A Magic: The Gathering player has come up with an ingenious solution to the age-old problem of explaining to other players what their Commander decks do: custom Sagas.
In Commander, Magic’s most popular format, the priority is less running a highly-optimised deck that can win as fast as possible, and more enabling the whole table to have fun. To that end, you’re encouraged to have what is known as a “turn zero discussion”, where each player suggests which decks they’d like to play in an attempt to set an overall tone for the game.
However, an ongoing problem with Commander is players who don’t explain their decks adequately or truthfully, resulting in mismatched games that aren’t much fun for those involved. To solve that problem, Twitter user Odward Frenry revealed custom cards he took to the recent CommandFest Richmond. Each card uses the same frame as the popular Saga enchantment, but is instead a quick explainer of what the deck does, how it wins, and any other special conditions other players at the table may need to know about.
For instance, in a photo shared by Frenry’s friend and Magic content creator Tappy Toe Claws, his Dina, Soul Steeper deck – known as Storm Brew – is described as having “Aristocrats and recursion with Storm payoffs”, and as “the fastest of [his] decks, with a variety of potential unbounded combos, albeing mostly fragile. Proxy heavy. This deck is a labor of love: love for Aristocrats, love for Storm, and love for the community”.
To top it all off, each card has a QR code linking to the popular deckbuilding site Moxfield to show a full decklist. This allows other players at the table to take a good look at the deck before playing, to ensure there are no cards in there that may be banned in Commander or could be against the kind of game they were hoping to have.
These are an amazing way of encouraging discussions before a game. Commander is a social format focused on the fun of the whole table and, while each player still aims to win, having one person leap ahead of the rest with the strongest cards ever printed can be unfun for someone using an out-of-the-box preconstructed deck.
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