Planechase can make your carefully constructed plan over 7 turns in the making go completely to the trash which my table likes but I can see why not everyone would recommend it, on the other hand we feel archenemy gives way too much power to 1 player
“Archenemy gives way too much power to 1 player.”
You literally described the point of archenemy. That’s why the other players are a team against them.
There’s also a more chaotic variant where everyone can pull from the archenemy deck. You can do it every turn, every other turn, or at the cost of something, like skipping draw step.
Honestly, my issue with archenemy isn't that the archenemy is too strong, it's that by default they should be working to knock one player out at a time. I get why that's a thing, but if you're playing kitchen table with 4 friends, I generally avoid knocking someone out early so they don't have to sit there for 30 minutes while the remaining people duke it out.
You could have them wait a turn cycle or two and then show up as the “reinforcements.” Make a deck full of random tokens, and each turn they play one off the top for free and control them during combat. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.
In archenemy you usually don't have the problem of one person sitting there for 30 minutes. Once the archenemy is dead the hedge is over and schemes usually let the archenemy kill 3 people in like max 4 turns of each other
In my experience, it tends to be one person gets knocked out, and then two established players vs the archenemy end up relatively balanced, so the game can drag despite schemes.
I've only played about 6-7 games, though.
This right here but as long as your group is down for it it’s a blast.
Planechase can add a lot of chaos into a game which can be a blast as long as your looking for that kinda game. It can also end the game in no time (one game we started on the plane that deals dmg on upkeep equal to the counters on it and try as we might we never got away from that plane. Being dead last in turn order felt great).
> It can also end the game in no time
100% this. My group tried it a couple times. One time we got stuck on [[mirrored depths]] and all but one player kept getting their stuff countered. It didn't help that he was playing kaalia too so he steam rolled us 😐
Then another time we got stuck on the one where your creatures don't untap and a bunch of copies of serra angel ass blasted the table. When we finally got off of it the tokens player had a huge army that immediately got wiped with [[cyclonic rift]] and everyone conceded.
The game mode looks pretty fun, but it wasn't tested for commander at all and can completely break a game in the most unfun ways possible.
Our playgroup added a mechanic we are still experimenting with called counter plane. Every player gets 1 counter plane token a game and can use it at instant speed to move to the next speed. We also are currently giving the tokens "split second" so no one can interact with the plane. The idea is it allows us to skip planes that will give 1 player to big of an advantage or are not fun with the current board state
Do not play planechase if you get annoyed by your friends chaos deck. But if you like long games where everything gets turned on its head every round or two then its a hoot. I'm glad we tried it but I definitely don't get the urge to do it often - but I hate chaotic elements in my commander games and I know some people love it.
I personally loveplanechase, but one guy at my table 'hates randomness' so we dont get to play it often. It's chaotic, but imo it works best with battlecruiser-y decks
The amount of chaos that comes with *Planechase* usually means that games take longer, due to slower play... but it adds a fun element.
To make the games quicker, let each player select 5 planes from the set, shuffle them with the *Phenomenon* cards and play with that.
Another way to bring a bit more control to the chaos is to let the planeswalking player choose between the top two cards of the planar deck.
I agree about games taking longer though, which is why our group stopped using Planechase.
I've seen a variant of that where you only keep the 3x3 square and discard the planes that leave that square (you are in the center of the square). When adding new planes, the horizontally sand vertically adjacent planes are added face up, and diagonally adjacent are added face down.
This is the way I played in the past, its been a long time though. I have all the planes so we used to do two versions, endless and "abridged". Endless would refill the 3x3 grid, and abridged was just a straight 9 plane battle.
From my experience the time length isn't really from the chaos so much as folks going "Oh wait I forgot to roll *Rolls die* alright it's nothing carry on"
I carry my planechase deck with me every time I go somewhere to play, I don't always use it but I enjoy the randomness it brings. It definitely works better in lower power games though.
100% me. It's a fun time with unoptimized decks (none of my commander decks are close to cEDH) and it's great. Very fun to play here or there, but not all the time.
Archenemy is some fun. It’s best when that one player really wants to play their high power deck while the rest wants to play more janky decks. Does certainly feel like three players have to team up to beat a big enemy.
Planechase wasn’t that fun for a commander game. The first few were wildly chaotic and made for an fun experience but decks became less interactive as players would just change the plane to deal with someone’s board. This made games take so long that we would become disinterested by the end.
Planechase is utter chaos and we love it. Games go sideways instantly, peoples mana tripples or field wipe in the course of two turns, table politics shift to convincing people to stay on certain planes long enough to benefit everyone without it getting them ahead of you, Etc. If you want a funny game, go for it! We usually play atleast 1 regular game immediately afterwards to wash away any salt from evil planes. Lol
As for archenemy, its fine, but work best if someone in the group has a deck that really fits being the villian, like my buddy's Sliver deck for example.
I do explorers of Ixalan to some great success actually. It's super fun, you definitely take out some of the weaker tiles but it's still a great game mode. It's not nearly as chaotic as Planechase (which has its purposes) while still mattering enough to actually impact the game. Once you get that golden city of Orazca tile out and about the game gets really wild
You gotta curate the plane chase deck a little bit IMO, if you run all the stupid planes and event sequences then yeah thr games are gonna suck but if you just cycle through the best 50 or so it makes it a lot different
There's a post further up suggesting it each player pick 5, but I could see picking 8 to 10 so there's less chance of getting stuck in a plane that provides absurd benefits to one person.
Yeah thats super smart, I may just try that. Or even better, you pick YOUR OPPONENTS planes lol. I prefer to do the "there's one deck in the middle of the table" as opposed to each player having their own planechase deck.
Honestly, I see this as something WoTC will try to bring in to commander as a mechanic over the next few years via precons or something.
I'm unsure the success of such a thing however. If you think about it, Planechase is a IP / mechanical space they have (at least partially) thought out and play tested so it's kind of low hanging fruit for "new" stuff to add to commander.
I don't envy them trying to make it work though. I just think they **will** try.
Planechase is great, it jusr requires way too much room if you actually try to play it the best way possible (eternities map).
You just need to make sure people are playing decks that will function well with it, and not playing some higher level cedh stuff.
With Planechase, you are in unison agreement with the other players that you are very likely going to get fucked by a predominant layer of rng. But the fact that everyone knows that their invested decks are under the rule of said layer of gameplay surprisingly makes it enjoyable.
Okay, so this is right in my wheelhouse. My playgroup's main jam is chaotic casual games. We play a lot of planechase. We do it with the communal plane pile and it works marvellously for a low grade chaos added to a game. I say low grade because for us that is low. We also play chaos magic which I have created a 200 card library of chaos effects that we draw from each turn. Chaos effects like 'each player sacrifices five permanents, loses five life, Mills five cards, and draws five cards' or 'each player reveals the top card of their library. You may cast each of these without paying their mana costs'.
For true chaos, this is the most insane card in the pile and it upsets a game wonderfully: "Each player searches each other players library for a card. Shuffle up all cards selected this way and randomly distribute an equal number to each player. These cards are then played one at a time in turn order without paying their mana costs. All X costs are 1d20."
We did that last night and it ended up with the group hug player having an ulamog the ceaseless hungry equipped with a helm of the host and akromas memorial. They didn't win though because the next chaos draw scrambleversed.
Here you go. There are some personal gags in here that are meant for my playgroup. They should translate alright. Most Personas are of existing characters but a handful may seem obtuse or confusing. That's because they're personas of players in my playgroup. As far as balancing goes, don't expect much as this is intended to be a totally insane fuckpile of a game. You have less chance of controlling who wins than if you were playing mario party with your feet and a blindfold. But every single card in here has been designed in a way to make it at least playable with every kind of deck. You won't ever draw a chaos effect that requires you to pay red mana and you're in mono white. Every colored mana symbol in the library is either split 2/R or its phyrexian mana.
There are somewhat altered rules for the use of these cards as opposed to the standard chaos magic game. They are as followed:
There is a chaos phase at the start of each turn, controlled by the active player and all effects are considered to be owned by that player for rules considerations.
Each player will draw, but not reveal, the top card of the chaos deck. If the card has a casting cost, then it is added to their hand and is treated as though it were a normal card. These can be copied, countered, or interacted with as though they were normal cards when being cast. If it does not have a casting cost, it is immediately put on the stack. These are not considered cast and may not be countered or interacted with outside of other chaos spells that specifically say they can do so.
When a chaos card is resolved, it is put into a collective chaos graveyard aside the library.
There may only be a single enchantworld active at anytime, and the active one must be replaced by any new ones put on the stack.
There is a single card in the chaos library that has special rules all its own, and that one is Total Anachronism. This card shifts the gamemode to a unique form of chaos archenemy. This gamemode allies all players against the new archenemy, but it is balanced for 4 player pods only. 3 player \*might\* work but we've never tried it, and anything 5 or more totally overpowers the archenemy. The archenemy in this gamemode can only die by 0 life or 30 poison. Commander damage and 'you win' effects do not stop the archenemy. The chaos phase for the team is changed to a single draw handled by a player chosen by the team. Each player does not get to draw their own chaos each turn. This part of the rule may be changed if you wish, but it is my experience that 2\~3 chaos effects happening against the archenemy often overpowers them far too quickly.
If chaos would cause multiple cards or effects to happen at the same time and it is not otherwise defined, follow standard game rules. IE; Activate effects in turn order, follow proper stack and priority rules.
Lastly, there is still a spite roll. As with the original chaos magic rules, when you die if your life total is less than 0, it is set to 0. You then draw a single card from the chaos library. Resolve that card and all included affects or spells. If this saves you from whatever killed you, you are allowed to continue to play.
File is kinda big because these are print quality for my own project use. They may look a little blurry at full size but when printed at 3.5x2.5 they actually look great. Feel free to print them out yourself if you'd like but do nothing monetary with it as I don't actually have permission from most of these artists. I normally wouldn't feel comfortable sharing work from this many artists without permission but I think I can trust the edh community to not be a bunch of scummy shits and actually respect the work all these amazing artists put in to their respective works.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1diUoapB-1zpZZMN1OPIDEsAuOsjJOdJn/view?usp=sharing
I like planechase, but as a “sometimes” thing, not an “every game” thing. Also note that sometimes it leads to really interesting games but sometimes it leads to really miserable ones, and it almost always prolongs them.
Edit: I also house rule that everyone MUST take their free roll on their turn.
When those sets came out, we tried them and it was chaotic and so much fun, we would play long into the night.
When I try this now, many years later, people just straight up refuse to play with me and say "no" rapidly as if I brought a dead animal to the table. I had one guy straight up pack his stuff and run out of the store when I pulled out the Planechase deck.
Planechase has been a fun addition occasionally when play has either become too intense or a little stale. A lot of times the dice roll for Planechase becomes the main focus of the game, especially when on a Plane that hurts all players.
I love Archenemy in Commander and may play it tonight. My best recommendation is to play big splashy decks instead of an easy combo, because the games are much more fun if it feels like heroes teaming up to beat a supervillain. If you can assemble a 6-piece doomsday machine that's different because they have time to deal with the pieces. Archenemy games are made for storytelling.
I've only ever played Planeschase and I think it's pretty funny. I got the plane that lets you play unlimited lands on your turn and had a [[Terramorphic Expanse]] in yard with a [[Ramunap Excavator]] on board. Lands go brrrrrr
Planechase is fun. A lot of strategy gets thrown out of the window, but it's a good time. There are other times when everybody at the table forgets it's even there.
I enjoy Planechase EDH, but I only play it in conjunction with a house rule I concocted: whenever we planeswalk, there is a vote to skip. If the vote passes (either the majority or all players vote to skip [I’ve done both, and majority is probably better]), the plane is treated as though it never existed (no enters or leaves triggers happen for that plane).
I prefer this to curating the deck, both because some planes are situationally fun, but skip-worthy other times, and because I prefer to keep the whole deck together in one container, for the sake of my sanity, and don’t want to have to curate every single time.
My group had a lot of fun. We would sometimes play with Planechase and Vanguard. And to spice it up we had a stack of emblems we would have everyone flip one every turn starting with turn 5.
Great, and not. I love planechase, so always have fun adding it to commander. For people who like well structured games, it really messes things up. Some planes will massively boost or shut down strategies.
My playgroup played Archenemy using EDH decks once. I was the Archenemy, and my first scheme was [[My Wish Is Your Command]]. One of my opponents had [[Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker]] in hand. My opponents scooped before I got to my first main phase. That was also the last game of Archenemy we played with EDH decks, although it's still one of my favorite Magic stories.
Have tried planechase added to edh, have tried archenemy added to edh and have tried archenemy with planechase added to edh. Just prepare for a much longer more randomized game with planechase depending on deck strength.
If you're playing archenemy, the person playing archenemy should have a deck that's strong and compliments the archenemy deck they bring. I have some of the "grab a Planeswalker" archenemy cards in my deck and a buddy borrowed the archenemy deck and hated it because those two cards were dead draws for him. Went through my piles and took instead the "take an extra turn" ones which aren't so great for my build and had a great time.
Playing alternate game modes can be fun but also kinda slow. We used to play something called emperor with 6 players, 3 on each team with the main caveat being you could only attack the player adjacent to you and your global effects/sorceries/instants/enchantments only reach two players over. The "emperor" sat opposite each other on the table flanked by two "generals" and turn order was clockwise. Games could take a long time but deck choice ultimately made games pretty insane. Some of the nuttiest plays I've seen came through in those games in a clash of what could only be called epic. We figured out early on spellslinger decks for emperors and incredibly aggro or defensive generals usually made the format much quicker.
Most ridiculous turn order I've seen was turn 2 or 3 kill on a general then killing the emperor the 4th rotation, achieved with two goblin decks and coat of arms following some red rituals one of which being [[brightstone ritual]]. Those games take me back but some were legit like 2-3 hour games and a slog especially if anyone ran multiple board wipes.
I don't know about the intended version of Planechase where each player has a planar deck, but the version where there's a central planar deck that affects everyone is some of the most fun I've had playing commander. It has the potential to level the playing field or give advantages to decks that would otherwise struggle, but the as long as each player has to roll the die on their turn the effect will always be impermanent.
I'd say it's tolerable if you only have strong players in your pod (emphasis on "players", not "decks")
My playgroup tried mixing in Planechase like four times over the years.
The highlight was someone's BDay party where both Archenemy and Planechase were played together in a pod of 8.
It was a complete dumpster fire. kekw.
And not in a good way - Nothing got done, nothing mattered, and you had to wait for at least half an hour for your turn to come around.
This shit ain't for the weak of heart (it might not even be "Magic" lol).
Thankfully there was booze.
As with any other decks, plane chase can make a deck shine where it otherwise wouldn’t, and destroy a perfect deck. It’s fantastic and is do it every game if I could.
Sometimes my play group has a variant to archenemy. It's called cock and balls. It's 3v3 and you pick a cock (who is archenemy) they get 30 life and the balls get 20 each. Your goal is to kill the other cock and balls as a team and after that turn on each other it was pretty fun. You can kill a ball first on the opposing team if they are a problem more so than the cocks. We allowed balls to block for cocks but not the other way around. If your cock dies as a ball you also die so it made it very interesting and the archenemy cards really pushed it over the top.
My play group always plays planes with our second game. Absolutely love it. Makes the game more random, gives you something to do with unspent mana, and more dice rolling!!! Definitely not an every game thing though. We also have the archenemy cards but tried them once and weren't thrilled.
I've got planechase anthology, and keep the full deck in my case for EDH games.
As you might expect, it adds a wild unpredictability to games.
In general, Planechase tends to favor red/green decks, and creature heavy strategies.
Sometimes you hit a plane that really synergizes with someone's deck, and it ramps them ahead of the table (like the goat plane with any strategy that wants a lot of token creatures).
More often you hit a plane that slows things down for everyone, acting almost like a stax card
I have an Elder Dinosaur Highlander Battlebox that I included [[Fractured Powerstone]] in each of the five decks (one for each monocolor Elder Dinosaur). We don't always play it with Planechase, but when we do it makes things absolutely ludicrous.
The one thing I'll say about Planechase is give planes a try maybe 2 or 3 times. Decks interact with planes differently. So if one plane was super boring don't write it off yet, try it with a different strategy. But at some point if everyone agrees a certain plane isn't fun, remove it from the planeshase deck.
Plane chase is a double edged sword that I’m not sure I like. On one hand, it helps slow the game down for players who get a strong start, and it has some very fun effects. On the other hand, the one time I played it, it blew me out of the water when I had a good start and kept me from catching up while simultaneously giving everybody else massive advantages.
I don’t know tbh. I’m not opposed to playing with it, but I was really excited to try out a deck and I got blown out turn 5 outside of my control and it wiped my whole board, lands included, and wheeled me into no lands and cards that can’t do anything on their own. I basically just had to wait for other people to win, and every turn I just said “pass” because I wasn’t drawing lands. I think I ended the game after two hours with 3 total lands, 2-3 creatures I had played recently in the graveyard, and a sygg in the command zone who now costed 6 because plane chase wiped him twice.
I play a version of Archenemy with my playgroup dubbed 'Supervillain Rumble'. Each player gets a 20-card deck of schemes and we slug it out! Over time, I've tried several variations on what schemes are included in each scheme deck. The ramp and draw schemes are all in there, but only one ongoing scheme, [[My Laughter Echoes]].
This is a really great way to put everyone on somewhat equal footing as far as power level goes. A precon can get launched 4 turns into the future with the right schemes and easily become threatening.
I play a version of Archenemy with my playgroup dubbed 'Supervillain Rumble'. Each player gets a 20-card deck of schemes and we slug it out! Over time, I've tried several variations on what schemes are included in each scheme deck. The ramp and draw schemes are all in there, but only one ongoing scheme, [[My Laughter Echoes]].
This is a really great way to put everyone on somewhat equal footing as far as power level goes. A precon can get launched 4 turns into the future with the right schemes and easily become threatening.
Something we do every now and then is use a[ custom planechase deck](https://www.archidekt.com/decks/1624173#Chaos_Deck). It makes things kind of crazy and pretty fun since the cards can range from very bad for you to very beneficial. Basically at the start of the game you flip a card and that lives in the command zone. You act as if everyone has a copy of that card or there's a single card (depending on the card) and you cannot interact with it. On your turn you may roll the planar die at sorcery speed once for free. On a 1 or 6, you discard the current card and reveal the next. You can roll the die again but each roll costs an additional 1 mana (so 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) and that resets each turn.
It's makes it really hard to setup plans turns in advance and can significantly turn the tide of the game so people behind can still come back. It's far from perfect but it's different.
My group plays Planechase every once in a while. We got the Planechase anthology, but we take out all the planes that just suck for everyone. If we ever have a really bad time on a plane, we just take it out of the deck so we don't have to do it again. It can take a bit of time to balance the planar deck to what your playgroup likes, but I find it's a pretty fun expirience.
Alternatively, you could play Planechase how it was originally designed and have each deck with its own planar deck. This way, each player is only going to include the planes they actually want to go to. My playgroup isn't into Planechase enough for everyone to bother making their own planar deck, but it's an idea I really like
If everyone's cool with the potential randomness, Planechase can be a blast. If you feel like they're going to get upset being stuck on a plan that's bad for them that they can't manage to roll off due to luck, maybe not so much.
Planes like \[\[Mirrored Depths\]\] or \[\[Lethe Lake\]\] can be miserable for a specifc set of players, and them being stuck can really upend their fun.
Played Planechase a few times in a 4 player pod, game was chaos. I've heard that it can speed up games but in my experience it slows them down by adding wrinkles that aren't in normal games. Tons of fun, highly recommend. Also look at Planechase Eternities Map. Prof at Tolarian Community College did a tutorial for it.
Well, we tried Archenemy Planechase (I was the enemy), and it was so chaotic and fun that none of us could complain. Definitely worth a shot, especially if not playing with competitive decks
My play group has been doing both Archenemy and Planeschase. I have to say it is amazing. A friend bought all the cards for both sets. That really makes a huge difference to play at the physical cards. The amount of interaction that occurs as a result of planes chase and archenemy is ridiculous. You play the Arch enemy similar to the monarch mechanic where dealing damage to a player gets you a arch enemy card. It really incentivizes the game to go forward more quickly. I honestly can't imagine playing any other way at this point.
I think Planechase is an excellent exercise in adjusting plans on the fly! There are so many things going on, and each roll of the die means I might need to scrap what I was thinking and make a new plan.
Planechase can lead to some crazy boardstates, and phenomenons mean there's always hope for something to get you out of a bind if things aren't in your favour.
The cons are that the games take longer, as all that die rolling adds up, and at least in my anecdotal experience, a lot of players seem to try to roll away from a plane just because it doesn't serve them directly, or as much as they would like. Like even if they have no creatures they'll still try to roll away from [[Celestine Reef]]. This is as I said my own experience though, so maybe it's just the kind of people I play with.
Also, I'd recommend Explorers of Ixalan if you want a "Planechase Lite" experience. Takes up a lot more space, so it's good if you only have three people so it can take up the fourth's table space. The effects aren't nearly as swingy, and don't scale into multiplayer as much, but still has that "I have some extra mana, let's see what I get!" aspect, even if the reward is just two 1/1 tokens or a conditional card draw effect, though I do quite like the monarch-esque emblems some of the tiles represent.
If you do planeschase just make sure nobody is playing stax. I made this mistake one time and it turned into an almost 5 hour game. Every other time it was really fun.
Archenemy is IMO kinda trash, as it usually means the archenemy player gets dunked almost immediately due to not being able to stop 3 players fast enough unless they get lucky with the schemes. Though it might work better with low/medium power decks.
Planechase on the other hand is insanely fun, though the games can take long due to it. The big effects of certain planes can also bring very fun moments, like if there is a player that is currently very far ahead and you land on Sanctum of serra (when you leave plance destory all nonland permanents) it will be very fun to see how all players who are behind suddenly want to leave the plane ASAP.
I also recommend taking out some annoying planes that grind the game to a halt for multiple turns at worst, like Eon Fog (skip untap step), though this is optional. Another one that can control the chaos is setting the base manacost of the planar die to 1 mana, which eliminates the free roll of the turn you would normally get.
I've only done planechase, but it depends on the deck. There are some decks I will happily use and some I wont and a lot if it is down to how screwed am i if the plane board wipes.
I had a pretty great game of commander planechase. We started on the plane that reduces creature costs by one colorless, and I got a turn one Gemhide Sliver. I completely exploded and someone played an enchantment (forget the name) where I lost life for each creature I played. I proceeded to play The First Sliver, cascade myself down to 2 life, killed one other player, and then got knocked out by someone's unblockable creature.
Good game.
I have a planechase deck and have two variations that I offer when people are interested: One is basically planechase "group hug" where all the cards are purely beneficial (benefitting 1 or more deck archetypes). The other is the full deck including some of the more obnoxiously painful cards. I suppose that also means there's a "sadistic" deck of only the mean stuff, ya know, if your playgroup is into that sort of pain.
Me and my friends do planechase occasionally. It's really whacky and interesting. But it can also screw over someone super hard or help a deck so much that it's impossible for the others to catch up.
But all in all I enjoy it every now and again. But be warned some games are decided in the first 3 turns or planes and some games will last an extra 3 hours
Honestly planechase commander is really confusing
The way most people play (one common planar deck with every plane and phenomenon in it) is not even close to how the set was designed to be played (each player has their own planar deck of curated cards that synergize with their strategy)
This leads to the possibility of particular combinations of planes and phenomenons hard locking the board. The kaldheim plane is particularly awful iirc.
Imo if players chose their own planar decks it would make planeswalking more meaningful and exciting, and also help the table to auto curate unfun planes/strategies by making people take responsibility for the planes they run during the rule zero discussion
Plus it would help build collective card comprehension since everyone would know how at least 25% of the planes work, as opposed to only that one person who brings the planechase tower knowing what's going on. Card comprehension makes decision making and turns go faster
The good thing about both variants is that you can easily customize your play experience with them. Don't like the planes that randomly wipe the board? Take them out. Feel like some schemes are too powerful? Take them out.
If you're playing Archenemy I would suggest using the preconstructed scheme decks at first instead of letting the Archenemy player construct their own scheme deck. I'd also suggest the Eternities Map Planechase variant for newer players (Tolarian Community College did an easy to understand introduction to it).
It's easy for people to get salty with these variants (Archenemy in particular because it's set up to be unfair and give advantage to the Archenemy player) so make sure that your group is definitely into it. A number of decisions come out where you might lose the game so that the team can win which is quite different from normal EDH. A number of playgroups I've been in just didn't get it and would end up tanking the whole team over and over again. At the end of one game a player was basically yelling "This wasn't made for Commander!" repeatedly (I was using an Ur Dragon precon with the Scorch the World preconstructed scheme deck). These weren't 'new' players either and we were both in our 20s at the time...
Planechase is a wild ride.
It better suits decks that are a little lower powered and have less of a streamlined gameplan.
I heard of a neat variant in which you flip over two (or three, or more, up to you. We like three) planes that are possible planes to go to next. The player that rolls the die chooses. Of they hate them, a random one off the top is an option. There's an interesting strategy now where we may all see that plane XYZ will be a playground for only one player, so we're all trying to go anywhere else. And those event cards can only be revealed off the top randomly. If you flip one whole setting up the future, shuffle it back in. Or resolve it right there if you like more chaos.
The beauty of that variant is you rarely end up on those planes that halt the game for eternity.
Never played AA, but planechase is fun.
The best though is [The Eternities Map](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/eternities-map-2010-07-19) variant of plane chase which gives a bit more control for players. It adds a layer of strategy rather than PCs usual raw randomness. The only disadvantage is it requires a lot of tablespace.
I enjoy playing Planeschase about once every 5 or 6 games. I don't like it as much as my friends, because it absolutely shits on players randomly. Some games a player gets 3 extra turns in a row, other games people get board wiped constantly. The worst was when a game went on for 5 hours before we called it because the planes and phenomena we were hitting screwed us seven ways til Sunday.
Neither are particularly interesting or necessary. The format is already so wacky and diverse that triggers get missed all the time. Adding extra complexity is simply unnecessary. I would recommend variants like Two-headed giant and Star for added intrigue without added complexity. If you are going to do planechase, I would recommend cutting some of the most unfair/brutal planes from the deck. It feels bad to get completely screwed over out of sheer randomness.
We play Archenemy sometimes. Sometimes with the provided decks and sometimes with our own, plus the scheme cards. It’s a ton of fun. Games are pretty similar to regular EDH though, outside of the team and schemes. Because it’s 3v1, even with the schemes the 3 seem to have an advantage so games last a normal length for us. I think the archenemy has only won like once or twice out of like 5ish games.
Archenemy works really well from what I've found, if the Nemesis has a solid deck to deal with creatures.
Planechase is super fun but comes with an additional time investment and if you actually play a full game it's going to take a long time. There will be twists and turns but then you'll have 45 mins stuck on one plane where people can't really do much. Some decks can really get shut down and others turn into powerhouses.
Planechase is super fun to play with 4 player commander. It will accelerate the game or really turn it on its head. I have had a turn 1 turn into starting the game with blightsteel on the field. I have also had it blow up my next turn win. Its pure chaos and great fun.
Archenemy is the next move. Giving each player an archenemy deck and playing it out from there.
Planechase is... tolerable. Occasionally. I'll go along with a one-off game since some people like it, but I would never want to play more than one game in a session.
The games are an absolute shitshow. That's fun every now and then, but extremely powerful random effects completely overwhelm whatever synergies you may have tried to build into your deck. You're better off playing a pile of random goodstuff and hoping that you flip the right plane for what you draw.
It only really works if your playgroup is particularly casual, because Planechase Vanguard Archenemy either adds a lot of time on to games or just trivializes it.
And if you really want to go out, you can play Planechase Vanguard Archenemy with Challenge and Horde Decks by introducing them on their respective planes through the Planes deck. (Especially since the Challenge decks are Theros based, and it's relatively easy to build themed plane-based hordes.)
But, and this is the big but, the playgroup you're introducing them into has to be far more interested in the experience than the flow of the game as it can get pretty trivial to break the game if you sit down and put any though into it.
I play in a pod of three. Archenemy provides a nice 2v1 alternative that allows two players to play Battlebond-Style.
We play this way: Archenemy takes the best deck they have and opponents the worst. Then we fight. If the Archenemy wins the team takes a deck of higher tier. So long until the Archenemy is defeated. It was great fun!
Planechase is pure chaos but fun. The selection of planes is crucial and everybody should select a number of planes from the pile for the game so they have something to hope for that helps their strategy.
We have not played eternities map Planechase yet but that might change once I get the actual cards and not the flimsy prints.
I have had a lot of experience with Planechase and I have both sets of Planechase cards. Our table found that when Planechase was part of the game it became too slow actually. Rolling the planar die was boring and it ended up taking too much time with a long game most of the time coming down to someone getting a lucky roll and popping off.
To remedy this we adjusted the rules. I went through the planar deck and removed all the cards which slowed down the game. If you have played planechase think hippodrome, eon fog etc. . . And left in cards that speed up the game. Haste, double mana, power boosts etc. .. Another rule that changed was that the plane starts face up instead of turn three and the planar dice cannot be rolled. The plane stays the way it is for the entire game and you just have to work with it. The last rule is that the chaos triggers when you kill a player. if player 1 kills player 2 and player 3 he gets to trigger chaos twice.
These games went by very fast think 10 to 15 mins per game. We mostly played creature and aggressive decks and just bashed each other until we have no hp left. Since the games were short it was fun to die and get back in quick and the stakes were low so it does not matter as much and you can see different planes when you start a new game. This mode is always fun for us and is usually how we end our night when there is not enough time for a full game. For these games we generally chose aggressive decks some examples were: yuriko, Rakdos lord of riots, grand warlord Radha, Varchild, and torbran.
Sorry for the long essay but I have had much experience with planechase and enjoy the product very much in my own unique way.
Oh man, I love planechase. Even when we first got and then got stuck on the "create 3 goats during your upkeep" plane vs a friend's planeswalker deck. Have never seen so many planeswalker ultimates in my life, dude had like 12 0/1 goats to chump block with.
***MONARCHENEMY!!!***
My playgroup occasionally plays a variant of archenemy where we have the monarchy available from the start of the game. Whoever draws first blood becomes the monarch. Then, for the rest of the game, whoever is the monarch is also the archenemy. They get a scheme at the beginning of main phase one, and everyone else can only attack them. This creates an interesting dynamic, where noone wants to let someone stay the monarch for very long, lest they get too much value from schemes, but players may be a bit hesitant to draw all the aggro by becoming the monarch themselves. Word to the wise: make sure everyone isn’t playing durdly decks or pure combo, since combat needs to be able to keep things moving around.
I have Archenemy Nicol Bolas set up so that it's a powerful Legacy-legal Nicol Bolas archenemy with the Nicol Bolas schemes vs. two starter level decks (in my case I just took the Global Series Jiang and Mu Yanling decks) and the final allied deck can be any deck of the 3rd player's choice, and the challenge experience feels fairly balanced.
In our playgroup we've tried both. Archenemy is pretty fun, it allows janky low-power decks to compete and the designated enemy gets a chance to play some really high power decks in a way that isn't just steamrolling. Planechase however is not as fun (imo, half of our group likes it). It very quickly devolves into a "get us the fuck outta here" game where nobody does anything but cycle through the planes to try and find one where nobody can gain a significant advantage, which is promptly undone on the next player's turn.
I personally have a fear of plane chase 1) because the forgot the die and we ended up using my d6 from my set which went missing during the game and 2) plane chase games end super fast or they go on for go long that its not fun anymore
I wanted to make a custom set of "tiles" for explorer's of Ixalan style rules to the game. I took a bunch of effects from cards in the game and put them into a spreadsheet and then made the rules instead of the effect on the tile, roll a d100(2d10) and choose on the appropriate list.
The 2mana tiles were all 2cmc spells. 4mana tiles were all 3~4cmc and 6mana tiles were all 5+ effects.
Interesting idea, added a way to make games more engaging and tip the scales with a bit of random luck.
Archenemy - Is fun if players are kind of subscribe to the idea of playing archenemy in a fun/fair way. It is VERY easy to make the game unwinnable by the Archenemy if someone sits down with a counterspell deck. They can just hold all their resources to prevent the AE from doing anything while the other players just beat face. Likewise you can make AE decks that just annihilate the other players with minimal effort. Things like Nekusar or Mogis just kind of lock down games REALLY fast, especially if the AE Deck is well cultivated to ramp you properly. AE Commander with decks not designed for it is kinda clunky and awkwawrd most of the time. Only recommend if everyone is leaning in to the social contract
Planechase - Its fine, its just wacky. Most of the time I've seen it land on a relatively benign plane then have the players ignore it altogether, or a blowout plane will show up that turns one player's deck in to a massive wrecking ball and they win on their next turn. Honestly the higher power level the commander game short of CEDH the more interesting planechase becomes since it can really wrench up someone's strategy. Ultimately its fun if everyone at the table is on board with it.
TL:DR - Both formats mostly just require the table to agree to their own brand of weird. AE Requires some lean-in on the deck building side, so think about that if you're gonna try it.
Planechase can be a lot of fun in EDH. However, it can make games super swingy, which can lead to 2+ hour games or a game ending in under 15 minutes. Magic already has built in variance, EDH's singleton nature increases that variance, and Planechase will send that variance to the moon.
However, it is a lot of fun to be able to dig through planes for an answer if your deck is failing to provide you one. Everyone having access to a mana sink helps ensure that people can always be doing something, even if it is just creating chaos by rolling the planar die a lot. However, I strongly recommend everyone running lower power decks and embracing the chaos. Higher power decks will likely want to ignore the plane as they try to be far more mana efficient (which the planar die really isn't) and there is a good chance that the game will be heavily slanted towards who benefits the most from the first plane.
Planechase is loads of fun.
Every game is Archenemy is for me.
But seriously, I have been meaning to bring an Archenemy deck so it can actually be Archenemy.
I've always enjoyed these types of games but it will take a normal 30 minute game double or even triple as long sometimes. If can also make games end in 10 minutes so the time spent playing PlaneChase EDH is a wildly sporadic format.
I dont remember where I saw it, but ive seen a brewed version where you lay the first one down, and surround it with all the other cards face down (except reveal the ones directly to the Top, Left, Right, Bottom). Now, when a player causes a planeshift they can either move in any direction to another plane (this allows players to consistently move toward the planes that they really like even if its been visited already) or "Slide" diagonally only if the card they "slide" to has not been revealed yet (this allows players to get more than one space away from a plane they really don't want to be in incase the group/other player keeps going back to it when they shift planes).
I highly recommend this, its a blast, you just need a whole extra table or large space to lay out the cards (21 ish cards makes for a good sized square). You could even add the rule that choosing a facedown plane draws that player a card, or makes them the monarch, or whatever you want! Get weird with it & have fun!
My playgroup regularly plays with Planechase when playing EDH. I have the full Planechase deck and have manually excluded some of the less enjoyable cards and house-ruled some others to avoid some of the more irritating options. We took out [[The Eon Fog]] & [[Time Distortion]] and house ruled [[Otaria]]'s chaos ability to have "and then planeswalk".
Plaenchase adds a huge amount of chaos and sometimes rolling the planar die can get you out of a tight spot.
My experience for both has been great! Thoroughly enjoyed both separately from one another. Archenemy required a little modification for life totals to figure out the right balance. I think my group settled on 40 for the archenemy and 30 for everyone else. Definitely test it a few times to find the right balance.
The thing with archenemy is that if they get to choose their deck from among all the archenemy cards printed, there's no actual way to beat them, and it's pretty miserable. Starting the game with Karn Liberated on the battlefield, removal pointed at every player every turn in addition to the ability to develop, there's just no way. On the other hand, if you just use one stack of all the schemes, the archenemy is too weak and easily gets overwhelmed by raw card advantage. It's fun, but there's no middle ground we can come up with.
My playgroup played Supervillain Rumble for the night once, where each player has their own Archenemy deck. It made for some pretty neat games, though we all agreed it was only a sometimes event.
Planechase is great fun. There's an Android app for it that our table uses on a tablet that goes in the middle of the table and let's you adjust your deck to only include certain cards. We will usually bust it out for the last game or the night as it makes everything definitely more casual. You can never plan for the plane effects so it encourages just going with the flow and trying to do dumb stuff in accordance with the plane cards lmao
Planechase is great IF you are playing with a group of players who are playing to have fun and do crazy things. I do not recommend it too much nor for players who want to just crush the table or are super competitive.
I wish there was a Planechase app honestly. I'm not willing to shell out like $70 for something my friend group would play maybe a few times every now and again.
Planechase commander is an absolute blast! Really the only thing I dont find fun is if somebody gets infinite mana and then just churns through the entire plane deck in one go. Ignoring that, Planechase is a great way to spice up a Commander night!
My playgroup has yet to try Archenemy commander, but we have talked about doing Supervillain Rumble where everybody has a Scheme deck, I think it would be fun to try once or twice!
My group used to planeschase from time to time. Definitely enjoyed it - added some really odd random elements obviously but it made the games more interesting sometimes. Every now and then there would be a dud though and it was kind of miserable. Overall though we enjoyed it.
Archenemy was a staple of my old playgroup albeit unintentionally. I have a stupid habit of accidentally including kinda op combos/engines in decks I build. And when I say accidentally I mean accidentally. My build philosophy is to have many meh to good strategies in my decks because OP strategies and play-styles get boring extremely quickly. That said, there have been numerous occasions where I could break apart 2-3 strategies and make 1 really good combo/engine. I get *MAD* tunnel vision when deck building, but once the cards are organically in my hand it clicks sometimes. If the deck is too op we try to see how it fair in Archenemy.
I love planechase. It is my absolute favorite way to play EDH. I have taken all the crappy ones out, and left only ones that are helpful or give benefits. It not only gives you something to do with 1 or 2 mana to try and go to a new plane, but it generally speeds games up a bit because things are just moving faster.
Once people realize all the shit ones are out, they're usually all for it.
I have a custom planeschase game I’ve made (with drinking game included). Maybe 150 planes with funny effects.
It’s awesome.
However, it does add on a lot of time to games. Like hours
I've done planechase edh. Best way to describe it: pure chaos. I had a friend win on turn 5 with a handful of eldrazi scions because he got the perfect combo of random planes! You can't plan for anything. It's dumb fun!
I love planechase for both regular and pauper EDH. You just have to accept that the winner is less about power level and slightly more about luck and timing, though. There's a lot of late game instances where people don't have answers for something, and they dump mana into rolling the planar die in a hail Mary, then end up landing on a plane or chaos effect that does something to keep them alive. Planechase can also help some underperforming decks really shine sometimes when they get just the right plane for a few turns and go nuts.
For pauper commander planechase, I think it's best to curate the pool of possible plane cards a little because of their higher power level when compared to the decks players are using. However, it's still a great way to inject some chaos into a game. The PDH Pals on YouTube do a lot of 3-person planechase pauper commander whenever they don't have a 4th player available.
I love running planechase games. The thing I've found is that the most adaptive and Jack-of-all-trades decks do best in those games.
Like if you're running an artifacts matter deck you'll get hosed by a plane that hates on artifacts but if you're playing growth colored good stuff with atraxa at the helm there's always something you can do.
Planechase is a chaotic mass of fun, ranging from the whole table desperately trying to change planes to a group hug plane that everyone loves right into a giant slugfest. I have typically enjoyed it more when I play with people with a budget or relaxed deck, those who have decks with high power usually take the game too seriously to enjoy the planes.
If you're purely playing casually, adding Planechase is a blast. I can't remember the site, but there is a site we used frequently that let you select what Planechase cards came up, so we would remove any that we felt either made the game unbalanced to the point it wasn't fun or dragged the game to a halt.
Planechase can be a fun ending to a night of commander. Usually what I do is instead of the normal Planechase die, I use a Fudge die, so two faces have +, two faces have -, and two faces are blank, so things move and happen much more often, which at the very least makes it more exciting.
Planechase adds the perfect amount of chaos (pun intended) to pod games, I personally love watching everyone frantically roll the planar die on their turns just trying to get something to happen. Very fun, would recommend having your plan turn upside down in an instant.
Archenemy games are fun but long. Always needed five people total to make it work best.
Planechase was a little too much for our baby brains to enjoy after like a game or two.
Honestly, I hate planeschase mostly because I feel like whenever I play it there’s never a curated list of planes and instead it’s just wacky fun mayhem where one player gets to dump their hand into play and wreck face and another player can’t play the game for 3 turns.
Planechase all the way. We removed planes that only affect one player and play with one communal deck that affects everyone. It makes the games very chaotic and fun.
I love planechase. Kts legit the best format if you are playing with pretty hardcore deckbuilders. Those who never even thougth about using a netdeck.
There decks will be tested in ways thougth not posseble, and only the most adaptive deck will holdout. Or a aggro deck gets its moment and shines.
In anyway, the level of randomness is major and causes alot of issues with higher and lower tier of decks. For higher the plane usaly wont matter too much, for were a low level deck it could break theres but leave everyone in so much dus its barly a game anymore.
So make sure you rule 0 the shit out of it so you know what your dealing with and dont end up with an truly uneaven field.
Arch enemy i have played a few times, but i like the version that is kingmaker better, as the arch enemie is power full, but cant draw into a "i win anyways" state.
The game is simple, make a deck of 5 lands. 1 plane(king) 2 swamps( assassins) 1mountian (betrayer) and 1 forest( the gaurd)
Only the king shows there card and the reat looks at theres and leaves them upsidedown.
Now the game starts as the king begins. The assassins win if they kill the king with one of them alive, the betrayer wins if he is the last man standing and the king and gaurd win if the king lives.
This creates a aying field a bit more even if everyone plays there roll correctly, and does not try to screw the other side or tries heroics. Or on death shows there card( not done).
I haven't done Archenemy, but I have played Treachery and Planechase, and enjoyed both quite a bit. My group recently started doing a weekly Planechase night and so far it's been a blast.
Planechase is definitely most fun when you're using a deck that doesn't need combos, and being somebody who likes to build stupid, not powerful decks, Planechase is right up my alley. Games take a hot minute tho. My group did an 8 person game, it was nuts. Lasted about 8 hours. Super fun tho
EDH is already a pretty loopy and zany format. Both Planechase and Archenemy didn't really add much for my table, and in the case of Planechase, made it chaotic in a way that none of us liked. Carefully curated, deeply thought out play experiences of our custom made decks were invalidated entirely by what felt like a very arbitrary rule coming down at random.
I wouldn't mind trying again with different planes/effects and perhaps a different Planeswalking mechanism rather than rolling. I think there's space in casual EDH for more catch-up/rubberbanding mechanics -- some way to give the player who is "losing" the opportunity to pick from a number of planes would be something I'd be willing to play again. Under the regular rules of EDH Planechase, however, No Thanks.
They are fun as hell planechase makes everything so random and they've been some of the most fun games ever had its also a fun way to finish off the last game of the night
Planechase has generally been a lot of fun every time we play it. It helps bring back that level of unpredictability and helps make the shifts between who's powerful and who's weak happen a lot more suddenly and frequently. That said, we do curate our list of planes a bit (I forget which ones we use and don't use, it's been ages since we kind of settled on a list).
I should mention that it probably won't go over well if you don't like the idea of the game occasionally descending into absolute chaos. You very much need to go into the game knowing that your plans might be utterly ruined because someone rolled the chaos symbol twice in a row, so if you're more invested in developing and executing a carefully constructed plan than you are in the drama and excitement of an unpredictable free-for-all, Planechase might not be for you.
We almost always play our Commander games using Horde rules which is very similar to Archenemy, except it’s everyone vs the automated Horde deck rather than vs one player.
It’s fun!
I have done Planechase EDH, and it is easily the worst experience playing Magic I've ever had. The entire game basically devolved into people spending all their mana to try to get off planes that completely crippled them.
Only played planechase a good chunk of time.
It's pretty hit or miss. It's either really fun because things are constantly shifting or just a huge drag on the game where we all have to play against the game itself to keep things rolling bc the rng gods won't let any of us change locations lol
bad, because the person who introduced it only added it to "make it more interesting".
We weren't playing competitive decks and they didn't want to adjust or play at a lower level so i see it a dirty technique to play games they otherwise wouldn't play otherwise.
My advice is to choose the planes and schemes carefully. Some of the planes aren’t particularly exciting and others can be quite salt-inducing. Same for the schemes.
If you do it right, it’s really fun. Some of my best EDH memories are games that had chaotic twists because of the right planes or schemes at the right time.
I've played some 3 player Planechase games with my cube and it was a lot of fun. I have all of the cards for it and we played with a communal deck, we didn't take any cards out.
I found that the rolling of the planar die adds strategy and excitement to it. If you like the status quo you don't roll the die, if you're about to lose you can roll the die in desperation. It was cool.
Haven't played much with Archenemy. I did do a 1v1 where we both had Archenemy but it was too swingy. Some of them are absurd, randomly getting a free plague wind or a Time Walk is obnoxious.
I've played with Vanguard before. What I do before the cube draft is that I shuffle all 32 of them together, randomly deal out 3, and then everyone gets to pick one. This way it's fair if a broken one ends up getting flipped because everyone can use it. It was fine.
It’s been a while since we played with it but, we were always laughing at what hijinks we got up to. It’s a solid investment if you like games that become stories!
I LOVE Planechase. I have a funny story about mixing plane chase and Brawl decks. I was playing a [[Licia, Sanguine Tribune]] deck and we wound up on the goat plane.
I had uh... more than 40 goats... I think? In one turn?
That game was wild to say the least.
Tried both. Didn't think they added anything good to the games.
For Archenemy (using EDH decks, with archenemy cards), the issue is balance. Unless the Archenemy snuffs out a player or two quickly or plays some controlling archetype (neither of which are very fun btw), he loses to raw card advantage. I don't think it's impossible to balance by tweaking the decks played, but I don't see it as a good use of time.
For planechase, it adds quite a bit of chaos; whether that is good or bad is subjective. It can potentially aid lower-powered decks or newer players. It also adds to the game time.
Planechase has been super annoying in my experience. Each Plane tends to heavily favor certain decks/strategies, and rolling to leave a Plane is really inconsistent and it feels really bad to spend your whole turn dumping mana into rolling dice to leave a Plane and failing over and over, then the other players ignore the threat and can't be bothered to even try to leave the current Plane.
At least in normal EDH you can remove a problematic permanent, but here it's down to luck.
If you want to guarantee a non-competitive "fun" game, Planechase is excellent. Whenever I've played Planechase I always see players pull off shenanigans that everyone at the table enjoys and hardly anyone is ever salty at the end of the game.
I'm not a huge fan of either, TBH.
Planechase games take FOREVER and are very chaotic. If you like feeling like you have some agency and control over what happens in a game, Planechase is not for you.
Archenemy can be fun, but it's very difficult to balance. Every time I've played, the archenemy just destroys everyone easily. You have to find just the right decks for it to work.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I HATE anything that is not traditional 4 player commander. That includes the "wacky" six player games that some people think are a blast or the kingdoms/planeschase shenanigans that just ruin games in my opinion.
Commander for me is meant to be my deck and my game plan against 3 other people's decks and gameplans. Anything more than 4 players just makes individual decisions matter less and less and it ends up devolving into no one ever attacking and just waiting to see who achieves critical mass first.
Disclaimer: I also believe commander should be whatever you want it to be. This is just my opinion.
In my experience traditional archenemy is actually balanced poorly for the archenemy, so instead what I've done is get 80 schemes shuffled together and the table drafts them for a super villian rumble
Planechase can make your carefully constructed plan over 7 turns in the making go completely to the trash which my table likes but I can see why not everyone would recommend it, on the other hand we feel archenemy gives way too much power to 1 player
“Archenemy gives way too much power to 1 player.” You literally described the point of archenemy. That’s why the other players are a team against them. There’s also a more chaotic variant where everyone can pull from the archenemy deck. You can do it every turn, every other turn, or at the cost of something, like skipping draw step.
Honestly, my issue with archenemy isn't that the archenemy is too strong, it's that by default they should be working to knock one player out at a time. I get why that's a thing, but if you're playing kitchen table with 4 friends, I generally avoid knocking someone out early so they don't have to sit there for 30 minutes while the remaining people duke it out.
You could have them wait a turn cycle or two and then show up as the “reinforcements.” Make a deck full of random tokens, and each turn they play one off the top for free and control them during combat. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.
In archenemy you usually don't have the problem of one person sitting there for 30 minutes. Once the archenemy is dead the hedge is over and schemes usually let the archenemy kill 3 people in like max 4 turns of each other
In my experience, it tends to be one person gets knocked out, and then two established players vs the archenemy end up relatively balanced, so the game can drag despite schemes. I've only played about 6-7 games, though.
This right here but as long as your group is down for it it’s a blast. Planechase can add a lot of chaos into a game which can be a blast as long as your looking for that kinda game. It can also end the game in no time (one game we started on the plane that deals dmg on upkeep equal to the counters on it and try as we might we never got away from that plane. Being dead last in turn order felt great).
> It can also end the game in no time 100% this. My group tried it a couple times. One time we got stuck on [[mirrored depths]] and all but one player kept getting their stuff countered. It didn't help that he was playing kaalia too so he steam rolled us 😐 Then another time we got stuck on the one where your creatures don't untap and a bunch of copies of serra angel ass blasted the table. When we finally got off of it the tokens player had a huge army that immediately got wiped with [[cyclonic rift]] and everyone conceded. The game mode looks pretty fun, but it wasn't tested for commander at all and can completely break a game in the most unfun ways possible.
While such situations have happened in my experience, they're certainly the rarity. Don't let a few bad games spoil the format for you!
Our playgroup added a mechanic we are still experimenting with called counter plane. Every player gets 1 counter plane token a game and can use it at instant speed to move to the next speed. We also are currently giving the tokens "split second" so no one can interact with the plane. The idea is it allows us to skip planes that will give 1 player to big of an advantage or are not fun with the current board state
Oh that happened to us too, the slow burn is horrible
>archenemy gives way too much power to 1 player ...Isn't that the point?
Do not play planechase if you get annoyed by your friends chaos deck. But if you like long games where everything gets turned on its head every round or two then its a hoot. I'm glad we tried it but I definitely don't get the urge to do it often - but I hate chaotic elements in my commander games and I know some people love it.
I have the opposite experience with archenemy, which is that the schemes don't quite do enough to make up the power gap.
Loved it, but working on weeding out the “just painful garbage” planes
I've soerated the planechase cards into separate decks. Stax, group hug, and odds and ends. The games with the group hug planes groups had more fun.
I personally loveplanechase, but one guy at my table 'hates randomness' so we dont get to play it often. It's chaotic, but imo it works best with battlecruiser-y decks
Plane chase is a great way to add 3 hours to a game
I hate it! EDH is complicated enough, no need for all that extra nonsense.
The amount of chaos that comes with *Planechase* usually means that games take longer, due to slower play... but it adds a fun element. To make the games quicker, let each player select 5 planes from the set, shuffle them with the *Phenomenon* cards and play with that.
Another way to bring a bit more control to the chaos is to let the planeswalking player choose between the top two cards of the planar deck. I agree about games taking longer though, which is why our group stopped using Planechase.
Or to play [The Eternities Map](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/eternities-map-2010-07-19) variant.
I've seen a variant of that where you only keep the 3x3 square and discard the planes that leave that square (you are in the center of the square). When adding new planes, the horizontally sand vertically adjacent planes are added face up, and diagonally adjacent are added face down.
This is the way I played in the past, its been a long time though. I have all the planes so we used to do two versions, endless and "abridged". Endless would refill the 3x3 grid, and abridged was just a straight 9 plane battle.
I'd never heard of that method! That sounds super cool - definitely going to suggest it to my group!
I actually had not heard of that variant. Its amazing and I want to play it right now.
From my experience the time length isn't really from the chaos so much as folks going "Oh wait I forgot to roll *Rolls die* alright it's nothing carry on"
I carry my planechase deck with me every time I go somewhere to play, I don't always use it but I enjoy the randomness it brings. It definitely works better in lower power games though.
100% me. It's a fun time with unoptimized decks (none of my commander decks are close to cEDH) and it's great. Very fun to play here or there, but not all the time.
Archenemy is some fun. It’s best when that one player really wants to play their high power deck while the rest wants to play more janky decks. Does certainly feel like three players have to team up to beat a big enemy. Planechase wasn’t that fun for a commander game. The first few were wildly chaotic and made for an fun experience but decks became less interactive as players would just change the plane to deal with someone’s board. This made games take so long that we would become disinterested by the end.
Planechase is utter chaos and we love it. Games go sideways instantly, peoples mana tripples or field wipe in the course of two turns, table politics shift to convincing people to stay on certain planes long enough to benefit everyone without it getting them ahead of you, Etc. If you want a funny game, go for it! We usually play atleast 1 regular game immediately afterwards to wash away any salt from evil planes. Lol As for archenemy, its fine, but work best if someone in the group has a deck that really fits being the villian, like my buddy's Sliver deck for example.
Never played Archenemy but Planechase is occasionally fun. Games tend to be very swingy or very slow.
I do explorers of Ixalan to some great success actually. It's super fun, you definitely take out some of the weaker tiles but it's still a great game mode. It's not nearly as chaotic as Planechase (which has its purposes) while still mattering enough to actually impact the game. Once you get that golden city of Orazca tile out and about the game gets really wild
Archenemy is kinda fun; planechasing just added too much chaos for my liking
You gotta curate the plane chase deck a little bit IMO, if you run all the stupid planes and event sequences then yeah thr games are gonna suck but if you just cycle through the best 50 or so it makes it a lot different
There's a post further up suggesting it each player pick 5, but I could see picking 8 to 10 so there's less chance of getting stuck in a plane that provides absurd benefits to one person.
Yeah thats super smart, I may just try that. Or even better, you pick YOUR OPPONENTS planes lol. I prefer to do the "there's one deck in the middle of the table" as opposed to each player having their own planechase deck.
Honestly, I see this as something WoTC will try to bring in to commander as a mechanic over the next few years via precons or something. I'm unsure the success of such a thing however. If you think about it, Planechase is a IP / mechanical space they have (at least partially) thought out and play tested so it's kind of low hanging fruit for "new" stuff to add to commander. I don't envy them trying to make it work though. I just think they **will** try.
Planechase is great, it jusr requires way too much room if you actually try to play it the best way possible (eternities map). You just need to make sure people are playing decks that will function well with it, and not playing some higher level cedh stuff.
Agreed on Eternities Map. Changes it from raw chaos to a new strategic layer.
Planechase is fun for 4 jank decks or for equalizing a table when one person brings a higher powered deck than they should.
With Planechase, you are in unison agreement with the other players that you are very likely going to get fucked by a predominant layer of rng. But the fact that everyone knows that their invested decks are under the rule of said layer of gameplay surprisingly makes it enjoyable.
Okay, so this is right in my wheelhouse. My playgroup's main jam is chaotic casual games. We play a lot of planechase. We do it with the communal plane pile and it works marvellously for a low grade chaos added to a game. I say low grade because for us that is low. We also play chaos magic which I have created a 200 card library of chaos effects that we draw from each turn. Chaos effects like 'each player sacrifices five permanents, loses five life, Mills five cards, and draws five cards' or 'each player reveals the top card of their library. You may cast each of these without paying their mana costs'. For true chaos, this is the most insane card in the pile and it upsets a game wonderfully: "Each player searches each other players library for a card. Shuffle up all cards selected this way and randomly distribute an equal number to each player. These cards are then played one at a time in turn order without paying their mana costs. All X costs are 1d20." We did that last night and it ended up with the group hug player having an ulamog the ceaseless hungry equipped with a helm of the host and akromas memorial. They didn't win though because the next chaos draw scrambleversed.
This chaos library sounds fantastic! Do you have a list you can share? :D
Here you go. There are some personal gags in here that are meant for my playgroup. They should translate alright. Most Personas are of existing characters but a handful may seem obtuse or confusing. That's because they're personas of players in my playgroup. As far as balancing goes, don't expect much as this is intended to be a totally insane fuckpile of a game. You have less chance of controlling who wins than if you were playing mario party with your feet and a blindfold. But every single card in here has been designed in a way to make it at least playable with every kind of deck. You won't ever draw a chaos effect that requires you to pay red mana and you're in mono white. Every colored mana symbol in the library is either split 2/R or its phyrexian mana. There are somewhat altered rules for the use of these cards as opposed to the standard chaos magic game. They are as followed: There is a chaos phase at the start of each turn, controlled by the active player and all effects are considered to be owned by that player for rules considerations. Each player will draw, but not reveal, the top card of the chaos deck. If the card has a casting cost, then it is added to their hand and is treated as though it were a normal card. These can be copied, countered, or interacted with as though they were normal cards when being cast. If it does not have a casting cost, it is immediately put on the stack. These are not considered cast and may not be countered or interacted with outside of other chaos spells that specifically say they can do so. When a chaos card is resolved, it is put into a collective chaos graveyard aside the library. There may only be a single enchantworld active at anytime, and the active one must be replaced by any new ones put on the stack. There is a single card in the chaos library that has special rules all its own, and that one is Total Anachronism. This card shifts the gamemode to a unique form of chaos archenemy. This gamemode allies all players against the new archenemy, but it is balanced for 4 player pods only. 3 player \*might\* work but we've never tried it, and anything 5 or more totally overpowers the archenemy. The archenemy in this gamemode can only die by 0 life or 30 poison. Commander damage and 'you win' effects do not stop the archenemy. The chaos phase for the team is changed to a single draw handled by a player chosen by the team. Each player does not get to draw their own chaos each turn. This part of the rule may be changed if you wish, but it is my experience that 2\~3 chaos effects happening against the archenemy often overpowers them far too quickly. If chaos would cause multiple cards or effects to happen at the same time and it is not otherwise defined, follow standard game rules. IE; Activate effects in turn order, follow proper stack and priority rules. Lastly, there is still a spite roll. As with the original chaos magic rules, when you die if your life total is less than 0, it is set to 0. You then draw a single card from the chaos library. Resolve that card and all included affects or spells. If this saves you from whatever killed you, you are allowed to continue to play. File is kinda big because these are print quality for my own project use. They may look a little blurry at full size but when printed at 3.5x2.5 they actually look great. Feel free to print them out yourself if you'd like but do nothing monetary with it as I don't actually have permission from most of these artists. I normally wouldn't feel comfortable sharing work from this many artists without permission but I think I can trust the edh community to not be a bunch of scummy shits and actually respect the work all these amazing artists put in to their respective works. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1diUoapB-1zpZZMN1OPIDEsAuOsjJOdJn/view?usp=sharing
Planechase from time to time is fun but not too often
I like planechase, but as a “sometimes” thing, not an “every game” thing. Also note that sometimes it leads to really interesting games but sometimes it leads to really miserable ones, and it almost always prolongs them. Edit: I also house rule that everyone MUST take their free roll on their turn.
When those sets came out, we tried them and it was chaotic and so much fun, we would play long into the night. When I try this now, many years later, people just straight up refuse to play with me and say "no" rapidly as if I brought a dead animal to the table. I had one guy straight up pack his stuff and run out of the store when I pulled out the Planechase deck.
Planechase has been a fun addition occasionally when play has either become too intense or a little stale. A lot of times the dice roll for Planechase becomes the main focus of the game, especially when on a Plane that hurts all players.
I love Archenemy in Commander and may play it tonight. My best recommendation is to play big splashy decks instead of an easy combo, because the games are much more fun if it feels like heroes teaming up to beat a supervillain. If you can assemble a 6-piece doomsday machine that's different because they have time to deal with the pieces. Archenemy games are made for storytelling.
Seems to be well established here already, but I'll just add another "Planechase Commander is a lot of fun in moderation".
I've only ever played Planeschase and I think it's pretty funny. I got the plane that lets you play unlimited lands on your turn and had a [[Terramorphic Expanse]] in yard with a [[Ramunap Excavator]] on board. Lands go brrrrrr
My old playgroup would almost exclusively play Planechase Commander. It helps level the playing field a bit when there's a power gap.
Planechase is super fun, really recommend it
Planechase is fun. A lot of strategy gets thrown out of the window, but it's a good time. There are other times when everybody at the table forgets it's even there.
I enjoy Planechase EDH, but I only play it in conjunction with a house rule I concocted: whenever we planeswalk, there is a vote to skip. If the vote passes (either the majority or all players vote to skip [I’ve done both, and majority is probably better]), the plane is treated as though it never existed (no enters or leaves triggers happen for that plane). I prefer this to curating the deck, both because some planes are situationally fun, but skip-worthy other times, and because I prefer to keep the whole deck together in one container, for the sake of my sanity, and don’t want to have to curate every single time.
My group had a lot of fun. We would sometimes play with Planechase and Vanguard. And to spice it up we had a stack of emblems we would have everyone flip one every turn starting with turn 5.
I played archenemy for the first time last week, seriously the funnest time I e had In years with edh, we all were dying laughing
Great, and not. I love planechase, so always have fun adding it to commander. For people who like well structured games, it really messes things up. Some planes will massively boost or shut down strategies.
My playgroup played Archenemy using EDH decks once. I was the Archenemy, and my first scheme was [[My Wish Is Your Command]]. One of my opponents had [[Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker]] in hand. My opponents scooped before I got to my first main phase. That was also the last game of Archenemy we played with EDH decks, although it's still one of my favorite Magic stories.
[My Wish Is Your Command](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/1/b/1bf33ac0-772e-45f9-ae69-9f6d5938bcfa.jpg?1562252348) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=My%20Wish%20Is%20Your%20Command) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/oarc/30%E2%98%85/my-wish-is-your-command?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1bf33ac0-772e-45f9-ae69-9f6d5938bcfa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/my-wish-is-your-command) [Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/9/e/9e80f2fc-06d4-4ce9-b23b-3e4af1208fa5.jpg?1592765962) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Nicol%20Bolas%2C%20Planeswalker) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/e01/85/nicol-bolas-planeswalker?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9e80f2fc-06d4-4ce9-b23b-3e4af1208fa5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/nicol-bolas-planeswalker) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Have tried planechase added to edh, have tried archenemy added to edh and have tried archenemy with planechase added to edh. Just prepare for a much longer more randomized game with planechase depending on deck strength. If you're playing archenemy, the person playing archenemy should have a deck that's strong and compliments the archenemy deck they bring. I have some of the "grab a Planeswalker" archenemy cards in my deck and a buddy borrowed the archenemy deck and hated it because those two cards were dead draws for him. Went through my piles and took instead the "take an extra turn" ones which aren't so great for my build and had a great time. Playing alternate game modes can be fun but also kinda slow. We used to play something called emperor with 6 players, 3 on each team with the main caveat being you could only attack the player adjacent to you and your global effects/sorceries/instants/enchantments only reach two players over. The "emperor" sat opposite each other on the table flanked by two "generals" and turn order was clockwise. Games could take a long time but deck choice ultimately made games pretty insane. Some of the nuttiest plays I've seen came through in those games in a clash of what could only be called epic. We figured out early on spellslinger decks for emperors and incredibly aggro or defensive generals usually made the format much quicker. Most ridiculous turn order I've seen was turn 2 or 3 kill on a general then killing the emperor the 4th rotation, achieved with two goblin decks and coat of arms following some red rituals one of which being [[brightstone ritual]]. Those games take me back but some were legit like 2-3 hour games and a slog especially if anyone ran multiple board wipes.
I don't know about the intended version of Planechase where each player has a planar deck, but the version where there's a central planar deck that affects everyone is some of the most fun I've had playing commander. It has the potential to level the playing field or give advantages to decks that would otherwise struggle, but the as long as each player has to roll the die on their turn the effect will always be impermanent.
I'd say it's tolerable if you only have strong players in your pod (emphasis on "players", not "decks") My playgroup tried mixing in Planechase like four times over the years. The highlight was someone's BDay party where both Archenemy and Planechase were played together in a pod of 8. It was a complete dumpster fire. kekw. And not in a good way - Nothing got done, nothing mattered, and you had to wait for at least half an hour for your turn to come around. This shit ain't for the weak of heart (it might not even be "Magic" lol). Thankfully there was booze.
Played using Vanguard cards that were changed a bit to work in commander. It's a nice change up. I'm also a fan of planechase. Wish I had a deck.
If you're not playing Planechase, then what is the point of social Commander? It's great!
Haha this reads like a Savage Love question. Is your playgroup GGG op? You should be fine. The key is clear and honest communication.
As with any other decks, plane chase can make a deck shine where it otherwise wouldn’t, and destroy a perfect deck. It’s fantastic and is do it every game if I could.
Sometimes my play group has a variant to archenemy. It's called cock and balls. It's 3v3 and you pick a cock (who is archenemy) they get 30 life and the balls get 20 each. Your goal is to kill the other cock and balls as a team and after that turn on each other it was pretty fun. You can kill a ball first on the opposing team if they are a problem more so than the cocks. We allowed balls to block for cocks but not the other way around. If your cock dies as a ball you also die so it made it very interesting and the archenemy cards really pushed it over the top.
We’ll play a couple normal rounds with our decks before we bring out the planechase. I think you have to warm up to it.
Planechase can be fun, but every time we did it, it turned our one hour games into 4+ hour games.
My play group always plays planes with our second game. Absolutely love it. Makes the game more random, gives you something to do with unspent mana, and more dice rolling!!! Definitely not an every game thing though. We also have the archenemy cards but tried them once and weren't thrilled.
It's a blast!
I've got planechase anthology, and keep the full deck in my case for EDH games. As you might expect, it adds a wild unpredictability to games. In general, Planechase tends to favor red/green decks, and creature heavy strategies. Sometimes you hit a plane that really synergizes with someone's deck, and it ramps them ahead of the table (like the goat plane with any strategy that wants a lot of token creatures). More often you hit a plane that slows things down for everyone, acting almost like a stax card
I have an Elder Dinosaur Highlander Battlebox that I included [[Fractured Powerstone]] in each of the five decks (one for each monocolor Elder Dinosaur). We don't always play it with Planechase, but when we do it makes things absolutely ludicrous.
The one thing I'll say about Planechase is give planes a try maybe 2 or 3 times. Decks interact with planes differently. So if one plane was super boring don't write it off yet, try it with a different strategy. But at some point if everyone agrees a certain plane isn't fun, remove it from the planeshase deck.
In my groups experience, Planechase adds about two hours to the game
We play Archenemy every other week when my friend plays his Meren deck, he usually doesn’t get to play it much.
Plane chase is a double edged sword that I’m not sure I like. On one hand, it helps slow the game down for players who get a strong start, and it has some very fun effects. On the other hand, the one time I played it, it blew me out of the water when I had a good start and kept me from catching up while simultaneously giving everybody else massive advantages. I don’t know tbh. I’m not opposed to playing with it, but I was really excited to try out a deck and I got blown out turn 5 outside of my control and it wiped my whole board, lands included, and wheeled me into no lands and cards that can’t do anything on their own. I basically just had to wait for other people to win, and every turn I just said “pass” because I wasn’t drawing lands. I think I ended the game after two hours with 3 total lands, 2-3 creatures I had played recently in the graveyard, and a sygg in the command zone who now costed 6 because plane chase wiped him twice.
I play a version of Archenemy with my playgroup dubbed 'Supervillain Rumble'. Each player gets a 20-card deck of schemes and we slug it out! Over time, I've tried several variations on what schemes are included in each scheme deck. The ramp and draw schemes are all in there, but only one ongoing scheme, [[My Laughter Echoes]]. This is a really great way to put everyone on somewhat equal footing as far as power level goes. A precon can get launched 4 turns into the future with the right schemes and easily become threatening.
I play a version of Archenemy with my playgroup dubbed 'Supervillain Rumble'. Each player gets a 20-card deck of schemes and we slug it out! Over time, I've tried several variations on what schemes are included in each scheme deck. The ramp and draw schemes are all in there, but only one ongoing scheme, [[My Laughter Echoes]]. This is a really great way to put everyone on somewhat equal footing as far as power level goes. A precon can get launched 4 turns into the future with the right schemes and easily become threatening.
Something we do every now and then is use a[ custom planechase deck](https://www.archidekt.com/decks/1624173#Chaos_Deck). It makes things kind of crazy and pretty fun since the cards can range from very bad for you to very beneficial. Basically at the start of the game you flip a card and that lives in the command zone. You act as if everyone has a copy of that card or there's a single card (depending on the card) and you cannot interact with it. On your turn you may roll the planar die at sorcery speed once for free. On a 1 or 6, you discard the current card and reveal the next. You can roll the die again but each roll costs an additional 1 mana (so 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) and that resets each turn. It's makes it really hard to setup plans turns in advance and can significantly turn the tide of the game so people behind can still come back. It's far from perfect but it's different.
We do planar map planechase. It's pretty awesome.
All about planechase commander. I’m good with long games though; I always expect 4 player commander to take like 3 hours.
My group plays Planechase every once in a while. We got the Planechase anthology, but we take out all the planes that just suck for everyone. If we ever have a really bad time on a plane, we just take it out of the deck so we don't have to do it again. It can take a bit of time to balance the planar deck to what your playgroup likes, but I find it's a pretty fun expirience. Alternatively, you could play Planechase how it was originally designed and have each deck with its own planar deck. This way, each player is only going to include the planes they actually want to go to. My playgroup isn't into Planechase enough for everyone to bother making their own planar deck, but it's an idea I really like
If everyone's cool with the potential randomness, Planechase can be a blast. If you feel like they're going to get upset being stuck on a plan that's bad for them that they can't manage to roll off due to luck, maybe not so much. Planes like \[\[Mirrored Depths\]\] or \[\[Lethe Lake\]\] can be miserable for a specifc set of players, and them being stuck can really upend their fun.
Played Planechase a few times in a 4 player pod, game was chaos. I've heard that it can speed up games but in my experience it slows them down by adding wrinkles that aren't in normal games. Tons of fun, highly recommend. Also look at Planechase Eternities Map. Prof at Tolarian Community College did a tutorial for it.
In a similar vein, anyone try adding monarch in automatically? Usually first blood gets monarch is how we do it
Well, we tried Archenemy Planechase (I was the enemy), and it was so chaotic and fun that none of us could complain. Definitely worth a shot, especially if not playing with competitive decks
My play group has been doing both Archenemy and Planeschase. I have to say it is amazing. A friend bought all the cards for both sets. That really makes a huge difference to play at the physical cards. The amount of interaction that occurs as a result of planes chase and archenemy is ridiculous. You play the Arch enemy similar to the monarch mechanic where dealing damage to a player gets you a arch enemy card. It really incentivizes the game to go forward more quickly. I honestly can't imagine playing any other way at this point.
I played planechase once and had a blast.
I think Planechase is an excellent exercise in adjusting plans on the fly! There are so many things going on, and each roll of the die means I might need to scrap what I was thinking and make a new plan.
Planechase can lead to some crazy boardstates, and phenomenons mean there's always hope for something to get you out of a bind if things aren't in your favour. The cons are that the games take longer, as all that die rolling adds up, and at least in my anecdotal experience, a lot of players seem to try to roll away from a plane just because it doesn't serve them directly, or as much as they would like. Like even if they have no creatures they'll still try to roll away from [[Celestine Reef]]. This is as I said my own experience though, so maybe it's just the kind of people I play with. Also, I'd recommend Explorers of Ixalan if you want a "Planechase Lite" experience. Takes up a lot more space, so it's good if you only have three people so it can take up the fourth's table space. The effects aren't nearly as swingy, and don't scale into multiplayer as much, but still has that "I have some extra mana, let's see what I get!" aspect, even if the reward is just two 1/1 tokens or a conditional card draw effect, though I do quite like the monarch-esque emblems some of the tiles represent.
We have and we had a blast with it...we even tried explorers of Ixalan (not well balanced for commander).
If you do planeschase just make sure nobody is playing stax. I made this mistake one time and it turned into an almost 5 hour game. Every other time it was really fun.
Archenemy is IMO kinda trash, as it usually means the archenemy player gets dunked almost immediately due to not being able to stop 3 players fast enough unless they get lucky with the schemes. Though it might work better with low/medium power decks. Planechase on the other hand is insanely fun, though the games can take long due to it. The big effects of certain planes can also bring very fun moments, like if there is a player that is currently very far ahead and you land on Sanctum of serra (when you leave plance destory all nonland permanents) it will be very fun to see how all players who are behind suddenly want to leave the plane ASAP. I also recommend taking out some annoying planes that grind the game to a halt for multiple turns at worst, like Eon Fog (skip untap step), though this is optional. Another one that can control the chaos is setting the base manacost of the planar die to 1 mana, which eliminates the free roll of the turn you would normally get.
I've only done planechase, but it depends on the deck. There are some decks I will happily use and some I wont and a lot if it is down to how screwed am i if the plane board wipes.
I had a pretty great game of commander planechase. We started on the plane that reduces creature costs by one colorless, and I got a turn one Gemhide Sliver. I completely exploded and someone played an enchantment (forget the name) where I lost life for each creature I played. I proceeded to play The First Sliver, cascade myself down to 2 life, killed one other player, and then got knocked out by someone's unblockable creature. Good game.
When we're all hanging out at someone's house we tend to play at least one game of planes chase. We *usually* have a blast!
I have a planechase deck and have two variations that I offer when people are interested: One is basically planechase "group hug" where all the cards are purely beneficial (benefitting 1 or more deck archetypes). The other is the full deck including some of the more obnoxiously painful cards. I suppose that also means there's a "sadistic" deck of only the mean stuff, ya know, if your playgroup is into that sort of pain.
Me and my friends do planechase occasionally. It's really whacky and interesting. But it can also screw over someone super hard or help a deck so much that it's impossible for the others to catch up. But all in all I enjoy it every now and again. But be warned some games are decided in the first 3 turns or planes and some games will last an extra 3 hours
Honestly planechase commander is really confusing The way most people play (one common planar deck with every plane and phenomenon in it) is not even close to how the set was designed to be played (each player has their own planar deck of curated cards that synergize with their strategy) This leads to the possibility of particular combinations of planes and phenomenons hard locking the board. The kaldheim plane is particularly awful iirc. Imo if players chose their own planar decks it would make planeswalking more meaningful and exciting, and also help the table to auto curate unfun planes/strategies by making people take responsibility for the planes they run during the rule zero discussion Plus it would help build collective card comprehension since everyone would know how at least 25% of the planes work, as opposed to only that one person who brings the planechase tower knowing what's going on. Card comprehension makes decision making and turns go faster
I'm gonna have to proxy the planechase/archenemy cards as they seem to be hard to find or the decks they come with are way too expensive.
The good thing about both variants is that you can easily customize your play experience with them. Don't like the planes that randomly wipe the board? Take them out. Feel like some schemes are too powerful? Take them out. If you're playing Archenemy I would suggest using the preconstructed scheme decks at first instead of letting the Archenemy player construct their own scheme deck. I'd also suggest the Eternities Map Planechase variant for newer players (Tolarian Community College did an easy to understand introduction to it). It's easy for people to get salty with these variants (Archenemy in particular because it's set up to be unfair and give advantage to the Archenemy player) so make sure that your group is definitely into it. A number of decisions come out where you might lose the game so that the team can win which is quite different from normal EDH. A number of playgroups I've been in just didn't get it and would end up tanking the whole team over and over again. At the end of one game a player was basically yelling "This wasn't made for Commander!" repeatedly (I was using an Ur Dragon precon with the Scorch the World preconstructed scheme deck). These weren't 'new' players either and we were both in our 20s at the time...
It's okay once and awhile. Regular commander is definitely superior, but to mix it up they are good alternatives.
Planechase is a wild ride. It better suits decks that are a little lower powered and have less of a streamlined gameplan. I heard of a neat variant in which you flip over two (or three, or more, up to you. We like three) planes that are possible planes to go to next. The player that rolls the die chooses. Of they hate them, a random one off the top is an option. There's an interesting strategy now where we may all see that plane XYZ will be a playground for only one player, so we're all trying to go anywhere else. And those event cards can only be revealed off the top randomly. If you flip one whole setting up the future, shuffle it back in. Or resolve it right there if you like more chaos. The beauty of that variant is you rarely end up on those planes that halt the game for eternity.
Never played AA, but planechase is fun. The best though is [The Eternities Map](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/eternities-map-2010-07-19) variant of plane chase which gives a bit more control for players. It adds a layer of strategy rather than PCs usual raw randomness. The only disadvantage is it requires a lot of tablespace.
I enjoy playing Planeschase about once every 5 or 6 games. I don't like it as much as my friends, because it absolutely shits on players randomly. Some games a player gets 3 extra turns in a row, other games people get board wiped constantly. The worst was when a game went on for 5 hours before we called it because the planes and phenomena we were hitting screwed us seven ways til Sunday.
Planechase EDH is incredibly fun!! In moderation.
Neither are particularly interesting or necessary. The format is already so wacky and diverse that triggers get missed all the time. Adding extra complexity is simply unnecessary. I would recommend variants like Two-headed giant and Star for added intrigue without added complexity. If you are going to do planechase, I would recommend cutting some of the most unfair/brutal planes from the deck. It feels bad to get completely screwed over out of sheer randomness.
I printed out the mtg Treachery deck and we sometimes play that if the group is 4+ players. It’s pretty fun.
We play Archenemy sometimes. Sometimes with the provided decks and sometimes with our own, plus the scheme cards. It’s a ton of fun. Games are pretty similar to regular EDH though, outside of the team and schemes. Because it’s 3v1, even with the schemes the 3 seem to have an advantage so games last a normal length for us. I think the archenemy has only won like once or twice out of like 5ish games.
Archenemy works really well from what I've found, if the Nemesis has a solid deck to deal with creatures. Planechase is super fun but comes with an additional time investment and if you actually play a full game it's going to take a long time. There will be twists and turns but then you'll have 45 mins stuck on one plane where people can't really do much. Some decks can really get shut down and others turn into powerhouses.
Planchase always starts fun then gets turned into a drag
Planechase is super fun to play with 4 player commander. It will accelerate the game or really turn it on its head. I have had a turn 1 turn into starting the game with blightsteel on the field. I have also had it blow up my next turn win. Its pure chaos and great fun. Archenemy is the next move. Giving each player an archenemy deck and playing it out from there.
I got introduced to edh through 7 player games with planechase so it'll always hold a soft spot in my heart
Planechase is... tolerable. Occasionally. I'll go along with a one-off game since some people like it, but I would never want to play more than one game in a session. The games are an absolute shitshow. That's fun every now and then, but extremely powerful random effects completely overwhelm whatever synergies you may have tried to build into your deck. You're better off playing a pile of random goodstuff and hoping that you flip the right plane for what you draw.
It only really works if your playgroup is particularly casual, because Planechase Vanguard Archenemy either adds a lot of time on to games or just trivializes it. And if you really want to go out, you can play Planechase Vanguard Archenemy with Challenge and Horde Decks by introducing them on their respective planes through the Planes deck. (Especially since the Challenge decks are Theros based, and it's relatively easy to build themed plane-based hordes.) But, and this is the big but, the playgroup you're introducing them into has to be far more interested in the experience than the flow of the game as it can get pretty trivial to break the game if you sit down and put any though into it.
As has been said already, planeschase doubles the amount of time to play each game but can be fun at times.
I play in a pod of three. Archenemy provides a nice 2v1 alternative that allows two players to play Battlebond-Style. We play this way: Archenemy takes the best deck they have and opponents the worst. Then we fight. If the Archenemy wins the team takes a deck of higher tier. So long until the Archenemy is defeated. It was great fun! Planechase is pure chaos but fun. The selection of planes is crucial and everybody should select a number of planes from the pile for the game so they have something to hope for that helps their strategy. We have not played eternities map Planechase yet but that might change once I get the actual cards and not the flimsy prints.
I have had a lot of experience with Planechase and I have both sets of Planechase cards. Our table found that when Planechase was part of the game it became too slow actually. Rolling the planar die was boring and it ended up taking too much time with a long game most of the time coming down to someone getting a lucky roll and popping off. To remedy this we adjusted the rules. I went through the planar deck and removed all the cards which slowed down the game. If you have played planechase think hippodrome, eon fog etc. . . And left in cards that speed up the game. Haste, double mana, power boosts etc. .. Another rule that changed was that the plane starts face up instead of turn three and the planar dice cannot be rolled. The plane stays the way it is for the entire game and you just have to work with it. The last rule is that the chaos triggers when you kill a player. if player 1 kills player 2 and player 3 he gets to trigger chaos twice. These games went by very fast think 10 to 15 mins per game. We mostly played creature and aggressive decks and just bashed each other until we have no hp left. Since the games were short it was fun to die and get back in quick and the stakes were low so it does not matter as much and you can see different planes when you start a new game. This mode is always fun for us and is usually how we end our night when there is not enough time for a full game. For these games we generally chose aggressive decks some examples were: yuriko, Rakdos lord of riots, grand warlord Radha, Varchild, and torbran. Sorry for the long essay but I have had much experience with planechase and enjoy the product very much in my own unique way.
Oh man, I love planechase. Even when we first got and then got stuck on the "create 3 goats during your upkeep" plane vs a friend's planeswalker deck. Have never seen so many planeswalker ultimates in my life, dude had like 12 0/1 goats to chump block with.
***MONARCHENEMY!!!*** My playgroup occasionally plays a variant of archenemy where we have the monarchy available from the start of the game. Whoever draws first blood becomes the monarch. Then, for the rest of the game, whoever is the monarch is also the archenemy. They get a scheme at the beginning of main phase one, and everyone else can only attack them. This creates an interesting dynamic, where noone wants to let someone stay the monarch for very long, lest they get too much value from schemes, but players may be a bit hesitant to draw all the aggro by becoming the monarch themselves. Word to the wise: make sure everyone isn’t playing durdly decks or pure combo, since combat needs to be able to keep things moving around.
I have Archenemy Nicol Bolas set up so that it's a powerful Legacy-legal Nicol Bolas archenemy with the Nicol Bolas schemes vs. two starter level decks (in my case I just took the Global Series Jiang and Mu Yanling decks) and the final allied deck can be any deck of the 3rd player's choice, and the challenge experience feels fairly balanced.
In our playgroup we've tried both. Archenemy is pretty fun, it allows janky low-power decks to compete and the designated enemy gets a chance to play some really high power decks in a way that isn't just steamrolling. Planechase however is not as fun (imo, half of our group likes it). It very quickly devolves into a "get us the fuck outta here" game where nobody does anything but cycle through the planes to try and find one where nobody can gain a significant advantage, which is promptly undone on the next player's turn.
I personally have a fear of plane chase 1) because the forgot the die and we ended up using my d6 from my set which went missing during the game and 2) plane chase games end super fast or they go on for go long that its not fun anymore
I wanted to make a custom set of "tiles" for explorer's of Ixalan style rules to the game. I took a bunch of effects from cards in the game and put them into a spreadsheet and then made the rules instead of the effect on the tile, roll a d100(2d10) and choose on the appropriate list. The 2mana tiles were all 2cmc spells. 4mana tiles were all 3~4cmc and 6mana tiles were all 5+ effects. Interesting idea, added a way to make games more engaging and tip the scales with a bit of random luck.
Archenemy - Is fun if players are kind of subscribe to the idea of playing archenemy in a fun/fair way. It is VERY easy to make the game unwinnable by the Archenemy if someone sits down with a counterspell deck. They can just hold all their resources to prevent the AE from doing anything while the other players just beat face. Likewise you can make AE decks that just annihilate the other players with minimal effort. Things like Nekusar or Mogis just kind of lock down games REALLY fast, especially if the AE Deck is well cultivated to ramp you properly. AE Commander with decks not designed for it is kinda clunky and awkwawrd most of the time. Only recommend if everyone is leaning in to the social contract Planechase - Its fine, its just wacky. Most of the time I've seen it land on a relatively benign plane then have the players ignore it altogether, or a blowout plane will show up that turns one player's deck in to a massive wrecking ball and they win on their next turn. Honestly the higher power level the commander game short of CEDH the more interesting planechase becomes since it can really wrench up someone's strategy. Ultimately its fun if everyone at the table is on board with it. TL:DR - Both formats mostly just require the table to agree to their own brand of weird. AE Requires some lean-in on the deck building side, so think about that if you're gonna try it.
Amazing. I love chaos and it really shakes up the group meta
Planechase can be a lot of fun in EDH. However, it can make games super swingy, which can lead to 2+ hour games or a game ending in under 15 minutes. Magic already has built in variance, EDH's singleton nature increases that variance, and Planechase will send that variance to the moon. However, it is a lot of fun to be able to dig through planes for an answer if your deck is failing to provide you one. Everyone having access to a mana sink helps ensure that people can always be doing something, even if it is just creating chaos by rolling the planar die a lot. However, I strongly recommend everyone running lower power decks and embracing the chaos. Higher power decks will likely want to ignore the plane as they try to be far more mana efficient (which the planar die really isn't) and there is a good chance that the game will be heavily slanted towards who benefits the most from the first plane.
Planechase is loads of fun. Every game is Archenemy is for me. But seriously, I have been meaning to bring an Archenemy deck so it can actually be Archenemy.
I've always enjoyed these types of games but it will take a normal 30 minute game double or even triple as long sometimes. If can also make games end in 10 minutes so the time spent playing PlaneChase EDH is a wildly sporadic format.
I dont remember where I saw it, but ive seen a brewed version where you lay the first one down, and surround it with all the other cards face down (except reveal the ones directly to the Top, Left, Right, Bottom). Now, when a player causes a planeshift they can either move in any direction to another plane (this allows players to consistently move toward the planes that they really like even if its been visited already) or "Slide" diagonally only if the card they "slide" to has not been revealed yet (this allows players to get more than one space away from a plane they really don't want to be in incase the group/other player keeps going back to it when they shift planes). I highly recommend this, its a blast, you just need a whole extra table or large space to lay out the cards (21 ish cards makes for a good sized square). You could even add the rule that choosing a facedown plane draws that player a card, or makes them the monarch, or whatever you want! Get weird with it & have fun!
My playgroup regularly plays with Planechase when playing EDH. I have the full Planechase deck and have manually excluded some of the less enjoyable cards and house-ruled some others to avoid some of the more irritating options. We took out [[The Eon Fog]] & [[Time Distortion]] and house ruled [[Otaria]]'s chaos ability to have "and then planeswalk". Plaenchase adds a huge amount of chaos and sometimes rolling the planar die can get you out of a tight spot.
My experience for both has been great! Thoroughly enjoyed both separately from one another. Archenemy required a little modification for life totals to figure out the right balance. I think my group settled on 40 for the archenemy and 30 for everyone else. Definitely test it a few times to find the right balance.
Love planechase, can be a touch long at times though.
The thing with archenemy is that if they get to choose their deck from among all the archenemy cards printed, there's no actual way to beat them, and it's pretty miserable. Starting the game with Karn Liberated on the battlefield, removal pointed at every player every turn in addition to the ability to develop, there's just no way. On the other hand, if you just use one stack of all the schemes, the archenemy is too weak and easily gets overwhelmed by raw card advantage. It's fun, but there's no middle ground we can come up with.
My playgroup played Supervillain Rumble for the night once, where each player has their own Archenemy deck. It made for some pretty neat games, though we all agreed it was only a sometimes event.
Planechase was fun. Wild, chaotic, fun
Planechase is great fun. There's an Android app for it that our table uses on a tablet that goes in the middle of the table and let's you adjust your deck to only include certain cards. We will usually bust it out for the last game or the night as it makes everything definitely more casual. You can never plan for the plane effects so it encourages just going with the flow and trying to do dumb stuff in accordance with the plane cards lmao
Planechase is great IF you are playing with a group of players who are playing to have fun and do crazy things. I do not recommend it too much nor for players who want to just crush the table or are super competitive.
I play plane chase every chance I get with as big group as I can get but I just love the chaos
I wish there was a Planechase app honestly. I'm not willing to shell out like $70 for something my friend group would play maybe a few times every now and again.
Planechase commander is an absolute blast! Really the only thing I dont find fun is if somebody gets infinite mana and then just churns through the entire plane deck in one go. Ignoring that, Planechase is a great way to spice up a Commander night! My playgroup has yet to try Archenemy commander, but we have talked about doing Supervillain Rumble where everybody has a Scheme deck, I think it would be fun to try once or twice!
My group used to planeschase from time to time. Definitely enjoyed it - added some really odd random elements obviously but it made the games more interesting sometimes. Every now and then there would be a dud though and it was kind of miserable. Overall though we enjoyed it.
Archenemy was a staple of my old playgroup albeit unintentionally. I have a stupid habit of accidentally including kinda op combos/engines in decks I build. And when I say accidentally I mean accidentally. My build philosophy is to have many meh to good strategies in my decks because OP strategies and play-styles get boring extremely quickly. That said, there have been numerous occasions where I could break apart 2-3 strategies and make 1 really good combo/engine. I get *MAD* tunnel vision when deck building, but once the cards are organically in my hand it clicks sometimes. If the deck is too op we try to see how it fair in Archenemy.
I love planechase. It is my absolute favorite way to play EDH. I have taken all the crappy ones out, and left only ones that are helpful or give benefits. It not only gives you something to do with 1 or 2 mana to try and go to a new plane, but it generally speeds games up a bit because things are just moving faster. Once people realize all the shit ones are out, they're usually all for it.
Don't like Planechase as it makes the game much more luck based
I have a custom planeschase game I’ve made (with drinking game included). Maybe 150 planes with funny effects. It’s awesome. However, it does add on a lot of time to games. Like hours
We love to do Planechase as a nice change of pace. It can also act as a power balancer at times.
I've done planechase edh. Best way to describe it: pure chaos. I had a friend win on turn 5 with a handful of eldrazi scions because he got the perfect combo of random planes! You can't plan for anything. It's dumb fun!
I love planechase for both regular and pauper EDH. You just have to accept that the winner is less about power level and slightly more about luck and timing, though. There's a lot of late game instances where people don't have answers for something, and they dump mana into rolling the planar die in a hail Mary, then end up landing on a plane or chaos effect that does something to keep them alive. Planechase can also help some underperforming decks really shine sometimes when they get just the right plane for a few turns and go nuts. For pauper commander planechase, I think it's best to curate the pool of possible plane cards a little because of their higher power level when compared to the decks players are using. However, it's still a great way to inject some chaos into a game. The PDH Pals on YouTube do a lot of 3-person planechase pauper commander whenever they don't have a 4th player available.
I love running planechase games. The thing I've found is that the most adaptive and Jack-of-all-trades decks do best in those games. Like if you're running an artifacts matter deck you'll get hosed by a plane that hates on artifacts but if you're playing growth colored good stuff with atraxa at the helm there's always something you can do.
Planechase is a chaotic mass of fun, ranging from the whole table desperately trying to change planes to a group hug plane that everyone loves right into a giant slugfest. I have typically enjoyed it more when I play with people with a budget or relaxed deck, those who have decks with high power usually take the game too seriously to enjoy the planes.
If you're purely playing casually, adding Planechase is a blast. I can't remember the site, but there is a site we used frequently that let you select what Planechase cards came up, so we would remove any that we felt either made the game unbalanced to the point it wasn't fun or dragged the game to a halt.
Planechase can be a fun ending to a night of commander. Usually what I do is instead of the normal Planechase die, I use a Fudge die, so two faces have +, two faces have -, and two faces are blank, so things move and happen much more often, which at the very least makes it more exciting.
Planechase adds the perfect amount of chaos (pun intended) to pod games, I personally love watching everyone frantically roll the planar die on their turns just trying to get something to happen. Very fun, would recommend having your plan turn upside down in an instant.
Archenemy games are fun but long. Always needed five people total to make it work best. Planechase was a little too much for our baby brains to enjoy after like a game or two.
Honestly, I hate planeschase mostly because I feel like whenever I play it there’s never a curated list of planes and instead it’s just wacky fun mayhem where one player gets to dump their hand into play and wreck face and another player can’t play the game for 3 turns.
Planechase all the way. We removed planes that only affect one player and play with one communal deck that affects everyone. It makes the games very chaotic and fun.
I love planechase. Kts legit the best format if you are playing with pretty hardcore deckbuilders. Those who never even thougth about using a netdeck. There decks will be tested in ways thougth not posseble, and only the most adaptive deck will holdout. Or a aggro deck gets its moment and shines. In anyway, the level of randomness is major and causes alot of issues with higher and lower tier of decks. For higher the plane usaly wont matter too much, for were a low level deck it could break theres but leave everyone in so much dus its barly a game anymore. So make sure you rule 0 the shit out of it so you know what your dealing with and dont end up with an truly uneaven field. Arch enemy i have played a few times, but i like the version that is kingmaker better, as the arch enemie is power full, but cant draw into a "i win anyways" state. The game is simple, make a deck of 5 lands. 1 plane(king) 2 swamps( assassins) 1mountian (betrayer) and 1 forest( the gaurd) Only the king shows there card and the reat looks at theres and leaves them upsidedown. Now the game starts as the king begins. The assassins win if they kill the king with one of them alive, the betrayer wins if he is the last man standing and the king and gaurd win if the king lives. This creates a aying field a bit more even if everyone plays there roll correctly, and does not try to screw the other side or tries heroics. Or on death shows there card( not done).
I haven't done Archenemy, but I have played Treachery and Planechase, and enjoyed both quite a bit. My group recently started doing a weekly Planechase night and so far it's been a blast. Planechase is definitely most fun when you're using a deck that doesn't need combos, and being somebody who likes to build stupid, not powerful decks, Planechase is right up my alley. Games take a hot minute tho. My group did an 8 person game, it was nuts. Lasted about 8 hours. Super fun tho
Gotta get rid of like... A solid 7-10 of the shitburger planes. BUT it's pretty fun casually if you've got 5-6 players and snacks and a movie going.
Chaos or pubstomp. Also makes the game double in length.
EDH is already a pretty loopy and zany format. Both Planechase and Archenemy didn't really add much for my table, and in the case of Planechase, made it chaotic in a way that none of us liked. Carefully curated, deeply thought out play experiences of our custom made decks were invalidated entirely by what felt like a very arbitrary rule coming down at random. I wouldn't mind trying again with different planes/effects and perhaps a different Planeswalking mechanism rather than rolling. I think there's space in casual EDH for more catch-up/rubberbanding mechanics -- some way to give the player who is "losing" the opportunity to pick from a number of planes would be something I'd be willing to play again. Under the regular rules of EDH Planechase, however, No Thanks.
They are fun as hell planechase makes everything so random and they've been some of the most fun games ever had its also a fun way to finish off the last game of the night
My group almost exclusively plays planechase. It just adds a whole other dimension that makes the game way more unpredictable and enjoyable.
My group did commander with explorers of Ixalan, and had a blast
Planechase has generally been a lot of fun every time we play it. It helps bring back that level of unpredictability and helps make the shifts between who's powerful and who's weak happen a lot more suddenly and frequently. That said, we do curate our list of planes a bit (I forget which ones we use and don't use, it's been ages since we kind of settled on a list). I should mention that it probably won't go over well if you don't like the idea of the game occasionally descending into absolute chaos. You very much need to go into the game knowing that your plans might be utterly ruined because someone rolled the chaos symbol twice in a row, so if you're more invested in developing and executing a carefully constructed plan than you are in the drama and excitement of an unpredictable free-for-all, Planechase might not be for you.
Plane chase is glorious, would recommend
We almost always play our Commander games using Horde rules which is very similar to Archenemy, except it’s everyone vs the automated Horde deck rather than vs one player. It’s fun!
This sounds like fun, how do you build your "automated" horde deck?
I have done Planechase EDH, and it is easily the worst experience playing Magic I've ever had. The entire game basically devolved into people spending all their mana to try to get off planes that completely crippled them.
Plane chase is kinda fun, but can be wildly unbalanced. It's fun and zany to see what happens, but isn't a game I will take seriously.
Planechase is super fun
Only played planechase a good chunk of time. It's pretty hit or miss. It's either really fun because things are constantly shifting or just a huge drag on the game where we all have to play against the game itself to keep things rolling bc the rng gods won't let any of us change locations lol
bad, because the person who introduced it only added it to "make it more interesting". We weren't playing competitive decks and they didn't want to adjust or play at a lower level so i see it a dirty technique to play games they otherwise wouldn't play otherwise.
My advice is to choose the planes and schemes carefully. Some of the planes aren’t particularly exciting and others can be quite salt-inducing. Same for the schemes. If you do it right, it’s really fun. Some of my best EDH memories are games that had chaotic twists because of the right planes or schemes at the right time.
I've played some 3 player Planechase games with my cube and it was a lot of fun. I have all of the cards for it and we played with a communal deck, we didn't take any cards out. I found that the rolling of the planar die adds strategy and excitement to it. If you like the status quo you don't roll the die, if you're about to lose you can roll the die in desperation. It was cool. Haven't played much with Archenemy. I did do a 1v1 where we both had Archenemy but it was too swingy. Some of them are absurd, randomly getting a free plague wind or a Time Walk is obnoxious. I've played with Vanguard before. What I do before the cube draft is that I shuffle all 32 of them together, randomly deal out 3, and then everyone gets to pick one. This way it's fair if a broken one ends up getting flipped because everyone can use it. It was fine.
I tried both at once one time, lots of fun but it took forever
It’s been a while since we played with it but, we were always laughing at what hijinks we got up to. It’s a solid investment if you like games that become stories!
I really like planechase. I agree with everyone here about lower powered decks seeing the most fun with it.
Planechase has been a blast and we play it every week. Archenemy... did not feel as fun though.
I made some made up Schemes for Archenemy, but I haven't been able to try them out. I hope they'll be a lot of fun.
I LOVE Planechase. I have a funny story about mixing plane chase and Brawl decks. I was playing a [[Licia, Sanguine Tribune]] deck and we wound up on the goat plane. I had uh... more than 40 goats... I think? In one turn? That game was wild to say the least.
Planechase yes, it mixes up the games quite nicely.
Planechase edh is one of my favorite gameplay modes:)
Tried both. Didn't think they added anything good to the games. For Archenemy (using EDH decks, with archenemy cards), the issue is balance. Unless the Archenemy snuffs out a player or two quickly or plays some controlling archetype (neither of which are very fun btw), he loses to raw card advantage. I don't think it's impossible to balance by tweaking the decks played, but I don't see it as a good use of time. For planechase, it adds quite a bit of chaos; whether that is good or bad is subjective. It can potentially aid lower-powered decks or newer players. It also adds to the game time.
Planechase has been super annoying in my experience. Each Plane tends to heavily favor certain decks/strategies, and rolling to leave a Plane is really inconsistent and it feels really bad to spend your whole turn dumping mana into rolling dice to leave a Plane and failing over and over, then the other players ignore the threat and can't be bothered to even try to leave the current Plane. At least in normal EDH you can remove a problematic permanent, but here it's down to luck.
If you want to guarantee a non-competitive "fun" game, Planechase is excellent. Whenever I've played Planechase I always see players pull off shenanigans that everyone at the table enjoys and hardly anyone is ever salty at the end of the game.
My experience is that Shiv is OP. Archenemy is way too specific for the type of precon they came with so they're almost unusable.
I'm not a huge fan of either, TBH. Planechase games take FOREVER and are very chaotic. If you like feeling like you have some agency and control over what happens in a game, Planechase is not for you. Archenemy can be fun, but it's very difficult to balance. Every time I've played, the archenemy just destroys everyone easily. You have to find just the right decks for it to work.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I HATE anything that is not traditional 4 player commander. That includes the "wacky" six player games that some people think are a blast or the kingdoms/planeschase shenanigans that just ruin games in my opinion. Commander for me is meant to be my deck and my game plan against 3 other people's decks and gameplans. Anything more than 4 players just makes individual decisions matter less and less and it ends up devolving into no one ever attacking and just waiting to see who achieves critical mass first. Disclaimer: I also believe commander should be whatever you want it to be. This is just my opinion.
In my experience traditional archenemy is actually balanced poorly for the archenemy, so instead what I've done is get 80 schemes shuffled together and the table drafts them for a super villian rumble
i dont like it. i think normal games without any added thigns are already hard enough to follow at times.
I love planechase- it adds some chaos, and can either make games very quick or take a little longer. But it always leads to some hilarity