Every Deck I Ever Built
(A Retrospective)
I don’t know why I did it, but I felt particularly crazy one night and decided to make a list on Moxfield. Not just any list, but a list of every commander I’ve ever had helm a deck. So…. uh… here it is?
I was spending a decent amount of time thinking about all these commanders that I’ve built, and wondered if I could learn any lessons from them, or if I have any sort of story to tell - and, so I started writing. Literally… that’s it… every word from here on is something I made up on the spot because I figured I’d write about myself now (since I’m not popular and no one will read it anyway) rather than later (if I happen to get popular I won’t have any time to write boring stuff like this).
So let’s get the ball rolling…
In August of 1993, Richard Garfield (another well-known Ph.D.) began the ritual that summoned me into existence by releasing Magic: the Gathering. That ritual took half a year, and in January of 1994, there I was, born into the world, ready to pick up playing cards.
Alright, maybe that was a bit too early to start. Let’s fast forward a bit: my friend invited me to go see a movie that had just been released in theatres with his family. That movie was Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. It was May of 2002, I was 8. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was also the month that the set Torment was released (and the year that we first have a record of commander’s rules being popular online). After watching the film I stayed at his house for a sleepover. The activities of the night included Star Wars-themed Risk, Talking about our favorite new show (Yu Yu Hakusho, which had begun airing in February of that same year), and, you guessed it, my first experience with Magic: the Gathering. Explained to me as a game that they played in college (who knows if that’s true or not), my friend’s parents taught me how to play. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, this game would quickly become a hobby of mine (alongside the more popular playground game Yugioh) that traveled with me through the ages.
Though that was my first experience with MTG, it was overshadowed by other things I did at the time - Yugioh, Pokémon, the like. It was around 2003 when I heard of a new game store in town where I could get Yugioh singles (and finally get that edition of Dark Magician I so desperately wanted), that I stumbled back into the hobby. It started with 7th edition (and that wonky Thorn Elemental) that came out that year, but several returned trips over the next few years would have me playing Kamigawa, Ravnica, Coldsnap, and even Time Spiral. When I was in sixth grade I went through a school move, a parent’s death, and an emo phase. I played with one Eventide precon (well, two - my strategy at the time was to buy two precons and meld them into one deck so I could run 4-ofs instead of 2-ofs and have more than one copy of Doomgape).
Ok, but get to the EDH already…
A few years later, I was in high school and a card shop opened near my home, on my walk to and from school. I checked it out and cracked a pack on a whim - therein I found Progenitus and remember, on the rest of the walk home, remembering I must’ve opened a very expensive and powerful card (I mean… protection from.. evvveeerryything?). That card shop quickly became an after school hangout for me, where I made friends and learned how to play the game for real - this time from a judge that I looked up to (and who took me under his wing, and later became the motivation for me becoming a judge myself - thank you, Brad). One of the store owner’s regulars had a dragon deck that was pretty strong, so I tried to make a vampire deck to beat it. Then… once I had assembled all the cards I needed… Zendikar came out. “Wow I took all this time and effort assembling a grixis vampire deck and now Vampires are just a playable kindred?” The new Vampire deck went on to be infamous in my playgroup (and standard of that year)… and I continued to develop a reputation at the store, not just for that, but also for FNMs. I had this weird habit of showing up to an FNM with five dollars, sorting through the bulk commons and uncommons, and winning the tournaments. (I once built a deck with a really confused Drudge Skeletons, stacked with Holy Strength, Unholy Strength, Oakenform, and Lifelink - the deck, which also featured some other cheap regenerator creatures like River Boa, won me a FNM promo O-Ring that was worth more than the deck was). (Edit from future me: article is here for that story). I was a big fish in a small pond. Now I’m a small fish in a big pond writing my life story to you.
This also lead to my first major tournament, which was during Worldwake.
Ok, I promised I was getting to EDH.
Ok, making Kitchen Table 60 card decks was “the norm” back then… but that changed for the most part when my judge friend introduced me to EDH. He used a monoblack Anowon, the Ruin Sage deck that killed me pretty fast with Vampire Nocturnus… I was interested, so he handed me a copy of Merieke Ri Berit and told me to make a deck “from this underplayed powerhouse” out of the commons and uncommon box - and I could keep the deck. My first commander deck. Later I wanted to build a second deck, but I wanted to play something that was… well, I wanted to play my three favorite colors: BUG (something we now call Sultai). At the time, the only Legal commander to play in that color combo was Vorosh, the Hunter, so that’s what I played. Eventually, they released the first set of commander precons featuring everybody’s favorite slime, and with my judge friend off to college, my friend Micheal (who was a fan of chaos effects - he relished in the time I had cast Epic Experiment for 10 into his Hive Mind in a 4 player game and tried to leave the table… only to realize I was the only one with the rules knowledge to resolve the stack) and I were left in charge of the group.
We had a couple of bad apples. One guy, a real sketchy adult (he stole a car from someone at that LGS), built a Mimeoplasm deck that easily won turn 5 every game. This mostly killed the format for me at the time and my commander activity lay dormant.
Sometime later…
Not all too much time had passed, but a few years feels like forever when you’re still in High School. We had a mostly new group of faces, but a couple of old ones. We were playing “Kitchen Table 60s” at our local 24/7 McDonalds (where we’d meet from time to time to play in the middle of the night - I’ve always been nocturnal, ok?) when one person said, “Hey I heard commander was cool, we should try it.” Michael and I turned to him and responded, almost in unison “Commander is cool, but if we get back into it we will probably never play any other format again.” That statement mostly rings true today (I only really care for EDH and draft, and don’t care about draft enough to visit people in person - I only really play it on Arena).
My first “post Hiatus” deck was Lazav, Dimir Mastermind. I remember distinctly thinking “I don’t know why everyone runs a ton of mill with him, you can get creatures into the yard with killspells and counterspells just the same.” I played a lot of monoblack (I had a stint with King Macar where I won every game with Exsanguinate). I taught my best friend to play by giving him Merieke Ri Berit (Since then he made a cool Surrak Dragonclaw Morph deck, and plays Sharuum from time to time - but notably, he played Ghoulcaller Gisa when I played Stitcher Geralf, and he’s my brother when we play my two nearly symmetrical Brothers Yamazaki 2HG EDH decks and references ‘Hooked on the Brothers’ every time we do). And there you have it, we were off to the races of keeping a functional playgroup together. We’ve had several gems grace our playgroup over the years, including a degenerate Prossh player who nearly tore the group apart (and stole a lot of Michael’s cards), a degenerate MLD player who would run MLD with everything (Zurgo, Jhoira, Dromoka…), also that one time Michael built Jace and Liliana when I built Kothophed and Alhammarret, and my desperate quest to play every Eldrazi possible. And I didn’t even mention Andy, the player who played Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (and after I had opened a foil one during draft!) when it was still legal, and who constantly tried to set up infinite turns with a Lighthouse Chronologist.
And after all that, somehow I’ve never built a Naya deck.
So much later they had to fire the old narrator and hire a new one…
The treasure we gained was the people we met along the way. There’s magic in us as well as in the cards. Here I am, writing stuff out into the void, pondering an infinitesimally small existence but having fun doing it… and what I learned today is… Actually... before we get into the lesson let’s take a break to meditate over our daily Koan. Today’s Koan is:
Master Chu-hung said to Layman Liu Lo-yang of Su-Chou, “Because it is simple, those of high intelligence overlook it.”
Take five to consider this ancient Zen teaching.
With this ancient Zen teaching in mind, we finally come to the lesson of this article: Man f*** Naya. There’s nothing interesting to do in Naya. I’ve never built Naya and I never will. WH4T NOW NAYA PLAYERS?!?!
