Readers!

Not being constantly beset by spoilers for a month so I could breathe has led to some of the best thinking I have done about Commander as a format in years. I hope you've enjoyed my writing this month; and, despite Dominaria United spoilers kicking off triggering a return to articles with decklists in them, I wanted to go over one more concept that I think can lead to building to make games fun rather than to make games predictable. I haven't used a word like "predictable" in the past, but if you think about what seems to annoy some people the most, it's predictability. The turn one Sol Ring or Burgeoning can put someone so far ahead that it makes the game predictable. Casting Thassa's Oracle makes the game predictable. Tutors make the game entirely predictable, at least for the person who tutored. I think ripping a card when you only have a few outs off the top is exciting and I'd rather lose than tutor. Those are my personal feelings about tutors and you don't need to agree and I don't need to defend them and we don't need to discuss it. It's about the types of players who are bored by predictability.

This article isn't going to be about this concept of predictable versus unpredictable, because I don't think it's a deep enough concept to give it more than a paragraph. I bring it up because thinking about predictability made me take another look at the EDHREC Salt Score Survey results and I couldn't really find much evidence there that lined up with how I was thinking about predictability as the enemy. As much as some people find it boring, they don't get salty over it. We aren't merely trying to make people not bored by suggesting they might not want to play cards that make people angry. Ultimately, we're trying to make games fun. In my search for some evidence on the Salty cards page to support my boredom hypothesis, I realized that I already realized why Salty cards made people angry, I just never concluded the thought, trying instead to reverse engineer the concept of a salty card to see if I couldn't figure out some cards to play instead. It's bigger than that, readers - the cards in boring games that make people salty aren't the issue. We already figured out what really makes people salty - not respecting their time.

Your time is the one resource you can't recoup, and while playing Commander with your friends isn't exactly the worst use of your time (people have spent time teaching themselves the made-up Dothraki language from the fictional series Game of Thrones after all), we shouldn't take others' gift of their time for granted. The answer was staring us right in the face the whole time - if making the turns take longer makes people salty, wouldn't shortening the game make them happier? I'm not talking about Thoracling people on turn two kind of shortening the game, I'm talking about making the game itself just not take as long in case you want to play with a different deck. The classifications for salty cards I came up with are as follows - Mana, Turns, Shutting Their Cards Off, and Free Spells. Every salty card (2 exceptions, we'll get to later) is in one of those four categories, and we can learn something from each of them about how to make the game more fun and exciting.

I started to look at all the different ways that those cards make people upset, but the lesson is one we already learned - people don't want you to make the game take longer. We explored that but we never really talked about how to do the opposite.

If we're trying to reverse engineer the concept, the obvious solution is to give people more lands. This seems like a pretty basic idea, but it was the key to unlocking every other idea and some of those I was pretty proud of. On a very obvious, fundamental level, Group Hug is one way to make the game faster. Some group hug decks can make the game longer, but they make the fun part of the game longer, when you're cracking each other with haymakers, and make the boring part of the game, where everyone is playing lands and mana rocks, a little shorter and more consistent. It's more fun when no one is mana screwed and a group hug deck makes sure people have the mana to do big things.

If you're cutting cards that make the game longer and want to replace them with cards that make the game shorter, you have way more options than you think. You can immediately start sorting cards into "Makes the game longer" and "Makes the game shorter" piles intuitively. The concept of "Good card with the drawback that it gives something to an opponent to offset how good it is" has been explored since the mid 1990s - you're going to find quite a bit to add to decks. Shortening the game can be anything from Heartbeat of Spring to Impact Tremors to Prosperity. Goading shortens games because it removes people's ability to be too polite to attack another player which can clog the board up.

Maybe it's my years of playing webcam games on stream talking, but I'm not sure the worst thing you can do to someone is upset them. I think the worst thing you can do is make them bored, because you can make someone salty without boring them but you can't make people bored without making them salty. Take another look at our "salty" categories - ruining their mana, making their cards not work, making them not have any cards. All of those things reduce their options, sometimes reducing them to 0. That's boring. Being that bored makes people upset. You can avoid all 100 cards on EDHREC's salt survey but if you're playing cards that make people itch to pick up their phone and check twitter, you didn't learn the right lesson from the salt survey.

As my closing argument, I'd like to bring up the Thassa's Oracle and Demonic Consultation. Those 2 cards were sort of outliers when we grouped everything up. Thassa's Oracle doesn't shut off their mana rocks. Demonic Consultation doesn't give you an extra turn. This two-card combo doesn't seem like a good fit on the salt survey if you believe the four categories we came up with encapsulate all of saltdom, and that forces us to conclude maybe we shouldn't divide them into subcategories at all because Thoraclesultation is the heading of the only category that matters. If you take just one lesson from everything I've ever written, let it be this; respect other people's time. They gave it to you as a gift and it's the one thing they can never get back.