In Magic the Gathering, there are a couple of player personas to describe who you are and how you interface with the game. Timmys like big spells and big creatures with massive splashy effects. Johnnys like the forgotten cards and winning in their special way. Spikes have a much simple goal – winning at all costs. I fit in closest with Johnny. I love my occasional big, splashy play and I also try to run efficient value engines that outpace opponents or finish games on the spot, but my heart lies in showing off old, eccentric cards I’ve inherited into my collection or with evocative art in the older styles of the game.

I interface with Magic through EDH. I love the story that manifests each time I sit down to play and am always on the hunt for the perfect pod of four commanders that will give me a rush when they enter the battlefield and begin influencing the game. The ever-growing pool of cards and potential commanders refreshingly allows me to explore so many options and alterations to my decks in between each round I sit down to play. I am in love with the open-ended nature to the format. If I primarily play at one spot with a consistent group of people, the next spot over may have a vastly different meta where my deck doesn’t work the same way. Exploring those intricacies or community meta and finding the solutions to both across a range of power levels is an endlessly crunchy puzzle to solve between every game I shuffle up.

For instance, my first commander was Ghave, the Guru of Spores. An amalgamation of weird bone-like protrusions and dangling vines, I knew instantly I wanted to tell a story by amassing an army of fungi to overwhelm my opponents. My first iteration of the deck – the milquetoast named Abzan Saprolings – splashed into the game immediately when I sat down and introduced myself as a long time fan first time player. I quickly played Ghave and began amassing fungus after fungus before winning the game with an infinite combo where I sacrificed creatures to produce mana and make more creatures to sacrifice. Stumbling through that combo, which I later would discover was only one of hundreds of pairings that Ghave could stumble into, gave me such a rush and I was hooked.

The next time I played was at a different store with different people, and I got trounced by decks that outclassed my meager pile of fungus. I used Ghave in ways people didn’t expect by gleaming empowering growths onto other player’s creatures to dwindle the board down to only the creatures I wanted to deal with, but my fungi weren’t strong enough that day to eat through everything. That session was the ignition that would start an obsessive process of deck building and design where I would power up my deck, win oppressively, then immediately try to power it back down to start the cycle anew. This cycle went on for a couple of months, during which I discovered a new subtheme in the fungus deck called undying, which eventually would break out and transform into a persist theme in a deck commanded by Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest and then later Meren of Clan Nel Toth. This branching point pushed my Ghave into a more casual pile of cards where I could have fun with the fungus theme and then explore the combo side of things with Mazirek and Meren.

In the future I may break down Ghave’s current iteration further and talk about the choices I’ve made and what direction I’ll go in the future with this deck. Right now he sits smack dab in the trope of a power level 7, and I get to show him off with some of my favorite cards from early on in Magic's history. His identity as the commander of the fungus has dwindled as I've moved on to other mechanics and themes, but someday I may get to explore that again with a deck tech on Ghave's fungus tribal (preferrably after we someday make it to his home plane!)