Do I Kill Iron Man?

 

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 Super Fast Tortoise's Iron Man. That's targeting a player, and villain brand or not, I care more about fair play than the bit. But using what I know to make my own deck better? To win more, instead of just stopping someone else from winning? Nothing wrong with that. That's the whole post, honestly.

I learned this the hard way. My first five to seven years of Commander were in one pod — my core four — and I picked up bad habits I'm still unlearning. The big one: playing to stop people, not to win.

One guy in that pod always picked his commander last. On purpose. He figured he could win almost every game just by choosing after he'd seen everyone else's. Nothing shady, nothing against the rules — just optimized in a way that made the table feel like a puzzle he was solving instead of a game we were playing. So I started doing my own version: bringing multiple commanders, deciding which one to run after seeing the table.

Which — yeah. Same move. I told myself mine was defensive and his was predatory. But "decide last, with more information than everyone else" doesn't care about your reasons. If it was sweaty when he did it, I don't think it stops being sweaty just because I meant well.

So: reveal commanders all at once? Make it a Rule Zero conversation up front? Everyone brings backups and the table picks together? Or does nobody care and we just play what we love?

My answer: reveal together, and let Rule Zero handle the rest. The second you let anyone choose after seeing even one other commander, someone has an edge — doesn't matter if their reason was nice. Rule Zero is where the real conversation belongs: power level, banned combos, what kind of table this is. Out loud, before anyone's picked a card. "Just don't think about it" sounds great until you remember I already ran that experiment. One guy exploited the gap. Indifference doesn't kill the incentive. It just means only the person willing to use it, does.

 

~M