Cherubs from the Sistine Madonna by Raphael Sanzio (1512). Hover Myr by Dan Scott.
Happy New Year's Eve!
Today's artwork may look familiar. As the year ends and 2018 begins, a few things will be changing around here. Today will be the first of the new style of posts on this site. My articles have been picked up by GatheringMagic.com and will be posted there every Monday from here on out.
Last week's was posted here, but also appeared on their site:
I'm not sure yet if I'll keep the same schedule, but I will be posting journal entries here. These will be more personal in nature, will probably be more sporadic, and will likely have more typos.
The More Things Stay the Same
Well, hopefully the past year of Commanderruminations wasn't full of typos, but I did share a fair amount of personal stories. My articles have always contained a bit of a running commentary on how my EDH League games are going and often touch on other Commander games I've been playing. That will continue and may become the main thrust of the content here.
If you are a regular reader, you can rest assured that each week I will include a link to the most recent article over on GatheringMagic,com,. That content won't appear here, so I'll be asking you to head on over to that site. You won't miss out on that content if you just follow my writing here, as I'll post links each week. New header art will appear exclusively on GatheringMagic.com. I'll be pulling from my favorite art that has already appeared on Commanderruminations for these posts. If any of it is new to you, it's only because you must have missed it.
In short, all those unnecessary "In Other News" segments where I used to blather on about how my games were going will now appear here, headed up by some of my favorite artwork from weeks past.
In Other News
So how are my games going?
After winning the top point total in 2016, I had a pretty strong 2017, but was edged out in the last few weeks by one of our best players. I had won a few months in 2017, and put in a strong showing overall despite playing a range of decks through the year.
In February I was able to pilot my Sidar Kondo / Tana The Bloodsower deck to victory, earning the most points that month. It's still one of my favorite decks, full of combat tricks and clever interactions. It folds to Elesh Norn, a strong board of flyers and probably some other stuff as well, but I do love to play my Naya Partners.
In September I played Ramos, Dragon Engine. It was a deck I took great pride in and wrote about extensively. It won me the month but I have since reworked it. The wincon (Infect / Chandra's Ignition) got a little tired and while I was winning games at a healthy clip, it wasn't as fun as it was when I first threw it together. I'm currently exploring turning it into a Villainous Wealth deck to see how fun that can be.
In October I decided to take it easy and played Marath, Will of the Wild. It was an excuse to ping various dinosaurs with the Enraged keyword and was chock full of Marath Goodstuff cards. Marath turned out to be more than enough to win the month. I set my personal high mark in points in a single week with that deck.
I had lots of other good weeks during the year, and plenty of bad weeks as well. I mostly kept my sense of humor, though I discovered that I really, really, really don't like hosting people at my house and getting knocked out of the game and having to sit on the couch for 45 minutes or an hour while the game winds its way to an end. I actually try to avoid killing anyone early in my home games as well, as I don't want anyone else sitting out for a long time either.
What Comes Next
I'm expecting 2018 to have plenty of fun in store for me. I've got a Rashmi deck that's been converted over from "Surprise Sea Monsters" to "Surprise Spaghetti". I may wind up writing an article about it in the coming weeks. Our league is going to be having "theme" months from February through December where one of our point categories will be doubled if your commander is "on theme". Having a theme to build around will be an exciting change for our league and while I really enjoy seeing other people win, I'm going to make a few pushes to win a few months in 2018 if I can possible manage it.
As for casual games, I'll be playing less at home because I've been finding the dynamic of "playing host" and dealing with spikey competitive players to not be working that well for me. That means I will probably be playing at some new local game stores, and I'm looking forward to meeting new people and getting beat in new and interesting ways. In a neutral setting (i.e. a game store) I generally can take a beating with much more poise than if I'm in my own home and just cooked for and am playing host to the people who are being assholes to me. Sure, a game is a game, and we play games to win, but I play EDH to have fun and it's NEVER fun to be out of the game with nothing to do for an hour.
That's all I've got for you today. Tomorrow my first 2018 article on GatheringMagic.com will go up. From here on out, you can find my articles there, and my more casual writings here. Thanks for reading, thanks for all your support over the past year, and here's to a fantastic 2018!