Team sealed is no easy nut to crack. Over the past two weeks, my team—the Christian Hunters, featuring Matt—has been meeting up at Christian’s condo in Williamsburg on Wednesday nights and, after some awesome time playing with his too-cute daughter and his pup, cracking some packs of Dragon’s Maze, Gatecrash, and Return to Ravnica and building some pools.

It’s not my first rodeo, of course. Matt and Kadar “History’s Greatest Monster” Brock and I have already competed in the SCG team sealed Open, in New Jersey, and we did some practicing at Fat Cat in Manhattan before that event. But team sealed is just that: a team event, and every team is different. So it’s taken some getting used to, learning about how people work in groups, how best to communicate, and how to get the result (a winning deck and happy friends) that you desire.

Just this weekend, I was talking with my friend Brandon Isleib about our deck-building habits. Brandon had been telling me about how his Game Day went, and without thinking, I asked, “What deck were you playing?”

“Great question,” Brandon said. “What deck was I playing?”

As it turned out, Brandon’s deck didn’t really have a name. He is a rogue deck-builder, a classic Johnny. To him, there is no fun in playing something tried and true. He proudly listed all of the obscure cards that he had successfully run in Standard, and I have to admit I was impressed.

I’m the exact opposite in a way—instead of Constructed, I like to draft, but I tend to find a deck that works for me and then run it into the ground. During Zendikar, it was Birds carrying machetes. During Gatecrash/Gatecrash/Gatecrash, I became known at my local game store for my “Friday Night Simic” decks. By its very nature, the very act of drafting kept this from ever becoming stale—I was typically able to assemble a consistent skeleton of cards such as Crocanura and Pit Fight, but actually filling out the deck called for thinking on my feet and making sometimes counterintuitive choices.

Brandon and I are very different in our deck-building styles—his exploration is more sweeping, while mine is fine-grained. But what we have in common is a fondness for solving challenges in interesting ways. As he pointed out, “It’s about variety and discovery. Draft provides that; weird Standard provides that; multiplayer provides that.” Although it can be expressed in a variety of ways, as Brandon and I showed, the desire to create and explore seems to be a common human drive.

Every night at FNM, between the second and third rounds, someone will undoubtedly come around with a little spiral notebook and ask you one simple question.

“EDH?”

For the longest time, I would reply with “No.” I did take part in one or two after-hours EDH games with a borrowed deck, but I didn’t feel that I enjoyed it enough to devote resources towards building my own deck. It wasn’t until I was in Seattle playing with my good friends Mike and Tifa that I started to really understand why Commander was so popular and why I needed to start playing it a bit more.

Commander, like trading, is a way to get to know people. It’s a way to let down the guard you might throw up before an event and maintain afterward that keeps people from seeing the real you. It’s a time to let your hair down and not be consumed with winning or “The Ideal Play”. It gives you the chance to bond with others over your shared love of underplayed cards from the past — or cards you’ve never seen played at all.

The new legend rule states that, if you have a legend and play a second of the same name, you choose which to keep. This means that if you have one enchanted with a Pacifism, you can exchange it for the fresh copy. Also, both you and your opponent can have the same legend in play.

This places more emphasis on the die roll. If you and your opponent are playing the same legend, whoever jams it first will have a huge advantage. That player gets to untap with the busted creature while before they would’ve traded. Can you imagine playing a UW Delver mirror with the new rules? Landing a Geist of Saint Traft on three would just win.

I do think Wizards learned their mistake from Geist of Saint Traft, and to a lesser extent Thrun, the Last Troll, and they have been playing with these rules for over a year now. I look forward to seeing what they do with this new design space! No pressure, Wizards.