Magic: The Gathering “Dungeon Horde”
Hello and welcome all,
For the last year and a half I have been developing a commander variant that would be a mashup between MtG and D&D. Obviously the introduction of D&D themed cards, decks, and materials helped that out a little bit, but I wanted more. About 6 months prior to any of the D&D themed sets getting released I got introduced to an older variant (circa 2011) that never really made it to main stream, Horde Magic. If you’re unfamiliar with the format it is pretty much The Walking Dead meets MtG. You have a pre-made deck with a 60/40 split, 60 zombie tokens and 40 random on theme zombie cards and between 1 and 4 players that fight against the horde. See attached link if you have the urge to check it out yourself.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/serious-fun/hording-all-fun-2011-10-25
Now to jump into my idea; enter the Dungeon Horde. I have always enjoyed the idea of D&D but hate the time commitment of hours upon hours of playing a campaign every single week. I’m a husband, father, and work a full time job as a construction manager, so who has the time to commit to something as time intensive as a months long campaign once to twice a week? So I decided to merge the short lived games of Magic with the campaign format of D&D. Essentially all you need to have a Dungeon Horde campaign is a storyline to follow, several Horde decks (3–5 mini horde decks consisting of 50 cards, and one boss horde deck of 100–150 cards), and a party of 1–4 players with 100 card singleton format commander decks following the Ravnica guild color schemes to fall into an appropriate D&D character theme. E.G., a warrior would possibly be Boros W/R, a rogue would be Dimir B/U colors, etc. I can’t take all the credit for this idea and want to give a shout out to one of my friends, his idea falls a little more into the D&D theme while still being MtG based. The players would then build those decks out to 100 cards broken down and played as such: At the start of the campaign, players would start with a 60/40 split, with having a 60 card deck and a 40 card side board. The purpose of this is to fight against all of the mini hordes though the campaign, and as each one is overcome, all players would “level-up” and get to add an additional 5 cards to their decks to buff up to face the boss horde.
As I have developed the idea it has struck me that this could turn in to a multi night time intensive campaign just like regular D&D can be. That is okay if other players develop it into that type of game but that isn’t how I plan to utilize it in my particular playgroup. I look forward to sharing the rest of my story, and how things unfold over the next few months until November when we all test out this campaign play style.
Until next time…….