III. Tournaments and Ways to Play

     After you have spent some time learning the game, crafting some decks and feeling out your talents as a Planeswalker you may want to give a tournament a try. The best way to find a tournament near you is to pop on over to your local comic shop and check their schedule, or if you are interested in a more large scale event check out StarCityGames and put your zip-code into their event locator.
     Once you have found a tournament that you are interested in, check out the format of the event because you may need to alter your deck to be allowed to play within the format rules.

Formats:

Limited Play:

     If you don't feel like your decks are up to snuff then you should look into a Limited Tournament, these events require the players to build a deck on the spot using a predetermined pool of cards that either come from a selection of boosters or from cards you get in a Draft.

Sealed Play:

     Players open up six boosters and build a deck. The only rule is that a deck must contain a minimum of 40 cards. Plain and simple this is one of the best ways to increase the size of your collection while having a good time with other players.

Booster Draft:

     Grab three to seven of your friends, you get three booster packs each and sit down at a table. At the start of the draft each player picks up a pack, opens it up and pulls out a card that they want then passes the rest of the cards to their left. This continues until all of the cards are drafted then the second pack is opened and the process starts again until all of the cards in all three packs have been drafted. Once all the cards have been drafted each player takes the cards they picked and then builds a deck out of them. Each deck must contain at least 40 cards.

Constructed Play:

     When you have built a quality deck then you should look into some constructed play. There are many different variants in constructed each one only allowing certain cards to be played. Decks must contain at least 60 cards and no more than four copies of any card, not including basic lands.

Standard:

     This format only uses the newest sets. The current block, the block that was released the previous October, and the most recent core set are all that are allowed to be played in a Standard deck. This is the most common format and Standard events can be found year round.

Block Constructed:

     This format uses only cards from a single block. These tournaments usually take their name from the first set in the block, i.e. Innistrad, Dark Ascension and the Avacyn Restored sets make up the Innistrad block.

Extended:

     This format includes all the sets legal in the Standard format and all expansions/core sets from the past four years.

Modern:

     This format allows all cards printed since the modern card frame was introduced in Eighth Edition and the Mirrodin Block.

Vintage:

     If you have a collection of cards that dates back from the first release in 1993, this is the format for you. Every single card ever printed is allowed in this format.

Legacy:

     This format is very similar to Vintage but some cards are not allowed.

Two-Headed Giant:

     If you have ever wanted to play with an ally then you may want to look into this format. A team of two players play against another team of two and you can choose whether you can to play in either Constructed or Limited. Both teams start with 30 life and each team shares a turn.

Another thing to note about these formats is that some specific cards are either banned or restricted to one card per deck. Here is a list (provided by Wizards of the Coast) of these cards, make sure you adhere to these rules or you may be disqualified from a tournament for having them in a deck.