Pure Evil

The past couple of weekends, I've had the opportunity to play Commander at my Friendly Local Gaming Store. It's been great! There's nothing quite like meeting new people over a game of Magic.

Playing the Lazav (Dimir State of Mind) deck was cool. I got a lot of positive comments. No one else had Lazav at any of the tables (or even U/B). While the deck worked as I expected, this particular pile of cards created tedious moments where timing was important or a trigger would affect everyone. Simple things, like the Sepulchral Primordial ability when it comes into play, would turn into a game-stopping spectacle as I resorted to simply asking everyone to pick a good creature from the graveyard and hand it over.



Lazav himself (along with library milling) was another game-stopping culprit. "Hang on, everyone. Mill one player at a time so that I can choose what I want to copy." That quickly turned into, "Just mill and let me know if you hit anything good." Most of the time people were cool about it and understood that I was trying to speed up the game, but there's always that one guy. Plus, as the "new guy" no one really knows where you are coming from. Are you just there to grief them?

So, I put the mono-black Demons deck back together. It's still called Get Ready for Griselbrand, even though he hangs out on the sidelines while Lord of the Void takes his place. I like to imagine that he's calling the shots from down low. Demons is a straight-forward beat-fest, for the most part. In general, one or two things happen per turn. I don't have to worry so much about triggers. And I rarely play anything that affects everyone with the exception of board wipe spells. Those are all-too-familiar in the format, so no trouble there.



I'm not saying that I'll never play Lazav at a large table again. But, do I really want to be calling people out on rules and timing all game? No, not really.

Demons is Pure Evil. Not the strongest deck. But evil. True Evil, on the other hand, is something else entirely. There's a guy at the store who brings a combo deck to the table every week. I haven't been in his pod yet, but I'm sure the day will come. When it does, I'll be running Arcanis (Braids) Brings Eldrazi. Not because it will win, but because I won't feel terrible for bringing a time-walking, mana-ramping, Anihillation-triggering, creature-stealing, blue deck to a "fun" game of Commander when the guy sitting two chairs down misses the point entirely and kills everyone on the fourth turn.