The time has finally come to dust off your French EDH decks and get ready to embark on an epic journey. Starting today we will be beginning our first ever French EDH League! I hope that there are as many of you excited about this endeavor as I am. This post will be going over the details of the league in order to clarify as much as humanly possible before the first round officially begins.
For those of you seeing this that know about multi-player EDH (or Commander as it is called by Wizards of the Coast), but have never heard of French EDH, allow me to explain. This is the unofficial 1v1 Commander format. It was created in order to allow tournaments to exist within EDH. As you could probably guess, having a multi-player tournament would be a nightmare to manage, so instead this tries to keep the heart of EDH but provides you with a more competitive feel. We have decided to expand on this idea, and move it towards a league instead (as we have been having great success with our Sunday Multi-player EDH league).
The ban and restricted list (as well as a more in-depth synopsis) for French EDH can be found here: http://duelcommander.com/banlist/
Some of you may be wondering at this point about certain rules that will be enforced for this league, so let me go over those now in order to avoid any problems that may arise:
- We will be using our in-house modified mulligan rules that we use for normal EDH.
- Each player receives one “friendly” mulligan back to 7 cards. After this free mulligan, if you still wish to mulligan, keep any number of cards you wish in your hand, then set aside the rest and draw that many cards minus 1. (so if you set aside 3 cards, draw 2). You may repeat this process of setting cards aside and drawing one less until you get a hand you wish to keep. All cards set aside are then shuffled back into your deck.
- No one is forced to make a deck list for this league.
- What this means for the players is that you may modify (or even change completely) your deck from week to week as you see fit. Didn’t like Oona week one? Why not try Sygg or even give Keranos a try instead. The choice is yours!
- We will be allowing a 10 card sideboard/wishboard each week.
- You are not permitted to sideboard until game 2 of your match, however we wanted to give players the ability to be ready for any deck in this changing environment.
- Since we are allowing a sideboard, this means that any “wish” effects (cards that allow you to put any card from outside the game into your hand) must come from this 10 card board.
- The matches each week will not be timed.
- While this may make for rather long matches for certain control decks, we wanted the league to run as smoothly as possible. Since our local level one judge (aka me) may not be around to enforce “round” times for each match, the best solution is to eliminate that entirely. This also means that there will be no draws each week, allowing us to have a definitive winner at the end of the league!
- The league will run for 7 weeks, beginning July 14th and ending on August 31st.
- Pairings will be posted on Monday of each week, and you have until closing on Sunday to arrange your match in the store.
- Each week we will provide each pair with the other’s email so they can get in touch and set up the day they wish to meet on.
- Pairings each week will be posted on our Facebook Page
- For those of you who don’t follow us, that page is here: https://www.facebook.com/TheEndGamesVA
- Make sure to give your match results to whoever is working the shop that day so that we can process them as fast as possible each week.
- The league sign-ups will run from today (July 7th) until Sunday (July 13th). Entry to the league will be 10 dollars, and all fees will be going towards the prize pool at the end of the league.
Hopefully all of this has helped you clarify any concerns you may have had about the league, and has gotten you excited to be able to play French EDH each week! I know many of us have been wanting a way to play French outside of a one day tournament structure (as most of us were having trouble attending said tournaments) so I am very hopeful that this looser structure will make French much more popular around the store.
To enter the league, stop by the store anytime this week, and provide us with your name as well as your email. We hope to see a ton of you out there getting prepared for the weeks ahead of us!