Sunday saw some 40k players taking part in a tournament over at Chatteris.

Luckily there was enough space for not only these miniature gamers but also other gaming like MtG and board games. So an invite was issued for others to come and make use of it.

My FLGS The Hobbit Hole was holding a MtG Standard Showdown, some of us had turned up to play Commander, other general board gaming.

With a failed attempt (once again) to organise a Commander session the previous day to play the new Anthology. I had decided to use the opportunity to play on Sunday to pick up my 2 copies.

When I arrived there was already a Commander game running using a couple of the new reprinted decks. The Atraxa deck being played had a Doubling Season added to it. So while that was going on I picked up my order and opened one up. I then immediately started sleeving the Atraxa deck. This is a deck I really wanted to play. For me it was almost at a mythic/legendary status because of its high cost to buy since coming out in 2016.

In the game currently running, the Atraxa deck was doing it’s thing. However I wish I was paying attention to what the other deck was from the Anthology being played was, because that was the one that ended up victorious.

I really like the presentation of the Anthology set. The only drawback I can think off is instead of the little included leaflet that is more flavour text for the deck than helpful, is a little bit about the tactics, how to play the deck for newer players. A “it would be nice to have” for these anthologies (this includes both sets) is the giant version of the Commander cards that come with the Commander decks when they were sold separately (I’m assuming that the older decks had these).

While the Standard Showdown was going on, 3 of us played Commander. I played my Dinosaur Tribal deck that now had Helm of the Host in it. Sam, John’s daughter played my Atraxa deck, and our third player was playing a Meren deck and all that graveyard shenanigans.

Sadly for the Meren player they were not really allowed to get the graveyard shenanigans going. I was forced by them to do an earlier than planned exiling of graveyards when they went to destroy my Silent Gravestone. But after that the Atraxa deck was exiling cards at will with one of their cards where they spend a swamp to exile a card from a graveyard, and if it’s a creature get a +1/+1 counter. Both our graveyards were hit that way.

I was starting to get a commanding board state, Rampaging Fericidon, and Gishath were out amongst others. Then bam, board wipe. But I was able to rebuild. Bought out my Commander, then Etali came out. I drew into Helm of the Hosts, and after my thinking, equipped Etali with it. Which with a kindred charge played, meant for one turn I was attacking with 3 Etali. Yes just think about that. That turn I killed the Meren player. Next turn Atraxa went down.

My deck had clicked. The Atraxa deck looks a lot of fun and I can’t wait to play it, both the standard unchanged deck, and a modified one. Yes I’m going to do the $20 budget upgrade from mtggoldfish as my starting point.

Sadly I wasn’t able to stick around for a second game of Commander, I made a poor judgement call earlier in the day. If I’d picked up the cat litter on my way out of town I’d have been able to play on. Sadly I didn’t think of that at the time, or I did and was too lazy. But the end result was I needed to hit the pet shop before it shut.

A big thanks to the 40K players for opening up the event to none players to use as well. Had a great afternoon.