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I was introduced to Magic just before Legends came out. For those keeping score at home, that would be 1994 and about 19 years ago. The current core set at the time was Revised, so we were still playing with scary things like Banding and Interrupts. And we didn’t understand some basic things like what colourless mana actually meant. A good example was Sol Ring. While we understood “T: Add 2 to your mana pool” easily enough, we didn’t get what colourless mana *did*. We did, however, understand that coloured mana could be used for colourless in costs – that Fireball could be cast for 3 with WWWR as easily as RRRR or WGUR – so we assumed that colourless mana could be used for coloured as well. We then house-ruled that Sol Ring got errata’ed as follows (in today’s terminology):

As Sol Ring enters the battlefield, choose a colour.
T: Add two mana of the chosen colour to your mana pool.

Seems pretty good for a 1cc artifact, right?

To be fair, though, we did get most things right. Even things like Interrupts we more-or-less understood pretty well, even though the rulebook wasn’t great at explaining things. And Magic, in the beginning, was designed as a two-player game, and we stretched it to be playable with more – which didn’t take much, since most cards that affected an opponent either said ‘target player’ or ‘choose an opponent’.

One thing we did was come up with our own variants. We didn’t have a lot but there was one I thoroughly enjoyed, which I since dubbed “Lich Wars”. See, in this variant, it’s not the last person standing who wins. Oh, no, no, no. It’s the last person who dies! Each other player is still in the game until *all* players died. Now, keep in mind, poison didn’t exist yet, so the only ways to die were deck death or damage. I think if you died from deck death, you just reshuffled your graveyard to make a new library, much like what happens in some other games. So here’s the deal:

  • Each player starts at the standard life total for the format – generally 20.
  • When a player would lose the game from being at 0 life, he or she doesn’t. Instead, that player’s life total can keep going down – or up – as long as at least one other player has a positive, non-zero life total. You still can’t pay life for spells or abilities at that point, so you couldn’t activate Greed, for example.
  • The game continued until all players had lost the game, generally meaning everyone had 0 life or less. The highest life total at the end won the game.

It made things interesting that way, because first of all, no longer were you unable to affect the game while other players played – sometimes giving you nothing to do for an hour or more. Second, let’s say there were four players, and you died second. If the game finally ended and you were at -6, as long as nobody else had a higher life total than you, you win. It certainly made the game fun, and different – having everyone gang up on you really didn’t accomplish as much unless you were the last Wizard standing! And one of your opponents might still win!

Enjoy!