From: Sean McKeown To: Frank Kusumoto Subject: MENTAL MAGIC: Rules and Guidelines As a variant of Magic: the Gathering, Mental Magic is quite different from any other variant of the game. Rather than prearrange your deck with the ideal cards, you get to choose which spell you cast at any time so long as you have a card with the exact same casting-cost as that spell... play that card as the desired spell and there you go. It sounds a bit abusive, but there are of course limitations. The game is played with one Mental Magic deck, divided evenly and randomly between the two players. Rule #1: Any spell may only be cast once. Not once by each player, mind you, but once each game! It is required that players (or a third party, such as a judge) keep track of each spell as it is being cast so that there are no repetitions. Rule #2: Your spells are ALSO your Lands. To play a Land, you take any card of your choice from your hand and play it, face-down, to turn it into a Multi-Land (See below for exact definition of this Multiland). Any nonbasic land cards a player draws may be played as any nonbasic Land that has not been played yet, or may be played face-down as a Multiland like any other card. Rule #3: You cannot cast the actual spell of the proxy card.. for example you have one land untapped and a Red Elemental Blast in hand, and you wish to respond to a Blue spell with a countering effect. You must cast that spell as a Pyroblast; if Pyroblast has already been used this game but Red Elemental Blast has not, you're out of luck. Rule #4 (Graveyard Rules): Cards that go to your graveyard revert to a neutral state; they lose all the natures of the spell they were played as. For cards such as Lhurgoyf, Revenant, and Necratog, these refer to *actual* summons or artifact creature spells in the graveyard, not any card in each graveyard that was *played* as a summons or artifact creature spell, or any card that *shares a casting-cost* with any currently unplayed summons or artifact creature spells. Rule #5 (Graveyard Rules): If any spell takes a card of a specific type out of the graveyard, such as Animate Dead or Living Death, it may only choose from proxy cards of that type (in this case, Creature) from the graveyard, then choose the spell you wish it to become. You may not choose a spell of a different type than is being returned from the graveyard, or of a different casting-cost. For cards such as Ashen Ghoul, etc. any card of the appropriate casting-cost that is present in the graveyard may be declared as this spell, but only for the express purpose of returning it to play, rather than to prevent an opponent from doing so in the future, and only if that spell has not been played already in the current game. All rules of Magic: the Gathering still apply so long as they do not directly conflict with one of these rules. Banned List: Mind Twist Ring of Ma'ruf Shaharazad Falling Star Chaos Orb Divine Intervention all ANTE cards Jester's Cap "Tutors" (*) (*) All cards that take another card out of your library and put it into either your hand or on top of your library are BANNED in Mental Magic. For example; Demonic Tutor, Enlightened Tutor, Survival of the Fittest, etc... when deciding whether a spell is banned from the game, it should remain within the _spirit_ of this rule, because it's not a simple task to track down _every_ card that violates this rule... until I get myself a recent copy of InQuest, that is... The Multi-Land: Multi-Land LAND Counts as a Basic Land. Tap: Add one mana of any color to your Mana Pool. Play this ability as a Mana Source. 0: Multi-Land counts as the basic land type of your choice. Play this ability as an Interrupt. 0: Multi-Land counts as a Snow-Covered Land. Play this ability as an Interrupt. 0: Multi-Land loses all previously assigned land-types. Play this ability as an Interrupt. The Mental-Magic Deck (My Standard Version): 7x Nonbasic Land 2x 0cc Artifact 3x 1cc Artifact 3x 2cc Artifact 3x 3cc Artifact 4x 4cc Artifact 1x 5cc Artifact 3x Bcc Black Spell 4x BBcc Black Spell 4x B1cc Black Spell 2x BB1cc Black Spell 3x B2cc Black Spell 3x BB2cc Black Spell 3x B3cc Black Spell 2x BB3cc Black Spell 1x BBB3cc Black Spell * 3x Ucc Blue Spell 2x UXcc Blue Spell 3x UUcc Blue Spell 4x U1cc Blue Spell 3x UU1cc Blue Spell 3x U2cc Blue Spell 3x UU2cc Blue Spell 3x U3cc Blue Spell 2x UU3cc Blue Spell 1x U4cc Blue Spell 1x UU4cc Blue Spell * 4x Gcc Green Spell 2x GGcc Green Spell 4x G1cc Green Spell 3x GG1cc Green Spell 3x G2cc Green Spell 3x GG2cc Green Spell 2x G3cc Green Spell 3x GG3cc Green Spell 4x Rcc Red Spell 2x RXcc Red Spell 1x RRcc Red Spell 4x R1cc Red Spell 2x RR1cc Red Spell 3x R2cc Red Spell 2x RR2cc Red Spell 3x R3cc Red Spell 2x RR3cc Red Spell 1x R4cc Red Spell 1x RR4cc Red Spell * 4x Wcc White Spell 4x WWcc White Spell 4x W1cc White Spell 2x WW1cc White Spell 2x W2cc White Spell 3x WW2cc White Spell 2x W3cc White Spell 2x WW3cc White Spell This should be composed of no more than 40% creature cards, to limit the abusiveness of cards like Necratog, which can be a real beating if every spell you have cast this game could be removed from the game for a +2/+2 bonus. I am, of course, open to suggestions on how to better tune the deck's contents for balanced play, so feel free to email me with any comments, etc... I am not sure what 'official' rules there are for Mental Magic, but this seems to be the fairest version I could concieve of after seeing a duel in which the "no Tutors" rule wasn't active, and where there were no predefined notions of what defined spell type on the proxy cards... Survival of the Fittest was cast, and the gloves came off. So you see, there really is a reason for these silly restrictions :o) --Sean McKeown --Gandalf@BDominia.com Mennenite on IRC "Who am I to need you now, To ask you why, to tell you no To deserve your love, and sympathy... You were never meant to belong to me..." --Smashing Pumpkins, "Crestfallen"