Locations
The cold, grey road stretched out ahead of us as we sped north along one of the many stretches of highway that would bring us home. As the only one who could drive a stick-shift, I was at the wheel for the roughly ten hour trip from north of Boston, Massachusetts down to Washington DC and I was the one to bring us back. My traveling companions were Bryan, a local judge and one of the best Commander players I've ever had the chance to play with, and Mike, an avid Commander player and a great guy who also happened to be recovering from knee surgery.
Bryan is a talented cEDH player who is also more than capable of enjoying and occasionally winning games of casual EDH with his Mono-White Kiyomaro, First to Stand deck. Mike is known in our home meta for his strong Marath, Will of the Wild deck, but he had spent much of the weekend borrowing Bryan's Godo, Bandit Warlord cEDH deck and learning how to pilot it.
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I was tired, but incredibly fulfilled. We had just spent three days at the biggest Commander gathering I had ever attended. I had played twenty-six games of Commander in all against a wide range of decks. A leather-bound notebook was my constant companion and in it I logged each game, adding additional notes if the game was particularly worth remembering. I didn't include any players' names, out of habit and out of a desire to let folks stay anonymous. When you play games with over sixty or seventy different people you can't really name them all in a recap.
I came away with a lot of great memories and I've got a lot of things to say, so I'm going to do my best to share my best memories and biggest takeaways from the weekend. Before I do so, I'd like to share the list of commanders that I brought with me and actually played. I'm pretty sure I did play every deck that I brought, and I brought enough to be able to switch up decks and have different options for my games on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Those decks were Chulane, Teller of Tales, Golos, Tireless Pilgrim, Grismold the Dreadsower, Grumgully, the Generous, Hallar, the Firefletcher, Kenrith, Returned King, Lathliss, Dragon Queen, Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, Marwyn, the Nurturer, Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, Najeela, the Blade-Blossom, Narset, Enlightened Master, Ramos, Dragon Engine, and Rith, the Awakener.
I build a lot of decks. A few were powerful, though none were "true" cEDH decks. One of them was newly thrown together and had never been played. It was quite an assortment.
Can you guess which did well? What do you think my overall win rate was? With that much variety in the assortment of decks I carried around with me, were there decks that I leaned on more than others? I'll go into all that at the end and will give you a rundown of the decks that won games at tables I played at.
Before I get to all that, let's go into some of my better memories and biggest takeaways from the weekend. I should warn you ahead of time - this may be one of my more rambling columns.
A Cast of Thousands
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have a healthy meta back home with a real variety of players and decks to play against. It's wonderful to know that on any given Saturday I can usually count on playing against decks I haven't seen in weeks if not months. Over the past year we've seen well over 100 different players join us in games in our Saturday league, but there is nothing in the world like walking into a room with thousands of other Commander players.
I played against decks that could (and did) win games in remarkably short order. A true cEDH deck can reliably threaten to win on or before turn five and I saw both cEDH and fringe cEDH decks that were just brutal to play against. I also played against what were fairly close to out-of-the-box precon decks. One of those precon decks even won a game, believe it or not.
I brought my Narset, Enlightened Master and actually found players who had not seen Narset in action and genuinely wanted to play against her. I had assumed that nobody would actually want to play against my best girl, and that I might only get a game or two in with her. It was wonderful to actually have folks who didn't roll their eyes when I told a table that it was one of the options for me to play. Don't get me wrong - I did have lots of players give me an abrupt "No, anything but Narset" but I also had some great games with her where my opponents enjoyed seeing the deck do its thing.
I love variety, so one of my biggest takeaways was that Commandfest DC brought an incredible variety of games to play over the long weekend.
Choose What to Hold Onto
Any time you play a game like Commander, you have to figure out how to get through all the losses. A game where you're playing against three other people you're likely going to be losing around 75% of your games. That is a lot of losing, so you have to figure out how to keep your optimism and bring your best attitude into the next game even if you're in the middle of a long losing streak.
My solution for CommandFest DC was to bring a variety of decks and to both play decks that were appropriate to the power level of the table and to occasionally allow myself to play a strong deck even if it might be a bit much for my tablemates.
If that sounds like a terrible thing to do when playing your first game with a bunch of strangers, let me explain.
I might think my deck is stronger or weaker than the other decks I'm playing against, but I can tell you that I've often been wrong in that assessment. I've gotten crushed by what I thought were going to be weak decks and I've likewise crushed what I thought were going to be really strong decks. My own Commander decks don't always perform the way I expect them to. Variance is real and is always ready to surprise you with some unexpected twist or turn in the story you're expecting to play out in your game.
Even with the occasional mismatch in my favor, I still lose a lot of games and I lost a lot of games at CommandFest. I was able to win enough that I felt good and I was able to enjoy a lot of the losses. Some of those losses were to players who were just a real pleasure to share a table with even if they got the better of me.
I had a game with my Marwyn, the Nurturer combo deck where a Kiki-Jiki player to my left wound up stealing my Sword of the Paruns and going infinite with their Krenko, Mob Boss. I had really wanted to get a win with Marwyn in that game and had thought I might be a bit overpowered for the table. Little did I know that the Kiki player, who swore up and down that they weren't going to combo off, would wind up comboing off with MY COMBO PIECE.
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It was actually pretty funny, though I was momentarily bothered by how things turned out. I played another game later in the weekend with the Kiki player and they were really just a pleasure to share a table with. They had a great attitude, a fun personality and made even a frustrating loss into a game worth remembering and a story worth sharing later on. I probably could have won the game if I had done things a little differently, but honestly - I think the win was more fun for the Kiki-Jiki player than it would have been for me so in retrospect I'm glad they pulled the shenanigans they pulled off to nail down the win.
The beautiful thing about having three full days of Commander games is that you can get in a ridiculous number of games. When you play three or four games in a night, you might not have anything good to hold onto at the end of it. Some nights just go that way. When you play eight or nine games in a day your chances of having good games or just crazy stuff to look back on goes up a lot. You do have to have the capacity to hold onto those good moments and you have to let the bad games go by without letting them get you down. That isn't easy for everyone, but it's a great skill to work on even if you never make it to an event as big as CommandFest.
New Experiences
I have never been to a Grand Prix, nor have I been to a MagicFest. I've played a lot of Commander and I run a league, but my paths had never taken me to one of these larger events. When I learned that there would be an event focused solely on Commander, I just had to get myself there. While this was a new experience for me, it wasn't my only new experience over the weekend.
It might seem like a small thing but Bryan and Mike took me to my first Dim Sum.
Dim Sum is a style of chinese cuisine where you choose a variety of plates of appetizers and they are brought out to your table one or two at a time and you basically snack your way through the meal trying each and every dish. I had my first chicken feet, along with my first of a lot of tasty and odd little dumplings and other things that I won't even try to describe. It was weird. It was awesome. It was something I've always wanted to try, and my friend Bryan Li - who is of Chinese descent - was a fantastic guide for my first Dim Sum. How I managed to wait until after I turned 50 to try this amazing cuisine (Dim Sum specifically - I've had plenty of chinese food in the past) I'll never know, but I'll always be in Bryan's debt for that.
I also had another first over the weekend and this one is a little... embarrassing?
I'm not a great self-promoter, but I had a notebook with me to log game notes in preparation for writing this column. Before every game I let my tablemates know that I write about Commander for CoolStuffInc.com and that I wouldn't use their names but might mention the game later on. One of my tablemates was really excited and turned out to be a regular CoolStuffInc.com reader.
I had an extra playmat with the Hovermyr art and had planned to give it away to someone over the course of the weekend. I don't remember the young man's name now, but I asked him if he'd like to have the playmat.
Not only was he excited about the gift, but he ASKED ME TO SIGN IT!
I have no illusions about being famous or even well-known for my writing, but I was floored. I said yes and signed it with the sharpie he had. I'm still a little taken aback. It's a great bit of artwork if I do say so myself, and I really hope he plays a lot of great Commander games on it. Even if he doesn't, I'll always be grateful to him for my moment of feeling like a semi-famous person. It felt pretty cool.
My brush with having a sense of being vaguely important has me wondering if I should set my sights a little higher in 2020. I've always thought about writing a book about Commander. Maybe this is the year to take that next step. If nothing else, it would be nice to feel like I've been doing something awesome enough to someday have an autograph that's really worth collecting.
Always Reach Out
One of my biggest takeaways from the weekend is that my belief that it is always worth reaching out to other people when you want to do something nice for someone else. We all have those moments when we think of some cool thing we could do for someone and then we don't follow through. Sometimes it makes sense to not take that next step, but I think more often than not you'll be happy to have done so.
This particular takeaway was the genesis of my going to Commandfest in the first place.
I hadn't taken a trip just for myself in a long, long time and I hadn't initially made any plans to go to Commandfest. I think I heard folks talking about the west coast Commandfest on a podcast and it got me thinking.
A few years back I was a guest on the longest running Commander podcast in the whole wide world - Commandercast. I went on to talk about running a Commander league and also talked with the hosts about the art I make for the header of each of my columns. I had listened to Commandercast for years and always felt that Mark and Adam share my approach to deck-building and playing Commander.
I had kept in touch with Mark and decided that if he had any interest in going down to DC, I'd offer to pick him up, do the driving and then drop him off on the way home. He's just one state south of me in Connecticut so he'd be right along the way. I had a feeling he wouldn't be able to manage it at such short notice - he's a teacher and I'd be wanting to drive down on Thursday - but I decided that it couldn't hurt to make the offer.
I was right. He couldn't take the time off from work, but my insistence that one of the hosts of the longest running Commander podcast in the world simply had to attend the east coast Commandfest didn't fall on deaf ears. Mark wound up deciding to take the train down after work on Friday so that he could take in the event on Saturday and head home on Sunday.
I got a couple of the guys who've played at my local game store to come along, but Bryan and Mike both were far more interested in playing cEDH than I am, so we didn't wind up playing a lot of games together. They did their thing on Friday and I did my own thing, hanging out a bit with awesome folk like Andrew Webber - the creator of the biggest Commander Facebook group in the world, and playing lots of casual games.
When Saturday rolled around Mark wound up joining me, Bryan, and Mike for breakfast and Mark and I spent the entire day playing Commander and having a great time. It was fun to have a kindred spirit to hang out with, and he told me later that he appreciated the company. I got to see some of the decks he's talked about on his podcast including a pretty cool Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed deck.
Mark turned out to be more than just good company - he was also a bit of a good luck charm. I wound up having my best day of the weekend in terms of wins and losses, going 4-4-1. I got a chance to play my Hallar, the Firefletcher deck, which Mark had mentioned a number of times on the podcast as being a deck he had been really tempted to build. I got to see his Tana, the Bloodsower & Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa build, which I'm pretty sure I had inspired him to build. That game happened to be one in which I played Najeela, the Blade-Blossom and Najeela kinda blew up too quick for anyone else to have much of a chance.
I should mention that Mark was extremely patient with me. I was introducing myself as a CoolStuffInc.com writer at every table I sat at, mostly to explain my note-taking but also to just spark conversation and see if any readers might happen to cross my path. I also made a point of introducing Mark to people as a co-host of the longest-running Commander podcast in the world. I find that pretty awesome and was happy to introduce him as such. He's done enough work over the years to deserve to be in the spotlight a bit and I very much doubt it'll go to his head.
We wound up doing breakfast Sunday morning before he headed out as we both happened to be in the same hotel. The entire weekend for me was awesome but Saturday was the highlight of the weekend. If I hadn't thought to reach out to Mark just to see if he'd be interested in going, I might not have wound up making plans to go to Commandfest at all.
As I wrote earlier - always reach out.
If you've got something kind to say or something nice you want to offer to do for someone, it's pretty much always worth following through. The more good you put out into the world, the better. If I hadn't reached out to Mark I might still have gone and I might still have had fun at Commandfest DC, but it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun as it was with a kindred spirit by my side to hang out and jam casual games with.
The Game of the Weekend
I wanted to spotlight the best game of the entire weekend, but to do so I really have to talk about two games.
Late on Sunday I was trying to jam in a few final games. I wanted to get to 26 in total because it's a lucky number for me, and as it turns out one of my games had been a draw. With 25 non-draw games I'd have an easy time figuring out my win/loss rate. The setup at Commandfest was such that you could enter into tournaments, you could play "on demand" games where staff pair you up with whoever is available or you could just find your own tables and play pickup games. I did the latter on Friday and Saturday but spent Sunday jamming as many "on demand" games as possible.
The "on demand" games won you tickets which you could turn in for items from the prize wall. I wound up giving away a few hundred points worth of tickets over the course of the weekend - mostly to kids - before I decided that I wanted to bring home a few playmats as gifts for my buddies at NexGen Comics. That meant I needed to get a bunch of on demand games in before the weekend was over.
The "competitive" on demand games would split tickets with 100 going to the game winner and 30 going to each other player. The "casual" on demand games split tickets evenly, with each player getting 60 tickets. I think the result of naming the two types of games this way was that the cEDH players went to the competitive games and the casual players went to the casual games. I mostly played the casual games.
Before I tell you about my most memorable game of the weekend, I should mention that I also have to tell you about the game after it. Those two games just happened to be the two games in which I found myself at a table with a kid. By "kid" I don't mean child - I mean a young person who was probably a pre-teen, but might have been just edging into their teen years. I didn't ask ages and as a newly minted 50 year old, I just assumed I was almost always the oldest one at the table.
It was great to see such a wide range of players over the weekend, but not every player was one I'd want to play with again.
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Game 24 saw me on Multani, Maro Sorcerer. I was up against a dude playing Mono-Black Ayara, First of Locthwain and his friend playing Mono-Red Torbran, Thane of Red Fell. My third opponent was a boy playing Edric, Spymaster of Trest. The Edric player wasn't a bad kid, but as the game started it became clear that he was probably playing the best deck at the table. Edric is a real deck, and while the rest of us weren't intentionally playing "bad" decks we all grew wary of what this kid was going to do to us.
I've lost games to kids before. It's not a big deal and at times it can actually make me feel good to watch a young player experience success and learn the format - even if it's at my expense. Commander is supposed to be a fun game and I'm all about encouraging newer and younger players to get into this amazing format and learn all that it has to teach us. When this particular tablemate started joking about having four extra turn spells in hand and had a board where he could swing his creatures at anyone he wanted because they were all unblockable - drawing cards with each swing - I realized I didn't want to just roll over and let him crush the table. I had a gut sense that he might not be a good winner and a few glances between me and the other two adults at the table made me realize I wasn't alone. None of us wanted to lose to this kid.
Table manners are a funny thing. The Edric player wasn't being rude. He wasn't playing badly or trying to cheat or anything like that. He just left the rest of us feeling like if we did one thing that day it was going to be to not let him win. This sense was absolutely the result of how this kid comported himself, but I wouldn't be able to explain why with any specifics. I just have to ask you to trust me. I think you would have probably reacted the same way.
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I was able to play Multani, Maro Sorcerer and while he wasn't lethal, he was very, very big. I had a Stonehoof Chieftain under a Mosswort Bridge and I was able to get it into play, use Crashing Drawbridge to give it haste, and cast Noble Quarry as a bestow enchantment on it so that I could swing with both Multani and my newly-cast, newly enchanted Stonehoof Chieftain. Multani would hit like a ton of bricks for something like 19 commander damage and Stonehoof Chieftain would wipe out much of the Edric player's board. He wasn't pleased, but to his credit the kid took it like a man. Well, he took it like a slightly whiny man, but I've been that slightly whiny man before so I get it. He wasn't dead, but he was really in trouble.
The Ayara and Torbran players had agreed to give me a turn with no pressure if I were to focus on Edric and they were both counting on Multani being smaller once the table was down to three players. I suspected Ayara was working to set up ways to force me to sacrifice my creatures. I want to say that on my next turn I sent Multani at the Edric player to finish him off, but in retrospect he might have scooped because he's a kid, saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to bother hanging in the game until he was officially dead. I should take better notes next time. The Edric player was a little upset and had mentioned that he needed 10 more tickets for something he was going to get from the prize wall, so I slipped him a 10 point ticket that I happened to have and that helped lighten his mood.
Once Edric was out, I turned my attention to the Ayara player and got one swing on him for a decent chunk of damage. Multani was smaller but one more hit would be enough to kill him. The Ayara player was down to 2 life but was able to play a Grave Pact to force me to sacrifice some creatures and eventually played an Exsanguinate and jumped back up into the twenties.
I didn't assume I would have an easy time with Torbran if we were the last two, but that Grave Pact forced my hand and on my next turn I was able to play Multani and use Crashing Drawbridge again to give my creatures haste and swing for another commander damage kill.
The Ayara player was a great sport about it, and understood that I really had no choice. Forced sacrifice can really shut down a deck that plays only a few creatures and tries to go big, not wide. He had been at death's door at 2 life and almost bounced back to set up a board that could keep us from being able to keep creatures on the field, so he really almost "got there".
With no prospect of gaining life and just a bunch of creatures to throw into battle, the Torbran player and I set to the task of trying to beat each other to death with the creatures we had on the field. I didn't draw into anything very impressive and had lost my Stonehoof Chieftain to a forced sacrifice, but I was able to knock him all the way down to 1 life. On his turn the Torbran player was able to crack back and kill me.
It was a game with some early, slightly weird player dynamics, a player getting down to 2 life and the eventual winner claiming victory with only 1 life point left. I was able to kill two opponents and with a little luck I might easily have won. The Torbran player didn't do a whole lot in the game that I remember but I don't begrudge him the victory at all. Some games are won by the player who hangs back a bit, and more than anything I'm just glad we didn't wind up losing to Edric. It was an awesome game and I literally high-fived the Torbran player when it was clear he had the victory.
While Game 24 was my game of the weekend, Game 25 also saw me at a table with a younger player.
I want to say that the Ayara and Torbran players were also in the game, but as I didn't write down names I can't say that with 100% certainty. Next time I really do need to write down names.
This second-to-last game on the weekend saw me on Narset, Enlightened Master up against Consultation Kess (a real cEDH deck) and a Pir & Toothy deck. Pir and Toothy are capable of having some pretty insane games so while I wasn't overly worried about them, I also wasn't assuming they'd be a pushover. The pre-teen (?) who was at our table was on K'rrick. I know that K'rrick is a real deck but I just assumed the kid wouldn't be able to deal with Narset and I also assumed that Kess might out-race all of us.
As it turned out, I was able to get Narset out and I think I swung with her once, but didn't hit into extra turns or combat steps. The Pir and Toothy player held up a Chain of Vapor which apparently was enough to keep Kess from going off and all three of us failed to take the K'rrick player seriously. It didn't take long before our young table mate had a Citadel of Bolas and Aetherflux Reservoir out and was churning through his deck losing and gaining life with no end in sight. I burned a Swan Song on something, but the horses were out of the barn. The other players were tapped out and K'rrick clearly had game.
Losing to a kid isn't embarrassing. The K'rrick player was a great table mate, he played a great game, and the three adults at the table failed to take him seriously enough. Even if we had, he might have still been able to beat us. It was a great game for him and I made sure to congratulate him and to make sure he understood that he had just beat some pretty good players who were playing some very good decks. My own gameplay wasn't interesting enough for me to call it my game of the weekend, but it was definitely memorable and it was definitely worth mentioning.
It was great to see young players at Commandfest and I would urge you to do your best to take them seriously. Be a good table mate, don't feel bad about knocking them out if it makes sense to do so, but don't underestimate them just because they are young.
What I'd Do Differently
I've never been to a MagicFest before so my reference point on CommandFest was probably either my trips to PaxEast or the trip my family took when we went to Minecon, the first Minecraft convention in Las Vegas back in 2011. I also spent over a decade running medieval fantasy LARP (live action roleplaying) events for a LARP community in New England, so I have some experience with event planning myself.
One of the mantras I'd follow when I used to plan my LARP events was "start together, end together". I would have the opening activity in the event be something that would include everyone. If the event was a tournament event I'd plan out something where everyone would participate at once. At the end I would do the same thing, setting up a tournament of some sort where as few players as possible would be sitting out with nothing to do. It served to bookend the experience of the event for each and every player. While they might have some periods of "down time" during the event, their memory would be framed by an exciting start and an end where everyone comes together. It was about maximizing the energy in the player base and also trying to create a greater sense of community.
At Minecon Vegas I remember very distinctly that the event opened with everyone together. Markus Persson ("Notch"), the creator of Minecraft went up on stage and flipped a big prop switch to indicate that the official first version of Minecraft was finally being released to the world. Everyone cheered and there was an incredible sense of excitement and togetherness.
At CommandfestDC I don't remember having any sense of community beyond just a general feeling of how awesome it was for everyone to be together in this expo hall with a shared love of our favorite format of Magic: The Gathering.
I might have missed the opening announcement but I never saw a stage and I'm pretty sure no thought was put into doing some sort of opening and closing ceremony. It's fair to point out that there wasn't anything to announce. There was no game being launched. There was no expansion set being released. I don't even know if Magic events ever have opening and closing ceremonies, but it felt to me like something was missing.
I would have had a special CommandFest promo card for each of the CommandFests. We all got a custom alternate art Sol Ring, but that wasn't a surprise to anyone. There should have been something to excite the crowd, even if it was a surprise card that we'd have to shell out money for. A foil, alternate art, or promo of some Commander format staple printed specifically for Commandfest DC would have been easy enough for Wizards to produce and would have given them something to wow the crowd with. We were happy to have our Sol Rings and I slotted mine right into my Narset deck, but there wasn't any real excitement about it. I paid my entrance fee. I got my Sol Ring. I put it into my best deck. I was happy to have it, but they could have done more.
I also might have named the competitive and casual on-demand events differently. Then again, I was happy playing casual pod on demand games all day on Sunday, so maybe I shouldn't complain. It did feel like people conflated cEDH with the competitive 100-30-30-30 ticket split and it seemed like the event organizers didn't necessarily mean for those pods to have to be cEDH. Folks had fun though, so maybe if it ain't broke, there's no need to try to fix it.
On a more personal note, I would definitely do one thing differently the next time I go to a Commandfest. I played games all day long, but didn't wind up playing much in the evenings.
Maybe it's crazy to suggest that 26 games of Commander aren't enough, but in retrospect I really wish I had gotten a suite. Most hotels have rooms that cost a little more and come with a space that would serve perfectly as a game room. All you need is a table and four chairs and you can play four player EDH all night long. I might not have done that the night before we drove home, but I definitely wish I had gotten a suite for the weekend so we could have played into the night a few times.
The hotel lobby was filled with EDH players all weekend long, so there were games to be had downstairs. I probably could have charmed my way into one of those games, but there would have been something really nice about hunkering down in a suite with some friends, ordering food and playing Commander all night long.
If there's one last thing I'd go back and do differently, I'd probably not have given away so many of my prize ticket slips. I mostly gave them to kids, but in retrospect I could have picked up a few more gifts for people back home if I had kept more of them.
Damned Lies and Statistics
I had promised to share some of the results from my weekend of play.
You already know that I had a draw. That was a game where I played Golos, Tireless Pilgrim against the Kiki-Jiki player I had played earlier. They were now playing a Kykar, Wind's Fury superfriends deck. I got Glacial Chasm out and while they had no answer to that, I didn't think I'd be hitting a wincon very soon. We had two players waiting for us to finish so we called it a draw so they wouldn't be waiting forever.
With 25 games, not including the draw, I wound up with a pretty healthy 36% win rate. My stats were probably padded a bit by playing Narset five times. She's my "guilty pleasure" deck and she went 3-2. My Grumgully, the Generous deck went 2-1 and my other wins were with Hallar, the Firefletcher, Najeela, the Blade-Blossom, Ramos, Dragon Engine and Marisi, Breaker of the Coil. They all went 1-0 except for Marisi, which went 1-1.
My biggest losers of the weekend were Grismold, the Dreadsower, Rith, the Awakener and Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, which all went 0-2. I didn't fully appreciate beforehand that most players would be bringing their best decks. Any games I played with what I consider to be a less powerful deck would probably have a pretty hard time getting a win. The losses were usually still fun games, but it is fun to win every once in a while and I was certainly able to do that.
When looking at the winners of all of the games I was in, it turns out to be a rogue's gallery of strong commanders. There were a few surprises mixed in, but by and large the more powerful commanders do tend to win more games. My sample size is just the 25 games I played in (not including the draw), but I still think it's interesting to look at.
There were a handful of commanders with mutiple victories. I never saw another Narset, Enlightened Master deck, but my girl was able to win three games. My Grumgully, the Generous deck won two games, though I'm still learning the deck so one was with the help of a tablemate. I managed to lose two games to Animar, Soul of Elements and Korvold, Fae-Cursed King.
Apart from my own decks, I also saw games won by Godo, Bandit Warlord, Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Alela, Artful Provocateur, Ilharg, the Raze Boar, Niv-Mizzet Reborn, Queen Marchesa, Yawgmoth, Thran Physician, Krenko, Mob Boss, Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer, Torbran, Thane of Red Fell, K'rrick, Son of Yawgmoth and Marath, Will of the Wild.
The Godo deck was a true cEDH deck. The Kadena deck was a slightly modified precon. There were lots of combos. There were lots of games won through regular combat damage. There were even commander damage kills, though I don't think I saw infect show up in more than one game and nobody died from poison counters.
I'm not entirely sure why I find win/loss number so interesting. I do talk a good game about fun being more important than winning, but a lifetime of following sports and a few years of running my local EDH league have me used to tracking wins and losses and looking closely at the numbers.
Final Thoughts
My biggest takeaway from Commandfest DC was that it was a heck of a lot of fun and I plan to attend another in 2020 if at all possible.
You should plan to go to one too - I don't think you'll regret it. I also plan to get a suite next time and to try to bring more people with me. Bryan and Mike were great company but there were folks we left back home that I would have been happy to have with me.
I didn't write down names but I remember a lot of the players I played with. I want to take a moment to thank Bryan, Mike, Mark, Andrew, Caleb, Kevin, Tam, Jazz, Tom, young Ben and everyone else I shared a table with at Commandfest DC. Thanks also to all the staff and judges who kept things running smoothly all weekend long. Each and every one of you helped to make it a fantastic experience.
If you went to Commandfest DC I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
That's all I've got for today. Next week I'll be writing a 2019 retrospective and then I'll be kicking off 2020 with another installment of "Winning Ways". If there's a wincon you'd like me to write about, please let me know.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week.
