If You’re Not Having Fun, You’re Not Doing It Right

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If you’re curious about the whole “99 Problems” issue, I would direct you to my MTGCP post and Sean’s post describing the situation (To be fair to both sides). If you’re looking to comment about that, please keep it in one of those two areas, anything left on here will be heavily moded. This thing could go on forever if we let it, but my wife looked at me this week and made one simple observation:

“It doesn’t look like you’re having fun with your ‘hobby’.”

And she’s right, I wasn’t.

Writing about Magic isn’t a full time job for me, hence why posts on here and MTGColorPie.com come at random times. I’ve now got a weekly series on Commander over at GatheringMagic if you want a normal weekly column. As anyone who has ever met me, or possibly even read some of my work, knows I’m not really normal. I write parodies of movies and put them as Magic characters/personalities; Aaron Forsythe has told me that it’s a little odd to see a fictional version of himself and tried to explain it to other people.

But this isn’t a blog about writings, or anything like that. This is a Commander blog, so let’s talk about Commander.

One of the main attractions to Commander, and Magic is general, is that it’s a game. With all of the facets that Magic has, it’s real easy to treat this than more than just a hobby. People earn money writing, playing and creating this game. There are things like the Pro Tour where if you want to be serious enough with the game, you can devote a huge chunk of your time and effort into earning a living. Then there are the people who cover the players playing at the highest level, and they get paid for that. There’s also people who buy and sell cards, some on speculation, and that’s how they earn money.

I play Commander. I look at Magic design theory. I make jokes.

I need to remember that Magic is a game. Games can be, and should be, fun.

That’s why I started to play Commander; it’s a fun format. Being able to build wacky theme decks and ten card combos is normal. You don’t have to stress out what the metagame has to be since nothing is on the line. Maybe pride. There’s no FNM for Commander, no Pro Tour Qualifier, no Open Series. Just some friends sitting together to play cards.

Your biggest worry in Commander should be how you’re going to get that foil to complete your deck, not all this dumb political stuff.

Now that the Commander product is released, there’s a huge growing interest in the format. I imagine that it’s one of the most popular casual formats that Magic has (I’m lumping Commander with Multi-Player). Players want to know more about it, which is why Sean and I write about the format. If no one card about this Highlander format I would see the numbers in my blog stats dwindle and my editor, Trick, at GatheringMagic would most likely let me go (We’re ignoring the content quality at the moment even though I’m assuming that would play a part in it).

But Commander is popping up all over the place on the major Magic sites and more Commander blogs are popping up all over the place. Players are excited for this format and are hungry for more information. It’s not just what Commander to pick, but which cards work well together and what’s good for playing in the format. This is an exciting time to be interested in Commander because Commander is interesting.

Cliché, sure, but it’s true.

What’s more fun than swinging in with your Dragon army? Or how about making 1,000 tokens? Or playing that one card that makes your opponent shirk down in his chair because it was the right card at the right time to destroy his plans? Or traveling from one Plane to the next and suddenly everyone’s trying to scramble to survive. Or teaming up with two of your friends while you try and take down the great Archenemy?

Right now we are living in the Wild West of Commander. There are hardly any laws and everyone has their own opinion about what should be done. So here we play, guns ablaze, smiling all the time.

Magic and Commander should be fun. And I intend to focus on that.

One of the things that I wanted to do when I brought back 99EDH was to publish articles by people wanting to write about Commander. I’ve got a submission that I need to edit, polish it up and you’re going to see it next week.

After that, I’ll dig into the Highlander Collective that I’ve started over on GatheringMagic. There’s a bright future for 99EDH and for Commander. I hope you’re along for the ride.

Until then, if you want to join in on some Commander discussion, head over to Google+ and add me (gplus.to/MTGColorPie) where I’ve got a Commander circle going. I’ll throw some Commander news and questions out every once in a while. Feel free to ask questions and engage in conversations.

Let’s go have some fun.