Three quick lessons

If this is your board state, in a 3 way chaos game, what do you do? (Difficulty: there is no Wrath effect coming.)

There are roughly 30 creatures on the board and I'm playing The Thing That Should Not Be against a G/W token deck and a B/W deck that isn't doing much.

Eventually, the GW player swings with 8 3/3 flyers for 24 and I block three of them, which means I take 15 and lose.

Except. See down there, in the lower right hand corner. Those two white cards with the green wave in the middle. Those are two flying tokens I could have used to block another 6 damage, keeping me in the game. I had thought something was wrong but I couldn't place it and in all the madness I'd forgotten/not seen those two tokens.

Lesson 1: if you aren't sure, slow down. Be 100%.

Next: Playing Freedom or Fire against Push the Fader. I know he needs to get 6 mana to Wildfire, I know that I either need to have lands in hand to recover or enough lands in play to make Wildfire not matter.

I go for the not matter strategy. My opponent hits two Wildfires within three turns but it's a little too late-I begin recovering and the Fader deck is drawing lands and Parallax Tide. I need to get Batterskull active again, my opponent needs me to not get that.

He plays more Tides but then doesn't do anything with them so I get my manabase up and running again. It isn't until the game is over that I suggest keeping my land count down by removing them from the game, in order to give himself time might have been a solid strategy.

Lesson 2: consider your options. Decks are often more flexible than their initial impressions.

Finally: I've been getting into a bit of a debate on the Transform mechanic at the WotC boards. Here's what I've discovered:

The people who like the Transform mechanic, like it because of how it feels. Any problems with this mechanic, from a physical perspective, involving potential cheats, hiding information, losing extra pieces etc: do not matter, because, and this is what they say, It feels good to transform.

It doesn't matter to them how difficult that mechanic is for anyone else, nor the myriad of issues that come up, nor the poor implementation of the G/R tribe--all these mechanical things that are issues for me are irrelevant. It feels good, so the conversation ends.

Lesson 3: know when to let people enjoy what makes them happy but be thankful that you won't/don't have to put up with that shit for long-or hopefully, ever again.