"Man, I just got rid of the last one," I cry indignantly. "What, do you have like eight of ‘em in there?"
"Stupid black creatures," growls Bob. "I don't know why Eradicate doesn't target black creatures - it doesn't make any sense!"
Correy is silent, searching his hand and board for an answer. None appears, and Dave smiles triumphantly. He knows that with the Blood Pet out, he's got us on the ropes.
What format could exist where three grown men cower in terror from a 1/1 Thrull? Could it be a version of Pauper Magic, with no rares or uncommons to be seen? Perhaps a variant Two-Headed Giant format? Could it be that Dave is simply using the Thrull as a proxy to represent something truly fearsome, like Dread or Lord of the Pit?
The answer is much more simple: Dave has two Gravepacts and a Strands of Night in play and just dropped the most easily sacrificed creature in his deck, thus granting him control over the entire board.
Welcome to the greatest "format" in the history of the game - casual multiplayer magic!
The Greatest Game Ever Played
While Standard is the driving force of Magic, forging ahead with new innovations and ensuring that new players aren't overwhelmed by a massive card pool and still have a chance to play competitively, casual multiplayer is without doubt the heart and soul of the game. Back when I started, we didn't know anything about tournaments, or pro players, or the "internet." Back then, if there was anything worth knowing about Magic it would show up in an issue of Inquest (which we rarely bought, because that was like two packs of Fallen Empires!). Back then, we were lucky to crack a Deep Spawn or Feral Thallid, and we liked it that way!
We played at the junior high lunchroom tables and it was here that wars were fought and won, alliances were forged and broken, and desperate and inadvisable trades were made for decks containing twenty Swamps, twenty Terrors and twenty Plauge Rats. While I hold some sense of nostalgia for an easier, simpler time in life - a time when running Homarid Spawning Bed and Sunken City was a killer combo - I don't want to go back to it. I love where the game of Magic has gone in the last fourteen years, and I love where Mark Rosewater has been piloting it recently; having quit (again) in disgust after Legions came out, I came back to Coldsnap (dude, dinosaurs!) and have been happy ever since (except for Future Sight).
However, when I came back, I didn't get into multiplayer; for nearly a whole year, I was focused entirely on the Standard environment and making unique decks to pilot. I also noticed what seemed, to me, an unusual trend: new players were showing up at drafts and FNMs, having never really played but eager to get some experience under their belt. This was a far cry from how I and all my friends learned, but I didn't really think anything of it until Ray-Ray called a multiplayer madness night at the local store.
I was shocked and terrified - how could I compete against players that had been collecting cards for the last five years? I missed half of Onslaught block, all of Mirrodin and Kamigawa block, and had spent months catching up on Ravnica block; I thought there was just no way I could compete in a multiplayer environment. Then I stopped being a huge wuss, threw some old cards (like Maze of Ith and Savannah) in a Seedborne Muse/Glare of Subdual/Saproling Engine deck I had lying around, and, for the first time in half a decade, won a game of multiplayer magic.
Three's Company, Four's a Party
The problem with multiplayer magic, for those that have never really dabbled, is that it can initially seem really intimidating. The difficulty of muliplayer, I believe, is largely a misconception. Multiplayer games are often the most forgiving when it comes to land screw, land flood, or play mistakes. More than any other format, it's easier to play multiplayer (unless your friends are jerks, in which case you've got bigger problems at hand). At the same time, it's arguably the most challenging format, pitting you against multiple opponents.
I'm not going to elaborate on the virtues of multiplayer further, nor discuss how complex and challenging it can be; better writers than me (see the Ferrett, and also the Ferrett) have already done this bit.
What I intend to do is try and dispel some common misconceptions and fears about playing in multiplayer magic for those that don't do it very often and want to get in on some group lovin'.
You Weren't Hugged Enough As a Child, Were You?
The main problem in multiplayer Magic, sadly, is other people. As great as the format is, it also means you have to deal with eight times as much ego, bragging, and silly jerks. Whiners, bad winners, cheaters (who I've found to be much more frequent than at tournaments, sadly) and kids that care way too much about killing everyone with their horrible combo deck can all ruin the game.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution: drop kick these offenders in the face. If that doesn't work, consider a power bomb, or perhaps just setting their minivan on fire. For those that would pursue more socially acceptable solutions, try talking to them in private, calling them out in front of other people, and just not playing with them (in that order). You can also gang up on repeat offenders until they get their head out of their bum and realize that being the best at every single thing in the entire world and then bragging about it is not the way to make friends. Not being a jerk is more important in multiplayer than any other format, because you don't just ruin one person's day - you ruin everyone's.
The nice part about multiplayer is you don't have to play someone if you don't want to. And remember: it's just a card game!
Answer Me These Questions Three
Now that's over, I can address what I think are the real issues for those new to multiplayer. There are three main issues, and for each one I'm going to post one of my decks and show why my set of cards blows that theory so far out of the water it enters orbit. Keep in mind that I don't take the game super seriously anymore, and mostly just play what I like because (gasp!) I like to have fun!
The three issues that seem to be raised most often are as follows: How can I compete with just my limited (i.e., Standard) card pool? How can I compete without very many good cards against "rare-bomb" decks? And, what do I do as a new player to stop from getting ganged up on?
Problem One: Threats from the Past
Possibly the number one worry I've heard from people I've invited to our playgroup is that "I just don't have those good old cards". It's really easy to be intimidated by the vast number of available cards; after all, Magic has printed exactly 840,326 different cards to date, and that's a fact. [Give or take several hundred thousand... -ed.] Furthermore, everyone who has been playing for a decade must have all sorts of crazy good cards, because everyone knows that all old cards are awesome, right?
Wrong. If you think this, you are wrong. Old cards suck. Old cards, in fact, are really awful. Yes, there are some exceptions - bits of Tempest, a few Alliances cards, and Urza's everything - but by and large, old cards are really bad. Dave got conned into buying a box of Homelands once; we're still finding copies of Root Spider and Aliban's Tower. Did you know that Lava Tubes is an Ice Age rare? Or that Eye of Ramos might be the most obsolete rare mana fixer ever?
Yes, sometimes a person will show up with a turbo-Stasis/Morphling kill-you-all on turn three deck; this is the exception, not the rule, and I've already detailed how to deal with players like this (dropkick/powerbomb). If nothing else works, just call his mom and tell her you saw him drinking beer at a party, which should get him, like, totally grounded for a month.
What a lot of people don't realize is that the quality of cards has been steadily going up in recent years. Commons and uncommons are actually playable, and rares are (generally) exciting, except for Barren Glory, which showed up four times during our last TSP/PLC/FUT draft (dear God in heaven, how I hate Future Sight).
The biggest problem people have when switching to multiplayer is that they automatically discount cards as "unplayable" because they don't work very well in Standard. Right now we have a huge amount of great stuff available to us, but many are so used to Standard that they just skip over great cards. Look at Lorwyn's Elemental Incarnations, for example. Most hardcore FNM players will skip right over a Hostility, but in a multiplayer deck, where getting to six mana isn't that hard and there is a little more breathing room early on, all of a sudden Hostility is amazing, often tripling the damage done by burn spells! Can you imagine a four-way game where you drop Molten Disaster for five, wipe at least one person's board, then swing for forty-five damage??? That would never happen in standard, but it's the kind of legendary multiplayer power bomb drop that you talk about for months.
Decks built for Standard don't do badly against multiplayer decks because the cards are bad. They do poorly because they are designed differently, at different speeds with different goals. A multiplayer deck has time to get out really expensive cards, and it needs to. Each deck has to be able to deal with a variety of threats and deal anywhere from 20 to 100 points of damage in order to win. The point is, there are awesome multiplayer decks just waiting to be made out of the Standard (or recently Standard) cardpool, and it's a great way to utilize all those Ravnica block cards that just rotated!
I once wrote an article about taking my Mishra deck to a Friday Night Magic, but I realized recently that this wasn't his real speed. Where he would really shine was in multiplayer, so I hastily rebuilt a deck around him. Because I had mostly Standard artifacts (and because I had already made one version of the deck) I didn't want to go digging through all my old stuff for a bunch of crazy combos and I don't have anything from Mirrodin, so it wound up looking pretty similar to the standard deck I ran.
The deck is ultra rare-heavy (I only had my rare folder on me at the time) and has a crazy, clunky mana base (I really should keep basic lands with me everywhere I go). Still, it's fared pretty well, and is now an established threat at our table.
| "Mishra Multiplayer Madness"Magic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards | |||
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Dudes: 4 Mishra, Artificer Prodigy 1 Sol'knar the Swamp King Artifact Dudes: 4 Epochrasite 4 Bottle Gnomes 3 Triskelavus Artifacts: 4 Lotus Bloom 3 Voyager Staff 3 Loxodon Warhammer 3 Icy Manipulator Spells: 3 Ponder 1 Demonic Tutor 2 Compulsive Research 3 Void 3 Demonfire | Lands: 1 Tolarian Academy 2 Polluted Delta 1 Underground River 1 Watery Grave 1 River of Tears 1 Steam Vents 2 Sulfurous Springs 4 Blood Crypt 2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth 2 Academy Ruins 4 Mishra's Factory 2 Snow-Covered Mountain 2 Snow-Covered Island | ||
The deck might look like a steaming pile of crap and expensive lands thrown together, mostly because that's exactly what it is, but I'm telling you it works... about a third of the time. The Voyager Staff is the most important piece of the puzzle here, and as soon as I find my fourth one it's going in; it protects Mishra, pumps Epochrasite, renews counters on Triskelavus, and makes people auto-lose games. That's right, auto-lose! I gotta tell ya, there are few things better in the world that staffing some smug bastard's Phage, the Untouchable and watching him cry.
The deck can get online pretty slowly, but guess what? In multiplayer, you can deal with that! The main threat is getting ganged up on, and it is here that Sol'knar, the Bottle Gnomes, and the Warhammer all come into play. The Warhammer, in fact, is the most potent kill card in the deck, often swinging for lethal while attached to nothing more than a Trisk token.
Perhaps most importantly, this deck is made using almost exclusively cards from the last two years, and everything that doesn't could easily be replaced, as can many of the rares. Very few of the key cards are "hot tech" in any standard deck, and many (including Sol'kanar) probably haven't even seen play in standard outside of weirdos like me.
A key rule of thumb: if you've ever looked at a card and gone "man, that card would be great if it didn't cost 5/6/7 mana", chances are it's pretty great in multiplayer. Get out there, go through your jank rares, make some wacky combos, and do some damage!
Problem Two: Mo' Money, Mo' Problems
Another big obstacle for people getting into multiplayer is the same one that faces (almost) every Magic player: cards are expensive, oftentimes hella expensive. It is here that the vast card pool available to us becomes a benefit. While there are a lot of bad old cards and some crazy format-breaking bomb rare old cards, there are also lots of great little gems that have been largely forgotten. How great is Krakilin in a green deck with heavy mana acceleration and a few Gruul War Plows? How sweet is Argivian Find in an enchantment-heavy white deck? It can be both painful and dangerous going through old cards at the local hobby store, but if you are short on cash, often the common and uncommon boxes offer hope in a bleak world.
I got pretty tired pretty quickly of making decks from my rare folder, and a lot of people got tired of playing them; sometimes having a crazy power multi-player deck just isn't fun for anyone at the table, so I decided to build some decks that scaled back the power level a little. For a low-key deck I chose to go (almost) mono-color and picked only eight rares, none of which would be bomb-style cards like Akroma, Angel of Wrath. This kind of weird green thing was the result, and is one of my favorite decks I've ever made.
| "8 Rare Green.dec"Magic OnlineOCTGN2ApprenticeBuy These Cards | |
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Dudes: 3 River Boa 3 Wall of Roots 4 Heartwarden 1 Hunting Moa 2 Citanul Woodreaders 2 Krosan Restorer 4 Yavimaya Elder 2 Phantom Centaur 3 Lhyrgoyf (rare) 4 Penumbra Spider 1 Kaysa (rare) 2 Penumbra Wurm (rare) 2 Krosan Tusker | Spells: 3 Rancor 2 Elephant Resurgence (rare) 2 Elephant Guide 1 Hush 2 Chain of Acid 1 Overrun 1 Disintegrate 3 Savage Twister Lands: 4 Terramorphic Expanse 2 Tranquil Thicket 1 Slippery Karst 1 Blasted Landscape 3 Treetop Village 3 Centaur Garden 1 Fungal Reaches 2 Mountain 3 Forest |
The deck takes some time to get set up; the first few turns are generally spent dropping tapped lands, putting out mana bugs, and mana fixing with Terramorphic Expanse, Krosan Tusker, and Yavimaya Elder. There are a lot of dudes with fat butts that tend to discourage attackers (Citanul Woodreaders, Penumbra Spider, and Wall of Roots), and this keeps me at a decent life total as I enter the mid-game, which is where the deck really starts to shine.
All of a sudden, the land-thinning I was doing early game starts to pay off as I draw either dudes or cycling lands. The deck doesn't care if the board gets wiped (Phantom Centaur, Penumbra Spider and Wurm, Elephant Guide and Treetop Village all help here), which tends to happen occasionally during multiplayer. Then, once the graveyard is nice and fat with all the cycling/self-sacrificing dudes and after-effects of a Wrath, I drop a 17/18 Lhurgoyf or pop out a 9/9 Elephant token with Elephant Resurgence. All it takes is one (very hard to remove) Rancor, and I generally swing for the win!
Again, this is a deck that might not look like much, but does very well on a consistent basis. Some of the stranger card choices are actually key; Hush is a great way to hose enchantments across the board and easily cantrips when it's not wanted, and a single Chain of Acid often wipes the board entirely clean of pesky artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers, and lands. The Savage Twisters are really great; frequently I'll drop a fat Twister and still have a decent-sized board left. It's a surprisingly subtle deck, and is versatile enough to deal with dedicated board removal, graveyard hate, and just about anything else.
One of the cards that really makes the deck tick is the Rancors, because, in case you hadn't noticed, Rancor is really good. Another amazing card in the deck is Phantom Centaur, who frequently just won't go away. More often than not, it's the Centaur that winds up pushing through for the win; pro-black and resistant to damage is just way too good on a creature (and an uncommon, to boot!).
This is my suggestion to players that want to do well in multiplayer but don't want to drop lots of cash: go to Gatherer and look through the commons and uncommons for Urza's Saga, Urza's Legacy, and Urza's Destiny. Often, there are great cards hidden away in there that you can order for pretty cheap. Find matching commons and uncommons from recent sets, toss in a few Vivid lands for color fixing, and season to suit.
The best part about budget decks - and this is doubly true in multiplayer - is when you win. In a format where everything is legal and anything goes, no one is allowed to complain when you beat everyone at the table with nothing but Kaysa and a pair of Treetop Villiages.
Problem Three: Why is Everybody Always Picking On Me?
Another very real threat that people new to multiplayer magic often face is the threat of the dogpile, whether that threat is perceived or real. Often, these new players will make a fundamental error, like dropping a fourth-turn Akroma, Angel of Wrath and swinging away. Do you know what happens in a six person game when you do that? Your Akroma gets destroyed, your graveyard gets wiped, your fields get razed to the ground and salted, and you get sent home crying to your mother. Everyone at the table panics, and even though you might not be the biggest threat, you definitely go out first.
Again, this is a fundamental difference between competitive and casual play: in Standard, much of the game is determined by speed and tempo. In multiplayer, the need for early speed in a deck isn't really an issue and can present you as a huge threat to everyone. Now, I'm not saying everyone should hide behind their Moats and Wall of Souls and Platinum Angels and other horrible, boring cards that ruin a fun game, nor am I saying that no one should do anything until turn nineteen. Rather, players new to multiplayer magic often have difficulty adjusting in terms of threat assessment, deck speed, and correct offensive plays. This can often swing the game against them, as they attack at random or make huge power plays early on.
Alternately, a new player might do nothing offensively, preferring to build up a steady wall of creatures and such; this also creates a problem, because at one point the rest of the board will look over, realize newbie Josh has twenty-three Thallids and fourty-seven Saprolings, and swiftly spank him harder than his sexy, sexy dominatrix.
The transition can be difficult for many players, especially since the political nuances of multiplayer are really non-existent in one-on-one Magic. It can take a while to figure out how a game with four to eight players works instead of just two players, and often these players, who may be great at standard, get really frustrated at constantly being beat on.
There are, however, ways to soften this transition. One solution to this problem is to quickly learn the politics of the table, carefully watch how everyone plays, make yourself useful to the most powerful player, and happily take second or third for a while as you learn the ropes. This, however, isn't always a whole lot of fun, and can be difficult if you've been drinking (which happens to us a lot). A quicker solution is to run a deck that makes the player useful to the rest of the table, thereby reducing the chance of getting teamed up on.
I threw this deck together for two reasons: one, I wanted to see what would happen if I regularly filled everyone's hands with bomb cards, and two, I realized that I only ever enjoy playing is when it's paired with . The result is a deck that is so much fun it actually hurts.
This is the deck that I give to new players, or to old friends who haven't touched a Magic card in years, but I'm always happy to pilot it myself; there's enough to the deck that it can be played in a number of ways, at a number of skill levels.
Here's the thing: everyone likes drawing cards, period. That's right. I dare you to name one person who doesn't like it. What? Underworld Dreams? Guess what, smart guy - Vision Skeins gets the whole table two cards closer to answering that problem.
Here is why cards that fill up everyone's hand at once are better than Howling Mine: the Mine works one player at a time, so everyone watches as their opponents keep drawing cards, often blowing the mine up and denying those cards to the rest of the table. This is not looked upon favorably. However, when I drop something like Skyscribing, everyone is so excited to be drawing their own cards, they don't really worry too much about what else is going on! Did they draw bombs? Sweet, they're excited about it! Did they draw crap? Sweet, that saves like four turns of drawing nothing but Mountains! Skyscribing is especially good because of its forecast ability. If I need to buy a few turns, nothing saves the bacon like forecasting the 'scribe and hinting that any turn now everyone is going to draw, like, nine cards, dude, I swear it'll happen any minute.
While I like causing havoc, I'm not totally stupid; I realize that giving people bunches of cards can create problems for my game, so I built the rest of the deck to make sure that all the card draw was just a little bit more useful for me than it is for everyone else. The deck is surprisingly resistant to combo, uses Evacuation to deal with huge creature rushes, and casts Storm Seekers that are frequently hilarious. Good ol' Simic Sky Swallower just ignores most removal, cards, and creatures that the game has to offer, and the single Chord of Calling can result in any number of nasty surprises.
The best part about the deck is that it's fun to play, and it's fun to play against. This is no accident; the four Mystic Snakes are in the deck as a last resort and a preventative measure against Wrath of God or infinite combos. After all, what's the point in giving everyone cards if I'm just going to counter them? That doesn't get me any friends at the table! The most important step in making this deck was removing the three copies of Arcane Laboratory that were initially included. Yeah, it makes sense to run it, but the only thing less fun than playing one spell a turn is playing no spells a turn (both of which blue seems to be mainly responsible for). Besides, the only way that most mono-black decks have of removing pesky enchantments is by removing the player who controls said enchantments (in other words, killing me). I subsequently discovered that once the Labs went out, other players were a lot more friendly!
There are a lot of different ways to make oneself useful to the table as a whole, and a lot of them aren't as obvious as card draw; maybe you're running four Rainbow Vales, or maybe you ensure that the infinite life combo deck gets shut down with a Blessed Wind. Maybe you simply play a deck that is clever, original, and occasionally makes people laugh (Goblin Snowman, anyone?).
Without doubt, you'll always manage to upset someone at the table, but that can't really be helped, and all alliances in multiplayer are tenuous at best. The important part, however, is that by focusing on what other players want (and how you can turn that desire to your advantage) you begin to think about the game in a wider context, and that is the key to surviving multiplayer.
Suddenly, you realize that just because you can kill a player doesn't mean you should. After all, it's one more person for everyone else to worry about. Now Dave's Spirit of the Night doesn't look so threatening - John V. ate all his Funyuns when he went to the bathroom, and you haven't even looked at Dave crooked for three games. And most importantly, once this perspective is gained, you (or me, or anyone, really) realizes that the game extends past what we can do right now, and becomes about what we want to do or what will do or what we want other players to do.
This Is the End, My Friend
This article wound up being a lot longer than I expected, but that's the thing about multiplayer - there's really so much to every single aspect of it that it can never really be fully covered, and any attempt results in absurdly long articles. Still, if at least one person who read this tries out multiplayer and realizes just how awesome it can be, it will make the article worth all the time I put into it.
The two most important things to remember are to have fun and make sure the people you're playing with are having fun. Everything else is secondary. I'd rather lose ten games in a row and enjoy myself than win one game with a combo deck that everyone hates, because really, what's the prize? The only prizes that you get in multiplayer are the feelings of accomplishment as you drop a crazy turn twenty-seven play that almost won the game, the laughter as you pull out your all-Homarid deck, and the reward of being with your friends and playing a game you love for the sheer joy of it.
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