Community

The link at the end of the article doesn't point to this thread. It points to Kelly's last article's thread.

It’d be pretty easy for an experienced player to get a little overbearing here.

A good fix for this if you know you're going to be playing partnered with an inexperienced player is to build an assist deck. For you, not them. You just fill your deck with cards like...

Fertile Ground
Deep Analysis
Walk the Aeons
Fertilid

Red and Black can help too by picking off enemy blockers holding your partner back.

(White, ironically, is terrible at cooperation. I have no idea why spells like Charge Across the Araba couldn't say "target player" in place of "you". If anyone in R&D is reading this, maybe they could fix the problem? )

Then what you spend the game doing is setting up your partner to win. Accelerate their mana. Draw them more cards. Protect their creatures. It's a team game after all. Their win in your win. But they'll probably enjoy it more this way.

(Aside: I also like playing this kind of deck on MtGO because it means every game is different, whereas with most decks you're looking to follow broadly the same plan every game.)

This was a great article, I found a lot of the ideas very helpful.

Casual play != chaos multi-player

I like where this article series is going. Kelley has spent a couple of articles discussing how best to keep the new players in your group interested and coming back. The cynic in me says that this is just pushing the "acquisition" theme we have heard from Wizards. However, if "acquisition" is going to help us get new players to our groups, and keep them there, it is a good thing.

Also, notice the end of the article: "What are your favorite formats? Do you play the same way every week, or try different things?" Kelley is asking you what you want the author of this series to write about. Let him know.

For my part, my group plays almost exclusively chaos. We throw in an EDH game every few weeks, and get a night of drafting in pretty much once per set.

Bruce

I like the article. It's always happen where I play. A new one come to play with us and he become overhelmed in older card that he don't know about. So what we do with the new one is play game that we are a number of 3 people. So the new one have only 2 people to think about and we can help him with older card and event mechanic of the game.

For the question :

What are your favorite formats? Do you play the same way every week, or try different things?

We usually do Bash (that how we name it lol). We are about 4 to 8 people playing in the same game with deck of average power. We don't play with our best deck so that game can have some round. With do some Emperor when the people like to, and we play a format that we have invented (maybe it is in the format of magic but i don't think so). The format is Legendary Creature Power.
It's really easy to play and a lot of fun for us because we don't build deck the same way in the format. (Oh and even newcommer can have a relatively easy time to build a deck in this format.)

It's a 40 deck card no less no more card. First of all you choose a Legendary creature with a casting cost of 5 or less(you can change the rule to say any Legendary Creature card accepted but the game tend to be to quick when we do that but it fun also). You will start with it in play in your first turn without paying it's mana cost. After that the deck cannot contain any Legendary card (except for the one that you start with but it doesn't count in the 40 card deck). Your not allowed to have any rare card in your deck either (the exception of the First Legendary Creature you have in play at the start). We take the list of restricted and banned card from the Vintage format for this type of game. We usually play 1 Vs 1 but we have also try 2 vs 2 and that was also fun. (you can even play 4 people eveyrone to themself but because it's more to help people to learn how to play then to make big game we don't usually do it)

What is fun about this it's that common and uncommon card are usually cheap to buy or easy to find so the only harder card to come by is your Legendary Monster. So new people that play magic have a relatively easy time to make a deck in this format. And also new people really love to have (exemple) and Akroma Angel of Wrath in the first turn lol (if you change the rule to be able to put any casting cost Legendary Creature you will see Akroma a lot of time so that why i sais 5 or less for the casting cost.). We play this format everytime we can to improve it.

Sorry for the long message but i just want to explain a format we love and also an easy one to play for newcommer and really a cool format to experience card that normally we would never see otherwise.