Yesterday thanks to a combination of intense heat and disrupted schedules, Fox and a friend and I wound up playing Magic: The Gathering using cards from repackaged boosters from our local card store. The decks were played with were commander decks – some using cards from our colection, but mostly stuff that, for the past few years, has been considered good enough to draft but never good enough to keep.
Two of the decks that emerged from this were Hythonia The Cruel and Yisan the Wanderer.
Hythonia was fascinating because of her raw power. Obviously. When I first started helping with the deck, with incorrectly looked for cards that could regenerate/survive her ability, assuming that we’d need that. Turns out we were wrong: When she becomes monstrous, the fact you have a 7 power commander on the table is very clearly going to win you the game in small multi situations.
The other goofiness was Yisan. I saw that Yisan could tutor up a Seeker of Skybreak and that made me laugh – popping Yisan to tutor up two four drops instead of a three than a four. That deck, which I love, generates tons and tons of mana. Right now I need to find ways to reset Yisan (ideally, something he can tutor up with Devour, perhaps?).
Really, though, I’m just going to gloat.
I had Yisan out. He’d squeaked past one counter, then tutored up a Seeker. Thanks to earlier survival moves I had a Patron of the Orochi down as well. In an end-step, I then tapped Yisan, tapped the seeker to untap Yisan, tapped Yisan again, tapped the Patron to untap Yisan and the Seeker, tapped Yisan and tapped the Seeker to untap Yisan and tapped Yisan again. Instead of tutoring up a 3 drop, I vomited four six drops onto the table.
I love Commander. I love remembering the fun you can have with the cards lots of people disregard as junk.