Tag Archives: Magic: The Gathering

A New Commander Deck – Back to the Future

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I’ve decided to try to flex my storytelling and my deckbuilding muscles at the same time, and build a new Commander deck for myself (my first in over a decade, it’s not really been my format to date). I’m going to try to tell the story of the Back to the Future trilogy, using only existing cards. I’m intending to rename where necessary, and create a full set of printable proxies so I can play with the story version (I’ll need to trade for the actual versions of a few cards, having them all to hand so that people know it’s purely for aesthetics).

Choosing the colours

It’s pretty clear that Doc is predominantly Blue–he makes artifacts, he invents, he’s a scientist, he’s a time-traveller: all Blue traits.

Marty is a little bit harder to pin down, but I think given his desire to prove himself, and his inability to handle being called “chicken”, and the amount of fights he gets into, I’m gonna say he’s predominantly Red. I looked at commanders in Izzet (red/blue), and picked out Jhoira of the Ghitu as a potential time-oriented mechanic, and as a 2/2, it seemed easy to make this be something like “Doc and Marty, Time Travelers”. I’ve explored that colour combination a bit, and I think I can make it work.

The idea with this deck would be to have some of the high cost taken-an-extra-turn sorceries in that deck that could be Suspended. I’ve added about 30-40 cards to this deck so far, hoping to complete it soon enough.

However, I discovered that as I designed it there were a lot of moments from the movies I wanted to incorporate that couldn’t quite make it in easily in just Izzet, so I examined which other of the three colours I could to be able to include them. Black was out–there’s nothing really evil or dark about these movies or characters–so that left me with Green or White. Given the number of Humans in the movie, both of these were good choices, but with the overall sub-theme of Artifacts in White, I decided to search in Jeskai for commanders. There are only 50 total, and only four who have any kind of Artifacts connection.

I thought about having Inspirit be the DeLorean but it doesn’t make a ton of sense mechanically, so rejected that one. The Gnome Champion makes no sense whatsoever, but the other two had some possibilities. It then led me to search for any commanders who had an energy token in their oracle text, so I found Satya, Aetherflux Genius.

Satya works as a Marty and Doc card (Menace works if you think of it as “you need two creatures to block us because we also are two creatures”), and they definitely have Haste, given how they can arrive in the nick of time (although one could argue that Marty seems to get quite a bit of summoning sickness in the movies).

The tapped and attacking token? That’s Marty from another timeline come to help, or the DeLorean you hid in an abandoned mine for 70 years.

I’m thinking of the energy counters as “flux” in the Flux Capacitor sense of the word. Timestuff. Chono-mana. Ya know, flux.

I’m going to try to build this deck out also, and I’ll post some articles about card choices as I make them and test out the deck. My goal is to nail the feel of the movies, and also having a working Commander deck, without having to invent any new cards (but maybe rename a few existing ones like Satya here).

Magic: The Gathering

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I’ve not ever written about Magic, despite having played it on off more or less since its inception. I think part of the reason for that is that the game changes very quickly, and I get frustrated with it, or with the community, or with the pay-to-play aspects of it and then I walk away from it.

I started playing back when I worked in a tiny hobby story called The Dungeon. I pretty much spent all my meager earnings on buying boosters for Revised Edition, Legends and The Dark. I taught a lot of people how to play, and my local comic book store then became a hub for playing and trading. There were no online guides on how to play. We had heard that Black Lotus was a really good card, but nobody knew why (nor had one). When we did eventually find one, it was kind of a let down–until we figured out the ridiculous combos it enables, and then I tried like hell to trade for one (spoiler: I never got one). I kept playing through Ice Age and Fallen Empires. Homelands came out (the worst set in Magic History, with probably zero cards to redeem the whole set) and Wizards announced they’d never print powerful cards like Black Lotus again: this combination of events caused me to stop playing.

I dabbled a bit on occasion over the next 10 years or so, but mostly I was busy having kids and moving around the world. It wasn’t until my kids started to get into board games again and I moved to a place where my closest coffee shop was also a game store that I started to get back into it. This was early 2011, when the Scars of Mirrodin block was being played, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor was dominating Standard. I slowly learned how to draft, and built a deck for Standard, eventually settling on playing Elves because everything else was just too expensive. I attended a few Pro-Tour Qualifiers, and did OK, coming away with more wins than losses. I traded aggressively to start to build a Modern deck when that was first announced. I became a Rules Advisor and found a Judge to mentor me. And then life happened–I don’t even remember exactly what, but I didn’t have the time or the passion to keep playing, so I stopped, sometime around the end of the Innistrad block. I sold all my cards, except for an Elf deck for EDH.

My kids got into playing it around War of the Spark, but it wasn’t until I was living on my own for a period during Covid that I really got back into playing again. I played on Arena a bunch (I have a screenshot where I was rated in the top 250 worldwide briefly) playing Werewolves in Standard. As restrictions eased, I drafted Kaldheim and New Capenna, and a few others, mostly to be social (and with Arena to pass the time while living alone). Modern had moved on a lot, but you couldn’t play it on Arena. I didn’t start to play competitively again in person.

And now one of my kids has got back into it in a fairly big way, playing daily online with their friends, and going to our local store for Commander games. I’m not a big fan of the Commander format as the games take a really long time to play and there’s a lot of not doing anything–it’s very much like a beer and pretzels version of Magic, and I much prefer the fast-paced duels. However, I’m learning to just treat it as a chance to chat rather than worrying about the playing.

I’m vaguely considering getting into playing Standard or Modern again, but the proliferation of Universes Beyond sets is … meh. Outside of this game, I’m a pretty big fan of TMNT, Marvel, and so forth. I’m just not convinced they belong in Magic. Well, it’s not my choice, I guess. And, like every other sucker out there, I’m sure I’ll spend money to have cards with some of my favourite characters on them (they better print a Garak card in the Star Trek set, just sayin’).