Just Like Magic
August 10, 2024 at 07:34
Last night was my first evening of playing Magic: The Gathering in close to 20 years.
I’d played three or four games last summer, and half a game of Commander with a borrowed deck waiting for my BattleTech opponent to arrive a couple years ago; I bought some cards (but never played them) during Guildpact, and I last played regularly during Champions of Kamigawa- basically for about two weeks after the pre-release.
(Those of you who are up on Magic are probably nodding slowly- for the 98.4% of the world that comprise everyone else: Guildpact was spring of 2006 and Champions of Kamigawa prerelease was September of 2004.)
Because I wasn’t playing (and my friend Becca was), when I played those games last summer with her, I gave her my collection- all cards from ~2000-2006.
Then my friends started getting into Magic this year and were pestering me to play. My answers were always the same- I didn’t want to get back into the sort of sweatily-competitive headspace I’d been used to, where decks were precision-tuned lethal instruments (“Given the tools and opportunity, nerds passionate about their games will optimize the fun out of them” is a bastardization of a very relevant quote).
Then Bloomburrow was announced.
I have some history with the Redwall books- they’re how I met many people dear to me, including my wife- and Bloomburrow honestly read as a magical love letter to Redwall.
Then my friend mentioned that a local store, having cracked open several booster boxes worth of packs to chase singles, was selling boxes of ~800 commons for $15. Well, I knew about Pauper formats, and a little investigation revealed that there was a Pauper version of Commander, which had become very much the most popular way to play Magic since I was last in the game.
I figured there’d be about a hundred lands in the box of mixed types (since there’s a basic land in every booster) and I’d have at least a couple of every common in the set with 700 cards. Why not pick a colour identity- oh, yes, I do enjoy red/black- figure out the set’s mechanics around those colours, and supplement with common singles? It wouldn’t cost much- I’d looked at the prices of starter decks last summer, wondering if I wanted to get back in the game, and sticker shock ($70-100 Canadian) had bounced me right back out again. But this? This could be Magic on a Budget.
Well, I’d underestimated the game store’s greed- the Bloomburrow basic lands were pretty enough that they pulled them all and were selling them separately- but my friend had purchased a bulk pack of lands and just gave me the cards I needed to get started. He was also responsible for giving me around a dozen commons that he had duplicates of from outside the Bloomburrow set, plus a card to serve as my Commander (per Pauper rules, this is “any Uncommon Creature”; per Commander rules, “any Legendary Creature”- he had a card that was both Uncommon and Legendary, so fulfills both definitions). I rounded out the 100 cards necessary by buying around two dozen singles from my local store (not the same one who sold me the bulk commons).
My total costs were about $55, and half of that was a box and sleeves for my new deck.
Somewhere in all this, I read both the Commander philosophy document and the unspoken speech from the Commander launch in 2011.
The Philosophy document said the game was meant to be first and foremost Social, where every player prioritized every player having a good time (not just themselves, with inescapable doom clock decks or “No, counterspell” responses to every play). It said the game was meant to be Creative, where you could build thematic or intriguing decks.
It said the game was meant to be Stable, because, and I’m quoting directly here
“Commander players become emotionally invested in their decks through play and personalization, and that bond is an important part of the experience. Players who build Commander decks should be confident they will be able to play with them over long periods of time.”
This was me to a T. I loved my little red/black Mirrodin deck. I clung to it. Previous decks had never really resonated with me, but that one did, and when it rotated out of Standard- then effectively the only format played outside of home groups- it killed the game for me. As far as I was concerned, “Playing Magic” meant “playing with that deck and the joy I got from it”. I still had that deck when I played what I expected to be my final game last summer. I gave it to Becca, because I wanted the cards to be played, and not just sit on my shelf.
If this was actually a core philosophy of the game, and it played out, I wanted to play.
Then I read the unspoken speech, and it explained that the core of Commander isn’t winning, it’s entertaining. Yes, you’re going to try to win, but not by going for the throat. You don’t want to be The Punisher, shooting your enemies so they can never resist you again. You want to be Dr. Claw, setting up elaborate deathtraps that Inspector Gadget will fumble his way through (or sometimes, you’re Inspector Gadget, fumbling your way through your opponent’s similarly-elaborate attempts to kill you).
Discussing the goals of the format, the Rules Committee said:
“We want to make sure that the shark-infested custard you plan to dangle your enemies over isn’t emitting toxic fumes, because that would be awkward. If you are using Erayo, or Armageddon, or putting Curiosity into your Niv-Mizzet deck, you aren’t thinking about defeating your opponents with a laser mounted on the moon, and there’s no banlist long enough to stop you finding guns too powerful for the format. But if you heard the phrase ‘shark-infested custard’ and that gave you warm fuzzies, I think we have a format for you.”
and YES. YES please. I want to build a deck that uses a moon laser to spot targets for my sharktillery. Let’s go. This is it.
So I built a deck- 99 commons and an uncommon commander, remember- and I went to the games store last night, as I put it to some friends, ‘7/10 expecting to be whomped by a deck tuned to be horrifically effective wielded by someone whose reaction to the idea that Commander is built for the phrase “And now my orbital moon laser will spot a target for my sharktillery!” is a blank stare.’
That was… not at all what I experienced. First, my deck held up better than it had any right to- almost totally because it wasn’t as much a threat (certainly not so obvious a threat) as my opponents. I also experienced a game where… people were genuinely concerned that I was having fun. Nobody ever said as much in as many words, but the atmosphere was very different from when I used to play. In Standard Magic (“Standard” being one of the rulesets), the goal is only and always to win as fast and hard as possible. Giving your opponent a chance to do anything is a misplay.
Last night, several times, one of my opponents would show me a card he was about to play, with a conspiratorial grin. We would co-operate with each other just long enough for the Inevitable Betrayal.
“Alliance of convenience?”
“Sure. Standard terms?”
“You mean ‘as soon as one of us thinks he can get away with it we stab each other wildly in the back’?”
“Yep.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
I had an absolute riot. I discussed with my opponents going in that I had a lower-powered deck, and they acted in respect of that statement, dropping their Earth-Shattering Kabooms on each other- partly because they figured they could deal with me later and needed the stronger plays against the other powerful decks, and partly because they accepted that they could kill me out of hand but that wouldn’t be fun … for me.
“Okay, this deck is a bit… uh… bullshit, I’ll play my other one-”
“No! Show me the bullshit! Flex on the mortals! Let’s go! Horrifying monstrosity!”
Because that atmosphere was in effect, I got to play my deck and even got a couple supervillain moments of my own. I didn’t win, but I did (as I informed my opponents was my goal) go down swinging. And that’s not nothing.
Boy, I’m excited for next week.