Maybe it wasn't my fault. Maybe they were just having a bad day. But, I'll bet that 5c Cromat Control (Burberry Cologne) wasn't helping the situation. It went down like this.
A few weeks ago, my friendly local gaming store decided to change the Commander schedule. They do this from time to time, I think to punish the players for getting into a routine. I stubbornly arrive at the old time, hoping that others will join me in a protest for changing the schedule. Instead, it's the Born of the Gods release. Everyone is doing that.
One of the guys from the store is up for a game of Commander, but he didn't bring his deck. I have two decks, so I've got him covered. One other player has dropped from the Born of the Gods release and is also up for a game of Commander. The store decides to make it an official three-person game, for prizes. Great.
My 5c Cromat deck is over 50% non-English cards so it's not super-friendly as a loaner. I don't really intend to play it "officially," but since I'm lending my Dark Eldrazi deck to the other guy, I'm going to have to. The third player drops Sliver Queen on the table. I immediately assume it's going to be combo-Sliver beatdown and I feel less worried about playing my 5c deck. You see, the 5c deck isn't a whole lot of fun to play against.
As an aside, let me just say that the 5c control deck IS a whole lot of fun to play against if you are into that sort of thing. I happen to like control match-ups, technical plays, and counter wars. But not everyone does and it may not be in the "spirit of the format." More on that later.
Back to the table. I start to make conversation and realize that the Sliver Queen player is not, in fact, playing bomb Sliver combo. She's just playing Slivers, sort of. She doesn't get to do much as I've got Stranglehold, Humility, Moat, and some other stuff out. It's bad. Bad, bad. To be fair, we both end up losing the game to my Dark Eldrazi deck off an Exsanguinate for 39. Yes, 39. Thank you Liliana's ultimate. And I don't have the counter in hand because I was stopping combo Sliver from going off (which of course it never would have, because it wasn't actually combo Sliver). Unh.
She says, "that's it?" I start apologizing and try to explain that there are normally lots of players, not just three. Not every game goes this way. I invite her to play again.
The Dark Eldrazi deck is inherently fair. When it wins, it almost always does it with attacks. Yes, those attacks often have annihilator triggers attached to them, but there are no crazy combos. The deck starts to actually do something on turn 7 or 8 and almost exclusively plays one threat per turn. It kills, at most, one player per turn. What I mean about "fair" is that it does not do the following:
Ramp --> Tooth and Nail --> Win
Ramp --> Primal Surge --> Win
Ramp --> Genesis Wave --> Win
High Tide --> Omniscience --> Enter the Infinite --> Win
I don't have a problem with this stuff, but it turns the game into a race to see who can hit 10ish mana first with the right card in hand. In that sense, these decks aren't playing "fair" because they aren't really interacting. They are doing their own thing, burning through 40 life, and then winning suddenly.
But! When the Dark Eldrazi deck is working, a couple of big attacks steps is tough to recover from. So, I play the 5c Control deck again thinking that I can drag the game out and see what her deck can do. Somewhere around turn 4, I have Intuition into Life from the Loam and a couple of cycling lands. Every turn, I'm dredging and cycling and drawing and there's lot of shuffling involved since I am fetching every turn, and she's just sitting there drifting away. At some point, there are tears. Great.
See, the weird thing is that the 5c deck is technically "fair" by the definition above. There are no crazy combos. In fact, it either wins with Cromat beat down, one player at a time, or with a 10 mana, two-turn Door to Nothingness, one player at a time. It's slow. It's technical. It makes whatever you are trying to do difficult or impossible to do. It's not splashy, it's not big, it doesn't encourage interaction or bring about cool board states. So, even though it's "fair," it's not in the "spirit of the format."
Where does that leave me? Can I walk on the edge of fair?
I do like the Dark Eldrazi deck. And even though it will occasionally drop Kozilek, equip Lightning Greaves, attack, and copy of the annihilator 4 trigger with Strionic Resonator, that's pretty rare. It's brutal, but fair. It doesn't win me the game on the spot. At best, it puts serious hurt on one player, especially if they are light on permanents already. It does not, for example, cast Jokulhaups (which is totally legal and only 6 mana), a card that makes me cry.
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