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Coliseum: An Eternal MTG Brawl Format

You’ve built a Brawl deck. You’ve faced it against your friends and enemies, gathering strength through wins and losses alike. Your commander has emerged from fistfights and sword battles bruised and battered, ready to go again. They have trained long enough. Now, your commander steps into a new arena, one filled with more monsters than men. Champions from throughout history gather here to test their mettle, and to win the honor of being the greatest fighters of all time. This is where the real fight begins.

Your deck has won the Brawl. But is it ready to enter the Coliseum?

I am proposing a new format, one which allows you to keep using your favorite brawl decks even after they rotate out of standard. This idea is heavily inspired by the command zone, who suggested the idea of having the commander determine the sets you can use. I am elaborating on that idea, and on why I think it makes for an incredibly fun, diverse, and approachable format.

First things first, what are the rules of Coliseum? This format is heavily based on Brawl, so here are the rules that stay the same:

Start at 30 life

Singleton

60 cards in a deck

You have a commander that determines color identity

No commander damage

The difference comes in this next point:

You may use any planeswalker or legendary creature from all of magic’s history as your commander, and you can only use cards that were in rotation with that commander in your deck.

You choose a commander, say, Doran, the Siege Tower. Looking him up, you see that he has been printed in a from the vaults, and in Lorwyn. Only one of those two sets were standard legal, so you head over to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Magic:_the_Gathering_Standard_(Type_II) to see what other sets shared a standard with it.

Looking at the sets it was in standard with, you choose one section to limit yourself to- likely either Coldsnap to Eventide or Lorwyn to M10, as those have the most sets in them. You cant go from Coldsnap all the way to M10, because even if they were all in standard with Lorwyn, they were never in standard all at the same time.

Once you’ve chosen your commander and the era of standard they were in, just gather up 60 cards from those sets, and you’re good to go! You can play the deck against other Coliseum decks, or even people’s Brawl decks- by design, every Brawl deck is legal in Coliseum. Different eras of magic, fighting together.

So why do I think that this is a fantastic format? Here’s a couple of the benefits I see from Coliseum:

This format is nostalgia trip. If you started magic years ago and haven’t played in forever, your cards are still good to go- use the cards you got when you first started drafting, from your first standard deck, whatever. Travel to your own history by using a commander that you grew up with and loved. When you choose a commander, you choose an era of magic history to explore.

This allows people to play in a simpler format of commander without having to buy into standard. Like in the last point, if someone took a break from magic for a few years, their cards are still good and, in fact, likely competitive. The same cant be said for modern, commander, or any other format I can think of. This allows for the best reintegration of older players out of any format. And new players can simply use their brawl decks, allowing for a cross pollination of the ages.

This format does not motivate powercreep. As new sets are added to magic, new decks will be made, but it does not provide old decks with an ever increasing pool of options to play with. You know every card that can possibly go into your deck, and that pool will never change unless your commander is still legal in standard. There will be more powerful decks, definitely- but it is impossible for every single deck to be overpowered. If someone has multiple decks, even if they’ve tried their best to improve every single one as much as possible, they will still have a variety of powerlevels so they can play new players fairly and without the vast advantages having played commander for a long time provides.

It is so much easier to build Coliseum decks than commander decks. There is never more than 2000 cards in standard at a time, and then you divide by color, that leaves the selection to be minimal. You can actually look at every possible card to put in your deck. New players wont be at a disadvantage simply because they haven’t gone through the however many cards there are in all of magic.

Each game will have high variety. With every deck built from entirely different card pools, you never know what you are going to face. Prepare yourself for some of the weirdest cards you’ve never heard of- they are going to use them. And prepare to discover some hidden gems you could never play in more powerful formats. This is the place to play jank.

All that and more is why I am so excited for this format. I hope that I have convinced at least some of you to go find a commander you love, and explore their home plane; supporting Sorin with innistrad vampires or seeing how the original Nicol Bolas compares to the other cards in his set. I know I personally am filled with enthusiasm at the thought of figuring out a way to make Norin the Wary work with only 2000 cards to select from, so I will leave you here to start building-- and I wish you luck on your quest to become the greatest fighter in all of magic’s history!