On Balance

Not much to add here: There's an article at BoardGameGeek.com from Richard Garfield on game balance. As someone who has been a part of how a game gets made, and experiences the result of games that are perpetually tweaked, from Magic to Remnant 2 to Marvel Snap, I found this to be quite informative!

So, How'd It Turn Out?

The pauper Commander event last last Sunday and I decided to go with Hallar in both games.

And...they did not go well!

One issue that I had was a misunderstanding of how Commander damage worked; namely, Hallar's trigger would NOT count as commander damage. So, that kinda sucked-but that one is on me. 

The other is that I underestimated the value engines people would be running; in both games there was a LOT of splash damage or heavily synergistic combos that did not leave a lot of room for me to develop my board. A little lifegain would have gone a long way, I think. But also some more out-of-the-box thinking in the way of disruption could've been good. What, I'm not sure. Because:

I also didn't do enough research, as it turns out. After the event, Rebecca pointed out to me that Moxfield has a Pauper Commander field and I could've used that to get ideas and hone the build. 

Because what I experienced were games where I just played "draw, go" and didn't get to do much of anything. I waited on creatures-maybe longer than I should have-in order to get kicker costs paid, and I kept drawing pump spells-which are nice but only really work if I'm attacking. 

And it wasn't until garbage time in the last game that I had more than two creatures on the table-an event that was fixed by someone's Crypt Rats. (I'm not upset by that-it was a good play).

However, I spent my time really not doing anything in the games and that just feels bad.

Finally, I think I just did not plan for flying creatures well enough. As with many limited formats, flying seems to be a HUGE ability here. In my first game, I was KO'd by an aura'd up 16/16 flying creature. How am I going to remove that at the common level? 

(Hint; Tranquil Path would've been awesome! But I didn't draw it.)

On the other hand: everyone else had a great time! And from what I heard/saw, the games were interesting and engaging. So I think it's just back to the drawing board for me, not: I hate this idea.

And maybe use a little time to do some research for Aryel, before that one gets taken for a ride. 

On the other hand: of the seven decks at the table, five had black. What I hope that means is that we are just trying to find out what works, with plenty of room to explore, and not that the best colors are rooted in black. The latter means that the metagame is already skewed and not as interesting. 

Two Paupers

 We'll start with Aryel, Knight of Windgrace 

Instant 1 Ardenvale Tactician // Dizzying Swoop 1 Raise the Draugr 1 Unmake 1 Rootborn Defenses 1 Demon's Due 1 Acrobatic Maneuver 1 Maximum Overdrive  1 Riot Control  1 Disenchant	Artifacts 1 Commander's Sphere 1 Orzhov Signet 1 Orzhov Cluestone 1 Whispersilk Cloak 1 Cliffhaven Kitesail 1 Tithing Blade
Enchantment 1 Hopeful Vigil 1 Knightly Valor 1 Pestilence	Sorcery 1 Smitten Swordmaster // Curry Favor 1 Call the Cavalry 1 Fell Horseman // Deathly Ride 1 Besotted Knight // Betroth the Beast 1 Return from Extinction 1 Diresight 1 Eriette's Lullaby 1 Risky Shortcut  1 Blood Tithe
Lands 12 Swamp 12 Plains 1 Sunlit Marsh 1 Silverquill Campus 1 The Fair Basilica 1 Path of Ancestry 1 Orzhov Basilica 1 Forsaken Sanctuary 1 Neglected Manor 1 Remote Farm 1 Hidden Necropolis 1 Peat Bog 1 Desert of the Glorified 1 Desert of the True 1 Mortuary Mire 1 Thriving Heath 1 Thriving Moor	Creatures 1 Knight of the New Coalition 1 Order of the Ebon Hand 1 Inspiring Captain 1 Benalish Cavalry 1 Benalish Knight 1 Parhelion Patrol 1 Leonin Skyhunter 1 Order of Leitbur 1 Skyhunter Patrol 1 Sigiled Sentinel 1 Attended Knight 1 Cadaverous Knight 1 Lost Legion 1 Argivian Cavalier 1 Barrow Witches 1 Locthwain Paladin 1 Relief Captain 1 Swordsworn Cavalier 1 Caravan Escort 1 Dauthi Mercenary 1 Ardenvale Paladin 1 Gryff Rider 1 Desperate Farmer 1 Cabal Paladin 1 Knight of Sursi 1 Devout Witness 1 Engine Rat  1 Grasping Thrull  1 Breathless Knight  1 Disciple of the Sun  1 Gravedigger  1 Eldrazi Devastator

Then we'll see what Hallar, the Firefletcher has to offer.

Instant 1 Colossal Growth 1 Falling Timber 1 Might of Murasa 1 Shivan Fire 1 Vines of Vastwood 1 Lifecrafter's Gift 1 Fissure 1 Overload 1 Lightning Bolt  1 Sulfurous Blast	Artifacts 1 Everflowing Chalice 1 Moss Diamond 1 Gruul Cluestone 1 Gruul Signet 1 Bumbleflower's Sharepot 1 Whispersilk Cloak 1 Armory of Iroas 1 Commander's Sphere
Enchantment  1 Bestial Fury	Sorcery 1 Grow from the Ashes 1 Reclaim the Wastes 1 Roil Eruption 1 Savage Offensive 1 Saproling Migration 1 Hull Breach 1 Tranquil Path  1 Elven Cache
Lands 12 Forest 10 Mountain 1 Gruul Turf 1 Racers' Ring 1 Rugged Highlands 1 Evolving Wilds 1 Terramorphic Expanse 1 Looming Spires 1 Sandstone Needle 1 Teetering Peaks 1 The Autonomous Furnace 1 Smoldering Crater 1 Hickory Woodlot 1 Khalni Garden 1 Slippery Karst 1 The Hunter Maze  1 Desert of the Fervent  1 Desert of the Indomitable	Creatures 1 Baloth Gorger 1 Gnarlid Colony 1 Gnarlid Pack 1 Goblin Bushwhacker 1 Krosan Druid 1 Mold Shambler 1 Oran-Rief Recluse 1 Skitter of Lizards 1 Torch Slinger 1 Viashino Branchrider 1 Longshot Squad 1 Citanul Woodreaders 1 Deepwood Denizen 1 Elvish Visionary 1 Generous Stray 1 Keldon Raider 1 Llanowar Visionary 1 Sarulf's Packmate 1 Seismic Monstrosaur 1 Yavimaya Elder 1 Bramble Wurm 1 Cactarantula 1 Hand of Emrakul 1 Krosan Tusker 1 Oliphaunt 1 Nacatl Outlander 1 Mountain Yeti 1 Wickerbough Elder 1 Aquastrand Spider  1 Panicked Altisaur  1 Pheres-Band Tromper  1 Spitfire Lagac  1 Anarchist  1 Zhur-Taa Druid

I've been testing these decks with Rebecca and Noah and they both have performed well! I'm not sure what might be the best of them, though I usually have a soft spot for RG decks, Aryel has been quite good-evasion, removal, good creature type to support. 

Maybe I'll get the chance to play both!

Pauper Commander Selection

Some friends of mine are getting together to do a pauper Commander day and I've been trying to pick a good Commander.

My current creatures under consideration are: 

Hallar, the Firefletcher 

Aryel, Knight of Windgrace

Eron, the Relentless 

Now, clearly one of these is not like the other. Of the Commanders, I think Hallar might be the strongest one, since it has an ability that pings all opponents, and +1 counters are pretty easy to add in Green. The plan is to do multiplayer games, so I'm encouraged to build my deck knowing that. 

Arvel might have the most synergy though: knights are very easy to produce in those colors and the removal suite is probably excellent. I feel as though this Commander would offer me a lot of resilience, and a typal theme is pretty easy to execute on.

Eron though...well, yeah it's not a great card but wouldn't playing a bunch of hasty red creatures be amusing? It's also so old school that I can't help but appreciate it and I could even go full scoundrel with Chandler and Joven.  

Note to future self; Do not do that.

As it turns out, I'd also misunderstood the assignment a little. I had thought that your Commander had to be an uncommon Legend-there are 380, so plenty of choices! But Matt pointed out that the Commander could be any uncommon creature. Which is WILD, as there are 4,999 of those. And that number seems small. 

Still, I'm sticking to my guns on this one.

Commander Tier List

 In case you haven't seen it, they've put identifiable tiers for Commander decks. 

It's a lengthy article but I do like the direction this is going in. Even though I'm a dabbler in Commander at best, I am glad they are taking the stewardship of the format seriously. 

1-1-1 (Aetherdrift pre-release)

As always, thanks to Red Castle Games for putting on a great event!

This was a 2-Headed Giant event, and my partner, Rebecca, built a U/W Vehicles deck while I had a R/G Exhaust-ish deck going. 

Our packs were a little unusual: We both felt like we got a lot more duplicates than we have in previous pre-releases. For example: I had four copies of Stampeding Scurryfoot and three Pedal to the Metal. Rebecca had at least two copies Collision Course and Midnight Mangler. 

It just felt like our options were more limited than usual, due to an abundance of duplicates. Still: I think she had a solid deck built and I had one that I thought went well on curve, with a lot of things to do on turns 1-3. However, the challenges to building decks in this format were unique and I think had us stumbling just a little. 

Round 1 vs Remi and Jeremy

Jeremy had a G/R Exhaust deck with Afterburner Expert and this was just backbreaking. Remi's UW deck was a good support build. helping keep tempo in their favor but we had to kill the Expert 4 times, because it just kept coming back. 

I probably made a mistake by letting my Chandra go too soon. Our opponents hyperfixated on it committed all their resources towards destroying, so I thought; Hey fine we'll get something to do to hit them on the crackback. But we just drew dead: Rebecca helped keep the game going by cycling a Valor's Flagship for four but it didn't yield much,and 1/1 bodies are not going to cut it. I had two Mountains in hand and Rebecca an island with a random white card (I think) when the big play came.

And the big play was when they hit max speed & got a Samut out via the Redshift. They took the game with just under two minutes left in the round.

Before Round 2, I added a second Crash & Burn. I had been reluctant to run a 4 mana removal spell but it's pretty solid in this format. 

Round 2, Vs Gabe & Lucy:

Our lands were not showing up; I was stuck at three mana, Rebecca at four, for most of the game. We managed to stall the game out vs their GB/UW decks-our opponents were able to mount pretty solid offenses but they weren't quite robust enough to get the win. We managed to stave off a Debris Beetle twice, and I made a pretty smart play when I forced Gabe to save his Engine Rat from removal, which meant he couldn't activate its ability to drain us for four life. Rebecca kept us in the game with a Voyage Home. 

After we went to time, Lucy drew her sixth land and was able to activate her Gearseeker Serpent and they went in for a massive attack that took us down to one life-but it was their last turn. We couldn't defeat them but they ran out of time to beat us. 

Whew!

Round 3 vs Eddie & Cody

Our opponents were stymied most of their game: Eddie (G/B) didn’t seem to have much to do—they frequently were drawing lands and Cody had a slight misunderstanding of how Marauding Mako interacted with Riverchurn Monument. When he understood that milling cards didn't trigger the Mako, I think it threw him for a bit. 

We kept a steady supply of pressure via an Elephant generated by the Scurryfoot and Glitch Ghost Survivor.  Rebecca kept the tempo in our favor with a steady supply of cards via Vnwxt, Verbose Host which kept her hand full & let her respond to their plays with Bounce Off and Spectral Interference. I drew timely Crash & Burns to take out the big creatures they could get out and we pulled the game off at the last minute. 

After all that, I talked to Rebecca about the event and here's where we came down on things.

Aetherdrift looked better in person than it did online. And as an insular experience, it was fine. While presenting some challenges to deckbuilding-how many vehicles can you have in a deck and still have a viable game, for example-those challenges didn't feel particularly compelling. 

It seems to play well with itself, she remarked, but she did not want to deal with the interactions it would have with the larger Magic universe. The bookkeeping alone was a problem for her, and we were both surprised that the pre-release boxes didn't have Exhaust tokens of some sort. They did have Speed cards to help with that mechanic, and those were very beneficial, so ignoring Exhaust feels like an oversight.

In the end: Did we love it? No. But we liked it more than we thought we would! Getting to Max Speed was more engaging than we thought it would be and actually made an impact on games. We even thought that more ways to interact with your opponent's speed might've been worth putting in the set-though that would mean that there would be more cards don't care about being at Max Speed which...they didn't do. We felt that RNG and inexperience had more to do with how the games went than just getting blown out--excepting Afterburner Expert. That card was annoying as fuck.

That said: our opinions of Aetherdrift are lukewarm. I found games to be a bit sluggish-all of our games went to time, but not in ways that I thought were compelling. Board states just locked up, and I didn't think we got to make many strategic decisions, rather ones that were pressured by how much time was on the clock

We didn't have a bad time but it didn't feel as much fun as the experiences we've had with Bloomborrow or Duskmourn. 

Aetherdrift Set Review

Here we go! The official list here. A list you can read here. Mechanics article here. 

Maybe it's just the times I'm living in, but this set is not exciting me. 

First, there's the sheer volume of text and mechanics and stuff on everything. Little of it seems meaningful and less of it fun. Let's start with mechanics:

Start Your Engines. I saw a comment on Reddit that said this should have been called Momentum, because then it could be used in any set. Start Your Engines means that if it isn't a racing set, the mechanic cannot be used and I really like this critique. Momentum is less flavorful but more versatile-and there are perhaps more fun ways this could be explored on other planes. 

It doesn't solve the problem though: this mechanic is booooooooooooooring. Like the City's Blessing before it, the mechanic only truly becomes meaningful if you get to "max speed" but otherwise isn't worth much. It adds in a bookkeeping layer and I know that whenever I think bookkeeping, I think fun! 

It also doesn't behave in a way that feels consistent to me: you Start Your Engines only if a Start Your Engines card tells you to, but you only increase in speed if you do damage to an opponent. So once you've Started, none of the other Start cards matter. And can you increase your speed on the same turn you start your engines? It looks like you can, because the trigger is a loss of life but you can only increase your speed once a turn, and 0-1 is an increase. 

Of the 42 cards that care about speed in the set, four have interactions that do not involve Max Speed and one of those is there to reduce your opponent's Speed. 

That is not, despite what the mechanics article says, 'plenty'. 

Worse, this all feels like 'win more'. If I have a 3/3 with flying and haste, what does lifelink do for me?  

Exhaust. Boy, it sure is a good thing that nothing puts +1/+1 counters on cards in Magic, otherwise you'd really have to invest in some bookkeeping to know if you've used an Exhaust ability or not!

And no, it doesn't matter if the Exhaust abilities are good (some are!) the issue is one of clarity. As with Monstrosity and Renown, these abilities don't play well with the rest of the game. And if you've got a Loot, +1 counters don't even go on the creature so now you've got to do bookkeeping to make sure that you don't re-use the ability. 

For a set that is about racing through three worlds, this mechanic is pretty damn insular. 

Vehicles & Mounts. First of all this is a flavor fail: under what circumstances am I supposed to believe that Boomcycle and Bullwark Ox are on competitive terms in this race? 

I didn't talk about Mounts or saddling in my Outlaws of Thunder Junction set review but having played with that mechanic I can say: I don't care for it. It seems like a neat idea, because I could use a freshly summoned creature to use it, but it rarely paid off for me. 

I think this is because the payoff can't be worth the cost. If I'm tapping a creature with 3 power to attack with Caustic Bronco, that's three power I'm leaving behind that can't block for me-and that's after investing however much mana I needed to create the saddling creatures. So then I'd better do something awesome with that, right? 

But that awesome thing can't be game breaking-which is totally reasonable but makes this a cost not worth paying. Since you must Saddle or Crew as a sorcery (at least if you want to attack), any instant speed removal means you're really down-they've taken out your crewed creature AND tapped another to get a bonus. 

They've tried to mitigate that through cards like Interface Ace and Cloudspire Captain so the cost to crew is blunted, but that overlooks the other problem: if I've paid seven mana for a Valor's Flagship, why do I have to do anything else to get that to do it's job? 

Finally, this set just seems overstuffed. 

The artwork doesn't feel consistent-Full Throttle looks like a completely different thing than Spectacular Pileup. Or even Chandra, if you want: Throttle looks like something out of a funny cartoon, Pileup is just a rainbow explosion, and Chandra is referencing Akira, which is such serious business that it doesn't fit together. There's clearly supposed to be some teams (U/B has the haunted racers going) but I cannot suss out who is what beyond U/B. Everything is, sigh, coming too fast and it's all a blur.

It's also interesting to me that the Commanders decks for this set don't utilize any of these mechanics. One Exhaust card, one Vehicle (a reprint), no Mounts, no Start Your Engines. It's as though these mechanics didn't exist: instead we have zombies and energy. Maybe they've never overlapped and I just didn't notice, because the rest of the set gave me plenty to talk about. More charitably, this is a way to represent the planes of Amonket (via zombies) and Avishkar (via energy), while Muraganda gets something I do like: five vanilla legendary creatures! 

I'm serious here: I think that Terrian, Tyrox, Kalakscion, Caelorna, and Sundial are pretty neat. 

I hope it's more fun than it looks. But it doesn't feel very engaging. I'll know more after Sunday's pre-release, I suppose!

Mental Health

Things...have not been awesome lately. My anxiety has spiked and it's been especially awful since I cannot point to anything specific to address in order to make things better.

In a Commander game last night-in all my Magic games last night-I just felt like trash. 

It didn't help that I was effectively locked out of the game via a Niko, Light of Hope loop with Solitude. I was playing Gisa and Geralf, and for some reason this deck just never works well, a condition that was adding to my poor state of mind. Plus: graveyard interactions are frequently nerfed by exile removal suites, so I had a bad matchup on top of that.

Maybe you know how it is; Why isn't this thing ever getting better?

I've felt like that a lot lately-decks I'm building just not coming together and the experience of losing but not knowing why feels bad. 

And it wasn't the other players: I really like the company I keep! But still, I was mostly helpless against the board state until I drew a Decree of Pain. Cool, here's an out for everyone! I don't have any creatures, the Hazezon Tamar player has five tokens and we're both being blown out: let's reset the board.

So I do that, and the Tamar player shoots his tokens at me via Goblin Bombardment. 

Which felt like a mistake to me. I'm not saying that it was, just that I was not the threat on board: The player gaining 12+ life a turn was. 

So; felt locked down and then mis-identified as the threat; ugh. It was bad for my headspace.

This morning I realized that the game was unearthing how I have felt at large for the past weeks. Helpless and frustrated. The game just put a spotlight on things so I couldn't ignore it.

Which isn't fuckin' fun, right? 

So, what can I do? 

Well, the first thing is to remember that I am not helpless here. I conceded the Commander game-and the constructed one early-in order to keep my headspace from getting worse. 

The other thing I can do is take Gisa & Geralf out of rotation until I can figure out what the fuck is wrong with that deck. It's zombie typal; it should be fun and it's got power. Maybe put some of my problem solving towards fixing that! 

The third thing I can do is remember that sometimes, things don't work out; that's part of the deal. It isn't personal. Even though it can feel personal.  

And the fourth thing I can do is look back and see if there is something I learned. There can be things overlooked in the moment because I'm not at my best, so I should give myself enough slack to review things and see if there's anything beneficial! 

In this case there was: in the constructed game I was playing Peaches and recognized that if I copied Will-o-the-Wisp with Silent Hallcreeper, I could have a 2/3 flying, regenerating creature to help keep the beats going. 

Nice spotting that interaction!