Game Night: Magic: the Gathering (Commander)

First meeting of the full game group since the pandemic started! The governor of our state recently allowed family groups of up to ten people, but we only needed eight 🙂

In those lonely weeks and months stranded at home, Wizards of the Coast managed to release the new Ikoria set for Magic: the Gathering, a set focused on such diverse cards mutated beasts, itinerant elemental gods and movie monsters (including the infamous Space Godzilla: Death Corona).

My son had bought five Commander sets from the new expansion, one for each of us. Commander is a variant of Magic: the Gathering where players build 100 card decks with no duplicate cards, aside from basic Lands, the cards that provide the mana with which to cast spells. The decks are headed by a Commander, a card of exceptional power that sits in an area called the Command Zone and can be brought into play when needed.

My commander gained power based on the varieties of abilities of creature cards that were in the graveyard; my strategy then was to discard or otherwise destroy as many cards as possible in order to fill my graveyard, then summon my commander to become an unstoppable force. Tom’s deck was all about making a super creature via repeated mutations. Drew’s deck seemed to have a blurred focus on cycling. Ally ran a token deck, and I couldn’t get a read on what Sean’s deck did, even though I was seated next to him. He did get to control a wide selection of other people’s cards, though that didn’t help him in the end.

Since there were five of us rather than the normal maximum of four, we played with the rule that you could only fight or otherwise effect the two people seated next to you. This made for some interesting gameplay, as instead of having three opponents — or four, this shrank the pool to two potential targets for your spells.

Once Drew was taken out an hour into the game, we shuffled the seats and finished the game as a standard foursome.

Ally’s token army was swept away by my partial board wipe, leaving her open to attack from Tom and Sean. Meanwhile, Tom’s much-mutated beast was slowly growing in power. Since all my creatures had flying from one source or another, nobody else could really stop my attacks, and I’d been chipping away at Tom’s health. Tom was well-positioned to unleash his beast on us both, but Sean killed Tom just before Tom would have killed me. I then defeated Sean for the win.

This isn’t the first set that came with commander decks, but usually the decks are poorly constructed and meant for quick, basic play before being dismantled, with the best cards being used in better decks.

Everyone felt the Ikoria commander decks allowed for far more advanced play. I was shocked at how well my deck supported playing cards into and out of the graveyard. Sean exiled my graveyard midgame, which slowed me down a little, but I had a mill card that just kept dropping more cards in, ensuring whenever my commander entered the battlefield, it came prepared to dominate.

Tom had played a card that only allowed each player one attacker and one defender a round, which slowed things down considerably, and let him mutate his commander into an ever more hideous form while more or less being too formidable for any one person to take on.

I’m not a fantastic MtG player, so I appreciate well-constructed premade decks like this. These sets had a wide variety of older and newer cards, without being just tossed together from only the Ikoria expansion. As such, they can easily be expanded from older sets to really lean into the deck themes. After last night’s game, all of us have decent ideas how the decks play and how best to improve them.

For my own, I played a card early on that let me mill cards into my graveyard during my upkeep each turn. Without this card, which I just drew by random chance, my graveyard wouldn’t have been powerful enough to boost my commander to its most formidable. Making this less of a random stroke of good luck would be the first step toward improving this deck.

We had two game nights this week, but we’ll be off for a few weeks as our schedules fail to mesh as nicely. It’s nice, though, that at least some parts of life are returning to normal.