Magic: The Gathering - Deck Card Frequency

I've been a fan of Magic: The Gathering for a while now, though haven't been collecting the physical cards for a good while - played a ton of the standalone PC games and more recently been drawn back in to 'Arena', the latest digital incarnation of the game.

One of the core rules of the game is that you are allowed 4 copies of any individual card in your deck (bar basic lands and a few special cards), and typically most 'successful' deck builds max out the copies of their core cards accordingly - so you may have a deck of 40 spells, but there may just be 10 - 15 actual unique spells in that list.

This tends to generate decks with very singular 'engines' that the player is attempting to start up, and typically once running the game is usually won.

This is great at the meta-level, where much of the skill is in deck construction and finding these clever 'deck engines' to utilise, but at the individual duel level, can lead to rather stale gameplay without much creativity (as the deck has a very specific rhythm and response).

The most recent 'fun' duels I've had took place during a promotion where only 'singleton' decks could be used. As the name suggests, these decks can only have a single copy of any given card.

So, one mechanism that springs to mind that would perhaps promote more creative matches and flexible decks is to modify that '4 copy' rule and expand it to consider the rarity of a card (common, uncommon, rare & mythic). The rarer the card, the fewer copies one can include in the deck. 4x common, 3x uncommon, 2x rare and 1x mythic.

This would probably promote decks with multiple possible win systems, as the limitation on rare and mythic cards makes it dangerous to focus on a single win strategy.

While the game rules are too established to entertain such a change, and it would not be the best from a commercial standpoint (chasing the rares and mythic cards drives sales after all), it could form the basis of a nice deck building limitation for fun matches and campaigns.