Nice to hear that you still enjoy the game Mike (even if it's become more of a chore money-wise nowadays).
I don't like Duels much myself (so annoying that you have to ask for permission to stop the action and do stuff when normal Magic is founded on the principle of GIVING the game permission to continue).
The puzzles on the harder end are genuinely amazing, though. They could've made some more so it would've been a better value for money (the rest of the game is bad), but yeah. Good stuff anyway.
Since someone once said that God kills a kitten every time a booster is opened without using it for Limited, I present two ways to use single boosters with a friend:
1. Minimaster / Pack Wars
Needed: 2 boosters, 2 players, 6 of each basic land.
Setup: Both players open their booster (cards face down so that you don't see any), remove the token, shuffle booster contents and 3 of each basic land together.
Play a game of Magic! It'll most likely be hilarious and weird. The occasional Minimaster never gets old. It's a good way to save kittens' lives and make drawing those bad rares a little less painful (since they're often completely bonkers in Minimaster)
2. Danish Minimaster.
Danish is a format where:
1. Mana is infinite
2. X costs can be 3 at most.
3. All lands have Cycling and "When this enters the battlefield, return it to it's owner's hand".
4. Players have no starting hands and draw one card per turn.
Danish Minimaster saves you the fuss of having basic lands with you. Just remove the token from the booster and start the madness.
Note: Danish doesn't have centrally defined rules, so some players may play it so that lands can never enter the field at all, that everything you can do must be done (ie. pay kicker costs, play everything ASAP and so on), etc, but these rules are the ones I like most. They preserve the madness and original spirit of the format but do give room for some personal choice in when to play cards and whether to cycle lands with special abilities.
I also mentioned Pauper previously. It's a format where decks are built entirely out of commons, and every card that has ever been Common (according to Gatherer) is allowed (except for two banned cards:
Cranial Plating and
Frantic Search).
The format is ridiculously cheap compared to other Constructed formats: the most expensive cards are
Lotus Petal and
Daze at about 3-4 $/€ a pop and
Sinkhole at 20-30 $/€. Of those, Sinkhole is largely a sideboard card and easily substituted by much cheaper, if a bit weaker options.
Some might think that the format is rather dull, but nothing could be further from the truth. The format is surprisingly one of the fastest in Magic (Only Vintage and Legacy top it at the moment), enjoying a decent variety of different decks from mana-ramping control to green decks focused on
Giant Growthing Infect creatures for blazing fast wins to monoblack discard to red burn to
Tortured Existence-based graveyard shenanigans.
To see what's hot in tournament Pauper can easily be seen
here ("Event Coverage" box in lower right, check the Pauper Dailies).
Here's two tournament listings that demonstrate the diversity in a format that makes it easy to check cards you don't know yet:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/Ma ... rn/2608839http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/Ma ... rn/2608845EDIT: Incidentally, Pauper is also the one legit reason for using Magic Online. The commons are generally ridiculously cheap to buy from bots, and the Pauper tournament community active enough to fire about 2-3 twenty-man tournaments a day. Whatever rares you pull from prize packs (or, more often, the unopened packs themselves) can be sold to fund more tournaments, keeping your costs very low if you're good.
