NEW CASTLE, Del. — In a cigar smoke filled basement pungent with far too much cologne, four players sit at a table counting large bills under a single light. Each wears a gaze that is somehow threatening without saying a word. You may be thinking this is out of a scene from a low budget CW gangster movie, but in reality, it’s Magic: The Gathering’s hottest new EDH variant called “Stax”. Though it’s named after the deck strategy, it has nothing to do with it. Instead, four players sit down and begin counting their money. At the end of counting whoever has more wins. Simple enough, right?
“Why go through all the trouble of taking your money, buying the best cards which will win you games, buying sleeves, and risking their value by playing them?” format creator Marek Nunez said. “When it comes down to it, the deck with more money poured into it is going to win more often than not. It’s why you have so many discussions about power level. This is basically the same thing, but we come to the same outcome by counting out ‘Stax’ of cash.”
But how is this a Magic: The Gathering format? The format’s creator explains.
“Well, the answer is simple, cash used in Stax can only be used from the buying and selling of Magic: The Gathering products. As we all know, the real game of MTG lies in buying up product and leaving it sitting on a shelf in the hopes that one day, someone who needs the product to play the game will need to pay out a massively inflated price. Why shouldn’t they get an MTG format as well? It already kind of exists, I just put a name on it so I could create a twitch stream.”
It’s currently unclear how much of an impact it will have on other formats.
“It’s a game for a certain sect of the MTG sphere, mainly those speculators and finance enthusiasts. Honestly this is pretty smart since this adds incentive to move product to have more cash available to win games which means more product in circulation for everyone else.”
At time of press a Stax tournament is in the process of being set up, though security is a big issue so rumors say that it will take place inside a series of armored vans.