I am better at Magic: The Gathering when I don’ṫ know what I’m doing

Or maybe just luckier.

I mentioned winning the first game of Magic: The Gathering I ever played (against someone else who also had never played) and also winning game of Dandân immediately having it explained to me. On Saturday I was meant to be playing a game of Lancer with Caoimhe and Tigris, DMed by the zombie enthusiast and when that fell through due to some technical difficulties we played a game of Magic instead. I did not have a deck but the zombie enthusiast had apparently brought several. She started to explain each one and I asked her to stop and just hand me one and I’d figure it out. I think if I am going to lean into my bit of being a Yu-Gi-Oh! character I should approach card games like one: Knowing as little as possible, rolling with whatever surprises happen and relying on dumb luck the heart of the cards.

The deck, as it turned out was a proxy deck themed after Pokémon cards that she found online, with Pokémon Breeder as the commander. The zombie enthusiast was using a Chainsaw Man proxy deck she made herself with Denji as her commander. Caoimhe was using Tigris’ walls deck with Arcades the Strategist and Tigris was using another deck that I do not remember the commander of but had a lot of dragons.

For much of the game zombies dominated what was happening, with Denji on the field eventually equipped with a Chainsaw¹ and Tigris having cloned her own Denji using Will of the Temur, resulting in six zombie tokens being generated every round which constantly got wiped out and flooded cards into their hands. I was holding on to a Heat Wave for much of the game and kept looking for chances to use it to wipe out a zombie horde to multiply my own tokens but they would keep being blown away before it got back to my own turn every time.

I never actually got to generate any eggs with my commander and her ability to play creatures from the deck activated only once, when a Tauros died that counted as an egg due to being a ditto. What resulted in me getting a Zacian on the board, but without a 10/10 Zamazenta to back it up because it wasn’t cast, and which was killed before my next turn anyway. My game consisted of getting out strong creatures (including my commander twice) which my enemies kept bapping away, but without ever taking much damage myself and only occasionally getting to deal it out. My life never went below 40 and nearly reached 60 at one point due to a Venosaur.

In the end everyone targetted Chainsaw Man for getting too powerful and killed knocked her out, then Caoimhe used Slaughter the Strong to wipe out Tigris’ amassed dragons and all of my creatures other than a 4/4 Turtwig generated by Grotle, and I finally unleashed Heat Wave to destroy Caoimhe’s Arcades, Floriferous Vinewall and my own Bulbasaur to multiply my Turtwig into a small army to wipe Caoimhe out.

I did quite enjoy just rolling with the punches and seeing where the deck took me. Learning the game is very fun to me and if I had a perfect idea of how everything should work and a huge knowledge of cards and builds and the metagame it would probably not really be that interesting to me any more. I have been struggling with the motivation to actually build my own decks following the Seto Kaiba one.