draft v7 rules (and other updates)

It's been a little while, so I wanted to write up where the Arcane Labyrinth is at. The short version is that the rules got a solid streamlining pass (V7), and I built a couple of tools that make the format a lot easier to pick up and play. If you've bounced off it before because the setup felt like a lot, this hopefully makes it a little easier.

For anyone new here: the Arcane Labyrinth is a single-player "Dungeon Crawl" format for Magic. You control a Hero and their Vanguard (your deck), and you descend through a 100-card Labyrinth deck one room at a time, fighting your way down to the boss at the bottom. No opponent needed, just you, your cards, and the dungeon.

What changed in V7

Most of the V7 work was about cutting friction and making runs feel less swingy. The highlights:

- The dice are mostly gone. The old version had you rolling to decide what the Labyrinth targeted or which mode it picked, which slowed things down and made the dungeon feel random. Now there's a single rule, the Villain Heuristic: the Labyrinth always makes the choice that hurts you most. It's less to track, and was kind of the defacto rule already.

- The dungeon escalates properly now. You tag your Labyrinth cards into three tiers (Fodder, Threats, Horrors), and the deck reveals more cards per turn as you get deeper. So a run starts gentle and gets more difficult as the game progresses.

- I pulled the shop out of the core rules. It's still around as an optional module (the Merchant), but the base game is just Treasure and Food tokens now, earned at camp. A lot less to build and keep track of.

- Camp mechanic. Every third turn you make camp: roll for an encounter, then take one action (rest, scout, forage, rearm). It folds the old random encounters and the shop into one clean step.

- A few smaller things: Exhaustion is less punishing, there's a simple score so you can rate a dungeon and track whether you're improving, and the Vanguard is Singleton by default now (it fits the format really well, and it's a great home for all your one-of-a-kind bulk).

If you want the details, the full rules are up on the site here.

The Labyrinth Forge

This is the one I'm most excited about. A hurdle for getting started with this format is building the 100-card Labyrinth deck and tiering it by hand. It's a fun exercise, but it's a lot to ask of someone who just wants to try the game for the first time. The game is meant to attract people who like building decks, and want to do something with mountains of bulk, but it can be hard to do properly while learning the game.

So I built the Labyrinth Forge. You paste in a decklist (a Commander precon works great), and it does the work for you. It looks up every card, scores how dangerous each one is to your Hero, and sorts the whole deck into Fodder, Threats, and Horrors. It suggests a boss and mini-bosses, checks your deck against the guidelines, and hands you a print-and-play setup sheet. If you disagree with where something landed, you can drag it to another tier, click any card to see exactly why it was scored the way it was, and share a link to a dungeon you've built. Here’s an example of one of my old deck lists as a perma-link in the tool.

An easier way to read the rules

I also rebuilt the rules page. It's an interactive document now to, to hopefully make learning/references the rules easier. It has a table of contents that follows along as you scroll, game terms you can hover for a quick definition, and a Quick Reference panel you can pop open mid-game so you're not scrolling around hunting for the camp table. It all comes from a single source, so it's always current as I’m releasing rules changes.

Come play, and tell me what you think

Honestly, the reason I'm posting this is to hopefully solicit some player feedback. I love this format, but the thing that actually makes a game better is other people playing it and telling me where it breaks and whether or not they enjoyed it at all. So if any of this sounds fun:

- Try the Labyrinth Forge with a deck you already own.

- Skim the rules (they take about ten minutes).

- Come hang out in the Discord, or just email me at arcane-labyrinth@pm.me.

I'd genuinely love to hear how your runs go, what felt great, and what felt off. Thanks for reading!