Embracing the Suck in EDH

    During my first year out of college, I built myself a Balan, Wandering Knight commander deck. I really hadn’t played a lot of Voltron or equipment commanders up to that point, and I thought the concept of a cat knight was awesome, so into the sleeves it went. Though it wasn’t very good, I thought I would take the deck out for a spin at my local game store for Friday Night Magic. I got placed into a pod, and if that wasn’t the worst matchup for me possible, let me tell you. One of my opponents, who actually owned the shop, was playing his Balthor the Defiled control deck. His strategy was very simple: control the board with removal until enough of his creatures were in the graveyard to reanimate all at once and overwhelm the board. Though I wasn’t the threat compared to the rest of the table, my commander kept getting caught up in the creature sacrifice removal spells which led me to not actually doing anything in the game.

 

Out of frustration as I wasn’t even playing magic at that point, I said “clearly this wasn’t the right pod for me.” Instead of calling me “Salty” and laughing me off, or on the other end trying to empathize with my frustrations, the shop owner said something to me in a tone that wasn’t condescending or confrontational, but rather inquisitive. “Your Voltron deck is not holding up very well against these sacrifice effects, what are you going to do about it?” That very statement, as simple as it is, changed the way I build decks forever.

There is a term in the military that I have grown to be rather fond of. It is “Embrace the Suck”. It effectively means that you have to accept a bad or unfortunate situation for what it is in order to move past it. People by nature tend to take the path of least resistance. When I was complaining about my commander getting constantly sacrificed, I was avoiding the problem by blaming it on the pod I was in rather than looking at the issue for ways to improve. I really needed to focus on making some tokens or finding equipment that makes it so my commander cannot be sacrificed through my opponent’s effects. So, when I went home, I swapped out some general good stuff cards in the deck for creatures that have an enter the battlefield effect that was useful and left a body behind, equipment and other effects that make creature tokens that I could use for various pieces of value, and equipment that prevented me from actually having to sacrifice my commander at all. The next week, I played Balan again and I was able to win two games in a row due to the resiliency, and the added bonus of being able to keep the creature tokens back for a wall of blockers.

Another example of this concept in more recent times involves one of my favorite decks to play right now which is Jodah, the Unifier. I absolutely love legendary creatures, and building a board that is chalked full of them that synergies in unique ways like a random chance Justice League is awesome! But, with that deck, I am WELL aware that people really like to use spot removal on Jodah any chance they get due to the power that he can bring to a game. When I play that commander, Jodah normally receives more attention early on due to being a more “Scary Commander.” Because I have embraced those weaknesses and acknowledge that they are something I need to address in my deck building, I play a lot more protection spells that are legendary that are Mana Value Two or Less to ensure that I can cascade into. I also avoid playing things in those slots that don’t help with protection to improve the consistency of resolving the protection. Once I can keep Jodah and the rest of my board safe, I can build my army of multiverse legends and swing for victory.

You see examples of this all across the Commander format. Every deck you can build will have some type of weakness or “silver bullet” card that makes them vulnerable. Token decks hate board wipes, superfriends decks do not like combat and a lot of creatures that can swing in and remove planeswalkers, Goading decks don’t like non combat/ combo decks that aren’t really using the combat step, etc. Regardless of what that weakness is, identifying that weakness so you can plan ways to protect against it is crucial to making a resilient commander deck. So for that token deck, I’m looking at a redundant number of protection spells like Unbreakable Formation and Teferi’s Protection. For the superfriends deck, maybe I’m looking at effects that limit attackers or simply increasing the number of board wipes I have. For that goad deck, maybe I look at some minor taxing effects to hinder the combo’s plans and force a combat matters type of game.

Now, with that said, are there times that the bad matchup will simply be too much to overcome? Absolutely! It is a weakness of your deck after all and nothing is completely bulletproof or everyone would be playing it! There are going to be games in which you get outgunned and that is fine, the point of “Embrace the Suck” in EDH is to have a fighting chance against your weakness and not simply fold to it every game. By having those opportunities to fight through that Kryptonite, maybe, just maybe, it will be enough to come away with the victory.

Thank you for reading!

If you have a topic or question you would like to see covered in the blog, send me an email at thoughtvesselshow@gmail.com