by Ken Baumann
Game 946
For a competitive person, losing a game of Magic can cause a cascade of self-loathing, doubt, theorizing, research, brewing, and credit card debt. After fifteen years away I returned to Magic by way of Commander in 2018, and it took precisely one night of games for me to fall into my local group's arms race, exacerbated by easy access to Command Zone videos and instant gratification via online card shops. Like so many Commander players, we lied to ourselves and each other about our arms race's existence ("We just like working on our decks!") and our desire to win ("We just want our decks to 'do the thing'!"). In other words, we embodied the contradiction inherent in Commander's original design: an anti-competitive outlet for players burned out by tournaments, EDH is also a free-for-all with numerous win conditions and only one victor. Commander's earliest designers and advocates wanted playing Magic to be a primarily social experience, a fun and no-stakes way to kill time with friends, yet they couldn't think outside the vocabulary and grammar with which most competitive games are structured. Calling Commander a "social game" was more so a post hoc attempt at rebranding the format like Dungeons & Dragons, a game explicitly designed to be social and open-ended in its rulesets. I wasn't yet acquainted with Elder Dragon Highlander's history, but I still felt this contradiction the first night I played—and I also knew my history of being deeply competitive. While stuffing away deck and pizza boxes, I started to wonder:
What if I stopped lying?
