My local playgroup has moved entirely to playing with proxies. It improved the experience immensely. Knowing that everyone has access to the same card pool and having the less financially stable members of the group able to bring multiple decks to the table rather than just one mediocre one has been a huge boon. Highly recommend anyone else do the same.
Agreed. Just make sure to have the discussion about what cards you shouldn’t proxy, even though you can (looking at you Jokulhaups).
Yeah, we laid some basic ground rules, everyone’s stuck to it, and it’s been great. Would be nightmarish if we hadn’t, though, I’m sure.
What were the ground rules?
We banned basic land destruction of unmodified lands (including mass land destruction that incidentally hits basics like Armageddon and Jokulhaups), some of the more oppressive stax pieces, mostly things that create locks where people can’t play the game, a handful of cEDH caliber cards, and certain types of infinite combos (2-card infinite combos where one card is your commander, for instance). One could argue that this creates an imbalanced environment by favoring strategies that take advantage of these rules, like ramp decks and lands strategies, and one would be correct - we’ve banned a lot of the normal ways to counter those strategies, but we maintain an overarching ‘Don’t be a dick’ rule that has so far covered it.
