"Sunday Commander Learnings"

"Sunday Commander Learnings"

by:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr.

The nature of my work ,(Here and there and back again Clinic duties) and the demands of my true Commanders(My wife and little girl) does not allow me much playing time. So much so that I must have imagined a combo or scenarios months or weeks in advance before I ever get to see them in real life. As you can read here my fantasy magic playing is way better than my real life magic statistics.

So last Sunday(November 16 2014) while the rest of the 64 player melee that is the GPT in North Edsa was happening. 6 players decided to eat some snacks at a place called Street Bites and played a couple rounds of Commander. Mainly it was me , Aya Bolinao , Robert Flores , Joey Hernandez , Lippy and Jin(Gene.Gin?).

I decided to play with Phenax as my Commander. I would soon realize that I would do less milling and do a lot of controlling. 

The first Commander game that I played that day in Street Bites and I learned that:

(3 turns and you are dead in EDH!)

#1 Zurgo Smash is real in EDH - I was getting pummeled by my most favorite Khan and other Blue players were letting Lippy welcome me back with back to back 7 damage attacks because it serves a good purpose. I am the lone magnet for such pain! That is until Jin(Gene , Gin?) prevented 2 successive attacks from connecting. Thanks man!

#2 No matter how frustrating your land base maybe there is always hope/light at the end of the rainbow...err...tunnel...With Aya casting Blatant Thievery and reducing my 4 lands to 3 and then casting an Obliterate which allowed him to keep Lurking Predators , Nahiri and Teferi Commander planeswalkers. Pretty abusive really. It was my turn and I drew a Command Tower , played it , cast a Reanimate that went uncountered and learned another thing...

#3 The Diluvian Primordial is awesome! I was able to cast Blatant Thievery myself and get Lurking Predators and a couple of lands. Making sure that I did not get Jins(Gene.Gin?)land(or any permanent he has) to thank him for saving my butt against Zurgo. I believe at this point Joey Hernandez played a spell on his turn and I was able to put a creature card for free on the battlefield. So I learend that...

#4 The Sepulchral Primordial is also awesome! I was able to get a Teferi Mage of Zhalfir , Stonehewer Giant and Muldaya Chanellers on my side of the battlefield because of the Lurking Predators on my side of the board. It was sweet to have these guys all playing together. After a couple of turns everyone decided that it was time to play another round.An awesome unexpected win!

During our next round I learned...

#5 Time warp is great! Especially if you just want to mess up everyone on the board by granting another Blue player to play turns continously until he gets his combo of Brine Elemental and Vesuvan Shapeshifter that basically means that all other players do no untap permanents...Forever...Robert Flores...Booo!!! Still that combo was deadly and forced the end of the 2nd match.

Later on at Padis...

I got into a 1 vs 1 commander game with Virl and learned that #6 Wrath of Wife does not merely come in the shredding type but also in the burning type where a fully loaded deck complete with Dual and Fetch lands goes up in flames in the wake of a spouses fury. I felt myself crying a little bit from the story. All those lands! All those cards! Why?!!!!

After recovering quite a bit from that harrowing story I also learned that #7 Kruphix and Prophet of Kruphix is a massive energy creating combo that could fuel a lot of X spells and colorless mana spells! Too bad that my Simic deck featured a lot of colored mana creatures but it did get me to cast a Kederekt Leviathan for basically just 2 Blue mana. Untapping lands and getting those colorless mana was awesome and pointed to some great potential spells that I could add. Maybe Karn and Ulamog won't be so hard to cast after all.

So all in all it was an awesome Commander weekend and I look forward to more Commander learnings whenever and wherever they may come.