Magic the Gathering – As you probably know if you're a regular reader of the blog, I'm a big fan of EDH (Commander). My play group has embraced this and Cube as THE way we play magic. Both formats are fun and I had a blast sorting through cards to build the Cube.
With different resonsibilites and availabilities the turn out for each weeks game night can be pretty varied. Which is cool because we get different dynamics from week to week and thing don't get to stale.
Recently we ended our game night on a bit of a sour note. The night started off well enough with everyone playing their favorite decks and control of the table swinging back and forth between all the players. The first two games were a ton of fun. Even though the second game got to be a bit oppressive due to Rise of the Dark Realms, Recover and Eternal Witness doing the dosie do drawing out all the mass removal spells and then going to town killing everyone slowly.
The third game we played was when things got awkward. Everything was going smooth with the guy that won the last game taking earlier beats per the norm. Right up until he was able to set up an Avacyn + Nevineral's Disk hard lock. We let him do his thing of killing everything on the board for a little while to see if anyone could draw into some form of exile, permanent theft or -x/-x. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen I asked the table if anyone had anything in their deck that could remove his lock. When the answer came back no, I suggested we all scoop and play another game, since the result was inevitable at that point.
The result of that suggestion was some mumbling about not putting that on the table again and watch checking to just call it a night early. Overall it was an uncomfortable way to end our weeky game night.
Now don't get me wrong I love combos and crazy board states and some of the super powerful thing you can do in Commander as a format. A quick combo that kills the table means we can play another game right away. A hard lock that makes it so nobody else can play while you slowly plink away at each opponent drags the game on and honestly nobody likes to watch their opponent play magic by them self.
Have you ever had this happen during one of your games and if so how'd you deal with it?
