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Cultivating Your Legend

Bennie Smith reveals how cultivating your Legend in multiplayer Magic can turn against you. He gives suggestions for how you can change your reputation in order to ensure that your multiplayer games stay fun!

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I don’t play in group games to win. I play in them to take a few people out before I go down and build on my reputation as a mean S.O.B. – Chuck Myers

I recently spoke on the phone to an old friend Chuck, who might need a place to live and had heard that I was looking for a roommate. I’ve talked before about my living situation and the insane work hours I put in just to make ends meet. I hope having a roommate will really transform my life from this rather bleak existence of mostly working and sleeping into something more resembling a normal life with, you know, time for fun.

Time for more Magic, obviously. And dating and socializing. And Magic!

He’s supposed to come over this weekend to check out my house and talk about things. I’m really hoping this works out. I mean, I could’ve gone the Craigslist route, but I really, really didn’t want to have to interview a bunch of strangers, do a bunch of background checks, but in the end just hope and pray that the person who moved in didn’t turn into a complete nightmare ensconced in my home.

Chuck—I know Chuck! It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, but for many years we hung out, played a lot of Magic, and also talked a lot about life. We share many of the same interests: he loves gaming, reading, and watching good television and movies. He’s divorced, so we now share that in common. We’ve gone on many Magic road trips together—and in fact, one of the most epic road trips I ever went on was to Pro Tour DC back in 1999 with Chuck and two other guys. The PT was a team event chock full of many future PT Hall of Famers, including an epic semifinal game featuring Team Antarctica (Jon Finkel, Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz, and his brother Dan) squaring off against eventual champions Your Move Games (Darwin Kastle, Dave Humpherys, and Rob Dougherty).

Our team, unfortunately, was there for the numerous side events, but it was fun checking in and seeing all these guys playing in person.

Chuck cracked a joke back then that still makes me laugh when I think about it all these years later. I’m not sure I can do it justice in print but I’ll try. Anyway, this was when the Magic rules changed and damage was "put on the stack" (yeah, so long ago that now the rules have changed again and damage is no longer put on the stack). It was a new rule using an amusing term which made it easy to spin into a joke about something in the real world.

We were heading back to Richmond from DC—me, Chuck, Kevin and a very eccentric old guy named Bill all piled in one car. The awful convention center food we’d resorted to eating on site had long since worn itself out, and we were all starving. We saw a sign for Pizza Hut, and beer and pizza sounded like just the ticket to wash away the road and our hunger.

We all got our beers and put in our orders. Now, Pizza Hut pizza was notoriously greasy, so Kevin, Chuck and I all got regular crust pizza with not much meat on it—I think I got a veggie pizza, Kevin might have had just sausage, and I believe Chuck might have just gotten plain cheese.

Bill’s order came out—he’d ordered a meat lover’s deep dish that was just swimming in grease, and to top it off, he’d gotten an order of chicken wings too.

As Bill tore into the food, the rest of us looked on, mildly horrified thinking about the gastric distress such a meal was sure to provoke. Chuck piped in with the perfect joke to express what we were all thinking.

"Damn, Bill—I hope I’m not around when that stack resolves!"

Heh… It still brings a smile to my face. Sorry if it’s one of those "you had to be there" jokes, but I just had to share it.

Most everyone who used to hang out at Total Access Games back in the day loved both competitive Magic and casual multiplayer Magic, and Chuck and I were both of that stripe. The casual multiplayer games at TAG were nonstop and epic with people bringing decks sporting 300 or more cards and games lasting for hours on end. This was before EDH/Commander but was still very much in that same spirit—much of the joy of the game was playing politics, making big ass haymaker plays, and to just have a great time playing the game.

There were enough people regularly playing multiplayer Magic that after a while certain people developed certain styles of play that you could often count on no matter what stack of cards they shuffled up. Much to my chagrin, a style of play that I cultivated to much success around the multiplayer table ended up being my undoing.

I recount the exact episode where I realized what was happening and thoughts on what to do about it in an article I wrote back in 2003 called The Legend of Chuck. I consider it a real gem of a multiplayer article—it’s a quick read, and I think it has timeless application to multiplayer Magic including Commander. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it, check it out. As a bonus, Chuck just added a Facebook comment recounting the incident that inspired the article from his perspective, and that’s fun to read as well. There are always at least two sides to every story.

With Chuck popping back into my life I thought it worth revisiting the lessons learned from The Legend of Chuck.

When you play multiplayer Magic with the same group of people, over time they get to know you. They know what cards you like, they know what lines of play you gravitate towards, they know what shenanigans you try and pull off whenever you can. Back in 2003, I had cultivated my own Legend due to my success with a style of play—namely, I was able to find innocuous cards that no one paid attention to but was able to combine a few of them into something that was surprisingly strong and often be able to win games out of nowhere. I picked "camouflage" cards that you’d dismiss at first glance as being relatively harmless so that people would leave me alone long enough to execute my fiendish plan. I loved green cards, and back then green had lots of "bad" cards to choose from.

Chuck’s comments mention an old favorite of mine using Elvish Farmer as a sacrifice outlet for the many Saproling producing cards to trigger Fecundity, drawing more cards, making more Saprolings, and eventually killing everyone with a huge Firestorm. Elvish Farmer and Saproling tokens don’t normally get people too worked up until those tokens get too numerous or get pumped up…but drop a Fecundity and suddenly you’ve got a sick engine going. My style of play sprang from what I love most about Magic—cooking up great little synergies between cards that take people by surprise. Longtime readers will recognize that in many of the Standard decks I write about. I find a lot of joy in that, and it’s what’s kept me playing Magic non-stop since 1994.

The problem with using this strategy too long and being very successful with it is that eventually everyone just assumed I was setting things up to kill them all with bad cards at any moment…even when I actually didn’t have anything going on and just had a bunch of bad cards in play! See the problem there? In multiplayer Magic a lot of decision-making is based on threat assessment—knowing who’s the most pressing threat and maneuvering other people to see things your way, while also trying to disguise your own threat "footprint."

Threat assessment in Commander is obviously very complicated, but at its basic level it involves seeing cards in play and figuring out which are dangerous to your health (and when) and which aren’t that big of a deal. I’d managed to kill people with so many innocuous cards that now anything I played was viewed as a threat. When doing threat assessment, all my opponents just automatically put me at the top of the heap. Even when it was obvious I didn’t really have much going on, I was attracting the "random" attacks from people because it was just better to be safe than sorry.

What’s scarier to face down in a game of Magic—the threat that’s there on the board that you can see coming or the hidden threat that you don’t know where it’s coming from or how it’s going to kill you? I’d cultivated my reputation—my "Legend"—as being the hidden threat that you never see coming…making me scary no matter what I was doing or how much I was smiling and laughing.

Conversely, Chuck had built his Legend differently. His style was one of direct and spectacular haymakers, and also one of vengeance. If you directed a "random" attack his way, he’d make you pay for it the next game. And maybe the game after that…and maybe the one after that. And maybe one next week. He wasn’t going to ambush you with some sort of sneaky, under the radar combo either—no, he was going to play out his mana and start dropping big haymakers on your ass until you were at zero life points no matter who was the actual biggest threat at the table.

The Legend of Chuck meant that you didn’t pick a fight with Chuck until you were going for the win (or trying to prevent him from winning). His Legend often meant that he lasted a really long time in group games. Conversely, my Legend often meant that if anyone had the opportunity to take me down, they took that opportunity no matter what else was going on. That translated into being sent to the sidelines of many group games a lot earlier than I probably deserved if you looked at that particular game in a bubble. But we rarely start a game of Commander in a bubble with a bunch of strangers. No, we typically come with Legends we’ve built for ourselves, for good or bad, and those Legends influence how our opponents play with us.

I think it’s important sometimes to take a long, hard look at the reputation—the Legend—that you’ve built for yourself around the multiplayer table. What do people expect from you? Do those expectations help you win more? Or do they contribute you to losing more? If it’s the latter, how might you go about changing your Legend into something more favorable? Sometimes it can be quite difficult because your Legend will often be tied into what you really enjoy most about Magic, your favorite style of play. But it helps to remember that sometimes playing outside of your comfort zone can be a lot of fun, too, and can lead to making you a better overall player…as well as giving your Legend a much-needed overhaul.

As an example, here are some things I could do to try and change up my Legend:

  1. Play cards that are obviously good. When I play a strange card that everyone has to read, it sets off "shenanigans" alarm bells. Conversely, when I play Primeval Titan everyone knows what that means.
  2. Play counterspells. I never play counterspells, so people always know that open blue mana from me doesn’t really mean anything.
  3. Don’t have any green or black cards in my deck. It’ll freak people out a bit.
  4. Avoid graveyard strategies; instead, run more things like Elixir of Immortality to just shuffle more cards into my deck.

So what’s your Legend? What might you do to give it an overhaul?

Before I go…a couple Commander-related tidbits!

The other day Andrea Shubert sparked a Twitter conversation about Commander and how it should be played especially if it’s going to be a "competitive" format. WotC’s own Aaron Forsythe chimed in with his thoughts.

This made me laugh, and I thought drew a really nice comparison to how playing Commander should be like horsing around with your kids and having a good time, not seeing how fast and brutal you can be. All in a nice little Tweet morsel. It made me think about how I could Tweet something similar. Here’s what I cooked up based on things I’ve written before about my general philosophy regarding the format:

I hadn’t written those exact words before, but rather it was a distillation of some things I wrote in a column entitled EDH Miscellany. Here are a few quotes from that article:

Of course everyone has their opinions on the format, which is cool and all…but ultimately Commander boils down to everyone at the table having a good time playing Magic. It behooves each player at the table to keep that in mind, both in the cards they choose for the decks they bring and the way that they play out the game.

Oh, before I go—I was psyched to see my Ruhan deck from last week featured on Wizards of the Coast’s Daily Decklist on Monday. Check it out!

That’s it for now…keep your fingers crossed for me that Chuck likes my house and agrees to become my roommate, finally letting me change my life around for the better.

Have a great weekend!

Take care,

Bennie

starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com

Make sure to follow my Twitter feed (@blairwitchgreen). I check it often so feel free to send me feedback, ideas, and random thoughts. I’ve also created a Facebook page where I’ll be posting up deck ideas and will happily discuss Magic, life, or anything else you want to talk about!

New to Commander?
If you’re just curious about the format, building your first deck, or trying to take your Commander deck up a notch, here are some handy links:

My current Commander decks (and links to decklists):

Previous Commander decks currently on hiatus: