Rules

3-Card Blind Summary

3-Card Blind is an unusual MTG format where each player has a 3 card opening hand and no deck or sideboard. Games are “played” 1v1 in best of two matches (one match where player A goes first and another match where player B goes first), but the players who submitted the decks do not actually pilot the decks, instead, the games are played “automatically” under the assumption that both players have perfect information and will only make decisions that will lead to a win (or a tie/draw in the case where a win is not possible). The format will test your deck building capabilities as well as your ability to adapt to the meta. Please note: you still must pay for casting costs on cards as usual, so consider including 0 cost cards, a land, or cards with alternative casting costs.

Deck Construction

Your deck may include any three cards not on the Banlist. You may include the same card more than once (you could run three of the same card). You may only play cards legal in Vintage (this means no silver bordered cards, acorn cards, alchemy cards, cards not yet released, etc.). You may also play cards restricted in Vintage and may use multiples of those cards. There is no sideboard, which means that Companions may not start the game outside your deck and “Wish” cards will not be able to find any cards outside the game. In addition, you are not allowed to use dungeons (you may run cards that reference these objects, but they will not be able to bring them into the game).


Please only submit one deck per month. Each submission must be calculated by hand, so multiple submissions from one player will not be accepted.

Rules Nuances

The games are played exactly like a standard game of Magic (players begin the game at 20 life), except players begin the game with all 3 of their cards in their opening hand and do not lose the game for drawing cards while they have no cards remaining in their library (players will still draw cards as normal if a card does end up in their library for any reason). Players cannot mulligan. Players' decisions are made assuming they have visibility to all cards at all times and will always make decisions based on attempting to win or avoid a loss by forcing a tie/draw (a tie/draw is defined as a game state where no player has any action they can take that will result in a win). Cards that ordinarily require players to make decisions secretly/privately are done so publicly and are made in APNAP (active player non-active player) order. This means if player A plays Call to the Void, they must publicly announce which creatures they are choosing before their opponent is required to make a choice.


Please also note that players cannot create ties by intentionally looping an action to avoid passing the turn/priority to the other player. 


Randomness

If there is a card that would introduce variance/randomness into the game, the effect resolves in whatever way would be most favorable to the opponent of the player who owns the card introducing randomness rather than resolving it randomly. This also includes non-card sources of randomness, such as shuffling libraries. Example 1: Player A casts Hymn to Tourach on player B. Instead of discarding two cards at random, player B instead chooses two cards to discard. Example 2: Player A activates Elixir of Immortality and shuffles it and another card into their library. Player B chooses the order those cards are in after shuffling.

Monthly Scoring

Players decks will play all other players decks in a round robin style tournament. For every possible opponent, players play two games (once as the player going first and once as the player going second). For both their first and second game in a match, players are scored as follows:

Players’ total scores are converted to averages ranging from 0% to 100% and are compared to other players during that month to determine winners.

Lifetime Scoring

Players are also granted lifetime ranks using an Elo system. Elo systems are used to rank players based on estimated skills levels as well as determine how to weigh scoring matchups. Players begin at 1500 Elo, and the average player Elo will always be 1500. You can read more about Elo ranking on this Wikipedia page. If a player has not been active, their Elo on the leaderboard will begin to decay at the rate of 100 Elo per month missed beyond the first month missed (players in Exemplar League will receive this penalty immediately after the first month). A player can earn back all of their decayed Elo simply by participating again. Note decayed Elo is added back before games are played (meaning that the restored Elo is what will be used to determine rank changes for game outcomes).