The past week there has been a more Commander slant to our games of Magic at work.

Last week I was playing my decks (Dinosaurs Tribal, Mono Red with Land Hate, the cheaply upgraded Arcane Wizardry 2017 precon, even my first ever built Commander deck with Scarab God saw play). But this week I wanted to play with the two Anthology decks (Guided by Nature and Evasive Maneuvers) that I hadn’t played with yet.

The first game with Guided by Nature that I played really did drag on. It was one of those epic long Commander games. Constant board wipes stopped me from getting set up. Eventually one of the students won with one of their 2017 precon decks. I don’t remember which one it was.

Yesterday instead of playing Evasive Maneuvers I went once more with the Guided by Nature deck. I had a great start to the game, after about 4 turns I was ahead on mana, I got my Commander out, was starting to build up a board presence. Then bam! Board wipe. I survived a second one too but with not such a big board state in front of me. Then I got the card Praetor’s Council that put my graveyard back in my hand, gave me no maximum hand size for the rest of the game. It was basically game over after that. I had a lot of mana, was able to tap Priest of Titania for lots of extra mana, I was getting an elf token every time I cast an elf, all my green spells cost one less to cast, my Commander gave me an elf Druid token, I was drawing a card for each none token creature that entered the battlefield that I cast. My turns were getting insane. Then I drew into Wellwisher and adding 1 life for each elf on the battlefield. The maths was getting silly. The inevitable happened I was able to swing in with lots of creatures that had been buffed up to some insane levels, and get the damage through as if the creatures had not been blocked. This deck was working just like the Strictly Better MtG Pauper Elf Deck. Which I enjoy playing.

I was going to build an elf tribal deck for Commander. But I think that Guided by Nature has a lot of the cards I want in my deck, including the Commander. So I think I may get a second copy of this and upgrade it. There are a few big creatures in this deck that although they have some great abilities are not elves, and so not really suitable for an elf tribal deck. So I’ll change my plan and look at how to upgrade this deck.

The photo below is my board state when I won with Guided by Nature yesterday. The photo was taken by a student who kindly gave me permission to use it here.

When I got home the latest kickstarter to come to fruition arrived The Flow of History. I’d nearly forgotten about this one until the email arrived saying it was being sent out. Somehow TMG had been a bit lapse in sending out kickstarter updates, or if they had I’d missed them totally.

I had to watch a YouTube video to refresh my poor memory what exactly the game was about. I also had to go back to the kickstarter page and remind myself what the extras were from the stretch goals. So basically I have here a card based civilisation style game, that has an auction mechanic, and is pretty aggressive! There is even a 2 player variant that uses a ghost third player.

I think this will be my third civ style/themed game in my collection. At the moment I think the three would all fall on the light to mid scale of things. I really do want to try one or two of the heavier/longer civ games out there.

Along with Tao Long this will be burning a hole on my shelf’s waiting to be played. Soon to be joined by The Manhattan Project 2 which is getting sent out to the kickstarter backers in the next couple of weeks I believe.