Premodern Highlander

The TL;DR story

Premodern Highlander is a format created by Marc Lanigra and Patric Hiness in 2020. The format is intended as a community run, casual format (but we all know tournaments will be played, just be relaxed). Want to play Premodern but with even more variation and explore almost infinitie deckbuilding possibilities? Then this is for you!

Goals of the format

Showcase the silver age of MTG when many of us fell in love with the game

Minimize “sameness” of games, leading to high replayability of most matchups

Give players the opportunity to dig even deeper into the vast Premodern card pool and let their creativity flow

Allow as many cards as possible with bans only addressing what is absolutely necessary, even allowing sets not allowed in regular Premodern, like Portal

General Rules

  • The gameplay is intended to be one versus one

  • Current standard MTG rules are applied

  • Starting life total is 20

  • One free mulligan, after that, regular mulligans

Deck construction rules

  • Legal sets: Most between 1995 - 2003 (see list)

  • Banlist: As few as possible (see list)

  • Only one card per unique name, except for basic lands

  • 100 card minimum deck size

  • All reprints of legal cards are allowed

  • Non tournament legal reprints are also allowed (CE, WCD, etc.)

  • Old frame versions of cards are highly encouraged

Legal Sets:

All blocks that are old frame

  • Ice Age / Homelands / Alliances

  • Mirage / Visions / Wetherlight

  • Tempest / Stronghold / Exodus

  • Urza's Saga / Legacy / Destiny

  • Masques / Nemesis / Prophecy

  • Invasion / Planeshift / Apocalypse

  • Odyssey / Torment / Judgment

  • Onslaught / Legions / Scourge

Base sets

  • 4th Edition

  • 5th Edition

  • 6th Edition

  • 7th edition

The Portal sets

  • Portal / Second Age / Three Kingdoms

  • Starter 1999 / 2000

Banlist with explanations

  • The amount of non-games due to an early or mid-early land destruction is pretty low in this format, especially when you keep basic lands in your opener, as they are rather safe. Strip Mine in the format would mostly just hit the first land played, no matter what, and would likely lead to miserable game states. Also, there should be plenty of options to kill annoying lands, so it's really not needed for nonbasics.

  • With a rather slow format, Mind Twist is just a very easy to splash bomb in many decks, often wining the game on the spot turn 3 or 4 with minimal ramp, and with black being one of the best colors, there's no need for this to exist in addition to the many good (fair) discard spells.

  • Red is the stongest color overall in this format so far, and the ability to kill the opponent with burn is the main reason many decks opt to run lifegain cards to combat aggressive strategies. Sulfuric Vortex is not only the best card that deals continuous damage over time, it also completely disables the conterplay of opposing decks. As such, it is often an auto-win for aggro decks that run red and red control decks alike. It is banned because it is the top card in top perfoming decks that often gave those decks free wins even against opposing tech.

  • Genesis is a card that is extremely hard to get rid of and wins almost any game in the long run. Part of the format is that usually your tools can only be used once. You have one Spike Weaver, one Uktabi, etc. Genesis enables infinite recursion as well as easy to setup combos like Spore Frog + Genesis to win games against aggressive decks. Also, against control it is usually more or less and auto-win. That makes this card extremely broken in almost every matchup and is the reason it is banned.

  • Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal, and Enlightened Tutor basically did the same thing in our early format. They fetch the one card (usually an enchantment) that completely turns the game on it's head, and that (most likely) your opponent can't even handle once resolved. These cards were basically copies 2 and 3 of your most unfair play, and while it's ok to loose to Humility / Aura Shards / Oath of Druids every once in a while, when your opponent draws into it - it shouldn't happen every second game. The win rate of these cards was just too high right from the beginning.

  • Later additions than Vampiric and Enlightened, these two instant speed tutors were put on the list mainly because they function as a kind of "solution joker". Whether your opponent has a big board and you need the boardwipe, or they have a single permanent that is extremely effective and/or hard to remove - Mystical and Worldly usually can find the answer at instant speed, once your opponent is tapped out or otherwise unable to interact.

    In addition, another issue arose with these cards: Without any real downside, like being sorcery speed or costing life and/or significant mana investment, they just act as a second copy of a key card in vertain matchups. This kind-of defeats the purpose of the Highlander format in general, and we decided that these are banned not purely from a power level standpoint, but because we don't want these cards to be format defining.

  • If you read the last paragraph for Mystical and Worldly, you know where this is going. In principle, Survival is a repeatable Worldly Tutor, and definately a card, that will win a game going on for several turns by itself due to it's ability to ensure consistently more card quality than your opponents draws. While the real abuse of this cards requires a lot of deck building concessions, the community felt that the impact of an early to midgame Survival was just too much for a hard-to-remove enchantment type card.

 

The story about the format

Once upon a time

It Premodern Highlander in its current form was born at the start of 2020. During a time when people had too much time on their hands and little to do, two German magic players sat together and reminisced about their first steps into the world of Magic: The Gathering.

When creatures like Spiritmonger were considered insanely strong and decks like Slivers, Madness and The Rock were hot and new. Somehow those memories and, more importantly, cards needed a real home: Oldschool MTG focuses on the mythical era of Moxen and Juzam Djinns. And modern formats, well … let’s just say a 3/3 vanilla for 3 mana (with upside!) might no longer be a staple in today‘s MTG economy.

German highlander

Some of the best experiences many in the German MTG community had in the late 2000s were playing “German Highlander”. It was a  format that had the ground rule of “There can be only one”. This concept was a huge boon to deck diversity and people had to weight different card choices in a world without high profile events giving you the best netdecks and solving the format before you even had a chance to dig in yourself.

The contemporary Highlander format was not what our two players were looking for, though.

Modern magic

Due to MTG's ever expanding card pool, even the singleton rule became a bit too easy to work around. Want to play deck that ensures a first turn mana dork? Don‘t worry, you have 15+ choices ranging from Boreal Druid to Noble Hierarch.

 

What’s worse, the power creep of new releases meant that the old nostalgic cards were being replaced constantly by straightforward upgrades. There’s just no reason to run an Uktabi Orangutan when a Reclamation Sage is also hitting Enchantments for the same cost.

Adding more cards would certainly erode the nostalgia factor and deckbuilding aspect.

The solution (not the deck)

The solution was rather obvious: Limiting the card pool to a fixed range. As every point in time could be considered arbitrary, the conclusion was to go for the one break point that many people used to classify MTG nowadays: The switch from old card frame to modern card frame. To distinguish the format further from old school MTG (and avoid the crazy interaction of dual lands and fetchlands) the starting point was 4th edition.

Another foundational idea was, that basically everything should be allowed in regards to power level. Mana Vault, Oath of Druids, Tinker, Necropotence, Tolarian Academy etc. are all absurdly powerful cards, but the whole point of the format was to showcase the old MTG world, where those cards were around. Additionally, it turned out that many of these cards were only broken due to interactions with cards printed later. Without Darksteel Colossus, you most likely tinker for a Triskelion or a Thran Dynamo. A very strong play, but not winning the game on the spot.

GLHF!

/Marc and Patric