Six years ago, a friend introduced me to Magic: The Gathering. A week later, I noticed someone on the bus was flipping through some cards across the aisle. Now, I had seen this dude before—big, scary, intimidating. But I thought, “Hey. He’s got magic cards, how scary can he be?” A month later Damian was one of my best friends. The guy who looked like he could crush me like a soda can turned out to be one of the coolest, most caring, honest people I have ever met. We spent a whole summer hanging out and delving into that hobby together. He told me once that his goal was to collect one of every Planeswalker just because of how awesome they were.
After he passed, his mom had to sell off some of his more expensive cards to help pay for some things, but he left me everything else. I respect that, and still have the majority of his collection today. A few days after his funeral, a couple of other friends and I got together and remembered that goal he had. We decided that it might be a cool idea to finish that collection in his name. Things change, life moves on, people drift apart, but I never forgot about the guy who taught me the game and kept the spirit alive for me, or what we talked about.
Its taken me a while, but even through school, work, family and friends, I slowly managed to gather these cards over the years. Some of them through trading, some as gifts, some I bought, but they were all with the same goal in mind and the same spirit behind them. I now own one of every Magic: The Gathering unique Planeswalker, and I’d like to dedicate that to Damian.
If you take anything away from this, let it be that people aren’t always what we judge them to be. If I had never talked to the big scary guy on the bus, I probably wouldn’t enjoy the amazing hobby that I do today. I wouldn’t cherish the time spent enjoying it with friends and family as much as I do. Don’t be afraid to meet new people. Don’t be afraid to tell them how important they are to you. They might not be around forever.
Give and Let Give.
Jeremy aka “Strictly Average” is an ‘average’ guy with ‘average’ plans. He is the creator and overboss of Strictly Average Gaming, which includes the Patreon group and StrictlyAverageMTG.com
EDH is a casual format which has gained huge traction in the Magic community since WotC began printing annual supplemental products (Commander) for it. In EDH, you run a 99-card deck with no duplicate cards other than basic lands. You also have a legendary creature as the poster child for the deck, called a General. There is a unique ban list for EDH, which is managed by an independent Rules Committee. In addition to the ban list, the Rules Committee put out a social contract, which is meant to be the overarching philosophy of the format, one of social interaction and good sportsmanship. But what does all this mean for getting into the format? As you’ll see, it can impact the different stages of deckbuilding.
When choosing a general to lead your deck, consider that this card will be the first impression your playmates have of your deck, before you even play a single land. When you’re playing with others who have been in the format for some time, this means they will have strong ideas of the decks behind certain generals. Creatures such as Narset, Enlightened Master and Grand Arbiter Augustin IV have well-developed competitive decks many players will expect you to be playing if they are your general. For a first deck, it’s usually better to go with something less defined. Maybe you really enjoyed the stories behind Theros block and want to run one of the gods. Maybe you think green is the best color and enjoy Overrun on a stick; sounds like Kamahl, Fist of Krosa may be up your alley.
When building a deck, multiplayer EDH is a format much more forgiving to involved set ups for plays. For an example, one of my favorite casual EDH decks I’ve played was a Mogis, God of Slaughter deck based around putting the whole table on a clock with cards such as Forsaken Wastes and Underworld Dreams. You can easily find room to try out pet cards such as these if your meta is of a casual bent, which in my experience most are. Another major consideration to take into deck building is the singleton design of the format. Any spell in your deck may not come up in a given game, as it is only slightly more than 1% of your entire deck list. I’ve had cards in several EDH decks which I won’t see for as many as 6 consecutive games. Therefore, if there is a specific effect you want to see regularly in a deck, be sure to have multiple spells which overlap. For example, if you want to be able to spot remove artifacts and enchantments, Naturalize is the classic, but you’ll probably also want cards such as Reclamation Sage, Krosan Grip, and Nature’s Claim.
A major consideration to keep in mind when building your first deck is to build something you’re going to have fun playing for hours on end. Many EDH games can last multiple hours filled with fluid alliances, flashy plays, and confusing card interactions. This will be a deck you are likely to find interactions within your own cards you never thought of or saw before it comes up mid game. Make it something you can have fun with no matter if you’re winning or not. You can easily make a deck out of the cards you currently have and fine-tune it, upgrade it, or outright change it as you feel like picking up other cards for the deck.
My favorite strength of the EDH format is the exact reason I have been playing it for years and see no end in sight for myself; you can make it into whatever you want. As long as you have a playgroup willing to try things out, you can do duel or multiplayer, casual or competitive. This is a format which lends itself very strongly to self-expression in your play style and deck design. Make it what you want it to be and remember to always keep having fun doing it.
James Chavey learned to play Magic on Ice Age block, and got into the game strongly in Tempest. He’s been playing off and on since then, returning to it over the last few years. James spends most of his gaming hours playing EDH, with side games of Tiny Leaders and is beginning to dabble in Legacy. He writes primarily on minimalism and theology at Simple Faith.
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Aether Revolt pre-release has come and gone and, as I always do, I was able to take part in the 2HG event at our store.
The store I play at, The Sports Alley in Sheridan, Wyoming, hosts two events each pre-release – a sealed event at midnight and a 2HG event the next day. I have always make it a point to play in the 2HG event.
My partner for the last two events has been my wife. She tends to be a far better sealed player than I am and plus, it’s just fun to play Magic with her.
Her sealed pool was far better than mine as she pulled a Tezzeret the Seeker. Further, she pulled some excellent control cards with blue. It made perfect sense for her to build around Tez.
Here is what she built.
Blue/Black Tezzeret
Creatures
Fourth Bridge Prowler x 1
Lawless Broker x 1
Gifted Aetherborn x 1
Wind-Kin Raiders x 1
Weldfast Wingsmith x 1
Planeswalkers
Tezzeret the Seeker x 1
Instants/Sorceries
Battle at the Bridge x 1
Daring Demolition x 1
Take into Custody x 1
Ice Over x 3
Revolutionary Rebuff x 1
Ceremonious Rejection x 1
Negate x 2
Artifacts
Watchful Automaton x 2
Treasure Keeper x 1
Servo Schematic x 1
Prakhata Pillar-Bug x 1
Prizefighter Construct x 1
Augmenting Automaton x 2
Lands
Island x 10
Swamp x 6
Without a doubt, everything she did was working towards getting Tezzeret on the board. Once he was there, she used his plus one ability to create artifacts while using spells like Iced Over to protect.
My job was to kill creatures and get blockers on the board. Once I had that going, she would ultimate Tezzeret. After that, it was hard for our opponents to rally.
Here is what I played
R/G Energy
Creatures
Outland Boar x 1
Embraal Gear-Smasher x 1
Reckless Fireweaver x 1
Freejam Regent x 1
Architect of the Untamed x 1
Peema Aether-Seer x 1
Aether Herder x 1
Thriving Rhino x 1
Instands/Sorceries
Highspire Infusion x 1
Take Down x 2
Furious Reprisal x 1
Chandra’s Revolution x 1
Chandra’s Pyrohelix x 1
Built to Smash x 1
Furious Reprisal x 1
Shock x 1
Artifacts
Fireforger’s Puzzleknot x 1
Daredevil Dragster x 1
Filigree Crawler x 1
Hope of Ghirapur x 1
Renegade Freighter x 1
Panharmonicon x 1
Lands
Spire of Industry x 1
Mountain x 9
Forest x 6
As you can see, my hope was to use Panharmonicon to build up my Energy counters with creatures that have ETB effects resulting in Energy. I ended up casting Panharmonicon all three games, which was good. I wasn’t, however, able to always capitalize on it. When it worked, it was great.
We played three rounds total. Our record going into the final round was 2-0. The last round we agreed to draw with the other undefeated team and split the prizes.
Overall, I think my wife’s deck was better than mine. It was pretty obvious that she was in the driver seat and I was doing my best to be a supporting player. I did my part as well as I could as I used my burn spells to keep creatures off the board and away from Tez.
Two-headed giant is, in my opinion, the best way to play pre-releases. Plus, I had the added advantage of playing with my wife. Score for me!
Did you pre-release this weekend? How many events did you play in? What was your favorite?
Patrick Cossel is the Publisher of The Forge Herald. He is a writer, gamer, father, husband, and Level 1 Magic Judge. Professionally, he is the Operations Manager for a family-owned newspaper company. He can be reached at [email protected]
September 26th
After what was arguably Wizard of the Coast’s busiest year for set releases, Hareruya and Big magic announce the Frontier format. Frontier is a new non-rotating format featuring cards from the new era of design, starting with M15 and up. Their reasoning is simple: modern has supply issues, which makes cards tok expensive. Also, the standard rotation is too fast, which makes cards from recent standard rotations cheap.
Within a week, Matt Mealing and Tony Cameron from Face to Face Games launch MTGFrontier.com, and their excellent podcast. They start breaking down what they expected from the format. They also announce that Face to Face games would be supporting Frontier with a Sunday showdown event at the end of November.
October 30th
Hareruya and Big Magic hosts a 300 player capacity Frontier event with free entry and huge payouts. The tournament filled to full capacity.
The payouts were as follows:
- 1st Place: 10 booster boxes, 1 for each frontier legal set
- 2nd Place: ¥25000 ($215 USD)
- 3rd-4th Place: ¥15000 ($130 USD)
- 5th-8th Place: ¥8000 ($70 USD)
- 9th-64th: 9, 6, or 3 boosters.
Here are the top 8 decklists: https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfrontier/comments/5a641h/frontier_challenge_cup_top_8_decklists/
November 16th
Due to growing interest in the format mtggoldgish.com adds a Frontier tab to their metagame analysis page, and starts allowing user deck submissions for the format. Articles also start appearing on Channel Fireball and Star City Games.
November 25th
A motivated redditor by the name of /u/Nande decides to make an xmage based online Frontier league event, which I participate in. The league operates off of the MTG Frontier subreddit and the Frontier discord channel. The league now consists of 24 players.
December 6th
Craig Wescoe becomes one of the earliest pros to voice his support for the format. Taking to Twitter he exclaims: “I just read @Chosler88‘s article on Frontier. That format looks soooooooo fun!!! Can we please make it a supported format on mtgo and irl?”
Mid December
Mtgfrontier.com announces they will be backing the next iteration of the reddit Frontier league with prize support. Session 2 of Frontier league will be starting on the 2nd of February. Be sure to sign up!
January 6th
Mark Rosewater (Maro) acknowledges the format on his Tumblr saying WOTC is keeping an eye on it. He also says he doesn’t like fetchlands and I agree but that’s a discussion for another day.
January 8th
Channel Fireball announces on Twitter that it will hold Frontier side events at it’s GPs this year.
January 9th
Hareruya hosts its “God of Frontier” event which draws 236 players. The top 8 decklists can be found here.
And now we’re here! But where is here? Well, Frontier has continued to grow as a format and more people are making content for it. We have a somewhat established metagame with defined archetypes. As someone who’s played a lot of Frontier, I can promise you that it’s not SiegeRhino.format, fetch manabases aren’t mandatory, Dig Through Time isn’t broken, and Bant Company or 4 Color Rally aren’t the best decks.
Frontier provides fun interactive games featuring decks with a power level that may surprise you. The cards are cheap, except Jace- we don’t like to talk about him. I expect Frontier to be an officially supported format within the next year.
If you’re curious to try the format out, I’m always open to playing games and so are the other 200 or so people on the official Frontier discord channel. You can pm me at DylanDaInfidel or post in the find-a-game channel
Until next time,
Dylan
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The Nexus on Puca Trade is a glimpse of which cards are received daily. If you watch it for any amount of time, you may have noticed an irregular number of Topan Freeblade flowing through in the month of December. OK, honestly, an absurd amount of them. We have one great trader to thank (blame) for that, Mr Strictly Average himself.
The real question is: why? What reason does he desire these little gems? The art is fantastic, no doubt. A pet card, perhaps? It was a solid choice in limited, but what use could they server now? The reason is beyond all of these, and something more fun. Strictly Average has devised a plan to show that we are all part of a community; solidarity if you will.
He’s been sending Freeblades as extras with his packages, and asking the recipients to sign them and ship them out in their next trades. I received a few recently and have since sent one to Oregon and Brazil. The hope is that participation by a vast number of Puca Traders, passing these Freeblades along will show our appreciation for the site and its fellow members. I’d love to receive a Topan Freeblade full of signatures so that it may live forever in my Sigarda, Heron’s Grace Commander deck as a testament to the good work that Puca Trade has done for me.
Are you ready to get involved? Here’s how; should you receive one of these wandering Freeblades, please sign it with your user name (or real name) and send it along to the next trader. You can even be so bold to post something to one of Puca’s social media pages, using #HaveBladeWillTravel. We want to see these Freeblades moving across the globe, wearing countless names. Show the MtG world that Puca is still strong, and that many of us remain dedicated to the Give and Let Give philosophy.
Chris is a Strictly EDH player and thorough Melvin from Columbus, OH. He squeezes in games whenever he isn’t on adventures with his wife and toddler daughter.