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If you've ever planned a holiday party, you know it helps to start early, especially if you're going to be doing something even a little complicated. This week I've got a nifty way for you to celebrate the holidays, but you might need a few weeks of planning to make it happen just right.
This week's Commanderruminations is an exercise in brainstorming for how I'd plan a Secret Santa party, or more accurately...
If you're sitting there scratching your head, unsure of who Zedruu is or what she might have to do with a Commander Secret Santa party, let me fill you in.
Meet Zedruu
Zedruu the Greathearted is a unique legendary Minotaur Monk who give you the ability to bestow gifts upon your tablemates.
She costs 
and for she lets you give control of one of your permanents to target opponent. You don't get nothing for your act of charity. At the beginning of your upkeep, for each permanent you own that an opponent controls you gain a life and draw a card.
The real benefit from Zedruu's ability isn't the card draw or the lifegain, it's the ability to use your gift-giving to help out or to completely screw over an opponent.
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Do you have an opponent with an overwhelming boardstate? Play and give them Statecraft.
Do you have a bounce spell in your hand and an opponent who is under 20 life? Play Illusions of Grandeur, gain 20 life, give it to an opponent, then bounce it to your hand so they lose 20 life.
Are you under 20 life and have an opponent at a high life total? Play Transcendence and give it to an opponent to instantly kill them.
You can also give them "nice" gifts if you like. I've built and played a Zedruu deck that was designed around playing face-down morph cards and giving them to players who had the colors to be able to pay to turn them face-up. It had some "bad gifts" in the mix as well, but turned out to be a fun casual deck that I kept together for a few years.
Zedruu doesn't enter directly into our plans, but I wanted you to understand my Zedruu reference before going into this this "Secret Santa" idea.
Secret Santa
A Secret Santa party is a Christmas season tradition in which participants set a price limit and sometimes specify the kind of gift they might like and then their names are randomly mixed up so that everyone gets to be someone else's "Secret Santa". You exchange names and on the day of the Secret Santa Party everyone gets together and opens their gifts.
A Commander Secret Santa party might seem like a difficult thing to plan. You're probably not going to give each other Commander decks. You might not know what a friend has in their collection that they might need. You could always just give dice bags, sleeves, deck boxes and that sort of thing, but that's a little boring for my taste.
Here's how I would do a Commander Secret Santa party, or more accurately, a Zeekrit Zedruu party!
Zeekrit Zedruu
A Zeekrit Zedruu party is an excuse to build some janky, fun Commander decks and have a party where you and your friends get together and play Commander. The decks don't have to be good, and as you'll soon discover, will probably have some bad cards in them. That's going to be a theme for Zeekrit Zedruu. Some gifts are good, but some might be terrible and that's part of the fun.
This plan will work best for a group that meets regularly to play Commander. The reason is that you're going to have your gift exchange and then everyone will probably need a week or two to build their Commander deck before you get together and actually play the decks you'll be building. I could see doing it all in one day if you have a collection your friends can draw from to build, but not all Commander players like to build decks in as short a time as a few hours.
You need to set a price limit and a number of cards that must be included in each gift.
The gift should include at least one card from the participant's wish list, at least one legendary creature that a Commander deck could be built around, and enough other cards to fill out the total number of cards that are supposed to be given.
All cards must be within the color identify of the Legendary Creature you included, and all of them must be included in the deck that winds up being built.
Participants should write down a list of cards that they might like to be given. The cards on the list should probably be no more expensive than about half of your price limit, but can be much less. Each participant's name and "wish list" will be randomly assigned to another participant.
So to sum up, you'll need to decide upon the following:
- Gift Price Limit
- Number of Cards to be given
- Date for Gift Swap
- Date to play the Commander decks you build
- Whether or not there's a price limit on the decks you build
The price limit should apply to both the purchasing of cards and the gifting of cards from someone's collection. If your price limit is $20 and someone gives away an old Replenish from their collection you could wind up with people being a little salty. Having a limit just helps to keep anyone from feeling like they drew the short straw and lost out on getting a better gift.
Good Gifts and Bad Gifts
Zedruu the Greathearted is as much known for her bad gifts as for her good gifts. This fact should be emphasized to your gift givers.
Let's say I was the Zeekrit Zedruu for someone in a gift swap where our price limit was $30 and we were supposed to give 10 cards. Let's say my person had Scapeshift on their list.
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If I had a spare Scapeshift in my collection I might choose to pick up Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma as the commander to include in my gift. I would then scrape together 8 more cards that would all have to be Green so they could be included in the deck they'd be building. I might include as many cards from their wish list as possible, but I'd also want to include a few stinkers or a few funny cards. Uktabi Orangutan, or as it is more commonly known, "Sex Monkeys" could be a humorous throw-in that isn't even that bad a card.
I might instead choose to give them Horde of Notions, Fusion Elemental, Mulldrifter, Maze's End and five other Gates and Elementals, daring them to go after a janky 5/c Elemental Tribal deck with an alternate wincon in the mix.
The goal isn't to force them to build a terrible deck, but it is to have fun.
They'll have plenty of room in their deck to build something half decent but because they have to include the 10 cards in your gift, they will hopefully be in the position of drawing and deciding whether or not to play a few ridiculous or terrible cards during the game you wind up playing.
Theming Your Party
So you've got your list of participants, you've decided upon a price limit for the gifts and a number of cards to be given. You've got a date for the gift swap AND a date for the commander game. If those are on the same date, you've got a collection of cards for your friends to dig through to build these crazy Commander decks. You're ready to have fun, but what can you do to bring your Zeekrit Zedruu party to the next level?
When Zedruu gives you something, you don't always know if it's going to be a good gift or a bad gift until it's too late. Why not extend this idea to the rest of your party?
You could bake cookies or brownies, but set aside some of the batter and add a little surprise to it!
No, I'm not talking about dosing your friends and seeing who will have to play Commander through the haze of a little THC, but a few teaspoons of salt or some flavor extract might make a small number of those cookies pack a little extra something. You could just have a few raisin-filled cookies mixed in with your chocolate chip cookies, but please be sensible and don't poison or "dose" anyone! Food allergies are a real concern and these are your friends, after all. Have fun with it, but be sensible too.
Giving Within The Game
If you've got a few Spectral Searchlights lying around, you can have some fun with them.
Spectral Searchlight is a mana rock that costs three mana, can tap for any color of mana, and most importantly, can be used to give that mana to any player provided they don't have hexproof.
Have every player start the game with a Spectral Searchlight in play, but house-rule it so that they can ONLY use it to give an opponent mana - they can't use it for themselves.
To make it more interesting, fill a bowl with an assortment of jelly beans that includes normal flavors AND includes some of those "bad flavored" jelly beans. Every time someone is given mana from an opponent's Spectral Searchlight, they have to eat a jelly bean!
Final Thoughts
I've had mixed success in organizing things in my local Commander community. Our league is very successful and our casual nights are a great time, but earlier this year when I tried to convince everyone that a "Yarglefest" would be fun, it was an abject failure.
I think a Zeekrit Zedruu party could be a lot of fun for the right Commander playgroup.
If enough of our local players are interested I'd gladly organize one, but you'll really need to have a good number of players on board. It's more complicated than your usual Secret Santa party and you really need players who enjoy building and playing janky decks.
If you hold it at a game store, you can certainly do it all in one day. Most game stores will have a collection of commons and uncommons so that players can build out their deck right there. Have the gift swap at noon, deck-build for a few hours and then play your game in the late afternoon. Again, you've got to have folks who are into deck-building for this to work, but it sounds like a great time to me.
Whether or not you have a prize for the winner of the Commander game you play is up to you. Maybe everyone could pick up a random booster pack and the players pick from them at the end of the game in order of when they were eliminated - with the winner picking first of course.
That's all I've got for you today. In coming weeks I'm going to have some retrospective pieces on some of the decks I've posted this year as well as spotlights on some of the top decks from the EDH league I run.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!
