River Landscape by Thomas Gainsborough (1768). Animar by Peter Mohrbacher.
2016 is coming to a close and my life has seen more change in the past 12 months than it has in a long time. I have stepped away from the LARP community I called home for decades, I am closing down the Minecraft server I've run for years, and I'm looking for more ways to get involved in a new hobby - Magic the Gathering. To that end, I decided to start a blog.
A year ago we had just gotten word that Myriad Games was closing down its Salem, NH location. It would be another month before we started up at NexGen Comics in Pelham. Since that time we've played an awful lot of EDH. As a practice post, and just for fun, I'm going to run down a few of my best memories of the past year of playing Commander.
Zurgo, Party Favor
Early in 2016 I was playing different decks every week. As a result, I was having trouble keeping track of what all my cards did and was not having much success in terms of consistently good performance. One week it would be Phenax, the next Marrow-Gnawer, then I would play something else. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and eventually I started staying with the same deck for an entire month.
One of the early month-long experiments I had was with my Zurgo Helmsmasher deck.
Big Z is indestructible on your turn, but he only has 2 toughness so he's a weak target and a terrible blocker.
There is a way to make him always indestructible - equip him with Assault Suit!
The suit give him +2/+2 and he can't be sacrificed but the big deal about Assault Suit is that on every player's upkeep you can give them control of the creature in the Assault Suit and he can't be used to attack the suit's owner.
Zurgo has to attack each turn.
What this means is that on every player's turn they have an indestructible 9/4 with haste that they have to attack with and can't use against you - and he is still doing commander damage!
In the game in question I was faced with four opponents, three of which had either a Kozilek, or a copy of a Kozilek on the battlefield. Somehow I was able to get Zurgo out and equip him with Assault Suit. At that point, I was ready to consider that an accomplishment, but I figured you only live once, so I passed turn and gave control of Zurgo over to the next player.
I honestly didn't think they would let me get away with it, but for the next few cycles around the table I kept passing him around like a party favor and everyone was using him to swing in on somebody else. I guess nobody wanted to lose their turn with him, so nobody killed me, even though my board was not particularly good.
Somehow in the end I wound up being the last man standing. That might have been the day I first got the idea of an EDH Bucket List, and that day I was able to check an item off of it.
Vroom Vroom!
One of my most enjoyable months of EDH this past year was October. Kaladesh had just come out and I had a pile of vehicle cards sitting around.
I was thinking of playing Reaper King in October and decided that reworking the deck to have all my vehicles might make for an interesting build.
Not good, mind you. Interesting.
The deck has tons of scarecrows and some other standard Reaper King stuff but wasn't a great deck to start with.
Adding vehicles did not make it better, but for the entire month every time I attacked with a vehicle I had a rule I had to follow.
I had to move it forwards and go "vroom vroom".
Seriously. I'm 47 years old, but know what?
It was super fun.
Burning down the House
My best day of EDH of the past year was probably the first EDH Saturday of November.
I decided to play my Purphoros deck and folks weren't familiar with how fast it can blow up. For the first time ever I won both tables I played at. Usually I consider myself lucky to win one game over the course of the day.
The best moment started with me casting a mana geyser to get 20 mana.
I used 2 to skullclamp a couple of goblins for some card draw.
Then I cast Devil's Playground for 6 mana, cast Reiterate for 3 mana, bought it back for another 3 and cast it again so that 12 devils hit the field.
Did I mention that both Purphoros and Impact Tremors were in play?
That win, and the other win that day both came easily and out of nowhere. Nobody realized that if they let me get to mid-game things could end very, very quickly and with little warning. In short, a well built Purph is a beast and shouldn't be let anywhere near the battlefield. Counter him early. Counter him often.
I try to play the same deck all month, but for the following 2 weeks I was targeted so much when I sat down to play in league games that I eventually capitulated and rebuilt the deck as Zada, Hedron Grinder. It's largely the same deck but in many ways it is now more fun as it has combat tricks that the old Purph deck didn't have.
The Bucket List
I don't actually have a list of things I want to do in EDH before I eventually stop playing someday, but if I did have such a "bucket list", I was able to put a checkmark next to one of the items on that list last night. I was playing some pickup games on our LGS' "Casual Commander" night with my Odric, Lunarch Marshal deck. It's mono-white, chock full of keyword-granting creatures and I had just added a bunch of vehicle cards into the mix. The idea of trying to get a Demolotion Stomper to have flying, double-strike, lifelink and indestructiability was too much for me to resist, so my janky old Ocric deck got rebuilt.
The game last night wound up featuring not a single vehicle. I started slow and took some damage, but bought myself some extra time with a Fumigate, bringing my life total back up from 24 to 44. As we entered mid-game, I found myself with no board state, 5 mana and a hand full of 6-drops.
On my next turn I drew a Plains and was able to play a Stuffy Doll, naming the player who had the strongest battlefield.
Stuffy Doll is in the deck so its indestructibility can be used by Odric to protect my whole board. Sadly, the old man was stuck in my Command Zone with a tax of 4 mana to be paid before he would again see the light of day. Fortunately, a few turns earlier I had drawn a couple of sweet little cards that play well with Stuffy Doll.
On my next turn I played Pariah on Stuffy Doll, so all damage done to me would be redirected to the player with the great boardstate, and passed turn. As fate would have it, my opponents had no answers, and on my next turn I played Felidar Sovereign, which resolved and for which they also had no answers available.
It was a bucket list win.
It also was a very weird win, and I didn't actually get to crew a vehicle, give it half a dozen keyword abilities, go "vroom vroom" and swing it into an opopnent, but it was still a nice way to wind up the year.
Maybe I should get around to writing down a real EDH bucket list someday...