Highlights from BronyCon 2019: Of Commanders, Cards, and Chicken

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Highlights from BronyCon 2019: Of Commanders, Cards, and Chicken

In which there is some gaming and some eating.

Thursday, August 1, 2019: The First Day of the Final BronyCon

I was at StableTop Games to kill some time. The next event on my schedule was still a ways away, so I wanted to play some games in the meanwhile.

Now I had brought my MTG deck with me; worst case scenario was that if I didn’t find a game to jump in to, I could at least play some MTG. As I wandered around, I did find a lot of MTG players … but most of them were playing Commander.

Me, I play MTG with the default rules. By contrast, “Commander” is a popular variant. The variant is called “Commander” because each player’s deck is built around a legendary figure from the MTG multiverse: the deck’s “commander”. The deck (100 cards as opposed to the default 60) can only contain cards that are within the commander’s color identity. (For example, if your Commander is a Red/Green creature, you can only use red and green cards in your deck.) There are some other differences between Commander and default Magic, but that is beyond the point.

Now note that I keep saying “default” MTG, while an outsider might want to use the more common word “standard”. However, to MTG players, the word “Standard” has a different meaning. You see, MTG has different formats:

• Standard is a rotating format: you can only play with cards from certain sets. Every year, old sets rotate out, and new sets rotate in. This is good for newbies, as they won’t have to account for little-known threats from the olden days of MTG. Most people just starting out with MTG would unknowingly be playing Standard anyway (just like you’ve always been talking in prose), as they’ll be playing with the newest cards or with pre-constructed Standard-legal decks.
• Modern is a non-rotating format: you can use cards going back to the Mirrodin set, which was released in 2003.
• Legacy and Vintage have the widest card pool, allowing you to use cards going all the way back to 1993 (with some exceptions).

I had a Standard-legal deck (the one that I used for my first Friday Night Magic), but so far, there was nobody to play with, as almost everyone I ran across was playing Commander! But I eventually found someone playing default Magic! His name was Aidan, and he was playing with a girl; I forget if it was his sister or his girlfriend. While we were introducing ourselves, he mentioned that he was relatively new to the game, and that he was playing “standard.”

When we started playing, however, it was clear that poor Aidan was quite green; he had cards in his deck that were clearly not Standard-legal. But even though I was actually playing against a Modern-legal deck, I held my own quite well.

And another mistake he made showed just how green he was. Memory serving, one of his cards was Urban Utopia:

Urban Utopia 1G

Enchantment — Aura

Enchant land

When Urban Utopia enters the battlefield, draw a card.

Enchanted land has "T: Add one mana of any color."

Ravnica's diversity produces blossoms of opinion in a rich soil of perspectives.

Poor Aidan thought that Urban Utopia was an independent mana source; he tried to tap the attached land for a mana and tap Urban Utopia for another mana. Nope: Urban Utopia allows the attached land to produce any color of mana.

Anyway, I had my Blue/Green (or “Simic” in MTG lingo) Merfolk deck. Aidan, however, had a Red/Blue/Green (“Temur”) deck. I lost the first game, but won the second. All in all, he showed quite a bit of potential. If you’re out there, Aidan, we need to have a tiebreaker.

Now note that I said earlier that I wanted to kill some time in StableTop Games. Here was the next thing on my schedule: Some of us at the Brony D&D Discord group had planned to have lunch together at the nearby Chick-fil-A. Apparently SharkGirl, Dark Wind, and Mind’s Eye were all in StableTop Games, but I hadn’t spotted all three of them. After my rounds of MTG, Dark Wind and SharkGirl met up with me outside StableTop Games, and we left for Chick-fil-A. Mind’s Eye, for whatever reason, didn’t go with us. SirBobTheMarvelous had already left, and he said that he’d meet up with us there.

Now if you think that BronyCon had long lines…well, you’d be right. But Chick-fil-A had long lines, too. And it was yet another new experience for Dark Wind, who had never been to a Chick-fil-A before. (You’d think that the Midwest would be full of them!) But at least Chick-fil-A had good customer service: there was a person who would go down the line and take your order. Afterwards, you could find a seat and wait for your name to be called. And we did have a good time eating together: me, Dark Wind, SirBob, Shark Girl, and two of her siblings.

After lunch, we headed back to the Convention Center and more gaming—with quite a few surprises in store.

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