For the second tournament there was a general rule about 'no infinite combos' and we were politely asked to not bring degenerate decks because its a casual game and novice players should be given a chance. Everybody was pretty cool about that and it went well.

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Originally posted by stab107:
I am in agreement with caquaa here. I have played EDH in several LGS settings and both the random achievements game play and the rewarding players for comboing the table out made me not want to return and play again. One of the local shops here runs a set of achievements that enables players to exploit it for packs via collusion. For example:

5 players start a 5-man pod, $5 each with 2 packs per player price pool.

Colluder A: "f I kill your dude here then you have this achievement."
Colluder B: "Yeah dude, let's get PACKS!"
Colluder A: "Ok, kill your guy."

This went down despite itbeing a very bad decision in terms of threat assessment. This then followed:

Colluder B: "Yeah! Got my fourth pack!"
Colluder A: "OK, I got my six. There are no more packs? OK, let's scoop and start another game and buy in for more packs!"

Are we playing EDH here or just pack farming? The thing with achievement systems is you have to be careful, as you could end up playing something that looks like it has some EDH qualities but isn't actually EDH.

One of my favorite casual groups had a rule at our LGS that every EDH game we started we would all chip in $2 for the shop. At the end of the game everyone had the chance to vote on best/most interesting/most fun player or best/most interesting/most fun play. We found that this encouraged interesting deck building and great interactions.

Keeping it casual and encouraging people to simply come out, play some cards and build up a community is what I recommend. Once it becomes about the achievements/packs/winning you lose (for lack of a better term) the spirit of the game.

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Believe me when I say this. Combo players will still get their packs, but they will have little to no chance of winning packs from the remaining 25% of the prize pool. I am intentionally designing my prize structure this way to keep exactly this scenario from happening.

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