eggies

I was going to set a reminder to buy the Odds and Ends Secret Lair. But I figured that there'd probably be a post on reddit about it going live, and that'd remind me.

But it's a print to demand secret lair with a 24 hour order window, so there's no controversy, and thus no new post appeared, either here or on one of the main mtg subreddits.

On the one hand, that makes sense. Our subreddits are not an extension of Wizards' marketing department. On the other hand, it is kind of ridiculous how much more likely we are to talk about something when things have gone wrong.

In any case, there are 14 hours left before the order window closes, as of this writing. So here's your reminder, if you n

My words of love do not uniquely stand,
They're woven in a tapestry more vast
Than me and you; embedded in a strand
Of endless summer's days, each like the last --
These words could have been stitched by robot hands,
Assembled from the breaths of a billion souls,
Plundered from countless tongues in far flung lands
And raked from all our hearth fires' cold grown coals.
If mere machines might thus love's proof derive,
If summed cliché could full compose these lines,
What use love's labor, why then should I strive
To note specific amber in your eyes?
I cast about, claim this: time's echoed loves, and ours,
As one affirm all words; fix love up in the stars.

*I w

I like the idea that the "platonic ideal" of an EDH game is that each deck gets a chance to do its "thing" before the game is over.

To me, doing your thing means playing some pretty cards, setting up some synergies, and (probably) casting your commander. You should expect to meet resistance when you start to setup an actual win.

It feels like a lot of salt gets spilled on the table when someone conflates "winning the game" with "doing my thing." That conflation makes sense in higher brackets, where the "thing" is to win, and the ideal doesn't really hold.

In lower brackets it gets tricky when someone is playing a "kill on sight" style commander. I always feel a little bad when I exile s

(I found this thing I wrote a few years ago on a social media site, and thought it might be useful to others here.)

I think I figured out how to articulate something that causes some confusion when talking about LGBTQ+ things.

I think that human gender and sexuality tend to be more fluid than we realize. We all have the potential to be many things. The dizzying variety of human cultures, and of human expression within cultures, is testament to that.

But that’s fluid in the sense of flexibly adapting to fit the shape of the landscape as we move through life. Not fluid as in flowing backwards.

You can’t return the stream to the spring. You can’t make the river flee from the sea.

Magic was designed as a dueling game, and its mechanics leave some gaps when it comes to multiplayer. It's not always clear who to attack, and when. Politics fills those gaps. 

But politics can be messy. I would like to offer a simple, practical approach to them, which deals with the facts on the battlefield as they are, and largely shuns drama and histronics. I think of it as a sort of "realpolitik," within the magic circle of the game. 

Your goal when practicing realpolitik is generally not going to be to convince players to do or to not do something. It does not become us to simper, or to bully, or to cajole. This is just a game, after all. Instead, we are going to set up facts on the g

In my essay about how Alela is the perfect Girlypop Theory Commander, I mentioned that I have a [[Queen Marchesa]] deck that was built from the ground up to be Girlypop. 

Some folks requested that I share. So here's a breakdown of how the deck works. 

First off, here is Girlypop Theory in bullet points:

1. It's not about winning or losing; it's about feeling good when the game is done. 
2. We actively participate in the game and strongly influence the course of the game without outright controlling it; we encourage our opponents to attack, but not to attack us.
3. We include cards that make us giggle and ✨. (Even in Bracket 4.)

And here's the [decklist](https://moxfield.com/decks/d

We talk a lot about synergy in deck building. 

But I've been thinking about tension. 

Tension comes naturally. Every time you think about how many lands to include in a deck, you are engaging with one of the fundamental tensions of the game. Do you improve your early land drops at the risk of late game flood, or play fewer lands and risk having to mulligan away good spells?

That tension is ever present, and inherent to the design of the game. What happens when you deliberately induce extra levels of tension? 

I had a player tell me that including [[Powder Keg]], which I use to eliminate 0 cost tokens, in my [[Alela, Artful Provocateur]] deck felt like a "nonbo." There is tension

Take a three color Commander deck. A rock solid mana base looks something like this:

3 Shocklands (~$10 x 3 ~= $30)
3 Surveil Lands (~$10 x 3 ~= $30)
9 Fetchlands (~$20-$30 x 9 ~= $225)
18 basics (pennies)
1 Command Tower (pennies)
1 Exotic Orchard (pennies)
1 Triome (~$20)
~ 2 util lands/MFDC lands/whatever (pennies or $20-$30, depending)

That's around $300 total. You can shave a big chunk off of that by refusing to run off color fetches, which is definitely a legitimate choice, though that now gives you 6 more slots to fill with things that aren't shocklands or things that can get shocklands. You can add tons of money to the tab by running original duals, but that i

As a follow-up to my post about "Girlypop Theory," I wanted to talk about a Girlypop deck that wasn't, and why it wasn't, and what I want to do better next time. 

Before we get into that, let's take a bullet point style go at what Girlypop Theory is:

1. A Girlypop deck feels good both to play and to play against. 
2. Girlypop decks attack, interact, and encourage others to attack.
3. ... but tend to nudge attacks at other players.
4. Girlypop decks seek to actively influence the flow of the game, but never to lock anyone out of the game.
5. Girlypop decks should have at least one thing about them that makes us giggle. Even the Bracket 4 ones.

(I wrote this for a private group, and it got some good reactions. I thought it might belong here as well.)

Alela, Artful Provocateur is one of my favorite commanders. A recent post mentioning that she had shown up in a list of "Girlypop commanders" got me to thinking about why I like her so much. I think that the answer is that she is a cute and sparkly faerie (especially with her Secret Lair Phoebe Wahl art) but also that she perfectly suits my play style. What style is that? 

We're going to call it Girlypop Theory. 

Girlypop Theory is not about winning. A side goal is to sneak in an above average win rate, just to add a little spice to the fact that our opponents are often going to und

As in a reference to the original, not the movie. :-)

It took me a while to put this together. And it's probably obvious to, like, ten of you. But ...

In the Magic lore, planeswalkers -- and remember that the players are planeswalkers -- are often driven mad by the sheer power of the Magic they wield.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus stops at the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where the inhabitants eat a honey sweet flower that has narcotic effects. He has some trouble getting his men off the island again after they eat the Lotus flowers themselves.

That means that Black Lotus, one of the most powerful cards in Magic, is maybe named that because it's referencing what planeswalker level magic doe

I was giving a newer player advice on building a Commander deck, and I had a thought. You could say that a modern (Bracket 3) Commander deck is made up of seven spells, plus lands and your commander.

(Bear with me here.)

You could say that a Commander deck is made up of:

• Sol Ring
• Opt
• Swords to Plowshares
• Fog
• A 2–3 card combo
• 0–1 pet cards

That's a deliberately provocative way of putting it. I think that it captures an important idea in an easy-to-remember fashion, however:

Commander games have become quite fast. The first 3–4 turns matter. At the same time, the card pool has become huge, and there are a lot of spells that do the same thing.

By turn three, you will have draw