Magic the Gathering

Casual

Rainbow Stairwell Explored

I love alter­na­tive formats.

I was on the verge of quit­ting magic around two years ago and then I was brought into the glory that is EDH. As much as I enjoy EDH some­times it can be hard to get a group of peo­ple together for a proper game and that’s where other alter­na­tive for­mats can enter into the equa­tion. In the upcom­ing weeks I’ll be writ­ing about some more fun for­mats that you might not see all the time. Today I’d like to start with rain­bow stair­well. Just like with EDH today will be a primer for the for­mat with a nice sam­ple list to kick things off.

Rain­bow stair­well has a less cod­i­fied sys­tem of rules so we’ll dis­cuss the dif­fer­ent vari­ants but there are a few con­sis­tent ele­ments. Your deck should be sixty cards. Note that this isn’t like the com­mon restric­tion where sixty is a min­i­mum amount, this is where sixty cards is the firm num­ber you need to have a legal deck. No more, no less.

Let’s get to pre­cisely why the for­mat is rain­bow and stair­well. Each deck needs to be all five col­ors and con­tain arti­facts. Addi­tion­ally, each deck needs to have one card of con­verted mana cost from one to six inclu­sive. So an exam­ple of the green por­tion of the “stair­well” could be:

Notice that each mana cost from one to six is present and there’s no restric­tion on the num­ber of mana sym­bols them­selves. A com­mon ques­tion is, “Does the green card with con­verted mana cost two need to lit­er­ally have two green mana sym­bols?” That is not the case.

Another fre­quently occur­ring prob­lem is the ques­tion of gold cards. There are con­flict­ing schools of thought on gold cards. Some groups favor allow­ing gold cards to count as one of the gold col­ors. For exam­ple a Sharuum the Hege­mon could count as a play­ers black, blue, or white six mana cost card. With that rule in place it can be fairly dif­fi­cult to keep track of the var­i­ous costs and col­ors and it also causes a large ques­tion about hybrid cards. The group that I play with has a sim­ple solu­tion to hybrid cards and gold cards.

Gold cards are not allowed and hybrid cards are fine but they need to count as one of the two col­ors. Under this sys­tem some­thing like Gad­dock Teeg is not allowed, a card like Creak­wood Liege is legal, but it needs to count as either your green or black four con­verted mana cost crea­ture. I think this sys­tem sim­pli­fies the pos­si­ble prob­lems which can hap­pen with the rules above.

Another mana cost issue is that of X-spells. A spell with X in the mana cost has value X is zero in all zones other than the stack. Once the spell is one the stack then X is what­ever has been paid for it. In order to avoid this ambi­gu­ity X-spells are also banned. Addi­tion­ally, split cards are banned to avoid the great dif­fi­cul­ties already presented.

The advent of col­ored arti­facts also adds a new wrin­kle to deck build­ing. It’s not dif­fi­cult once we recall that a card is what­ever col­ors are in the upper right hand cor­ner (with a few small excep­tions). So Sanc­tum Gar­goyle is per­fectly legal! Just make sure you count him as a white card and not an arti­fact and you won’t have any trouble.

With the main prob­lems in con­struct­ing the main deck hav­ing been addressed it’s time to dis­cuss the mana base. The orig­i­nal iter­a­tion of the for­mat called for two of each dual land and for decks to be fifty-six cards. That’s just crazy talk. First of all it is entirely too cost pro­hib­i­tive, espe­cially for newer play­ers. Sec­ond of all, it is a lit­tle counter intu­itive to be play­ing a sin­gle­ton for­mat and allow two of each land type.

There is one sug­ges­tion which calls for three of each basic land type, one of a “cycle” of lands of your choice (i.e. the Onslaught fetch lands), and then four other lands of your choos­ing. Again this seems to go against the idea of the for­mat, forc­ing peo­ple to run basic lands they don’t want to run seems dif­fi­cult and dis­cus­sions on what con­sti­tutes a cycle of lands can get tricky. Even worse lands such as Library of Alexan­dria and Mishra’s Work­shop can again push the for­mat out of the price range of most players.

I would like to pro­pose a more mod­est solu­tion instead. I see no rea­son the EDH land sys­tem can’t be used with a minor mod­i­fi­ca­tion. If a land has an acti­vated abil­ity that does not pro­duce mana then it can­not be used. This rids the prob­lem of the major­ity of the heavy price tag lands. Gone are Library, Work­shop, Bazaar and even Dia­mond Val­ley. The Taber­na­cle at Pen­drell Vale is still around, but hey, nobody’s per­fect! It’s also worth not­ing that Urborg, Tomb of Yawg­moth is also still legal since it has a sta­tic abil­ity and not an acti­vated ability.

There are a few periph­ery rules. Cards that tar­get non­ba­sic lands are typ­i­cally sort of taboo. Magus of the Moon, Blood Moon, etc are usu­ally frowned on, with some rules sys­tems ban­ning them out­right. I per­son­ally have no objec­tions to them and I run a lot of non­ba­sics. And I do mean a lot! So to each their own!

Rain­bow Stair­well offers a fun alter­na­tive to your reg­u­lar for­mats and can be just as pop­u­lar as EDH. Addi­tion­ally, it’s more dif­fi­cult to “break” the for­mat since not every tutor and combo can be packed into the same deck. I would rec­om­mend giv­ing Rain­bow Stair­well a shot and next week I’ll be putting together an inter­est­ing lit­tle stair­well con­coc­tion and out­lin­ing another rogue for­mat which has really caught on at Armada, Pack Wars!

Until then this is Ben­jamin McDole (usu­ally) giv­ing you a hun­dred rea­sons to play magic!