PREs in the Spotlight: Introduction

Hello everybody! This is my first article for MTGOAcademy, but I’ve played paper M:TG since 1994 with sporadic breaks up to 2006. Now, I only find time to play online, because it provides a lot of benefits to me: a huge community, always having people up to play the format you like, being much cheaper than paper, no requirement to find a local shop and the ability to play right from my living room. =)

My purpose in writing is to establish a column about Player Run Events (PREs). I support and play these events, because I appreciate the work the players’ community has invested to keep the myriad of formats and events going. Besides that, I haven’t been completely satisfied with the official policy WotC follows for the typical MTGO event in quite a few years, but that’s a topic for another article- back to our theme!

If you’ve never heard of PREs, I will quickly introduce you to them. Player Run Events are not directly supported by Wizards of the Coast- you won’t find them in the official tournament area on MTGO. However, WotC does offer a place to congregate the info of PREs available, and that place has information and the dates of the current events offered- it is the PRE sub-forum of the official Wizards forums! Here, you find posts for every single PRE format with their detailed rules. It is also a great place to post your questions about a particular format or event (and a nice guy from the PRE community will always be willing to help out)!

It’s common for a player like you or me (that has invested a lot of time into his favorite community) to host a PRE while prize support is sponsored by a major bot chain or web site. The prizes are usually less than what you’d expect in a Daily Event or Premier Event, but all of these events are free to enter! You only have to bring a legal deck for the format you choose to play and show up at the correct time.

One of the great things about PREs is the fact that even new players have good changes to win prizes, because most events offer door prizes to competitors that don’t finish in the prize just for entering and playing. To enter an event, you have to show up at the events chat channel on MTGO at the announced time. After the registration is done, your host will post pairings for the first round. Matches are played at the “Anything Goes” room or the “Casual Decks” room, depending on the event. Players have to submit their round results to the host in a results chat room, and the next round will be paired after everyone has submitted. Additional details about the different types of events will be divulged in my upcoming articles, but you can always start figuring out things now by just entering a PRE. The players and hosts are always happy to see new faces, and they will welcome you with a helpful attitude!

In this introduction, we will focus on important facts about the major PRE formats. As mentioned before, WotC’s event offerings are not always easily accessible to much of MTGO‘s player population. Luckily, PREs offer some budget friendly formats for players that cannot afford 100 ticket Jace, the Mind Sculptors, 75 ticket Force of Wills or a playset of the newest Block. They are amazing places for deck building adventures. The most well-known and established PRE format is a budget one that many have heard of before:

Pauper

I’m sure you already know that Pauper only allows common cards from the Classic card pool to be played. But what you might not know is PREs have Pauper for Extended, Standard and many more in addition to widely popular Classic-based Pauper. Pauper Magic uses Magic: Online rarity levels to define the legality of cards- if a regular version of a card is available online as a common, it’s legal. A popular fan site for Pauper events is pdcmagic.com. To join the community chat on MTGO, type /join PDC and the people there will be happy to answer your questions and or play test games.

Pauper was originally established as a PRE and was so successful that it was added to the official formats that WotC supports! Now, you can find Premier Events on the Tournament Section of MTGO (as well as an in-game format filter). In general, Pauper is a budget friendly format, as you can imagine, since it’s only commons. But some exceptions have to be mentioned- Classic Pauper has some really good decks that use some of the most expensive cards from the common slot. Pauper staples like Crypt Rats (1.75 tix), Daze (10.50 tix), Fireblast (2 tix), Lotus Petal (5 tix) or Snuff Out (5 tix) are the more expansive ones you could need for building your favourite Pauper deck. But compared to established formats like Standard or Classic, it’s a budget format for sure. Next, similar to the Pauper scene, we have a format called Peasant.

Peasant

Peasant is based on the Pauper rules, allowing only commons to be played, except that your deck and your sideboard in total can have 5 uncommons too! For example: you can add 1 uncommon like Juggernaut to your deck while having 4 Chill in your sideboard. Any other division is fine as long as you have only 5 uncommons in total.

Another interesting aspect of Peasant is the fact that it also follows Paper Magic rarity levels. The Peasant PRE thread words it as such: “Unlike Pauper Magic which uses online rarities, Peasant uses Paper-printed rarities as shown in Gatherer. Every card is legal at its lowest commonality of any printingonline OR offline. So if you want to use Hypnotic Specter as one of your 5uncommons,that’s acceptable, even though it was never an uncommon online.”

While Pauper does not have a Banned List (well, only Cranial Plating is banned, so it’s more like a banned card than a list) at the moment, Peasant does have a Banned List. The following cards are not allowed in a Peasant event:

Peasant Magic BannedCards:

• Any card priced $ 10 or more according to MTGOTraders. (Currently Daze, Force of Will, StripMine…)
• Atog
• Demonic Consultation
• Demonic Tutor
• Skullclamp
• Tendrils of Agony
• Brain Freeze
• Frantic Search
• Sol Ring

Note: A card like Daze is legal in Pauper, but not in Peasant!

Beside Pauper and Peasant, the format that follows the budget idea strictly is Heirloom.

Heirloom

This format was just established this year and has a fast growing community. At the moment, a Classic Event and a Sealed League are up while plans for more formats are ready. The legality of cards in this format is set by a Static Legal Card List because only very cheap cards should be legal. For a card to be legal in Heirloom, it must be legal in its format already and be in the Official Heirloom Legal Card List. The legality of cards in Heirloom was based on a tiered pricing system when the Legal Card List was first made, and whenever it is revised, the following prices are used to determine legality:

• Commons- 0.05 or less
• Uncommons- 0.10 or less
• Rares- 0.20 or less
• Mythics- 1.00or less

The Static Legal Card List is only updated when a new set is released on MTGO or after a set interval of time has elapsed; daily price changes don’t affect the legality of cards! (Only the current List sets the legality.) I will talk about this format in more detail in my next article, because it has a lot of potential and (to be honest) it’s my favourite. The online community meets in /join heirloom. Information and links are available here, and a community website provides more resources here.

Tribal Wars

As you can imagine, in Tribal Wars you lead one of Magic‘s numerous creature types onto the battlefield. For this format, every deck must contain at least 20 cards of a single creature type- so you can play a deck with 20 Elves, Gobos, Dragons, etc. The remaining slots can be filled with anything you want (more creatures, instants, sorceries- whatever you desire)! On MTGO, the community meets in the /join tribal room. The Tribal Apocalypse group can be found there. Tribal Wars Classic banishes all cards that are banned and restricted in Classic and bans the following ones because of their power in tribal-based decks:

Build Your Own Standard (BYOS)

These PREs are the most creative to my mind. Like the name insinuates, every player generates their deck from a self-made Standard environment. The BYOS PRE thread does a great job of describing how a player builds their own standard: “Each player chooses any two Blocks and any one Core Set [then] builds their deck from that [pool], essentially creating their own standard environment. This allows forthe format to have something for everyone. Standard players can bring a current standard legal deck and easily compete, while extended players can add their favorite tools. And Classic players can use their oldest cards while [remaining confined so that] the power level [doesn't] go through the roof.”

Players don’t have to follow the past Standard structures; in BYOS, the Blocks don’t need to be consecutive! For example, you can combine the Mirrodin Block, the Scars of Mirrodin Block and any Core Set. Or you could combine the two tribal Blocks, Onslaught and Lorwyn, to build your favorite tribal deck (that is probably legal in Tribal Wars too)! You want to play a cycle deck? Just chose the Blocks that pushed cycle cards (like cycling in Urza’s and Onslaught).

Because of the differences between paper-printed sets and MTGO releases, some sets are banned or virtually added for this format:

• Blocks from Ice Age and up are legal.
• Core sets from 5th Edition and up are legal.
• Masters Edition sets CANNOT be chosen as either a Core Set or Block.
• Duel Decks CANNOT be chosen as either a Core Set or Block.
• Other special sets CANNOT be chosen as either a Core Set or Block.
• The Ice Age Block consists of Ice Age, Alliances, and Coldsnap.
• Homelands can be chosen as its own Block (lol).
• Lorwyn and Shadowmoor are considered one Block.
• Zendikar, Worldwake and Rise of Eldrazi are considered one Block.

As the Ice Age Block and Homelands were never released on MTGO, cards from other sets (Force of Will from MED is also in Alliances, part of the Ice Age Block) are allowed as proxies for those sets. Join the group in-game on the chat /join BYOS. Also, a seasonal metagame thread is available for to view there.

Until now, I have only introduced single events that are held weekly. Besides these, there are some very interesting leagues that run as PREs.

The Coalition League

The Coalition League is run in four week periods and always features a new theme for each successive season. The last theme was the plane Mirrodin: Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin, Darksteel and Fifth Dawn. Before that, Coalition League was Core Set themed (only allowing boosters from Core Sets). Each participant is required to buy 6 boosters of any combination of the legal sets and then builds a Sealed deck with those cards. Then each following week, another booster can be added to the Sealed pool from one of the legal sets. Each player is allowed to play 5 matches a week (facing each opponent not more than once a week). There are some more details about the league, but I will explain them in one of the upcoming articles. The league room is /join coalition. The community web page has been established there.

The Heirloom Sealed League

This second PRE league that is currently active- it’s the Heirloom Sealed League I mentioned before. In general, the Heirloom Sealed League follows the Heirloom Classic rules introduced prior. Each season runs for four weeks. A sealed pool of 6 boosters will be generated for each participant by the tournament organizers and will only contain Heirloom-legal cards. (The players will have to buy/trade for those cards on MTGO, they are not given out to you!) Each week you can add another Heirloom “booster” to your cards.

You can play as many games each week as you like while not facing each opponent more than once. The central gathering place online for all Heirloom activity is in the “Heirloom” room (which is joined by typing /join heirloom). The community Heirloom website and the Heirloom Link Hub provide all information and activities for Heirloom. A detailed article will concentrate on this league later.

For this introduction, I have only mentioned the single player events that I know well- besides these, there are many more options for PRE fun (with some even being multiplayer events) on the PRE Forums. Maybe there will be time to focus on those events in the series later on, but my next article will concentrate on the Heirloom events since some really interesting changes and developments are going on at the moment. Don’t miss the next part of my series: PREs in the Spotlight!

Cheers,
Mario