Welcome again! I'm on my quest to make casual Magic great. I've already talked about Dandân and my absolute favourite The Basic Land Game. Today, I have yet another way to spend your between-rounds time.

Enter - Pack Wars!

What are Pack Wars? | MTG

Pack Wars is a way to take a booster pack and create a mini game of Magic: The Gathering out of it. In this piece, I will talk about the version I've been playing with my friends for as long as I remember. After an FNM when you've won two packs, why not crack them open with a friend and get some play out of it while at it?

The idea is also that you don't need anything else other than booster packs themselves - no basics, tokens, dice, sleeves.

A natural question arises - how to approach what is going to follow in this piece with different *types* of boosters? After all, we've had classic boosters, draft boosters, set boosters, play boosters. The honest answer is that you can just adjust rules as you go for as long as you and your friend are on the same page. If the pack has fewer cards than you'd expect, divide the pack into a different number of piles for instance. With that - let's get into specifics.

Pack Wars: The Rules | MTG

You and the opponent take the whole pack and divide it into five piles of three cards (or four piles of three and one pile of two - or some other combination depending on the card, token, basic land contents of the pack).

Then the person who's built their piles first is on the play for the first battle. You can choose whichever method you want to decide which piles play against which - die roll, blind choice, anything.

Now the game begins - both players have their piles as their opening hand so all three cards are there. There is no library and you don't lose to decking. You have infinite mana of every colour. You are at 5 life. And that's it! The game is on.

Does it mean that if your pile contains Valakut Invoker you can just use infinite mana to kill the opponent? ABSOLUTELY YES.

Because you have access to all the mana in the world, the dynamics change a ton. There are some cards that would otherwise be unplayable but here they shine a new light on what they are capable of.

How do Pack Wars games play out? | MTG

Now that we know how to play a legal game, there is still a question of how it actually plays out.

In practice, you will have piles that are all creatures, or maybe one evasive threat and some interaction. Sometimes you can make small combos like Fling and a big threat to turn one kill the opp.

Being on the play is indeed very important, because you can utilise haste threats very well and potentially one-shot the opponent - again, 5 life isn't a lot. On the flipside though, you literally put all the cards on the table so the opponent who's on the draw knows what you are up to.

Another question arises - what if there is a board stall? Well, that'd be a draw. In this game, draws happen because there is typically perfect information and both players can assess that nobody has good attacks and there is no way to close the game. 

While you may have had a thought that it's very RNG focused and random, I'll stop you right there! There are two main skills in this game as far as I'm concerned - the deck building part and combat.

Sometimes it took me several minutes to optimise the pack I received as there are so many options on how to couple the cards. You can try it for yourself - crack open a pack, set a timer for one or two minutes and try to make five piles that you can say are competitively optimally split.

On top of that, combat matters in those close spots where it's not clear that your 3/2 flyer kills the opp in two attacks. What happens a lot is when one player can make a call to attack with, say, two creatures, get swung back at to then return the favour for exactly lethal.

Pack Wars: Strategy | MTG

This is where a lot of sealed-esque skill comes in. You want to divide those piles in a way that you win most of pile-to-pile battles against your opponent. You could make 3 really good packs and 2 auto-loss packs or maybe flatten the power level out a bit more evenly for each pack to have a fighting chance.

I generated a random Foundations pack for us to take a look at it together and analyse.

There are 14 cards here, including a land. While lands are useless, they do count towards the card total - here it even gains you one life.

Therefore, we need to make 4 piles of 3, and 1 pile of 2. The pile of 2 could just be your auto-loss pack but we can actually make *something* work. For instance, pair Sands with Spitfire Lagac that has landfall!

Now you want to look at "combos" that can get you up to 5 damage. The standouts are Bulk Up that doubles power and Claws Out that pumps. For instance, one pack could be Healer's Hawk, Dazzling Angel and Bulk Up. In your first combat, attack with all and double Angel's power to 4, totalling to 5. However, my hunch would be that we're "wasting" such a good pump spell in a pack full of flying and even lifelink. With infinite mana, we can play Bulk Up from hand and flashback again so a 1 power creature becomes 4 power.

You could have a pack of Sands and Mischievous Pup, granting you two life total thanks to the land's etb effect.

You could have a more reactive pile with Dazzling Angel as a wincon, Refute as a counter, and Heartfire Immolator as removal. You'd also trigger prowess with Refute.

The list goes on but I hope I've shown how many possibilities there are!

Conclusion

As you can see, you can get a ton of mileage out of a pack that you'd normally just crack open and be done with. You get so much free fun in addition to what's inside! Have fun Pack Warsing!