Hamilton Challenges

Below are some of the various challenges and a handful of deck lists that were played at these events.

Please note that some of these challenges were years ago so provided deck lists may have since grown beyond the $10 budget. When reading through these please note that when you see words like “Competitive” and “Aggressive” it often must be taken in the context of the format, though that some of these decks were quite the surprise and could end games very quickly. Here is a short list, click any one of the to be taken to the full rules and lists. Please not that deck lists provided met the budget at the time of the contest, but over the years as cards shift value many may no longer be valid Hamilton decks.

PG13 – All cards newer than Magic 2013.
Bird is the Word – Half the cards in your deck must share a chosen word in the name.
Diversity – Three copy limit and no card may share an original print expansion with another.
Oops! All Rares – Every card must be Rare as of its most recent printing.
Taste the Rainbow – Deck must contain an even mix of all 5 colors and basic lands.
Hammander – Commander Hamilton Style.
Structure – Every player builds with the same number of cards among types.
Maximus Deckimus Meridius – Six stacks of 10 cards, no Legend Rule.
Jukebox Hero – Build a thematic deck around a song of your choice.

PG13

The first deckbuilding challenge in Hamilton format that had a requirement beyond a flat budget constraint. It was designed more to explore some unappreciated bargains in Theros, Khans, and Zendikar blocks than any specific deck building challenge.
Rules:

All cards must have a print in Magic 2013 or later (Theros block forward)

Deck Lists

Demon Whip – Desecration Demon was cheap, and falling back on Gary was easy with black devotion. Two copies of Whip of Erebos was half the budget at the time but was a very aggressive deck.

Assault Formation – Khans had a good selection of “toughness matters” cards to work with. Gary was a star as well here, but a turn one Disowned Ancestor into a turn two Assault Formation was a consistent and painful start.

Bird is the Word

Probably the first deck to meet the flavor of Hamilton format. After playing a handful of generic “$10 deck” challenges we began to begin looking more into alternative options to ramp up deck building all while still falling within the $10 limit. Simply pick a word and ensure half your deck has cards with the word in their card name.
Rules:

Choose a word to build your deck around. 50% of your deck must include cards which share the chosen word in the card name (type line does not count).
Plurals are acceptable (Elf/Elves or Fire/Fires)
The chosen word is allowed be part of a different word (Flame/Flamecaller or Battlewise/Stonewise)
Sideboard cards are not counted when determining your chosen word percent limit. Only the deck you play must meet the 50% requirement.

Deck Lists

Chosen Word “Thrull” – I wanted to do something old school but it turned out embarrassingly bad. If the stars aligned and an early Death Pit Offering was dropped you had a chance…but not much. It was still fun as many players had to read each card as they had never seen them before and throwing out all sort of dated counters was a nice bonus.

Chosen Word “Dream” – Dream fracture was a cheap counterspell. Dream fighter and Dream Prowler were able to help control combat. Thakalos Dreamsower to lock down problem creatures. The dream play was Dismiss into Dream and use Gigadowse of Siren Song Lyre effects to clear the board.

Chosen Word “Mountain” – Basic lands technically count in this contest, so if you could build based off the one meeting that 50% mark would be cake. Harmless offering and Mystic Compass can ensure your mountain walk creatures always have a clear path to victory.

Diversity

By Diversity the ideas for challenges began to better develop. While earlier challenges saw decks with varied performance Diversity saw a steep climb in quality with many decks becoming more competitive.
Rules:

You may have no more than 3 copies of a card in your deck.
No card may share an ORIGINAL expansion appearance with any other card. For example if you chose Healing Salve as a card its original print was Limited Alpha. This would prohibit you from choosing any other card from the Alpha set. You could not then use Lightning Bolt and claim it from Beta as its original print run was Alpha and you wasted your choice on Healing Salve.
Using a different print of a card for cost purposes is acceptable so long as you preserve that cards original set. As the example above you may use the Classic Sixth Edition of Healing Salve which likely costs a penny or two so long as you count the card as coming from Alpha. In short, you are NOT required to purchase from the specific original set.
Sideboard cards counted towards this challenge. Your sidebaord could not have a card that shared an original set printing with a card in your main deck .

Deck Lists

Mono White Diversity – At the time this deck came in at $9.97 just barely squeaking by. Built around Quest for the Holy Relic and Argentum Armor. Every creature either had the ability to bounce something or a value ETB effect. This allowed you to quickly stack counters on Quest and get the Armor into play.

Bouncy Bant – Another bounce based deck. Idea was to turn on Angelic Accord. Keep life gain running and with Bower Passage effectively get an army of unblockable angels to finish the opponent.

Oops! All Rares

Every card being a rare or mythic rare didn’t sound easy. You expect the good cards to be costly and the cheap rares to be hard to build around. Still, this challenge turned out quite interesting and saw some surprising decks come to the table.
Rules:

Every card in the deck, outside basic lands, must have been printed at Rare or Mythic Rare in its most recent printing.
If a card was “upshifted” to rare in its most recent printing you were allowed to use the previous non-rare printing in your deck.

Deck Lists

Gruul Stompy – No secret tricks here. Beastcaller out the gate can land a Champion of Rhonas on turn three. Exerting from there could open a lot of disgusting options. A benefit of all rares meant a lot of good removal was not available so creatures were a safe bet.

Jund Weenies – Looks to drop Quirion Dryad quick for value with cheap costing creatures. Zurgo dash could help get Dryad big. Turn one Honored Hierarch was a amazing opener. Warden of the First Tree or Oviya Pashirir, Sage Lifecrafter gave some mana dump options to keep rolling late game.

Enchanted Cats – Just like in the case of removal an all rares challenge means disenchant effects were also less likely to show up. Mana Bloom is a surprising foundation. The ability to return it and recast gave a lot of benefit to cards like Herald of the Pantheon, Eidolon of Blossoms, or Ajani’s Chosen. Martial Law keeps some pesky abilities at bay. Together Forever adds to enchantment count as well as a great backup for an important creature on your board.

Vehicular Manslaughter – Not very complicated. Easy to pilot. Depala and Weatherlight keep drawing gas. Aethorgeode Miner and Solemn Recruit ended up being surprisingly solid. Heart of Kiran is a pretty good value in this format and puts up serious work.

Taste the Rainbow

This was one of the most intensive challenge when ran. The constraints lead to some very tight builds. You would find yourself constantly looking to build effects in the limited slots available and sometimes end up scrapping your deck entirely to change colors.
Rules:

No multi-color cards allowed. Mono-colored cards with an activated ability of a different color are allowed. Devoid cards with only one color in their casting cost are allowed.
No colorless cards allowed, this includes non-basic lands. Devoid cards count as the color indicated in their casting cost. (Basic lands are excluded from this rule).
Each deck must contain an equal number of basic lands among all five land types.
Each deck must contain an equal number of colored cards among all five colors.
No sideboard allowed.

Deck Lists

Buyback the Rainbow – Simple premise. Three sets of creatures (Quirion Dryad, Murmuring Mystic, and Guttersnipe) with a casting matters payoff. Cheap spells with buyback to abuse them. There are some good buyback cards taht were passed because double mana costs in a five color format were prohibitive. At the time of the event two copies of Mystic Speculation were more than a quarter of the deck price but I was never sad to have one in hand.

It’s Morphin’ Time – Designed around the morph mechanic. Morph guarantees bodies even if mana doesn’t play out. Rattleclaw Mystic was an all star. Gets you a creature on board, flips for any combination, and provides more than half the colors of the deck. Trail of Mystery keeps you fixed. Some basic landcycling also helps ensure the color you need is close at hand.

Pride Week – Ally deck. Building from each of the five colors. No special plan here beyond ally synergy with every creature drop. Most of the creatures are a little above curve but once you can land a couple on board you have access to a handful of dozens of synergies. An early Beastcaller Savant will generally fix you right up to begin dropping numerous allies each turn for value.

Hammander

With the popularity of the commander format this was only a matter of time until this was visited. While sounding tough on paper it was surprisingly easy to get rolling. Depending on your land count you could only spare about 15-17 cents per card to make budget. Thankfully there are plenty of VERY cheap options to dump in your 99 to save up some cash for a cohesive strategy.
Rules:

Commander rules are all intact from singleton requirement and color identity.

Deck Lists

Basandra – .

Grismold – A surprisingly competitive deck. Grismold hits the field and begins building tokens across the board, with plenty of ways to kill them and buff him up. A small package of creatures and enchantments to punish opponents for every death on your board allows you to build safe behind a wide board and chip everyone down, or go harder and try to swing out with a massive commander.

Wort – A Wort deck, designed around tokens and then conspiring to go wide fast. A few copied ramp spells can get you all the namana you need to reach critical mass then drop something like Hellion Eruption to go all out.

Structure

A challenge to limit all decks to fitting the same breakout of types. Each type line was limited and due to the deck size restriction outside of 4 wild cards no card could have more than one type (no artifact creatures).
Rules:

60 card Singleton
Deck must contain 10 Creature Cards.
Deck must contain 6 Instant Cards.
Deck must contain 6 Sorcery Cards.
Deck must contain 6 Enchantment Cards.
Deck must contain 6 Artifact Cards.
Deck may contain 4 wild cards (type line does not matter).
Deck must contain 22 lands. Non-Basics count towards deck cost, basic lands exempt from singleton rule.

The four wild cards were exempt from any type line restriction, and thus could be multiple types. Rules only care about type lines so cards that can change types, such as lands that can become a creature, were within the rules. Sideboard was allowed with any types so long as the structure of the deck was preserved.

Tempt the Dungeon – A mix of dungeon and The Ring synergies. Push through the Tomb of Annihilation as quick as you can to both get your Atropal as well as turn on all your dungeon synergies. Sam, Frodo, and Gollum were great pieces and a couple games were won by making Frodo the ringbearer so very on point.

Hail to the King

Maximus Deckimus Meridius

A very different challenge meant to dig into using too much
Rules:

Decks must contain 6 sets of 10 cards.
2 of the sets must be lands, if deck is monocolor you may have 2 sets of the same basic land. Non-Basic lands count towards deck cost.
1 of the sets must be a creature. The legendary rule is suspended for this challenge.
Remaining 3 sets may be 10 copies of any non-creature card you choose. You must have 3 unique sets of 10 for this.
Cards that core hand. graveyard, and library (such as Lobotomy) are banned.
Sideboard can be 1 set of 10 cards.

Colorless Vehicle – A wild deck to pilot. With no legend rule 10 Zabaz help create cheap creatures with modular keeping them relevant even if one dies. The remaining 3 sets are vehicles, with Bessie being the workhorse but both Plow and Kiran carrying some weight. As long as you can hit 2 Zabaz you can turn on Bessie, and in turn Kiran. Mech Hangar gives a way to get plow on easier, which in turn allows for Zabaz to have flying when attacking. Mobilized District allows for a lot of synergy, with a couple Zabaz crewing a Bessie, into a Bessie you find all your Districts can become free creatures to swing or further crew. There was always interesting lines to take playing this deck.

Famished Salt – Was actually not played but an effectively infinite combo using Psionic Gift and Famished Paladin. By turn 3 you could potentially enchant the paladin with gift, target with blessed defiance and combo off.

Illuminated Production – Get and Erdwal or two out, as a 3 toughness creature it offered good protection. Start dropping Hard Evidence. and when you have a couple of Confront the Unknown in hand you can swing for a ton of damage.

Jukebox Hero

One of the more subjective challenges. You choose a song, originally limited to classic rock but then opened up a bit to more genres, and build a deck that captures the theme of the song. This could be simply using cards named after lyrics or using cards thematic to a song, as long as there was a good argument for it fitting you were good to go. The creator of the challenge helped approve ideas to keep things in line, an as an additional fun challenge they created a play list of songs used as well as decoy songs that may have been related and the group tried to guess afterwards. The best advice for a challenge this subjective is embrace it fully and dive in, it’s a blast.
Rules:

Submit a song and premise for approval.
Deck must have some logical argument for how it relates to the song at hand.

Hearts on Fire – From Rocky 4, Heart flame duelist is the super star. Aggro Boros with plenty of life gain. It only came up a couple times but dropping Aria of Flame into a Skullcrack sure feels good.

Kiss by a Rose – A showing of how subjective the challenge can be, a Bat deck (from the film Batman and Robin). Essence Channeler is your go to, everything else revolves around cheap life gain and buffing it up. Originally looked to run Archon of the Wild Rose to boost the bats into bigger threats but it was found value usually won out and Zoraline was cheap enough to fit at the time.