http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/A ... eature/100

I posted this link in the games/tourney reports forum, but it seems to make more sense here. Author should be familiar to many on these boards.

Love this idea... We will be testing it in the near future.

I was excited by it as well. I'll need to see if I can goad some people into trying it. Preferably with EDH.

One major concern I have with it is space. I'm not sure where all y'all play, but none of the tables I've played seem large enough to support this.

A much lesser concern is the Naar Isle rule. I don't really think it's a problem, but it's strange that the plane behaves differently in this format than in typical Planechase. I guess it would also feel a little bit wrong to remove counters from Naar Isle while it was still visible, though. Again, this is not a huge concern. EDIT: The link in the spoiler below leads to a custom card, I thought I would add it here because there aren't any other real planes that use counters on them (yet).


Overall, this sounds really cool and I hope to try it out someday, although I'm super busy all the time these days.

I tried this and enjoyed it greatly. It is a much better system than just playing with random cards out of the deck. My only two complaints are that it takes a large table, and that EDH Planechase takes even longer than normal EDH, upping the average game length in our group from two hours to three.

100% agreed. The biggest advantage of the Eternities Map format is that it makes Planechase feel a bit less random which (in my playgroup at least) was the biggest criticism of the format; you have enough advance knowledge of where you will end up that you can apply a bit more strategy instead of simply "rolling blind".

The downside is it take up a LOT of space (we devote an entire separate table to it), and it does stretch out the games a bit more, especially when people keep jumping back to particular planes (Sanctum of Serra and Eon Fog come to mind). It's also better when all the players know what the planes do, otherwise you end up stopping the game while players read 4 planes before rolling.

I still need to try this. If I get to, I will probably remove a couple of the really obnoxious planes (like Lethe Lake) from the map. They're really just annoying, and I've played EDH games with planechase the regular way where we got stuck there for too long and it really ruined the game. Other likely cuts would be Naar Isle and Eon Fog.

Now this looks great! We'll be testing this scenario out the next time we play.

I really need to try this once I get the rest of my planes. This solves so many of the problems I had with Planechase.

We tried this over the weekend, although we modified it to removing the Planes 2 steps away due to limited table space.
The one player in our group who (understandably as he's been screwed over both times he's played Planechase) can't stand the format wasn't in attendance, but for myself I'm not sure it added enough variance to assuage his concerns.
Still, it was nice to have a bit of an option and not have everything left to chance.