Readers!

I know you're all very excited to hear about how the new set Commander Legends is going to impact 75% deck-building and I am excited to write that article. However, I think it's prudent to wait until we have a few more cards previewed before we get into it. With dozens of new commanders and new partners being added, there's a lot of information forthcoming. I read we'll have over 1,500 partner combinations, which would keep me busy for the next 28.9 years. To psych myself up for a set that's going to have so many potential new decks to write about I'll never get to them all and will have to leave some exciting articles unwritten, I'm going to talk about something that has been bothering me for a while but I could never find the time to write about. Put simply, my favorite card is terrible right now.

I've written about this epiphany before, but I will take any opportunity to tell the story again. Reading Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and in particular, the passage "A bushel of my enemy's grain is worth twenty bushels of my grain" caused me to think about stealing creatures in a brand new way. Playing Control Magic was like a Doom Blade on steroids - it deprived them of a creature and gave me a creature at once, effectively a 2 point swing in my favor in the zero-sum game of "having creatures." A card like Bribery was like ramping from 5 mana to a lot more, but also depriving them of a big creature later and sometimes a combo piece. Bribery soon became my pet card and I jammed it in a lot of decks that maybe didn't need it because I liked to play it so much. I began pairing Blue with Green to ramp to Bribery a turn or two earlier to really give them a hard time when I took something huge.

When a 75% deck plays a Bribery, you're taking a look at your opponent's strategy and seeing what kind of deck they have. This lets you play the rest of the game knowing precisely what you're dealing with and what they can handle. As much as it doesn't always feel great to have an opponent manhandle your precious cardboard and peek at your long-term plans, an experienced 75% player can make sure that is offset by a game experience that is tailored to that player. In general, you're not going to Bribery for anything they can't handle - it's a great way to tailor the game experience to the player. I talk about "scaling" your deck to match theirs and if you want to do that, Bribery's combination of using their cards and giving you information about how their decks plays is the best sort of scaling spell you can cast. So why did I say it's terrible right now?

If you're like me, these days, you're playing a ton of games on webcam. Webcam Commander has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is that it allows us to play at all during times when in-person gatherings aren't possible. I've met dozens of new people, played at very odd hours when a shop or GP would be closed down, and I've given myself an excuse to upgrade some of my equipment. Playing on webcam isn't all upside, however, and there are some fairly significant drawbacks, not the least of which is how clunky it is to play certain cards. Bribery is among the very worst.

To that end, I want to discuss a few cards that I advocate putting in 75% decks often and some cam-friendly alternatives so you can adjust your decks. You're building 75% in the first place because part of what you value is the table having a good time, and the table is not going to have a good time if you make someone hold their library up to their cam and fan through their deck. You're either revealing their entire library to the whole table or you're trusting them to avert their eyes and be bored for a couple of minutes. Here's how you avoid a mess.

Don't play Bribery...

Bribery is the big bad here and it is the first on the chopping block. This card is a nightmare for webcam games. If you thought it caused some bad feelings before, wait until you try to resolve this in a game where you can't physically and discreetly handle their library. It's a mess any way you slice it.

Play this instead!

Mind's Dilation has worked out so much better for me in practice. It costs a lot more mana but it's super worth it, and 7's not an insurmountable sum in Commander, is it? You're revealing to the entire table the same amount of information as if you had milled them 1 card and players who watch you bin something good or steal it from someone who isn't them will have more fun. I had this in quite a few decks but I replaced every copy of Bribery with Dilation in the rest of them and haven't looked back. I may keep the decks this way if we ever go back to playing in person - that's how much fun this card is. The best part is, you can get non-creatures, expanding your access to powerful and fun new cards. I can't recommend this enough.

One caveat is that you'll have a lot of copies of their cards since you can't physically grab their card and put it on your board. I recommend a temporary proxy like Infini Tokens or sleeving some blank cards and writing on the sleeve with dry erase marker. It comes off fairly easily and allows you to play long games where Dilation comes down early and sticks around.

Don't play Praetor's Grasp...

Grasp is a great card, don't get me wrong. However, as clunky as Bribery is, this card is even more clunky and doesn't even work as written in practice. How are you going to have someone show you their whole deck and then set aside a card facedown without them seeing it? You're also showing the card to the rest of the table and everyone watching on webcam. That's fine in the abstract and some people are fine with all of that since you're going to cast the card anyway, but there are a lot of things you can do with Grasp in a typical game that you can't on webcam and that combined with how inconvenient it becomes for the person you grasp means it's not worth it.

Play this instead!

This is a card I've never included in a deck before but one I think is a lot of fun. It doesn't accomplish the same thing as Grasp does, but it plays a little more similarly than it may appear at first blush if you think about it. One way to use Grasp is as a kind of Jester's Cap, removing problem cards before your opponent can have access to them. Sure, you can Grasp for a Sol Ring, but plenty of times I have taken Merciless Eviction or Expropriate from someone and they didn't even know it wasn't still in the deck. This doesn't quite play like that, but it does deprive them of a card in their short-term plans which can be just as damaging. Fiend has to hit them, but it can hit them more than once, it can wear a Blade of Selves or Helm of the Host, it can attack each player giving you a card from every hand over a series of turns and it can regenerate. A rules update allows you to use cards like Chromatic Lantern to cast the spells even if you're a Mono-Black deck, making casting their cards even more fun. If you're not Mono-Black, your options expand even more.

This plays as a bit of a hybrid of Grasp and Fiend and I think it's perfectly serviceable. The graveyard is a "known zone" and lots of cards reveal hands and no one really gets salty about it. Intrusion isn't a great card but I like it and you're replacing a card that just does not work on webcam with one that works fine. Playing their cards is fun and stealing something from their hand they were hoping to cast or just exiling it forever can disrupt them more than taking something from their deck they may never draw. This is even subtle graveyard hate in a pinch.

Don't play Gonti, Lord of Luxury...

Gonti isn't the most egregious possible commander given how few of their cards you mess with, but it also doesn't play quite as written. You will have to tell everyone what card you want to keep exiled face-down and while that's not necessarily a huge problem since people would know what it was when you cast it later, the deck usually revolves around casting Gonti as much as possible and it becomes sort of irritating. There are a lot of cards you can swap Gonti with in the 99, especially since the decks that play it in the 99 don't typically tend to rely on flickering it a ton since they can't draw him reliably. If your deck was built around Gonti, you may want to set the deck aside for the time being, and play a deck that plays a little differently.

Play this instead!

Triplets seems just as clunky as Gonti, but Triplets can be played on webcam exactly as written in a way Gonti can't. Cards where everyone sees everything are preferable to cards where some information is meant to be kept secret. With Triplets, everything happens face-up and that works much better.

As a final thought, there are a lot of players who feel that none of the cards in this article should be played on webcam. You're going to want to be sensitive to that. However, after playing lots of webcam Commander, I can tell you that players see advantages to this system. No one walks off with another player's card in their deck because a creature that got cast with Bribery was killed and the Briberyer (Briber?) put the dead creature in their own graveyard by mistake. No one handles someone else's cards and runs the risk of making them uncomfortable that the person handling their deck might not be as careful as they'd like. If you read this article and aren't convinced that playing any cards that aren't your own on webcam, Doug Y on EDHREC wrote an excellent piece about exactly which cards you'll want to avoid. He mentions problems associated with cards I didn't mention here because I think they work just fine, such as Etali, Primal Storm, Stolen Strategy, and Sepulchral Primordial. Those cards are great alternatives to cards like Bribery and Praetor's Grasp. However, if you want to avoid situations where you play with a card that you can't physically take from another player and put on your board, it's a fairly exhaustive list of which cards to avoid, and it's a great intellectual counterargument to the one I've put forth here.

The world is a different place than it was a year ago and while I don't think we should abandon our strategy of using our opponents' cards against them, I do think we need to be a little more careful in selecting cards that work well with a webcam game specifically. I don't think we need to stop running all Treachery effects forever, but I think keeping the Helm of Possession in our... err, possession while letting people convince us to lose the Bribery is a good compromise. As a general rule of thumb, taking a card that's face-up is probably going to work out just fine if you're prepared to represent that card on your board, but be receptive to how those sorts of cards go over with the pod - you may want to have a deck with none of those effects ready to go. Control Magic is just fine as a Magic card, even on webcam, but you don't want to be correct and alone. Follow rule 0, figure out your lightning situation so you don't have cards obscured by glare, mute your mic to type and have fun making new online friends. Thanks for reading, until next time!