Initial Concept: players design their own commanders, build decks around them, and compete for some prize (or maybe not, who knows?). Please bear with me and continue reading, because I don't believe this statement by itself will produce any kind of reasonable tournament.
The idea for this came suddenly, and I've been recently working out bugs to see if this is even possible. It started as a brain child of a store owner and myself, and he left it to me to figure out more details. He has been having trouble getting people interested in my area for formats outside of Standard and Limited, and recently successfully held a Duel Commander tournament with a first place prize of a Commander's Arsenal (I didn't approve of the tournament at all: used an obsolete version of the "French" banlist which allowed some players to take advantage of new players to EDH who didn't know any better, particularly a judge who supported those rules in an effort to take advantage of people; the store owner didn't really know any better, and by the time I figured out what was going on it was the day before the tournament and he couldn't change anything). He was looking for other possibilities for tournaments when I happened to talk to him at the right time.
"Hey, would you mind talking to me again later about your spider dude?"
He caught me just as I was leaving one night, and while I had my car window rolled down we talked and came up with an the idea of holding a tournament based around players designing their own generals.
See, this spider dude is Ulanok, Center of the Web. With the help of some other players (old and new), I designed and created the art for the card. My wife only plays EDH, and threw the idea at me to build a spider tribal EDH deck--not as easy as you think. There are no legendary spiders in Magic. Well, I decided to make one.
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Ulanok, Center of the Web--1RGW
Legendary Creature--Spider
Reach
Spider creatures you control have Colony (
this creature has toughness equal to the total text toughness of Spider creatures you control).
Kinship--at the beginning of your upkeep, you may look at the top card of your library. If it shares a creature type with Ulanok, you may reveal it. If you do, put two 1/2 green Spider creatures tokens with Reach onto the battlefield under your control.
4/8
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Definitely strong, but due to color restrictions it can't be ridiculously taken advantage of (for instance,
Doran, the Siege Tower).
Unfortunately, this initial concept is very unstable. What is players create generals which basically win the game when they come out for a very low price? Well...that's a big issue. My first thought was to form a committee who oversees each design to determine the power level and become a staunch defense against over-powered cards. The committee would be able to reject any design through probably a simple majority, and then suggest changes to create a more balanced card.
However, I still don't think this is enough. The problem is, by the time players finally figure out how to make their general and go through the committee process of approval, we'll have blown through three to six months of time depending on the number of people interested. This is way too long for the store to wait around for a tournament. In order to cut down time, this is what I think needs to be done:
Conclusion Concept: a committee will design and agree upon a set number of cards specifically to be used as generals, and each player who participates in the tournament will either be given the chance to choose one according to their own play style, or given one randomly to compete with.
This will save on time for the design process and also educate the players in the area on what is a "good" card design and what is not. If it works out, then maybe another tournament allowing the same players to design their own can be explored. Again, this is only a concept. I'm trying to cover all of my bases. If there's sufficient logical argument against something like this working, it probably won't happen (it might not happen anyway). In the end, at least I have one general designed to play very casually with.