think ‘Gulliver’s Trav­els.’ The peo­ple would all be small. As would their whales. So a Segov­ian Leviathan is like our Orca or something.

So how is this a joke tied to the Hip­po­drome? Well the Hip­po­drome Plane art is per­haps the most impres­sive of the ones I looked at. Steve Argyle (Mayaela’s Aria, Naya Bat­tlemage) painted this race track with audi­ence and rac­ers in the tilt-shift style you see in pho­tos. To be able to con­trol your paint­ing such that you put a cer­tain sec­tion in focus is sim­ply amaz­ing to me. Using the tilt-shift focus on a photo of reg­u­lar peo­ple causes them to look like minia­tures, it’s a fun trick to use. And so, through the art, it eas­ily con­veys the sense of how small they are.

Over­all I think most play­ers will enjoy Plane­chase and that it will be extremely pop­u­lar, espe­cially among the casual Magic player. Def­i­nitely worth the $20 price tag to get started.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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