Wacky Worlds 2026 ran on Saturday! It was wicked fun for me and I hope the same was true for everyone who came. There's a lot for me to write about here without talking about the seven different formats or point system that we'd worked out ahead of time, so if you are interested in that, you need to check out my prior post about all of the Wacky Worlds 2026 rules. The four main things I relate here are:
- How I fared.
- How it went for the particpants in general.
- Some surprising stats.
- Takeaways for future consideration.
Participants started arriving right at the 10am start time, though some people didn't arrive until the afternoon. In all we had 11 participants and there was a stretch in the afternoon where all 11 people were here!
I took photos of the packs people chose before they opened them. The first player, P1, opened Wilds of Eldraine, Journey to Nyx, Theros Beyond Death, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, Duskmourn, and War of the Spark:
Those are from six different sets, so they got the 6-point bonus.
P2 opened the most spectacular set of packs, Secrets of Strixhaven, Avatar, March of the Machines: Aftermath, Strixhaven, War of the Spark, Alara Reborn 6-card pack, Homelands, and Fallen Empires:
There are so many fascinating aspects of these eight packs:
- There are packs from all four decades: Nineties, Aughts, Tens, and Twenty-Twenties.
- The time difference between the release of the first pack (Fallen Empires, November 1, 1994) and the last (Secrets of Strixhaven, April 24, 2026) is 31 years, five months, and 23 days. That is easily the longest I've seen between packs at any kind of chaos event.
- There are four different kinds of half-sized packs. No one else opened more than one.
- We looked up what the rarity distribution of cards was for the Alara Reborn 6-card packs beforehand, and it was very unlikely there'd be a rare in the pack.
I will be amazed by these choices for years to come.
UPDATE (June 15, 2026): P2 also had an amazing combo in their deck: Deep Spawn + Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. A combo 25 years in the making!
P3 opened Mystery Booster 2, Modern Horizons 2 and 3, Magic 2012, War of the Spark, and Double Masters:
I don't think I've ever seen a Double Masters pack opened before! Crazy!
Those first three players opened their packs, built their decks, and got down to challenging the horde decks and earning points pretty quickly. I had a moment, so I got my packs ready. I opened an Onslaught Tournament pack, Khans of Tarkir, Murders of Karlov Manor, and Duskmourn:
I picked boosters with other face-down creatures to complement Onslaught. I opened my packs and definitely had the cards to fit that theme:
I did not build my deck right then because more people showed up!
P5 arrived and brought blueberry scones they had made! (I ate two.) They opened Strixhaven, Modern Horizons 2, Lord of the Rings, Modern Horizons 3, Avatar, and Secrets of Strixhaven:
They were very careful about building their deck!
Meanwhile, P6 opened Mystery Booster 2, the full trio of Modern Horizons packs, a Duskmourn Collector booster, and a March of the Machines: Aftermath:
Part of the reason I wanted to do a sealed event was so that people could open and use collector boosters "safely". Draft doesn't work as well because then you have to pass a bunch of the cards.
P6 named their deck "You better check yourself before you deck yourself" because they ran out of cards in all but one game! They also were very nice as they brought two elder dragons to add to the prize pool! Amazing and generous!
P7 arrived with P6 and opened Secrets of Strixhaven Collector, Aetherdrift, Spider-Man, Turtles Collector, and Lorwyn Eclipsed:
You'll notice that they didn't have six different packs, so just like me they didn't get the 6-point bonus. They didn't like their pool and only played one game before they decided to open a second set of boosters with Spider-Man, Turtles, Lorwyn Eclipsed, Thunder Junction, March of the Machines: Aftermath, and Secrets of Strixhaven Collector:
P8 arrived and opened Duskmourn, Thunder Junction, Bloomburrow, Tarkir, and two Final Fantasy packs:
P9 arrived and opened Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, Kaladesh, Aetherdrift, Edge of Eternities, Brothers' War, and Duskmourn:
P9's plan was to build around vehicles. Their deck, "Teferi Kart World" succeeded! It was in Yore-Tiller colors (WUBR) with Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim and 6+ vehicles-matter cards!
I think it was around this time that I had my deck built. Here's what I put together after many cuts:
I didn't have a lot of mana fixing, but I also had so many 3-generic face-down creatures to play that it was okay.
P10 arrived. They had been talking about their pack choices for a while, so I was excited to see what they settled on. They opened March of the Machine (normal and Aftermath), Secrets of Strixhaven, Modern Horizons 2 and 3, and Commander Masters:
Commander packs might be broken in this format, if only because Sol Ring is such a powerhouse! At least they counted as 1.5 packs, so you couldn't just swap out a single pack for one.
I got into some games. Here's me playing Face the Hydra with P5 and P8:
Here's a game of Defeat a God I was with with P10:
Here's a shot of the planar map from a Planechase Eternities Map game I was in with P3, P5, and P10:
See how Lethe Lake and Sanctum of Serra are next to each other? Their combined oppression caused many people to die by decking. At the end of the game, I was at 3 and P3 hit me with Incinerate with their dying Lethe Lake trigger so that P5 won! Amazing!
Here's how the Explorers of Ixalan setup looked in the middle of a game between P1, P5, and (I think) P2:
P11 arrived and opened Lord of the Rings, Match of the Machine: Aftermath, Commander Masters, Battlebond, Aether Revolt, and Thunder Junction:
P11's Aether Revolt pack was one they had purchased on a summer trip to a store I used to play at two decades ago in Salem, Massachusetts! With their pool, they built a five-color deck named "WUBRG Speed Mill". (I didn't get to play with them, sadly.)
I got into an Explorers of Ixalan game with P1 and P3 and achieved a new thing for me: I got a morph creature, a manifest creature, and a mysterous creature all in the same game!
The week before, I told some people that I'd be really excited if we ever had three simultaneous games running at any time. Well, that happened multiple times!
No games were allowed to start after 8pm, so once 7:20 hit, I felt pretty confident that no new games were going to start. I was in an Explorers of Ixalan game with P1 and P2 that finished at exactly 8pm. I ended with 16 points and P1 and P2 both had 45, tied for first. P5, P8, and P9 were locked in an epic game of Ravnica: Clue, however, and P5 also had 45 points. Although P1 and P2 had played more games, P5 was on a winning tear, scoring 4 points in three non-co-op games! They didn't win that final Clue game (they did score two points by guessing their opponent's correct accusation at the end) but any result was enough to put them on the top. P5 won with a total of 47 points!
In order to determine second place, we had to go to the (poorly crafted by me) tie breaker: the product of the individual scores instead of the sum. P1 got 3 x 3 x 6 x 6 x 3 x 3 x 4 x 1 x 1 x 4 x 2 x 6 x 3 = 1,679,616. P2 got 3 x 3 x 6 x 6 x 3 x 3 x 4 x 1 x 4 x 3 x 6 x 3 = 2,519,424. P2 won second place! (I'm so glad we didn't have to resort to any hare-brained further tie-breaking measures!)
As for my own results, I earned 16 total points: 2 from a Battle the Horde win, 2 from a Face the Hydra win, 4 from a Defeat a God win, 2 from surviving five planar shifts in a Planechase game, 1 from each of two Explorers of Ixalan games, 1 from a Ravnica: Clue game, and 3 bonus points for playing in six different formats. (I tried really hard to discover the Golden City in the Explorers games, but it didn't happen.)
I noticed one card constantly underperform during my games: Efreet Weaponmaster. Because of the word "another" on it, you really only get the full value when:
- You have another creature, and
- You get into combat with both that creature and the face-down Weaponmaster, and
- The other creature happens to be fighting something it needs more power to kill, and
- The Weaponmaster is facing something with two or more power and four or less toughness, and
- You have the five mana available to pay for the morph cost.
That is really hard to make happen. I even just had trouble getting another creature to stick on the board.
Take that, Khans of Tarkir card!
Congratulations to P5, P2, and P1 for taking first, second, and third places! I made a Google Sheet to track all the scores as games were finished.
Here are some fun stats:
- All seven different formats got played. (Only one game of Kingdom was played.)
- Packs from 38 different sets were opened! Three of those were collectors and play boosters from the same sets, so 41 different packs were opened!
- 26 different games were played, not counting co-op games where the players didn't win. (I didn't record those!)
- 9 people were able to claim the 3 bonus points for playing 6+ different formats.
- Only one brave soul played all six formats: P3.
- Four people scored 40+ points! P1, P2, P3, and P5. I was very surprised the scores went up that high! Four more people scored 30+ points: P6, P7, P8, and P9.
Time for the takeaways! First, here are things that went great:
- Each player opened many different boosters. There was plenty of wackiness! I'm not even sure I needed to include the 6-point incentive.
- Players were excited to pull off combos between cards from different sets.
- People seemed to have a good time!
- The sheets worked out pretty well; people were able to keep track of their own scores pretty well.
- No one made the mistake of opening their packs beforehand. Whew! I was nervous about that one.
- Having the March of the Machine Aftermath Epilogue packs available was good to help fill in 1/2-pack gaps for people.
- People needed assistance and had rules questions for many of the games. Thankfully I was expecting I'd need to help facilitate, so my expectations were set correctly.
- If people were out of one game early, it was easy to get them into a different game.
- I'm glad each co-op format could only be scored twice.
- P1 and P2 were both really gung-ho about Wacky Worlds. They knew all the different formats really well and helped out a ton by answering questions and encouraging the wackiness all around. Props to both of them!
- The Ravnica: Clue "add-on rule" for Wacky Worlds worked nicely. (This was that before someone makes an accusation, all other players write down what they think the correct answer is. If the accusation is correct, then those players reveal what they wrote down. If any of them match the accusation, then those players score 2 points instead of 1.)
- The standings were close! There was a quick spike by P1, P2, and P3, but then lots of people caught up and they went back and forth a lot at the end.
Here are some "woulda-coulda-shouldas" (based on things that didn't go so great):
- I should have rearranged my furniture more to make more room so I could comfortably hold three tables of games.
- Events were not self-explanatory. I don't know how I could have solved this except by making print outs of each different format to hand out. Ooh! I should have put a QR-code on the score sheet that linked back to the blog post!
- I left some typos and formatting errors in the sheets. I need to proofread those better. Oops!
- The max scores for the horde formats should have been harder to accomplish, so groups couldn't speed run those and might decide to come back around to them later instead. I would have preferred people score points on the easier setting first instead of only going for the max points on each.
- There was some confusion about what "X" meant in the scoring table (a four-player option) for the Battle the Horde format.
- Planechase Eternities Map games took too long. In the future I would set the starting life totals to 10. I know that's extreme, but I think one of them took well over two hours! It would also mean that it's less likely to claim the 2-point loss scenario by surviving five planeshifts. Everyone got that.
- It would have nice to have some sort of 1v1 format so if there were two players who had completed all the co-op events, they could start a game.
- I bought seven take-and-bake pizzas from Aldi's to serve for dinner. They are quite big and we only ate four. Oops!
- The learning curve for Kingdoms is really high and since it only supports exactly 5 people, it's hard to run. (Ravnica: Clue also has a high learning curve, but it's not as bad.)
- I wish I had tracked all of the horde losses instead of just the wins. I'm not sure how feasible that'd've been, though.
- 10 hours was probably too long. I can be a marathon-magicker, but some of my friends seemed like they were getting worn out towards the end.
Congratulations again to P5 for being the Wacky Worlds 2026 champion! Congratulations to P2 and P1 for coming in second and third. Thanks to everyone who came and everyone who contributed ideas for the formats and rules. Thanks to people who played formats they'd never done before! I hope your bravery was rewarded! I hope everyone had at least as much fun as I did.
If you want to do something like this yourself, go for it! If you don't have the supplies, I made sites where you can play Face the Hydra, Battle the Horde, Defeat a God, Ravnica: Clue, and Kingdom.
Happy Magicking, as Wacky as you can get!
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