I was first introduced to the concept of a format -- meta-rules limiting which cards could be played -- by my friend Carl, who it turns out really didn't want to play Magic. Being a man of high ambition, Carl wanted to play the recently released DOOM, and had quit his job to do so when it launched the year before. When computers for DOOMing were unavailable and it came down to card games, Carl wanted to play a different game called "creature beatdown". Creature Beatdown used Magic cards, but it wasn't Magic.
I distinctly remember our first game… Carl said "here, let me show you my black deck", and we proceeded to play. My favorite color combination was and is Green/White (Selesnya fo' life, dawg!), and the fact that Carl wanted to play mono black was a little weird to me. During the time of Revised, only one kind of player generally played mono: morons. But Carl had a trick up his sleeve.
A couple of rounds into our game, Carl had beaten on me for a few points when I finally drew the card I was looking for and triumphantly plunked it down.
"Circle of Protection: Black."
Carl's reaction was immediate. "A COP?!?! Dude, what the hell?"
I was confused, and offered an intelligent rebuttal: "Buh?"
"Dude, we don't play with color-screwers."
"Guh?"
"Cards that mess with other people's colors. We don't use them. It's weak."
"But those are about a third of the cards in the set."
"Yeah, but they suck. You need to retune your deck."
Here, I had a problem. I wanted to play Magic, but the game Carl wanted was some limited subset of Magic. My other Magic-playing friends (of which there were 3) were unreliable, and Carl and I were always hanging out. So if I wanted to play a game that looked like Magic, I'd have to play by Carl's rules or he just wouldn't play.
We finished the game (I won, given that I had color-screw cards and he didn't), he moaned and complained the entire time, and then I begrudgingly pulled out my CoPs, my Karma, my Wards, my Lifeforce, my White Knights, and so forth, replacing them with the crap creatures remaining in my collection. I tried to put up an argument: "But if you don't limit yourself to one color, color-screws won't hurt as much. Besides, you can answer them with dispel effects and so forth."
Carl dismissed these points as "weak" (it's interesting to note that he thought color-boost cards like Bad Moon were just fine).
I wound up having two decks: one deck for Creature Beatdown with Carl, and another deck for playing my other friends. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of money (and thus not a lot of cards), so I wound up having to scratch-build a deck from the same card pool depending on which friend was coming over.
Later, Carl and I played a game in which he showed off his all-artifact deck, powered (naturally) by the various Urza's lands. He dropped Colossus of Sardia, and I immediately responded with Disenchant.
"DUDE! I thought I told you we don't play with color-screws."
"I took them all out. You watched me."
"Colorless is a color! Get rid of your Disenchants, your Shatters, your Shatterstorms…"
I started to wonder if playing with Carl was really worthwhile. It was actually another game that convinced me to stop playing with him: Richard Garfield had followed Magic: The Gathering with Jyhad, a vampire-themed, White Wolf-inspired collectible card game with the interesting twist of having political interaction in addition to combat. I built a deck with just enough combat power to stay alive, and packed it with political power cards. I proceeded to win a 6-man free-for-all with it, literally voting myself to victory.
Soon after, I sat down to play Carl. One of my first vampire drops was Lucian, the Malkavian Justicar, who could almost single-handedly win any vote that came up. He hurt like hell to put in play, but he was worth it.
"Dude, if you're planning to do any of that political crap you might as well just put your deck away. We don't play with political cards."
So we just didn't play.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and I'm re-entering the world of Magic. At first I quailed a little at the thought of competing with almost 20 years' worth of cards that I had never seen, but then I learned of Standard -- a glorious format that forced everyone to use currently in-print cards. I cringed at the idea of coming to FNM with my wussy little deck, fearing all the while that I'd run into another Carl situation, so I asked Bryan at Wizard's Norman a bunch of stupid-sounding questions about the format, the rules, and the customs of the local community. I read obsessively about the format's official rules, intending to rules-lawyer the hell out of the first person who told me I couldn't play a card just because they didn't like that style of play.
Thankfully, none of that happened, and as most well know, the group at Wizard's Norman is cordial and polite almost to the point of obsequiousness. I can't imagine a better group for my return to Magic, and the joy of gaming is not lost even when being beaten by the Wizard's crew, but of course there is a downside…
In the end, Carl won. Color-screws are all but gone. Creature beatdown is the norm. Mono decks are viable. Worse, I spent my first FNM getting destroyed by Delver of Secrets decks while remembering how I used to keep Tsunamis in the sideboard to ruin Blue's day.
