Lab Notes!

  You Can’t Beat Me Unless You Kill Me (Because We Aren’t Playing the Same Game) Let me start with a disclaimer. I’m not saying I’m good at Magic. I missed more triggers tonight, playing a precon, than I’d like to admit. I’m not writing this because I’ve figured the game out. I’m writing it because I think I’ve figured out something about why I enjoy it , and I think a lot of players are quietly losing that. The Game Inside the Game I play Commander for fun. That’s the whole strategy. And I think it’s why I feel like I’m winning more, but I don’t mean games. When I say winning, I mean walking away from the table happy, whether my commander took the game or got boarded out on turn six. A good night is one where I enjoyed the people, the plays and the chaos. By that measure, I win almost every time I sit down. Meanwhile, I watch other players hold cards back, waiting for the perfect game-winning play. Then someone disrupts it, and the table goes sour. If the only thing that cou...

  Be the Threat? Let’s Talk About That A while back I clicked on a Commander video, and within seconds my gut said “no.” The message was that every player at every table should be the threat.  I’ve thought about it since, and I still say no. Here’s why, and what I’d do instead. Credit where it’s due. Passive Magic is a real problem. Sitting on a hand of cards and waiting for the perfect moment makes for a long, flat game. If that’s what he’s pushing against, I’m with him. But “be the threat” isn’t “do something.” It’s “be the one everyone has to deal with.” A threat vs. the threat Being a threat means developing your board, having a plan, and staying relevant. That’s good advice at any table. Being the threat means pulling every opponent’s attention onto you. In a four-player game, that can mean three players’ removal and attacks landing on you before you’ve done anything. And if everyone follows the rule, nobody is the threat anymore. You’ve just invented a race. ...

  Why I Keep Bringing a  Knife  to a Gun Fight (Thanks SFT) People assume that when I show up to a pod, I'm the guy holding all the cards — the broken combo, the powered-up bracket 4 nightmare deck, overwhelming force against whatever the table's running. A knife to a gun fight. They've got it backwards. More often than not, I'm the one walking into a bracket 3 arena with a bracket 2 deck. A knife to a gun fight, if we're being honest. And I do it on purpose. Here's why. 1. I don't need to win. I've reached a point in Commander where I'm just comfortable playing the game. Winning isn't the thing I'm chasing anymore, which frees me up to make choices that a "win at all costs" mindset never would. 2. It makes me better. When I bring an underpowered deck to an overpowered table, I can't lean on good cards to bail me out. I'm forced into subtler, more nuanced lines — actually thinking instead of executing. A lot of the de...

  Do I Kill Iron Man? Do I kill Iron Man? I feel like a jerk just typing that. But it's a real question, and it's got me thinking about something bigger: what do you actually know going into a game of Commander, and what are you allowed to do with it? Start simple. You know which commander your opponent is running. That's it, that's the whole information. How powerful is that? And what do you do with it? I've hit this before, thirty years of RPGs deep. There's a word for it there — metagaming. Acting on what you know instead of what your character knows. Commander doesn't have a character to hide behind, so the line moves: it's not fiction vs. reality, it's this game vs. your history with this person . Commander on the table? Fair. Commander you looked up on Moxfield last night? Not fair. Commander you know because you've played this guy forty times? Somewhere in the murky middle. Here's where I land: I'm not building a deck to kill...

    Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced:  Building Three Commander Decks with Purpose The last video I did in this format landed well, so I'm sticking with it — three decks, three skill levels, one philosophy tying them together. "Beginner" Isn't an Insult Let's get this out of the way first: when I say "beginner," I don't mean "less than." I mean simple in structure — and simple is a feature, not a compromise. Case in point: Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim . Out of my thirty-some Commander decks, my ongoing goal has been to simplify — to make games move faster and smoother. It's already a lot to track your own deck's plan, let alone three opponents' plans at the same time. Complexity adds up fast, and not always in a fun way. So when I got the commission for this deck, I went back to basics: strip gameplay down to its core rules and build from there. Play cards that reward you just for putting them on the board. This deck runs twen...

  What Losing Teaches You (That Winning Never Will) I've lost a lot of Commander games. More than I've won, probably. And I've come to believe that's exactly why I'm still playing this game after all these years, and why I've gotten better at it. Winning doesn't teach you much — it's just the game working as intended. You built a deck, you executed a plan, you won. Great. But you don't learn a lot from that outcome, because "it worked" doesn't tell you which part worked, or whether it'll work again against a different table. Losing is different. A loss gives you something specific to look at: You can usually pinpoint the exact moment or decision that cost you the game That specificity means you can fix the actual problem instead of guessing It keeps you from overcorrecting — you're not gutting the whole deck, you're addressing one real weak point Over enough losses, that adds up to genuine improvement instead of ...