Flavortown
| Flavortown | |
|---|---|
| DCI Sanctioned | |
| Paper |
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| Magic Online |
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| Magic Arena |
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| Rules | |
| Type | Constructed |
| Multiplayer |
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Flavortown is a casual, usually multiplayer variant format of Magic: the Gathering play, built around enjoying and appreciating the flavor text of cards. The format is usually played with constructed decks, with strong incentives to play different versions of cards. The format is defined by access to My First Tome, a card which asks other players to identify cards based on flavor text.
Format Rules
The basic form of the Flavortown format is a 60-card singleton constructed format, with all black-bordered and some Silver-bordered or acorn-stamped cards allowed. While the exact list of silver-bordered cards varies between groups of players, typically they are limited to:
- Flavor-matters cards, as in the scryfall tags: flavor-matters
- Art or Artist-matters card: art-matters or artist-matters
while cards involving dexterity, speech, clothing, reminder text, and activities or people outside the game are excluded. It is common to allow cards that "could have been black-border", such as Contraptions, Augmenting, or cards such as Blast from the Past and Greater Morphling. Philosophically, Flavortown should play like "real" magic, except for requiring attention to the art and descriptions.
The one new restriction on deck construction is that each card must have flavor text, including basic lands. This is required to encourage interaction with the one rule change from traditional magic:
Each player begins the game with a My First tome emblem, reading:
{1}: Say the flavor text on a card in your hand. Target opponent guesses that card’s name. You may reveal that card. If you do and they guessed wrong, you draw a card. When you activate this ability, you may not activate it again until your next untap step.
As an emblem, it cannot be targeted, destroyed, or exiled. The additional line replaces the tap cost (as emblems are not permanents and thus cannot be tapped or untapped). As a result, it forms a powerful draw engine, assuming that your flavor text is sufficiently difficult to guess. It is standard to assume that if using non-English variants, e.g. Japanese Mystical Archive prints, flavor text is read as the English-language equivalent from the set.
Gameplay
As a format defined by additional drawing and revealing of cards, standard draw synergies such as Wizard Class would be attractive, but are illegal due to the lack of flavor text. On the other hand, Brainstorm comes in varieties with seven different flavor texts, which places considerably more burden on a player hoping to memorize the flavor texts of more popular staples.
The addition of the rule that basic lands must have flavor text followed the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, which added the first basic lands with flavor text: Scryfall Search. This list was doubled with the release of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate.