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Thinking about the time that I made a Magic: The Gathering deck specifically designed to attack the other player instead of their cards.
It was when somebody brought like 10,000 cards to the commune and just said “go ahead and make yourselves decks out of whatever.” The real nerds stole all the good cards right away of course, but I finally got interested in deck building.
I was reading about asymmetrical warfare at the time and MTG was a great testing ground. Everybody would build up their decks to have a theme and a specific strategy, then hope they could get it in motion before the other player did.
I thought, what if I could get inside the OODA loop of the other player’s strategy and just make it impossible for them to succeed? War of attrition. Insurgency model, fourth generation warfare.
So I built a deck that was all about changing the rules of the game in ways that other players couldn’t predict. Making it so every time you draw one card you have to draw seven cards and then discard. Making it so all of your creatures would tap every turn if they didn’t attack.
Lowkey I also hated Magic: The Gathering because half of the community would stay up late drinking coffee and making donuts and playing Magic: The Gathering, and then do no work during the day. Baby brain mfs for real. So I wanted to make the game unpleasant for them.
People played Commander style, which I guess is usually a longer game than non-Commander. But most one-on-one games would last like an hour tops. I could drag a game out to 4 hours of sheer misery.
The only deck nearly as annoying as mine was my friend who made a fungus factory and would just spend 5 minutes every turn multiplying his spore tokens. He would also narrate the whole process. “Ah, another beautiful morning dawns over the fungus factory…”
I didn’t always win my games, by the conditions of the rules. But I considered it to be a win if I got my opponent to give me a look like they were dying or say “I hate this game” or just forfeit to end their suffering. I was playing the game on a different level.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned from this. Most people expect you to play by the rules, and to have the same win condition they do. If you have a different vision, you’ve got to be willing to play by different rules.
