The more I follow online magic the more I see people always complaining about specific cards needing to be banned from standar, or how standard is to powerful or there is not enough deck diversity. That said bans will never fix standard there is always the next card, as long as there is net decking diversity will be low in standard there is no penalty nor rulers that encourage diversity, and no single ban will correct the power creep in standard you will have to ban 20-50 cards to address that.

So While thinking about this problem I came up with format which restricts deck building by assigning each card a point value and limiting you decks total point value. This format will be meant for brewers and for jank, one that won’t be friendly to net deckers and finally that encourages diversity. So rather than banning cards we limit how many powerful cards you can jams in your deck , while also limiting the power level of supporting cast you give said card.

In my proposed format , which I call Point Decking , [for lack of a better name(help please)] your decks total acceptable point value will vary from deck to deck and be determined by the following equation , deck point limit (DPL) = Deck size (DS) - land count (LC) (excluding modal spell cards ) /2. (Dpv = (DS-LC)/2 ) . with the exception of the pathways the modal land won’t count towards your land count But will worth atleast .25 points automatically. Being a new format idea I don’t know how strong modal lands will be in my format and fear that playing 24 tapped modal lands as your land base but having access to 30 points may be worth all lands entering tapped. This means if you run a 60 card deck, with 24 lands your sack can have a total point value of 18 because (60-24) /2 = 18. Now say you have two modal lands modal lands, that means you only have 17.5 points to build rest of the deck

Furthermore, the reason I chose an equation and not a set Point limit is to not punish abnormally large decks, at same time I don’t want to punish manna hungry decks that run 28 lands, so I set a floor at 18 a ceiling at 60 points .

The point value of cards will be determined as follows: if a specific card gets played in over 8% of decks standard BO1 or Bo3 or in this format it will instantly automatically no questions be assigned a value of 1 point unless it’s a Modul land at which point it will automatically be assigned a value of 0.5. If it reaches 45 % threshold it will be upgraded to 2 points. Than these cards as well as any card reaches the threshold of 5% of decks played will be evaluated by a human and the appropriate point value shall be assigned by taking into account wether the card is an issue, i an enabler, or if it’s part of a deck built of a bunch of good cards that together are unstoppable (I’m looking at you dimir rouges) . If need be a cards value will be lowered to .5 but not erased because we don’t want destruction tribal at same time don’t want to make cards to costly. Take eliminate, we don’t want eliminate to be in every deck at same time it’s not worth a point, there fore it will be .5 points. Furthermore truly problematic cards that can warp or have potential to do so even if currently they don’t meet requirements such as winota and zenith flare not hitting 5% of decks according to mtggoldfish they will be worth 2 . Lastly any cards that get banned from standard will be worth 3 points, with Oko theif of crowns and fires of invention being the only cards straight up banned currently in the format .

Lastly card base would be limited to standard And This is is the current list I created consisiting of 105 cards which have point values. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1055-fjSKKF9zkI0E03K2rQG4bPwJ7Acunm_p5svmblk/edit

Personally I think this could lower net decking and would be a format only played by people who are looking to actively brew as you may play what ever deck you want to net deck in standard no restrictions.

What do you think? , what parts of this idea do you like, what parts don’t you like? Please leave feed back. THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, I would love feed back as well as if anyone is intrested someone to play test with to test the validity of such a format.

I know it will make deck building very complex that said if your interested and have any form of background in app development/ coding I was thinking maybe it would be possible to create a program to build your deck on and will keep track of point value and will automatically update the list based on mtggoldfishes commonly played list, and allows for us to over ride point values of card if need be.