The basic idea is that you have two teams of two players. One player from each team is inside the ring at any point in time, facing down one of their opponents. Players can switch places by paying ever-increasing amounts of mana. While "in the ring", that player can attack and target their opponent, etc. While outside the ring, that player still takes turns, etc, as usual, but can't attack or target anything any other player controls. Any spells they cast only affect their own board state.
Here are some more specific rules:
- Each team takes a simultaneous turn.
- The swapping of players can be activated whenever a player has priority.
- Swapping places costs colorless mana to activate. The amount of mana is exactly one more than the last time that team activated it. (We had different starting values; see below.)
- Players cannot swap out during combat after blockers have been declared. If the defending team swaps places before blockers are declared, all attacking creatures are still attacking, and the newly in-the-ring player is the new defender. If the attacking team swaps places (also before blocking) all those attacking creatures leave combat and there are now no creatures attacking.
- Targets of spells and abilities opponents control "vanish" when their controller tags out. This can cause those spells and abilities to be countered as normal.
- The effect of swapping places does use the stack.
- Permanents owned by players who are out of the ring do not die just because they are in another player's zone. This became important because my team (me and Earl) used Stab Wound to kill Nathan in the second game.
We played two games, using different rules for tagging out. In the first game, the first swap per team cost 3 colorless mana, and went up by 1 each time. Either player could activate the swap.
In the second game, the first swap cost 1 colorless, but only the player in the ring could ever pay the mana to tag out.
To set up, we drafted like normal (triple Return to Ravnica) sitting across from our teammate. I decided to change my strategy in two ways. First, I would be on the look out for cards that would be good to play while I was tagged out (this led me to value Inspiration highly and take it early). Second, I figured we would be able to set up a long game, so I didn't mind taking cards with high casting costs. When all was said and done, I had something like 6 cards with CMC 7 or more. (I also didn't mind dipping into all 5 colors, but that is not a change from my usual drafting strategy. :-P) Looking back, I would probably value targetted removal slightly lower since teams can always swap places to fizzle those spells.
This wound up working out really well as Earl drafted Rakdos-Golgari. We were good to go: he started both games in the ring, going aggro, and we tagged it up as necessary. Tapping out became a more dangerous move since not only did it mean that you didn't have any tricks, but it also meant you couldn't swap in or out unexpectedly. Even though we only swapped about 5 times per game per team (an estimate) the potential to swap was often a big deterrent to opposing plans. I don't think I ever felt like I had too much untapped land available.
It's important to note that these games tended to run long. Even longer than 2HG, probably because although there are less card interactions going on at any one time, there are still a large number of potential interactions, thus making decisions about when to switch really tough.
We discussed adding a mechanism for one team forcing another to swap. That could be very nice. In either case, both of the variants we used were awesome; I definitely want to play this again!
Think of something we didn't? Anything I forgot to mention? Questions? What can be done to nail down the rules for this more?
Also, if you give Tag Team a try with your play group, I want to hear about it! :)
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