We’re going to have a little history lesson today. I find world-building to be a pretty lofty effort and one that stumps new players in terms of making anything even remotely unique. New Vorthoses do the expanded-universe idea pretty quickly on Tumblr, adding elaborate stories and nuance to established characters. What separates really great worlds from marginal, forgettable places is the level of detail. Explain too much, and it’s a bland, overly saturated, stale world. Explain too little, and your flavorful core set is a dead fish. Leaning on tropes is good for making a new world, but the effort comes in making a cohesive theme to block your set together from established things.

Let’s start with arguably the best Magic set in the past decade and how the world-building effort relates to Khans of Tarkir. The set that set a standard, is Innistrad.

I’d like to help Magic: The Gathering become healthier. I’d like to help Magic: The Gathering players become healthier. Healthier is happier.

We know there’s a stereotype about chair-gaming players, and there’s a truth to it. Crackgate exposed it. This is a problem. If MTG convention pictures are going viral, I’d like it to be because of the incredibly fit people.

Let me be clear that this is not a knock against any individuals. I have much love to all. I’m talking about a potentially systematic problem—around the Magic: The Gatherings, the cities, the country, maybe America, and maybe humans around the world in general.

So, what can we do? We can do a lot actually—so much. We’ll get to that.

Today, we're going to go a little more meta than just the mechanics of the format. Two things worth talking about have cropped it, so I'd like talk about them. The first is proxies, and the other is a discussion on social behavior.

The Multiverse is an interesting place.

I wanted to test my newly configured and reinforced mizzium thermo-aetheric mana conversion rig, so I figured I'd venture out on another jaunt into the Blind Eternities to determine its structural integrity during a planeswalk. I somehow landed in a plane I could never even begin to comprehend. It was called "Indianapolis," and they were having their yearly ritual of celebrating games. I regard games much as I do my experiments combining my spark-given powers with my guild's gizmometry: they must be honed through research, diligence, and more often than not, by just pumping as much time or mana into it as possible to see what happens. So I embraced my inner Dimir and acted as a native resident of the plane both in terms of actions and thoughts, a relatively easy thing to do for somebody as powerful as I am; even the Firemind is unaware of my ability to visit other realms. Using my Spatial Electrofractalyzer, I was able to record an immense amount of data, and I will record it here for further analysis.

The festival seemed to last for four days, which is extremely long for this sort of thing. Also with these particular four days being the best in gaming, they required a hall unlike any other, and you really need to be there to see for yourself.

In the history of Magic, the Gods are recent additions, making them hard to evaluate. I knew that Thassa would be good, but I overestimated how good she'd be if she wasn't a creature consistently, and I tried her in a few different failed Eternal lists. She was fine as a Zur target in Modern, but didn't do enough in Legacy Miracles.

Then Keranos came along, and as with Thassa I assumed the card needed to be turned on consistently, writing it off for Eternal play. That was a mistake.

A few days ago, I was messaged by Bruno Ramalho, a Legacy player from Brazil. We'd talked about Keranos in Miracles before, but this time he'd just Top 4'd a reasonably-sized tournament and had stories to share.

I don't believe I have any big ideas about Commander. My ideas are small but immediately applicable, like "Play more basic lands." And "Be unafraid to try new things." It's a function of writing this column: I need ideas that can be conveyed clearly in decks that rack up 100 cards and are encapsulated in your feedback. Digestible, practical, and self-contained are my typical requirements.

But there's one idea I've been working on for some time to distill down into its core pieces, and I needed the right kind of deck and feedback to bring it to bear. It's a term I've borrowed from the design of another game because that's where it all started to gel together: Active Mitigation.

Let me start with a question with an answer that might not be obvious: What are you fighting in Commander? If you choose to make your primary target your opponents, I have some bad news: Every four-player game ends with more losers than victors. I don't want to spend most of my games strictly looking for every opening to kill off enemies, although I'll usually take them when I find them. Instead, what I want to most is advance the game state by: dealing damage, disrupting defenses, answering the specific threats that cause stagnation, and in the broadest sense being a "pest" to players who are trying to set things up.

That's the principle behind active mitigation: Choosing to use spells and resources in a way that moves the overall game closer to conclusion by stopping staleness and reducing life totals.