My decade-long undefeated winning streak in Magic: The Gathering ended last night

I played one game of Magic: The Gathering back in uni at a games night against one other person who had also never played it before and won. Yesterday I played my second game: A commander match against Caoimhe and our friends Tigris and someone who I will be calling a zombie enthusiast.

I was, of coursing, using the Seto Kaiba deck¹ that Caoimhe had made for me. Caoimhe herself had Lazav, Dimir Mastermind as her commander with a deck based around milling everyone’s cards. The zombie enthusiast also had a mill-heavy zombie deck led by Gisa and Geralf. And Tigris had Arcades the Strategist commanding a deck otherwise made mostly of walls.

It was a lot of fun and I did quite well despite not having really studied the deck that had been made for me that much beforehand. It took a while before much started to happen but as I started to get a few dragons on the board Tigris quickly became a very intimidating threat with a Corrupted Shapeshifter duplicated by Mirror Room and boosted by Arcades the Strategist giving her two 12/12 creatures. Some Lightning Greaves on Arcades also meant that the dragon was difficult to get rid of as well. Our zombie enthusiast was also building a nasty horde including deathtouch, easily revivable Poxwalkers.

In response to an increasingly scary board state I summoned Junji, the Midnight Sky then Damned the board to wipe the slate clean, using Junji’s death ability to put Corrupted Shapeshifter back on the field as 0/12 blocker for myself, which Tigris complained about not being able to get past for the rest of the game. It was Caoimhe’s turn after mine and she played something I don’t recall that exiled the zombie graveyard, taking the horde off the board a little while. Those two back-to-back Caoimhe turns were a real blow for the other side of the table. Not that we were playing teams; myself and Caoimhe just happened to be sitting next to each other. And I repaid Caoimhe for her part of the double-whammy by knocking her out of the game at the first opportunity I got, which she congratulated me on.

I was doing well for some time, with the most life of everyone for much of the game, but eventually myself, Tigris and the zombie enthusiast all got whittled down to single-digit life. Junji got raised from the dead twice during the game, once as a zombie and once by me, and Tigris’ walls were not able to block it’s menacesome flying and was killed by it, leaving only myself and the zombies.

I think I managed some Yu-Gi-Oh! worthy reversals a few times, countering some nasty spells, using Aetherize to ward of horde of zombies that would have finished me off, and then stopping their master from being able to attack me at all with Sivitri, Dragon Master as she didn’t have enough life to pay the tax to attack me. But, unfortunately, life didn’t otherwise matter to her as she was able to play Lich’s Mastery when I didn’t have any mana to counter it and then could not find a way to remove. By then she had refilled her graveyard and I was just not able to do enough damage to empty it as she used it as her replacement life pool. I thought I was being very clever spending a couple of turns using Soul Manipulation to revive Hammerhead Tyrant and then using its ability while recasting my commander so I could send Lich’s Mastery back to her hand but I failed to notice that it had hexproof. Phyrexian Arena had been serving me well in getting me more cards throughout the game but now it was acting as a countdown for the number of turns I had left and even though the zombies couldn’t attack me she still had other things that could drain my life. In the end I was finished off by her playing my own Brainstealer Dragon from my graveyard, trigging its ability and killing me². Ugin, the Spirit Dragon could have saved me from Lich’s Mastery but this is not Yu-Gi-Oh! and it does not count as a dragon just because it has the word “dragon” in the card name, so Sivitri, Dragon Master could not pull it from my deck for me.

It was a lot of fun! Thanks to some megamorph creatures I even got to say “I play one monster face down and end my turn!” One thing the game did highlight is how, even though having a flying 6/6 on call was useful, Dromar, the Banisher is even worse than we all realised at first because his ability hits all creatures on a chosen colour, including himself. So unless you’re targetting 🌶️ or 🌳 with it you are dismissing your own commander every time you use it and in this game no one had any 🌶️ cards and Tigris was the only one with 🌳, Caoimhe and the zombies’ commanders both being 💀💧.

I am playing with revising the deck with Sivitri as commander rather than Dromar. This means no more ☀️ but that was the least-used colour in the deck anyway and of the custom proxies I made it only loses Smothering Tithe. Caoimhe has objected that “a little bit of white mana is useful for Kaiba to be portrayed as not entirely evil,” but on the other hand, nah.