Can you beat beef.dec?

Introduction

If you're anything like me, you love goldfishing commander decks. But while it's great for getting used to the basic mana curve and tempo, playing against an empty table isn't close to the real experience of a game. At the same time, playing your own decks against each other feels overwhelming. You might not even have decks around the same bracket.

My alternative is inspired by Horde Magic. In Horde Magic, you and your teammates cooperate to beat a deck that has some degree of control logic. Beef.dec is the dumbed down version of that: a simple autobattler that tests your deck's ability to handle a straightforward aggressive assault.

How to Play

beef.dec is a one-on-one game between you and an imaginary opponent. Both players start at 40 life, and beef.dec goes first. beef.dec doesn't have any cards in its hand, command zone, or library. It doesn't lose to drawing from an empty library, but other win conditions are fair game.

At the beginning of its upkeep, beef.dec creates a X/X green Aurochs creature token, with power and toughness each to the current turn. On turn one, it makes a 1/1. On turn two, a 2/2. And so on. The power/toughness tops out at 6, since that makes it easier to track with dice (it also better mimics non-Eldrazi sizes).

During each of its combat steps, have beef.dec make a "reasonable" attack towards you and/or any planeswalkers you control. Obviously, there's a lot of wiggle room here for you to determine “reasonable”, but what I generally do is:

1. Avoid attacks that will cause Aurochs to die without getting a significant amount of damage through. For example, don't have the Aurochs attack a 1/1 into a vanilla 2/2. But do attack with a 1/1 Aurochs into a utility 1/1.
2. Do play around on-board tricks.
3. Don't play around hidden information from your actual deck.

On your turn, beef.dec doesn't have any responses. Make reasonable decisions for any actions that would affect it (i.e. if asked to sacrifice a creature, have it sacrifice the one with the lowest power). Block with untapped Aurochs if there are any, either to kill an attacker or to prevent it from losing its last life point(s).

That's pretty much it- beef.dec represents a simple, snowballing horde of creatures that will slowly (yet surely) overcome you if you don't have blockers or interaction. It's super easy to pilot: all you need is something to represent the Aurochs, like dice or slips of paper. If not using something card-shaped, I keep them in two separate herds to represent tapped or untapped Aurochs.

What, why?

First, it's surprisingly fun solitaire. It starts out simple, but soon you'll be at 10 life and digging for an answer to these oversized cows. It doesn't take much mental load beyond playing your own deck. And yet, I find that beef.dec is actually a pretty reasonable approximation of real commander. You’re forced to make real decisions about blocking and attacking, so you can't rely on utility pieces sticking around. Your deck has to actually play interaction, with mass destruction being really useful, if potentially slow to catch up.

Second- and your mileage may vary on this one- beef.dec can help you determine which bracket your deck fits in. beef.dec feels very much like a Bracket 2 deck that's going off: completely unanswered, it’ll win on turn 7. If I have a deck that generally struggles against beef.dec, I'd consider that a 2. If a deck usually wins but requires a bit of luck or clever thinking to stabilize the game, that's a 3. The decks that combo off too faster, or out-beef the beef, are my 4s.

Ok, so I play propaganda and win right?

Look, it's a pile of cows, it's not going to be perfect. There are obviously playstyles that are a bad match-up for beef.dec. On the flip side, a dedicated mill deck won't be able to do anything under the current rule set. My goal was to be as accessible as possible, to permit testing most decks. And to some degree, it’s realistic that not every card in your deck will have use cases against the Aurochs.

Expanding the Concept

One obvious extension would be to give beef.dec an actual deck. Specifically, you could set up a pile of cards that the autobattler draws and plays each turn. This gets you closer to the original Horde Magic concept, while giving you some variance of play. It would also support practice against a mill deck, and give counterspells more meaning. Spells it could cast include:

·       Artifact / enchantment sweepers like [[Fracturing Gust]]

·       Mass pump effects like [[Overrun]]

·       Preemptive disruption effects like [[Hesitation]]

·       Life gain like [[Angel’s Mercy]]

·       Lands, to give you a turn off, while allowing it to pay for things like [[Mana Leak]

TL;DR

Playtest your deck with an autobattler deck that generates an arithmetic sequence of Aurochs. It's fun!