This past weekend my roommate and I went to a local game store to participate in a Commander event. We have both gone to Prerelease events in the past and he’s participated in Draft weekends, but this was our first time going to this particular store to check it out. The store we normally go to for cards and Prereleases doesn’t really sponsor EDH events, so we started looking elsewhere. We found another store that is about 20 minutes from home that has an EDH event every Friday and Sunday (at least for the time being) so we signed up and played on Sunday.

The event was set up as follows: Starts at 2pm until 5pm. Three rounds are played. Pods of four are randomly assigned. You only get to use one deck for all three rounds, and the rounds last 50 minutes. At the end of a round if there is no winner, then everyone gets a point for participating til the end, and each player votes for someone besides themselves who they thought played the best. If you win a round I think you got 2 points. We were playing for prizes so the shopkeeper kept track of all these points. I guess if there were a minimum of 8 players, the grand prize would have been one of the 2017 Commander Precon decks. In this case there were only four players, so we were playing for Rivals of Ixalan packs and a special promo card. We ended up with these commanders going head to head:

I was playing The Locust God, my roommate was running Ghave, and the other two guys were playing Reaper King and Zacama. I was surprised to see someone else playing Reaper King, and I was also surprised to see how this guy built his deck… it was really nothing like mine but he admitted he had just thrown it together and that it could use some revision. He still had some interesting ideas. I’m all too familiar with my roommate’s Ghave deck, and apparently the other guys we were playing with had no idea. I almost played my Reaper King deck for the event but am kind of glad that I didn’t because it would have been two of us in the same pod, but at the same time maybe I should have so I could show the guy what it can do. One thing I did learn: I suspected that Zacama was not a good choice for commander for a dino tribal deck and these games proved me right. I’m sticking with Gishath for my dino tribal deck, and putting Zacama in the 99. He’s just too slow to get going and not splashy enough. He truly belongs as one of the 99 in a dino tribal or in his own sort of combo/jank deck.

The first round played was the closest. Me and my roommate were basically racing to see who could get off their infinite combo first, and he did. He won around the same time as the timer was going to expire. In game two, we expected there to be some sort of change in behavior for the other guys we were playing with. They seemed to recognize that my deck could do some busted shit, but they seemed to ignore Ghave despite him winning the first round. Spoiler alert! He won all three games because I was the only one trying to stop him, which in turn set me back on my own progress to win. Frustrating as that was, I suppose it was going to come down to one of us winning from the get go, since the other guys we were playing with had super casual decks that weren’t going to compete anyway. So my roommate walked away with a few packs of RIX and a promo foil of Brass’s Bounty. I somehow came in third despite actually making an elimination in one of the rounds… probably due to the voting thing. I got two packs of RIX (which means I about broke even, as the buy-in was for $8 so I’m not complaining). Didn’t pull anything good from it, but my roommate did and we made a decent trade later.

After the official stuff was over we played one “for fun” game with shopkeeper. I put fun in quotes because he had a hell of an abusive deck that no one stood a chance against, at least with how fast it got going. He was playing Doran, but was really playing a “secret commander” sort of deck.

What I mean by secret commander is that his official commander int he command zone was Doran, but his deck heavily revolved around Gaddock Teeg, Meren and another ghost spirit thing that had built in recursion. This deck was mean, and it was fast. He was constantly sacrificing and recurring creatures with ETBs that made us sacrifice our own creatures of blew up artifacts/enchantments. My roommate switched to his Scion deck for this game, and I had swapped to Kaalia. He was eliminated in like 10 minutes flat, while I attempted to slow down the shopkeep, and the other two guys were twiddling their thumbs. It got to a point where I couldn’t stop this guy and he prevented me from doing shit aside from board wipes and other removal spells so I ended up scooping and so did the rest of the table. Guy had a hell of a deck, but man was it frustrating to play against!

When we got home, I traded my roommate an Ash Barrens and a Seafloor Oracle for Kumena, Tyrant of Orzaca.

He pulled Kumena from his victory packs which is a $20 card (and one that I really wanted to finish up my Simic Merfolk deck) and since there have been a few trades we made in the past that favored him monetarily, he said that he would trade me for some lesser value cards. He really wanted the Ash Barrens that I had, which was something that came in a precon at some point but has gone up in price due to Pauper, and he didn’t want to spend the money on it, and I threw in a $.50 card that he wanted as well. It was a nice pickup, and I ordered the remaining cards for that deck shortly thereafter.

Overall it was a fun experience. We’re looking forward to doing something like this again, and now that I know more of what to expect it should be easier to be more prepared. We’re hoping that more people show up to the next one, or that at the very least we can find someone who wants to join our more dedicated pod so we can play more often again.