The Boogeyman Phenomenon: When Threat Assessment Goes Wrong

    I first noticed this phenomenon when I went to my very first Magic: The Gathering convention put on by Star City Games in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had signed up for a casual commander event with a lot of random people I had never played before. For this event, I decided to play my Breena, the Demagogue deck. It was built around +1/+1 counter synergies and used Breena mostly for the card advantage. At the time it was a more middle of the road powered deck and was not a particularly strong deck. One player at the, whom we will call Dave, had his eyes get really big when he saw Breena and immediately warned the rest of the table that Breena was a big problem and proceeded to tell the tale that someone from his normal playgroup has a Breena deck and stomps everyone all the time. The other players at the table were a little bit more cautious towards my deck then they probably would have been, but Breena was actually a preconstructed commander so they weren’t totally bought in on the idea. Dave however, attacked me and used removal on my things way more than was probably needed based on the board and what everyone else was doing. I’ll talk about what I did in that game in a moment, but the reason why I bring this up is to discuss this idea which I like to call “The Boogeyman Phenomenon.”

The premise of this is quite simple so I will give it a definition.

    “The Boogeyman Phenomenon- The effect in which someone’s past experience, usually in a defeat, results in the overvaluation of the power level of a commander.” So, because of Dave’s play experience against Breena, he was very threatened by something that didn’t exist in that capacity in that game (like the Boogeyman). I think we see this phenomenon in three different capacities, a commander, an archetype, or a color combination.


    Starting off with the commander, I am NOT talking about playing a commander that is notorious for being super strong and building it in a lower powered way. If you have a Chulane, Teller of Tales adventure deck, that is great! You are still going to receive a lot of hate from the table as Chulane is a very powerful commander. I think the biggest example of this came out of the 2016 preconstructed decks with Tymna and Thrassios. At the time, Tymna and Thrassios were the top cEDH partner pair and were considered to be the most powerful deck in all of commander, if people saw that combination, they were likely to take out that player as quickly as possible, even though there were several builds available that could be done since the commanders were so vague and versatile by design. The commanders that I am looking at have a more limited ceiling out of the command zone. Breena is a good example of this because yes, she can put counters on creatures and draw cards, it also puts cards into other players’ hands as well and only provides black and white colors. Despite this, it is commander we are talking about and broken stuff can happen especially in the arms of capable deck builders and pilots where a powerful deck can be built out of practically anything and can have a good showing.


    The next Boogeyman that occurs is with archetype. Differing from playing a particular deck that has a disadvantage against archetypes in that game, some players have a lot of resentment or fear towards particular archetypes. I think the two biggest victims of this are planeswalker decks (aka, Super Friends), and combo. Jacob from our podcast also called “The Thought Vessel” has a Carth the Lion planeswalker deck that primarily focuses on planeswalkers in green and black that either make tokens or can use some type of removal. This deck rarely wins as players will see the planeswalkers come into the board, read the ultimate ability and immediately want to remove them. At its absolute best, it still required several turns of set up and an eventual pump spell with his build in order to win with no alternate win conditions. Speaking of alternative win conditions, combo decks get a lot of boogeyman attention as well. This occurs because of two different reasons in my opinion. One is that it can be frustrating for players to have the game end in a loss for a game action you didn’t see coming and can be anticlimactic. The other has to do with the fact that cEDH players normally will take the most efficient of these combos and build their decks around them and players will associate that with all combo decks. There are decks that run combos as their backup, or have a really janky combo that requires like 5-6 pieces in play to pull off, but they will get treated at the same intensity as a level 10 cEDH deck.


    The capacity we see the Boogeyman Phenomenon is with colors, specifically with Blue. As of writing this, I have three different mono blue decks that have very different playstyles, strategies, and power levels. One is an Urza stax deck that looks to lock down the board with stax effects and win with a combo, one is Siani/Eligeth that looks to have a bunch of flyers to convert scrying into drawing, and the third is a Malcolm/Sakashima that wants to clone Malcom a bunch of times to build up a stockpile of treasure and then look for better clone targets. Each of these decks play very differently from each other, but they all have the capability of running counter spells if they so choose. Because the color blue has access to the most efficient card draw, counter spells, and extra turns, all of which can be pain points for opponents, players are usually a lot more intimidated from decks that play blue as a primary color and especially so if it is mono blue.


    Now that we have established what a boogeyman looks like in commander, the question becomes what can you do if someone thinks your deck is the boogeyman? The way I see it is you have some choices, though they all might not work depending on the deck or situation. The first option would be to try to make them an ally in the game. Try to make a deal with the player early on, even if it is a small thing like a one turn protection from each other, just to build up a bit of a relationship. The player very well could take that deal if they are intimidated by your commander and don’t want it coming their way.


    The second is to discuss the issue head on and see what it is that happened to them last time. If there is a particular card or combo that beat them in the previous game and you are not running that card, you can assure them that you don’t have that in your deck and that you built the deck differently. Now if the player doesn’t believe you, you can wait until the end of the game and show you the deck to ensure that you are not running the power level you think they are. There still might be players that simply are going to be afraid of that Derevi birds only deck you have built and that is alright. This is where option number three comes into play and what I actually had to do in Charlotte, the self fulfilling prophecy. Warning: This should only be used as an absolute last resort.


    As a pilot in commander, if there is a player that is removing your things or attacking you more than the other players, they might be more of an immediate threat to you because they are actively undoing your board development and chipping at your life totals. In that game, I tried to let him know it was not his friend’s commander deck but it did not persuade him. So, instead of spreading the +1/+1 counters around onto various value pieces, I loaded up my commander and kept back on defense until her power got to 11. Once I was there and Dave didn’t have a flying blocker, I gave Breena, the Demagogue double strike, and took him out with commander damage. After the game was over, I let Dave look at my deck and we talked about the differences between the two decks and he actually let me know of some cards that I could consider adding. But in the moment, in order to stay alive, I had to go to war.

Thank you for reading!

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Author: Levi Perry (Aka Senator Spike)