Experimental Limited Format — Swap

I’ve had this idea for a new Limited format for years now. It’s partially based on the trade mechanism from Andromeda and partially on a vague idea about how players could build a Limited deck in a way analogous to how starting players build Constructed decks: by opening a few packs and trading cards.

No card designs follow.

Here’s the core idea: Each player opens 3 booster packs; players trade with each other; players build decks using the cards they kept and traded for; they play. That second step is the critical part that requires work and will make or break this format. It could be dirt simple and have no rules behind it: Anyone can trade anything with anyone else, until everyone’s done, or time runs out. The reason I’d like to avoid that is a lot of players hate binder trading and/or are terrible at it. Like me. (It’s also not a terribly clever display of game design, but that’s awful motivation.)

I would be remiss not to mention the possibility of using Pit trading, but that's just as chaotic as free trading with the added insanity of lying and betrayal, so I'm just going to set that idea aside. In this lock box. On the bottom of the sea floor. Of Venus.

I was attracted to Andromeda’s trading because it lets multiple players trade multiple cards in a structured way that’s pretty interesting on its own. The player whose turn it is sets out 2-4 cards, one at a time, and each other player sets out a card of his own whenever she does, of any color except the colors the active player has revealed. She chooses a pile of cards to keep and the choice of what to take next passes to the guy she chose from. Players are effectively bidding for the first player’s lot, or for another player's bid.

I tested that once years ago, and it didn't go great. It wasn't awful, it worked, but it wasn't awesome. I wish I knew where my notes were for that, but my recollection is that it was too slow and too rigid. Cards have wildly different values in Magic where they are abstractly identical in Andromeda, so forcing trading at 1:1 is limiting. Also, I tried breaking the trading up pack-by-pack so it would be more like a Draft, but trading some white cards away in pack 1 and 2 only to open a white bomb in pack 3 (while still valuable to trade) would be frustrating, so doing it all at once ala Sealed will give players a bigger picture of what they have and what they need.

Here's what I'm thinking now. The active player chooses any number of cards from her pool and reveals them. The other players reveal any number of cards from their pools. The active player may choose to abort the trade if she doesn't want any of those offers. The other players take their bids back in this case. (This is so that players can't purposely undersell the active player, or ignore her offer in favor of others.) Hopefully this doesn't happen, in which case she chooses any offer and takes that. The person whose offer she took then chooses any offer and takes that. And so on. Each player will be the active player the same number of times. How many? I'm really not sure yet. I'm guessing twice around. The number should be small to keep things moving and force players to make the most of each round of trades.

How many players? I'd like to test initially with 4 or maybe 6. It would be super if the format could scale well, but I'm guessing it'll skew heavily in favor of 8- and that would be fine. The world needs more Limited formats for 3-7 players. Likely, the number of rounds should scale with the number of players so that the total number of trade turns remains fairly constant, making the format consistent in length regardless of the crowd. I'll try 12 turns minimum. So, 3p=4 rounds, 4-5p=3, 6-8p=2.

What do I call this format? The most obvious name is Trade, except that's already got an important meaning in Magic, so I'm leaning toward another short, descriptive name like Swap or maybe Swap Meet. I'm tempted by a fun/flavorful name like Bazaar, but Swap fits the pattern set by Draft and Sealed much better.

I hope to try this out soon, and I'll let you know how it goes and what I learn. If you'd like to try it out, I'd love to hear what your group thinks of it.

Parameters, Technicalities and Variants
Skip the rest unless you're interested in really nitty gritty design stuff. This is mostly for my reference, but totally open for discussion.

Players open packs (less than Sealed) and trade cards with each other to make 40 card decks. This activity should take an hour or less. How to improve your initial pool in this way should be intuitive. There should be no ways to abuse the swap format that can't be easily judged. Collusion is an obvious concern, but I also don't want to see players getting locked out of trades either intentionally or incidentally.

Usually, a player with 36 cards from three boosters will want to trade away three colors to get 23-24 cards of a two colors. Ideally, mono-colored and poly-colored decks won't be terribly hard/unusual, but let's focus on two-color decks. 14-16 of your starting 36 will be in the colors you choose (more if trading isn't so easy that you can ignore your broadest colors in favor of your bomb colors, which I'd push to support a little more). That means you'll be looking trade for about 10 cards and able to offer about 20, which makes me optimistic that trading quantity for quality (and vice versa) will be a thing. Given 12 total turns to trade, you can trade 2:1 ten times, fail to trade twice, and be perfectly on target. That sounds like a lot of wiggle room. I'm more concerned about it being too much than too little, but we'll see.

10 total turns, maximum: 2p: 5 rounds, 3p:3, 4p:2, 5p:2, 6p:1, 7p:1, 8p:1. (total rounding: 12)
10 total turns, minimum:  2p: 5 rounds, 3p:4, 4p:3, 5p:2, 6p:2, 7p:2, 8p:2. (total rounding: 16)
12 total turns, maximum: 2p: 6 rounds, 3p:4, 4p:3, 5p:2, 6p:2, 7p:1, 8p:1. (total rounding: 11)
12 total turns, minimum:  2p: 6 rounds, 3p:4, 4p:3, 5p:3, 6p:2, 7p:2, 8p:2. (total rounding: 9)
15 total turns, maximum: 2p: 7 rounds, 3p:5, 4p:3, 5p:3, 6p:2, 7p:2, 8p:1. (total rounding: 15)

15 total turns, minimum:  2p: 8 rounds, 3p:5, 4p:4, 5p:3, 6p:3, 7p:3, 8p:2. (total rounding: 12)

My Draft group usually does a rare redraft, which is great because we don't pay extra for prizes, and players have no incentive to pick a card worth more on eBay than in their deck. When we do Sealed, we just keep what we open and forget prizes, because the redraft would take twice as long (and we often have more tied records because we usually have 4-6 Sealed players). We could go either way here since it's a small number of packs, but given the fact that we're trading cards, it seems more natural that players would just keep what the end up with. That will make it a Thoughtseize a pretty weak card to open for purposes of winning (because it's worth in a Limited deck is reduced, and you're unlikely to trade it away for something more useful), but I'm pretty okay with there being some balance between opening helpful cards and valuable ones. Note that this introduces another skill factor: knowledge of card prices. A lot of Limited players don't know Constructed card prices and that can be a real disadvantage when drafting for keeps.

You could play multiplayer, but I don't think any kind of team play would work, because team members might trade exclusively and/or abusively with each other.
We could restrict players from offering cards of the same color as any in the active player's bid. We could restrict the active player to offering cards of a single color. We could let the active player state what it is that they're most interested in. Each of these would add a form of complexity and limit player's flexibilty, in return for adding focus that might make trades more impactful. The second idea is the simplest and I'm guessing I might end up there, but I'm inclined to start with the third idea. If it works, it's super elegant; my concern is that it could slow proceedings down immensely for a lot of groups.

We could make non-active players reveal their offers one at a time, but that sounds slow as dirt. All choosing and revealing simultaneously is an option, but I'm calling it plan B. First I'd like to try asynchronous bidding. Each player can bid for the active player's lot at any time until everyone is done, even adding cards to their bid after seeing other's bids. I could potentially allow removing cards as well, but that sounds like a slippery slope toward unending bidding. We could time bidding and cap it a minute; we could let the active player count down from N; we could say when the second to last person locks in their bid, all bids are locked; or we could leave it open and just yell at slow players. I'll try that first, but I suspect some external end will be necessary. If 'table talk' is allowed before bidding, is it allowed during? That could slow things down or cause loudness, but it might be hard to prevent once any table talk is allowed.

If trading proves faster and easier than I predict, the format could potentially support a mere two packs per player. I doubt it, but you never know. If it's slower and harder, we could easily go to four packs and Swap would still fill in a useful gap between Draft's 3 and Sealed's 6. You could totally Cube Swap, though I imagine that could be a brain burner what with the much tighter power band.

What do you think?