Who Are You Again?

Hi. I'm Ben.

I only got into Magic: The Gathering this year and, months before I actually sat down to play a game, the main appeal was the vibes. I was in a new city, looking for ways to meet likeminded folks, and I came across an Aetherdrift promo image.

WipEout was my all time favorite franchise, so the idea of a racing set had me immediately sold. I had also played Hearthstone for years and was a big fan of over-the-top flavor and aesthetics being the foundation of a set. When I read that there were 10 different racing teams you could "play as," I got even more interested.

I've played Marvel SNAP since launch and, since the beginning, I loved the idea of building decks based on story arcs or teams, but quickly discovered that the game was not designed to encourage this. (Until the most recent Fantastic Four: First Steps season, which, thank god.) So the idea that you could build decks with mechanics and flavor with cards that were actually designed to work together, I was all-in.

At the same time, I was reading about this Commander format, designed to be social, populated by casual players, it seemed like the perfect fit. Initially, even with my (limited) CCG experience, deck building seemed like an impossibility to me. I started on Precons, liking the idea that they were decks built with a theme in mind. They would come with these fun little bios about the Commander and how the deck represented their general vibe.

When Aetherdrift came out, a few things became clear. You couldn't really build a 99 card deck for one team using just the cards from the set, and the two Precons had almost nothing to do with racing. (This was long before I'd ever tried, or even understood, how Sealed Magic worked. I now understand that the ten teams were shorthand for the archetypes you could build in Draft or other Limited events.) (This didn't stop me from eventually building a totally sick Cloudspire Racing Team deck, but more on that in a future dispatch.)

I was also getting more games under my belt and discovering that, at least locally, even "casual" commander players played pretty competitively. So, since it's harder to find opportunities to play my goofy little creations, I wanted to find a way to share them with the world more readily.

Which brings us to B+ EDH. Every two weeks, I spotlight a new decklist that are just fun to explain to people, to walk through as you play, pointing out why any particular card fits into the theme.

Feel free to drop me a line at bplusedh@gmail.com and share your experiences building these, or any of your own deeply uncompetitive decks.