Month: May 2015

Why I Love Commander Let me tell you about the time I dropped Hive Mind on turn 5. We’re playing Commander—and it’s a big game this time, six players, with a good mix of aggressive decks and control-based decks at the table. Prossh, Gisa, Daghatar, Alesha, and a particularly innovative brew of Kangee, Aerie Keeper are all present. And then there’s me, playing Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer, with my political deck that exists solely to hand out favours and be everybody’s friend. I call it “fun-stuff tribal”, and if the deck had a motto, it would be “Let me make you an offer…” (I mean, that’s what I tell people, anyway. The deck’s actual motto is “Let’s you and him fight,” but nobody needs to know that.) I get a really good start, with a Sol Ring and a Howling Mine out on turn 1. So everybody’s drawing lots, everybody’s getting cards they like, combos are happening, it’s a good time all around. And then I cast Hive Mind. In a normal two-player game of Magic, this card is… not great. You get a copy of what your opponent is casting, sure, but they also get copies of what you’re casting, which is… yeah. Probably undesirable. But in Commander, this thing is a beast! The next turn, I cast Telemin Performance. It’s a spell that lets me steal the creature...

Clever Bread-related Pun In Title So it’s my second or third booster draft, and I’ve decided to go green. Just, nothing but green. Lots of mana, lots of beasties, and hopefully I can beat my opponents’ faces in with raw power. Round 2, I finally get to play one of my rare cards—Hornet Queen, from Magic 2015. And it is here that I am introduced to the concept of a “bomb”. Drafting is one of Magic’s “Limited” formats, where you don’t play with your collection—just sealed product that you open right before playing with it. Specifically, a booster draft consists of 4-12 players sitting down around a table, each with three booster packs. Each player opens a pack, selects one card to keep, and passes the rest of the pack around the table. Repeat the process until the pack is done, then do it all over again with the other two packs. At the end, you’ll have 45 hand-picked creatures, spells, artifacts, and possibly even planeswalkers that you’ll use, along with basic land provided by the draft organizers, to build a 40-card deck with which to beat face. And after drafting and building your deck, you face off against the other players in the draft to see who built the best deck out of the available cards. I have a goal, with drafting. I would like to go 4-0...