by Ken Baumann
Three months after Lincoln said a house divided cannot stand, a twenty-one year old student was shown how to see. When Samuel Hubbard Scudder met his professor Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz at Harvard, the elder handed his pupil a fish in a jar of alcohol and said, "Take this fish and look at it; we call it a haemulon; by and by I will ask what you have seen." The young student felt disappointed. He was here to study bugs. Why examine a dead fish? Worse, Agassiz told him not to use any tools. "My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field."
Hours passed.
Scudder felt tortured, but Agassiz didn't budge: "Look, look, look!"
Three days' looking later, the student had seen the fish.
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In December 1994, Usenet user Gregory Alan Love asked other Magic: The Gathering players: "How do some of you go about testing your decks, other than actually playing them repeatedly against all comers? I currently just play a one sided game, doing damage as if the opponent had not yet drawn a mana, (no defenders) and average the number of rounds it takes to kill them. This is very inefficient, and it doesn't seem to bear out in real play. Any better ideas?"
John Palmer responded: "Here's one: draw 10 cards. If your deck has a theme, is it starting out already?" He clarified: "When I built another blue and white deck, I had too many creatures, so now my question is always 'at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the time, can I start rolling out stuff by turn three ABSOLUTE LATEST!'" John's closing statement evinces the laconic style of so much early theorizing: "So fast action is a *BIG* test."
Other users proposed alternate methods: randomizing an opposing deck using polyhedral dice; using chess-style notation; playing against yourself using a deck built to beat yours. Nine days later, the thread ended with a post from Stephen Lil IV. "Good test decks have very focused strategies (ideally, you can train a chimp to play it effectively, in other words), so usually it's very clear what your test deck will do under every circumstances." [sic]
Here is a sentence only Magic: The Gathering players could possibly understand: The chimpanzee is the proto-goldfish.
The Dojo, the earliest Magic-focused web magazine, defined "goldfish" in 1997 like so: "A method of testing so named because the opponent casts no spells, has no creatures and so never attacks or blocks. The idea is to play your deck normally and see how many turns it takes for you to deal 20 points of damage to the goldfish. Doesn't work for some deck types (Millstoners, lock decks etc.)." But the term was formalized two years prior in an article in the seventh issue of The Duelist magazine titled Playing Your Pet: Rough Testing A Magic Deck. Beth Moursund—who would go on to become one of the first L3 Judges and then Magic's second Rules Manager—explained the problem: "It's Magic day at your game club tomorrow, and you have a new deck idea you want to try out. You've picked out some spells that should work well together, and added a reasonable number of lands. Now you want to test it out, and do some tuning before you take it up against the tournament-level decks tomorrow. But you're home alone, and it's too late to call a friend. If only you could teach your pet to play...." These animal-themed tests aren't optimal, of course, but they "let you get used to playing the cards in your deck, and help you figure out your best combinations, which cards you need to protect with Counterspells, etc."
The first animal in Beth's lineup is The Goldfish. Beth called it the "most basic deck-test" and its structure is simple: "Count how many turns it takes to kill the fish. Do this several times, and average the results to get a measure of the sheer brute power of your deck. Five or less is an amazing score, usually possible only with extremely lucky shuffles or a deck loaded with out-of-print cards. A more typical fast deck will score seven or eight fairly consistently. If your deck consistently scores over ten, you’re likely to get chewed up by faster decks." It's fun to infer from this the expected pace of play in 1995. But more importantly, we see in Beth's article The Fish's broad features: its shape, its heft, the color of its scales.
Early Magic was a breeding pool for critical concepts. For example: the earliest name for a red deck that gets its opponents dead quick was Geeba; later popularized by Paul Sligh, the Red Deck Wins archetype was the consequence of a mathematical insight from Jay Schneider while thinking about Magic in a calculus class in 1996. Speaking with Cody Neff in 2023, Paul explained the origin of the concept of the mana curve: "I was trying to figure out a deck in my cardpool that could beat the decks that I was seeing on MTG-Strategy[…] I wondered what the slope of a deck looked like. Then I wondered what the optimal slope of a deck should be." Now a game of Magic could be formally considered as a sequence in which resources are expended optimally. This too helps us see The Fish.
Cut to 2020. COVID has forced the booming cEDH scene to live online, and Harry Finocchiaro and John Tull created and published the website Moxfield and it quickly became cEDH's de facto repository of knowledge. The largest tournament thus organized went off without a hitch: Okoberfest / Oktoberfest drew 118 players, Commander Format Panel member Rebell Lily made the cut on Sisay (hell yeah), and Kinnan took it down (snooze). We now can intuit how The Fish moves.
History had then conspired to create the most accessible, and arguably the most popular, format of Magic: The Gathering. This format isn't cEDH, unwieldy in its demands for four hundred cards and numerous humans with hours to burn. Nor is it best-of-one games of Standard on Arena, a quick fix just clicks away. The format I'm describing was first outlined in 1994, formalized in The Duelist a year later, then enabled by Moxfield and basically required by a pandemic in 2020. I have played this format over a hundred thousand times, and would wager that any given cEDH player has played it at least five thousand times. The format I'm talking about is called The Fish. Its structure is simple: a Magic nerd goldfishes their deck using the Moxfield playtester over and over and over again.
Importantly, this format meets all the criteria by which an activity is defined as a game. The easiest proof: Solitaire. More technically: the player playing The Fish experiences success and failure using limited resources to solve well-defined problems—and the outcome of any given attempt is at least partially unpredictable. No matter that those who fish lack human or programmed opponents. Much in the way Magic: The Gathering has been deepened by adding elements (e.g. Commander adding extra two players, a simultaneous social game, design restrictions, and win conditions), it has also been deepened by the subtraction of elements (in this case: human opponents, their decks, and time pressure). But people have been fishing their Magic decks since the game's earliest days; why call this activity a format in 2026? I'm arguing that cEDH's unique nature as a hundred card singleton format consisting nearly entirely of the combo archetype has elevated The Fish to the status of a format on its own. In other words, cEDH was the professor asking us to see.
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The phenomenology of playing The Fish is unique in a few ways. Its joys and frustrations are primarily private. The game can be abandoned or resumed on a whim. On the one hand, the conditions required for play are minimal (you can fish for a few minutes as long as you can use your phone); on the other hand, the consequences of such minimalism can be disastrous (one friend had to quit playing cEDH because fishing on Moxfield was colonizing his mornings and nights). The aesthetics can be seen as solitary or lonely—but they can also be seen as self-affirming, focused in that prayerful way described by nerd luminary Simone Weil. But despite those sacred pretensions, The Fish also conveys to us the same dangers of any quick dopaminergic activity: The Fish and Candy Crush Saga have more in common than The Fish and a round of Legacy. Though unlike a run-of-the-mill mobile game, The Fish is often played under the pretenses of increasing one's skillfulness for a different game—a realer game. Playing The Fish, in other words, is often framed as practice. This puts the format's experience of deep satisfaction always just out of reach. It is both beautiful and sad that most who play The Fish believe they are getting ready for "the big game." Imagine rehearsing thousands of times for a performance staged only once each week.
But we are losing sight of our specimen. To return to the beast on the table: How best to play The Fish? Let's compare The Fish to cEDH. In a round of cEDH, folks play a social game requiring performance and persuasion while simultaneously playing the most mathematically complex and mechanically interactive format in Magic: The Gathering's history (see: the statistical nightmare of four-player hundred-card singleton, the proportions of cards devoted to fucking up opponents' plans, the rapid and nonlinear accumulation of resources, etc.). The Fish jettisons all that complexity for the sake of a Sligh (or Snyder)-like focus on curving out, chaining tutors, and identifying the most common play patterns in a format defined (though less and less as the same design space is retread again and again) by its lack of redundant game pieces. While playing a game of cEDH, one can become intimately familiar with the thousands of ways one's deck fits into the elaborate mesh of Magic's most complicated format; while playing The Fish, one can become intimately familiar with one's goals and tendencies in relation to a deck regardless of context. To engage in The Gathering is to beat others at making reality match expectations; to look at your Fish is to beat only your psychology. Finally, since The Fish is the format in which a deck's underlying probabilistic structure is most expediently and consistently revealed, and since Magic: The Gathering is deeply mathematical, The Fish is the most pedagogical format yet devised. The only win condition of The Fish is to have learned something.
It seems to me that The Fish was first played at Harvard back in 1858. Back to Scudder and his aquatic partner:
I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will and discovered one new thing after another until I saw how just the professor's criticism had been. The afternoon passed quickly, and when, towards its close, the professor inquired: "Do you see it yet?" "No," I replied, "I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before."
Ultimately, The Fish is a way of disabusing ourselves of our fantasies. Maybe that's a funny thing to do while playing Magic. But as leisure time thins, economies go K-shaped, and Hasbro seeks profit at the expense of integrity, I believe that we should more often rely on ourselves—on our fundamental capacity for privacy—in order to feel good. Learning in your own home and at your own pace is a sustainable and edifying way to pass the time. And it is good to cultivate a humility toward the complexity of the world by any means necessary. Yet we should also remember the analogy by which The Fish came to be. As Beth Moursund reminded us in 1995, Magic is no replacement for a living thing and a game is no replacement for care, be it of another being, a playgroup, or a community. Fish aren't meant to be dead in jars—they're meant to swim alongside others. To live, we must turn away from the alluring dream of self-improvement; we must throw the averages overboard. "Whatever you do, don't forget to feed your pet."
Ken Baumann is a writer who lives in New Mexico.
