In a new league.

Last week I mentioned that I've just moved, and in my new location there was a league that I wanted to try out. The only problem: I have no cards with me, left them all back in Washington until further notice. That did not stop me however, and here is how my night went.


Once I entered the shop and asked about the league, I was given a points sheet and had the points briefly explained the system to me. It's pretty straitforward and nothing that hasn't been done elsewhere. The points lower the desire to combo out and stress a more "casual" atmosphere. Utilizing abilities multiple times each turn grants you negative points as does paying a large x in x spells.

Each night there is 1 round, this round lasts (if i recall correct) about 2 hours. At this point the game is over and everyone still alive gets a point. There are also other strange things that will grant you a point that I doubt anyone wants to do on purpose...

I walk over to where the commander players are playing casually before the league begins and ask if anyone has an extra deck that I could borrow. A guy named James motions over and offers to lend me either of 2 decks led by child of alara or Jor Kadeen. Big note here that I don't know anyone at this table and have only been in the shop itself once before. I asked 1 time and about 30 seconds later I had a deck to play. I feel this speaks volumes of the atmosphere of commander leagues like these ones, and I don't think this is abnormal from what I have observed. We as a community want others to have fun, this doesn't stop with our deck building or our playing, but is included when players like James offer to let players they don't even know use their decks so they (me) can be included. Thanks again James.

I chose Child. The deck was pretty interesting it played a lot of ways to sacrifice creatures to get child into the yard whenever things were going poorly for me. During the game, I sacrificed "child" about 6 times clearing things that were getting out of hand. The other players at the table were playing sen trips (apparently a combo I never saw), Norin (shenanigans), mono blue (does the general matter?combo), and a tribal elf deck led by Nath.

During the game the elf player managed to deal some damage to the sen trips player (16 or so) I dealt another 7 I think in retaliation to a counterspell from him and the norin player finished him off when pandemonium came online. I guess the trips player was the biggest threat from history, not that I knew. Once he was out of the game the mono U player figured he was next and decided to combo out, time was also close to ending. Note: he couldn't combo out without negative points and had the combo the whole time. As he is comboing out all 3 of us draw spells (thanks to him) that hurt him and we were able to stay alive long enough for time to be called. Points were tallied, but didn't seem to matter to anyone really. The mono U player getting -20 or something as we didn't want to actually keep track of the points he went in the hole.

The night was fun and I can't wait to build my own deck and play some more. I returned the deck back to James and thanked him again.

Interesting points I learned:
1) I want to play my own deck. Playing another players deck was fine, but Im a deckbuilder and like showing off my own choices. There was nothing wrong with the child deck, but it's probably not something I'd likely build on my own.
2) I wanted to play Ruhan in an environment where I knew noone. I had a few opportunities to attack, but no clue who the threat was. I think I attacked Norin once and Sen Trips once. Ruhan would have been nice, just because you dont have to think about who you are attacking. If you play against players you dont know feel free to try Ruhan. (Ruhan may be my favorite commander)
3) This will be a good environment to do my Izzet Vs Golgori deck series. Sept 7th the new duel deck comes out. I feel this is a great opportunity to build a new cardbase for commander. I'll be buying this product and building commander decks similar to what I posted for the planechase decks, (hope to have the deck list posted tonight/tomorrow) and actually playing them in this league and slowly switching cards out each week.