Lab Notes!

  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 ...

  Nobody's Coming for You Personally (And That's Why You Should Play Harder) Derrick from Super Fast Tortoise said something on his morning show that made me stop and think: he wants to play more assertively. Maybe even aggressively. My first instinct was the same one every Commander player has: careful, that's how arms races start. I don't think that's true. Here's why. Two Different Levers "Assertive play" is a mindset. How you pilot. Develop every turn. Take the line instead of waiting for a safer one. Apply pressure. You can do all of that with a Bracket 2 precon. An "arms race" is a deckbuilding problem. Cards getting swapped for stronger cards, session after session, until nobody's having fun even though everyone's winning more. Two different levers. You can pull one without the other. I've watched a totally passive stax pile — hold everything up, combo off turn twenty — that's more of an arms-race deck than an a...

  The Weakest Deck at the Table Still Wins I don't usually do this. Most of what I make lives in the video and stays there. But the deck tech format only gives me so much room — rapid-fire card talk doesn't leave space for the why behind the picks, and some of that why is worth more than a soundbite. So I'm trying something new: a written companion piece to go with the video, digging into the parts that didn't fit. If this is useful, let me know — I'd like to know whether it's worth doing again for future videos, or whether it's better left as a one-off. I don't remember the games this deck has lost. That's not me being modest, and it's not selective bragging either — it's just true. I can tell you the exact turn Whiptongue Hydra cleared a sky full of dragons. I can tell you what it felt like when a $25 deck put a $400 deck in the graveyard. Ask me about a loss, though, and I've got nothing specific. My brain doesn't file those aw...

  Stopping Your Opponents From Winning Is Not As Good As Winning Yourself I heard someone say this recently and it hit me like a ton of bricks. For the first five to seven years I played Commander, I was playing it wrong. Not wrong by the rules — wrong by mindset. I learned to play to stop wins, not to win myself. I've spent the last ten years unlearning that. Nothing has ever said it as clearly as that one line. The mindset I had to break Playing to stop wins feels like playing well. You're reading the table, you're holding up interaction, you're never the reason someone resolves their combo. It looks like skill. But it's a defensive crouch dressed up as strategy — and I didn't actually start improving as a player until I started playing to win. Getting there meant clearing out two specific excuses I didn't even realize I was leaning on: "Money is what's stopping me from winning." This one is comfortable because it's external....