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 course, 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 of 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.

An increasing number of people close to me are into, have been getting into, or are getting back into Magic: The Gathering. I don’t have a massive reluctance to learning or playing it but there’s a big upfront investment in learning it and I wasn’t particularly motivated to, but I was picking bits of it over time just from conversations with friends and I was on a nostalgia kick for Yu‑Gi‑Oh! recently so eventually I agreed with Caoimhe³ to play iff she made me a commander decker themed around Seto Kaiba.

This Reddit post outlined a basic idea for a deck with Dromar, the Banisher as a commander and other themes that were identified for the deck where: dragons, machine monsters, lads with big axes and the words “raider” or ”kaiser” in their names and big flashy trap cards that fuck up the opponent’s deck because this is first a comic about card games with big dramatic reversals and second a an actual card game. As well as Dromar repping the mandatory Blue-Eyes White Dragon I was keen on having some representation of some other cards I always associate with Kaiba like Crush Card Virus, Lord of D. and XYZ‑Dragon Cannon. I also wanted to have at least a few cards that functioned similar to trap cards or flip effect monsters from Yu‑Gi‑Oh!

Another friend threw out a list of card suggestions, though warned that Dromar was not a particularly good card to build a deck around. I pointed out that that was appropriate seeing as Ol’ Blue Eyes itself is fairly rubbish in practice and I am not intending to enter tournaments here, just play with some friends. I also suggested toning down the amount of cards from her suggestions that involve searching through the opponent’s deck, as doing that constantly sounds miserable for everyone involved in the game, especially when I’m new and wouldn’t really know what to look for.

Caoimhe took all of this and did her best to turn it into a usable deck list. I have no intention of spending a load of money buying cards, I am just going to print off proxies for all of these (the fact that I have a printer has also made me popular amongst my friends who play) and I have had some fun making some Yu‑Gi‑Oh!-styled proxies of the cards for the deck using the YGO Pro card editor, Card Conjurer and the GNU Image Manipulation Project.

Jester’s Cap combines the Crush Card Virus and Saggi the Dark Clown, which Kaiba often used together. I originally used the trap card layout for this but decided to save that just for cards with foretell, as those are going to be the ones played face down and settled on leaving artefacts as normal spell cards.

I might make some more if any particularly cute or fitting ideas strike me, but I don’t intend to do the entire deck. Trying to do a full hundred cards would quickly go from fun to tedious.

And now I need to actually play a game.

I posted a diorama I made for Caoimhe³ yesterday. I like to make little things for partners sometimes.

My other partner has a strong fondness for the pokémon goomy and I have learnt that your partner identifying with an extremely marketable pokémon makes putting together silly little gifts pretty easy. A couple of years ago I got a little 3D-printed goomy figurine from an Etsy shop (that doesn’t seem to sell it any more), painted it myself and and paired it with a love ball from a more official toy as a gift for her.

She has also been, more recently, getting back into Magic: The Gathering and had put together a ooze deck which she used my printer to make proxies for. While I was doing that for her I threw in some little custom cards for the deck.

For the Slurrk card I used Poké Card Generator to fill in the basic rules then made more modifications in GIMP. For the token card I used Card Conjurer and put a photo of the goomy figurine over a swamp background made by Aveontrainer.